Narrelle M Harris: writer | editor | songwriter | crafter
Words are like oxygen
I sometimes sort-of-joke in job interviews that I haven’t had a career path. I’ve had a career meander. I’ve pottered about, taking jobs on the basis of my skills and interests at the time. Sometimes my interests were basically ‘I need to pay the rent’. I have been a bank teller, a customer service person, a kitchen hand and, for […]
» Read moreMy father recently gave me a charming anthology called The Family Book of Best Loved Short Stories, a Doubleday edition from 1954, edited by Leland W Lawrence. He said he’d seized upon it long ago because it had Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King in its contents. I took it with me on my recent reading holiday because […]
» Read moreWhile watching a show about design a few months ago, I learned that the use of mixed upper and lower cases on road signs was a deliberate choice. Research showed that people could read the signs from a distance more easily because people could recognise the shape of the word before they could really even read the word. (For the […]
» Read moreWhen I was a little kid, my younger brother, Bryce, and I decided to search the house for the Christmas presents we knew must be secreted somewhere in our parents’ bedroom. After some heavy duty snooping, we did indeed locate presents that matched what we’d been asking for, or at least seemed likely to be ours. Come Christmas morning, we […]
» Read moreA few months ago during the Q&A session of one of my library talks, I mentioned that I had a day job. One of the attendees promptly asked me whether, in that case, my novel writing was just a hobby. I have to say, the comment stung a little. I replied that, no, it was not a hobby. That in […]
» Read moreA little while back, I wrote about self-publishers needing to put in the time and effort to match the excellent work that traditional publishers do in getting a novel ready for publication. That work includes editing, proofreading, cover art and design. (Not to mention expertise, PR contacts and simply taking on all that hard slog so that the author doesn’t […]
» Read moreWriter and food historian, Gillian Pollack, has sent me some recipes for Election Cake in honour of the Australian election being held this weekend. I was joking that we needed cakes full of nuts to represent our conservatives, or a hollow cake in honour of the policy-free zone that has led up to polling. She sent me three recipes, none […]
» Read moreApart from the aches and pains that increase with age, which obviously would make anyone grumpy. But Tim and I have noticed something in recent months – that things we thought that everyone knew aren’t actually as obvious as we thought. I mean, I’m used to the fact that not everyone knows the frequently strange and obscure things I have […]
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