Still wondering what to give your writer friend or loved one for Christmas? Perhaps you’re planning to get serious about your own writing in 2019?
If the relevant writer lives in or near Canberra, here’s a great deal:
Short courses at CIT Solutions are 15% off until the end of the year and that includes the amazing creative writing courses that my writing buddy and I will be running in early 2019.
- CAPTURE YOUR READER: a six-week course in creating compelling characters, page-turning tension and delivering on your promise to the reader.
- WRITING LOVE, LUST & LONGING: a Saturday intensive on big and little ‘r’ romance, as well as vocabulary, anatomy and emotion.
- SEDUCE YOUR READER: a six-week course focused on understanding your story’s heart and immersing your reader in the protagonist’s experiences and feelings.
- WHO’S TELLING THE STORY?: a Saturday intensive on tense, voice and point of view and making sure you’re writing an unforgettable main character.
Register in any course by the end of 31 December 2018, use the SUMMER19 discount code, and you get 15% off. It’s win-win.
‘Fabulous,’ you say, ‘but what’s it got to do with that snowy fox in the banner?’
I’m glad you asked.
These courses are a new adventure for me and Juliette together (although goodness knows we’ve clocked up a lot of instructional hours separately) and they’re also the first string to the bow of our new company: PICARESQUE PRESS.
Every bold endeavour needs an inspirational mascot and ours is Picaro the fox, as pictured. Or perhaps it’s Picara the vixen? I couldn’t tell them apart, because at the time of our acquaintance I was living on the second floor of a terrace house in Edinburgh and the fox family lived under the garden shed next door – I never had the opportunity, or the need, to assess the gender of my vulpine neighbours.
The foxes used the suburban stone walls as their roads and came and went at will – here’s another photo, from spring, of one of them heading up the on-ramp. Look closer. Closer…
An urban red fox is an opportunistic beast with a certain roguish charm. Clever and adaptable, they are wary, but accustomed, to the presence of humans. Here in Australia, foxes are a feral creature, responsible for the destruction of native marsupial populations which have no defence against such predators. But that’s not our beastie.
Our mascot Picara (or Picaro) is not an urban fox, nor a feral fox, but a thought-fox.
Ted Hughes wrote of every writer’s experience when he described ‘this midnight moment’s forest’, ‘the clock’s loneliness’ and the ‘blank page’ – in his poem, The Thought-Fox. He draws the creature out – the fox prints in the snow are the dark marks that fill the white page. His fox is both real and imagined, forever wild and yet captured by the words of the poem that evoke it.
We couldn’t find a better symbol for the art and action of creative writing: a roguish, rule-breaking, risk-taking thought-fox.
Sign up for a course with Picaresque Press and discover where a thought-fox can lead you.