In less than two weeks, I’ll be appearing in three separate events at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival, and I’m really excited about this wonderful opportunity to promote Wild Boys. On Saturday 5 September, as part of ‘BWF in the ‘burbs!’, I’ll be speaking at the Mitchelton Library, and the following day, I’ll be discussing Wild Boys on the Queensland Terrace of the State Library with my dear friend Edwina Shaw (check out Edwina’s blog for her review of Wild Boys). Straight after that session, I’ll be giving a 3-hour Masterclass in memoir writing – ‘Close to Home’ – where I can share all the tricks I’ve learned from working with some of Australia’s best editors over the years. So, it’ll be a hectic weekend, but lots of fun – especially catching up with Edwina again.

Meanwhile … it’s full steam ahead here in Armidale. The official launch of Wild Boys is being held at the BackTrack Shed next Tuesday. Professor Annabelle Duncan, Vice-Chancellor of the University of New England (UNE), will launch the book in the BackTrack classroom – and this event will bring together two very different parts of my life in Armidale. Wild Boys developed as a parallel project while I was completing my PhD in Creative Research Practice at UNE, and the university has always been very supportive of my writing (click here to see UNE’s recent media release about Wild Boys). I think the launch will provide a sense of completion for this writing project … in a way, it’s almost like I’m ‘graduating’ from BackTrack.

Over the last month, while I’ve been dealing with a range of complex post-publication emotions, I’ve been putting in lots of applications for writing opportunities in 2016. Hopefully, some of them of them will come through for me – and I’ll be able to see a bit more of the world next year. Finally, in today’s Sun Herald, Karen Hardy has written a fantastic feature about Wild Boys.