I’m like Stanley Fish; I appreciate the fine art of the perfect sentence. I love its structure, pattern, poise and precision. Fish’s ‘How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One’ has seduced me. How could I not buy a book whose first quote is?

One Day the nouns were clustered in the street,

An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.

The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.

The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

 -Kenneth Koch, “Permanently”

I causally picked up the book in the GOMA bookshop in South Bank Brisbane. I was so excited that someone else loved the sentence as much as I did. I had to have this book. Instead of collecting fine wines or lino prints, Fish collects sentences. And so do I!

It's an easy phrase to say; you can't judge a book by its cover. But the reality is different. We always judge books by their covers. I've been teaching a class on Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and this prompted me to do some reasearch on the packaging of that book over the years. Here are three completely different covers.

We thought we’d continue on from our first post on creative resolutions, to check out our favourite six writing tools to help you keep those resolutions.

Each New Year I make resolutions – only a few brave-hearted and determined souls I know can avoid the annual period of reflection and reassessment. Along with the usual suspects, this year I’ve added ‘submit work’ to my list. Although I’m primarily a novelist for middle readers and young adults, I often write poetry, flash fiction and a small amount of creative non-fiction. Back when I wrote mainly poetry, I was constantly submitting it to journals and competitions but these days I treat these excursions into different forms as a kind of small holiday away from the main project.

This year I’m changing that.