Louise Cusack's Blog, page 5
April 30, 2014
Thirty-seven years ago, in a galaxy far, far, away…
Yesterday I heard some news that made me happy – not in a passing Hey, that’s cool kind of way, but a deep down bone-and-sinew kind of happy, the sort of happy that’s so strong and exuberant I went to sleep thinking about it and woke up this morning still thinking about it, still smiling. The sort of happy that confirms irrevocably that inside my chest beats an unabashedly geeky, sci-fi fangirl heart.
Disney (who now own the Star Wars franchise) announced that it has brought Harrison Ford, Car...
April 10, 2014
Her beauty and her terror, the wide brown land for me
I’ve grabbed a line out of one of Australia’s most popular poems. My Country by Dorothea Mackellar, and here’s the context:
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!
I’ll post the complete poem at the end of this blog if you’re interested to read it, but the gist is that young Dorothea is being dragged around Europe by her father...
April 2, 2014
Surfers Paradise hosts innaugural Indie Authors Down Under book signing
This is me!
I’m late blogging this, but I wanted to share the awesomeness of the very first Indie Authors Down Under mass book signing event organized by book bloggers Jodie O’Brien of Fab, Fun and Tantalising Reads, and Jess Savage of A is for Alpha, B is for Books.Jodie and Jess are dynamos who pulled together a professional and fun event at the luxurious Outriggers Resort in Surfers Paradise. Prior to the event, the seventy authors who attended shared the joy across their social networks an...
March 11, 2014
Review: Winter’s Tale
I see a lot of movies and I don’t often cry in them, even if they’re particularly soppy. This movie wasn’t soppy at all, and I cried. Twice. If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the trailer:
I have to begin by saying I love Colin Farrell as an actor. He brings such vulnerability to his roles and was fabulous in Saving Mr Banks and In Bruges. In this movie Russell Crowe was truly menacing as his adversary, Pearly, and while part of me wanted him to just leave the lovers alone because they had eno...
January 18, 2014
The world, not as we know it
As a fantasy author, I’m occasionally required to put on a cartographer’s hat and sketch out a map of the world I’m creating. This helps me with continuity of distances between kingdoms, how long treks/flights should last, relative temperatures during various seasons etc. The current fantasy world I’m working on is a duplicate earth, a parallel world, and to give you an idea of how I was planning it, here is an early map I created:
I’m writing new scenes at the moment where my protagonist Dan,...
December 18, 2013
The Cruising Author
I recently went on my first cruise. It’s been a long time coming, but I was scared of the ocean (love to look at it, just don’t want to be on it) so the time had never been right, until I was offered the gig of being a Special Interest Speaker on a cruise, and I thought This is a year of firsts (see Game for a Change), why not!
Why indeed…
I won’t bore you with my two-day-terror as we crossed a known rough patch of ocean (known to everyone but me, thankfully, or I may not have had the wherewith...
November 6, 2013
Game for a change
As a fiction novelist, I work alone. I draft, I edit, I polish. If I get stuck I might spend the day working through a plot issue with a colleague, but the majority of my writing time is solitary, and I like that.
Yet… I’ve always been drawn to the idea of working in computer gaming, which I know is a highly collaborative industry.So when QUT (Queensland University of Technology) advertised for artists to be part of the [imi] (Interactive Media Innovation) project, where the outcome could be a...
October 15, 2013
Introducing…The Fussy Librarian
There’s a new website for readers that’s like a matchmaking service for ebook lovers. You type in your email, tell them what kind of books you like to read and how you feel about profanity, violence and sex in novels. Then a daily email comes with your book recommendations. They’re featuring my book soon and they’re very supportive of authors like me, so I hope you’ll support them and sign up!
October 11, 2013
Redlitzer Awards 2013: Encouraging grass roots writing
Last Saturday I traveled to Redlands, just south of Brisbane to attend the Redlitzer Awards where local writers were presented with trophies and certificates by the Mayor, and saw their winning short stories published into anthologies. I was involved as a judge, selecting the winning stories, along with authors Rowena Cory Daniells, Marianne de Pierres, Angela Sunde and Peter Matheson. Two anthologies of winning short stories were launched (ten adult and ten teen stories in one anthology, and...
October 7, 2013
Fantasy, inspired by da Vinci
Who doesn’t love Leonardo da Vinci? There’s so much to admire, from his curiosity about the world around him to the exquisite beauty of his paintings and the meticulous detail of his mechanical inventions. In 2009 a traveling exhibition of his machines came to Brisbane and I was so fascinated by his mind, they had to throw me out at closing time. His accurate sketches of the construction of the human body (courtesy of illegal autopsies) and his insights into how blood pumped and lungs work...
