Category Archives: About writing

Some pertinent comments from Kevin Ashton, author of How to Fly a Horse: The secret history of creation, invention, and discovery: “The people who are truly passionate, truly engaged and incredibly persistent and take lots of small steps by showing up … Continue reading →

Writerly thoughts from Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mark Strand who died in November 2014:  “One of the amazing things about what I do is you don’t know when you’re going to be hit with an idea, you don’t know where … Continue reading →

Failure is something many writers come up against time and again, so I was interested to read this response from young Australian artist Gemma Jones: “That a knock-back stings, but it doesn’t really injure you. That I sometimes live in … Continue reading →

From The Economist, a marvellous essay on books and publishing. Here are a few quotes: ‘… to see technology purely as a threat to books risks missing a key point. Books are not just “tree flakes encased in dead cow”, … Continue reading →

Neat review of The Children’s Pond by Karen Chisholm on the AustCrimeFiction blog: www.austcrimefiction.org/review/review-childrens-pond-tina-shaw

A little bit of bragging … New Zealand Fiction – Week ending 19 July 2014
 1 The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton (VUP) ISBN 9780864739889 2 The Children’s Pond – Tina Shaw (Pointer Press) 3 The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton (VUP) 9780864739124 4 Heartland – Jenny Pattrick (Black Swan) 5 Tenderness: Stories – Sarah Quigley (Vintage) 6 Purgatory – Rosetta Allan (Penguin) 7 Landscape with Solitary … Continue reading →

I’ve recently started work on my next project and got to thinking about how messy and convoluted it sometimes seems to be when writing the first draft of a novel … am reminded all over again of how the first … Continue reading →

The ebook version of my novel The Children’s Pond is now available from mebooks.co.nz and here at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LX954M6

You’re hearing it here first: my novel is being published in July 2014. It’s called The Children’s Pond and is set in Turangi and the Tongariro River – hence the image of the young rainbow trout – contemporary New Zealand … Continue reading →

Something from Neil Gaiman, one of the coolest writers around … “If you’re only going to write when you’re inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you will never be a novelist – because you’re going to have … Continue reading →