Tatto For You

Below is the prepared speech I readied as a member of the Negative for a debate recently, arguing - for the positive - that career success was entirely up to chance. In the end I delivered my part off the cuff and did not use this speech at all. Therefore, I thought I would share it with someone so as to put the work to some kind of use... I appear before you in the role of writer, the creator of the Monster-Blood Tattoo series, three books – or roughly 350,000 words – published in 18 countries and 13 languages, with hopes and plans to write further stories in a similar vein and a of long career ahead. Yet I trained as an illustrator – not a writer – at the now vanished Underdale campus of the UniSA. How on earth did I get here? By sheer fluke it seems: for after a somewhat successful 9 years in Sydney as an illustrator, when of a sudden, I quit my job, where I lived, upped sticks and with a Great Plan burning in my soul went on an adventure across the seas, New York, London, Paris. On...

My word, you folks sure got close to 80 comments . Impressive - but you are not a jedi yet... I certainly gave you enough time to have a red hot go, as "they" say. But alas, guilt has got the better of me and here I am posting after a bit too long not posting... um... I'm like, an excellent writer and stuff... On with the show! As much as the hype is off-putting, I am very glad the Twilight series has my niece reading; she would not look sideways at a book before. Now, who knows, she might venture out further into the realms of the written word and for that I can only be grateful. The uber-series is an interesting creature - perhaps making reading cool again; I often marvel that without Master Potter's 7 tomes there would probably be no MBT , not through any influences (though I read a review today that suggested I was apparently employing the good ol' school-environment shtick a-la Harry P, to make Lamplighter work...) but because Ms Rowling has forged such gro...

Here is something worthy that Will has brought to my attention: Free Rice - a vocabulary guessing game where every word you get correct has the organisers donating 20 - yes 20! - grains of rice to the hungry and disadvantaged. Better still I suppose, is to help folks fend for themselves but they still need to eat in the meantime. 20 rice grains does not sound like much but it all adds up if you get into it, I found the challenge to my vocab very stimulating indeed and they give you a VOCAB LEVEL (a stat!) which for old role players who like numerical levels like me is a great incentive to keep getting words right (as if helping others was not...) Does anyone here dare post up their best Vocab Level? I hope folks can forgive me for going off topic in this way... and cheers very much to you all for the very stimulating discussions regarding the social status of teratologists .