Bad Diaries Salon: First

I was fit to burst with excitement when author Jenny Ackland (Little Gods) recently invited me to be part of a Bad Diaries Salon in Geelong next month.

Bad Diaries Salon was established by Jenny in mid-2017 with a call out on Twitter: were there any writers who still had their old, bad teenage diaries, and would they be prepared to read them live? As noted on The Bad Diaries Salon Facebook page, the response was overwhelming.

(You can read more about the history of Bad Diaries Salon on Jenny’s blog).

The theme of next month’s Bad Diaries Salon is FIRST. I’ll be joining my friends and fellow authors Robert Gott (The Port Fairy Murders), Rosalie Ham (The Dressmaker), Tracy Farr (The Hope Fault), Jock Serong (The Rules of Backyard Cricket), and Leah Kaminsky (The Waiting Room), to read for ten minutes each from our early, unedited works; Jenny Ackland will moderate.

To prepare for the FIRST Salon, I have (literally) dusted off the early notes for my three novels. I managed to find some field notes from my visit to Chiang Mai in 1999, which inspired the plot of my first novel, Behind the Night Bazaar. These notes morphed into the first draft of a scene in the book as I wrote them. Spoiler alert: it’s all telling, no showing.

My first draft notebooks contain some truly awful material. I wonder if I will have the guts to read it out loud…

Bad Diaries Salon: FIRST takes place on Wed 11 July at 6.30pm at the Geelong Library and Heritage Centre. Bookings here.