WRITING THE BODY COURSE

Happy Yogi

Happy Yogi

On the 31st of January, I am running a half-day WRITING THE BODY workshop through the fabulous Queensland Writers Centre, combining my twin passions, yoga and writing.

I have enjoyed a regular daily practice of yoga since 1993, and currently teach professional dancers at a local university. I’ve been doing yoga longer than most of my young students have been alive! It’s certainly the only thing that makes it possible for me to keep up with them, if only for a couple of hours.

However, yoga is much more than a physical discipline.  It is the perfect remedy for healing a multitude of woes, working on the emotional and spiritual planes alongside the physical in every pose.

Writing is a sedentary profession. Like most people these days, I spend far too long sitting down in front of a screen. A daily yoga practice helps keep my body pain-free and my mind clear. It also helps to build that discipline which is so necessary for those of us on creative paths –self discipline. Otherwise known as bum glue!

happy writer

happy writer

In the WRITING THE BODY workshop I lead participants through gentle yoga exercises to help relieve common postural problems writers encounter, such as sore necks, shoulders and lower backs. But more than that, we will discover how to express the sensations of the body through writing and use yogic techniques to go deep within ourselves to unearth the stories held there.

It’s going to be lots of fun. I hope you can join me. Click here for more info and to sign up.

Free mini-massages for every participant!

You can combine my course with another session on journaling which looks wonderful. I guarantee you’ll come away feeling more relaxed than you have in years, with a renewed enthusiasm for writing.

A NEW ADVENTURE

screenplay

screenplay

A few months ago I sold the film rights to Thrill Seekers. I was thrilled, as I’ve always envisioned my stories one day being made into films. Once I was sent the screenplay and read it over, I realised that writing the scripts was probably something I could learn to do myself. It didn’t look so scary after all. Then I went to see Gone Girl at the movies and learned that Gillian Flynn had written the screenplay herself based on her novel of the same name. Not only that, she’d made it onto Forbes list of top-earning authors. That’s one list I’d like to be on, one day.

So, after searching the internet for information and scouring the books on script writing I’ve collected over the years, I sat down to make a start on my own screenplay for Dear Madman. Hmm, it wasn’t quite as simple as I first thought.
Much trickier in fact – a whole new art form for me to explore and play with!

Fortuitously, the QLD Writers Centre was offering a Feature Film Writing Clinic with Duncan Thompson, one of Australia’s foremost screenplay editors and teachers of the craft, and I didn’t even need to be an experienced screen writer to join. I did, however, have to submit the first five pages of my screenplay! With a lot of help from my friends I got that together and I’m in! The course starts in ten days and I’m super excited.

I’m fascinated by this new way of looking at story and enjoying every minute I’m working on my screenplay in progress. I’m back at that absolute beginner stage I remember from when I first started writing fiction over 12 years ago. It feels like PLAY and I’m having a ball. Maybe that’s why they call them screenPLAYS?

It’s also keeping me busy, so I’m not compulsively checking emails to see if the publisher has read Dear Madman yet!