the look I’d pick for Maxim Serebrov(actor Alexander Ivaskevich)

On Duncan Lay’s blog, I’ve written a guest post about whether women can successfully write from the POV of male characters, and vice versa. I say yes, of course, and illustrate it by talking a bit about my experience of writing Maxim Serebrov, in Trinity: The Koldun Code.

Big congratulations to poet Stephen Whiteside for winning the Book of the Year (also known as The Golden Gumleaf) for his collection of poems for children, The Billy That Died with its Books On and Other Australian Verse(Walker Books). The award was announced last night in Tamworth during the big Tamworth Country Music festival. More info here.

Some of the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre have started telling their stories, in lucid, chilling, heartbreaking words.

Sigolène Vinson, legal affairs writer for the magazine, speaks in a radio interview, republished in Le Monde,  about how events unfolded, and how she came face to face with one of the killers. And Philippe Lançon, who writes for both Libération and Charlie Hebdo, and was seriously injured in the attack, writes poignantly in Libération of the last moments before the gunmen burst in, and of what happened afterwards. Both are extraordinary, devastating accounts. At the moment the full accounts are in French only and if you can read French it’s much better to read those, but there are some partly paraphrased translations of Sigolène Vinson’s testimony here and here.

I was moved to tears by Adam Gopnik’s lucid, beautiful, passionate and perceptive piece in the BBC’s Point of View blog. So many things have been written about these cruel attacks, but this is outstanding. Read it here.

The ghastly events in Paris at the offices of Charlie Hebdo have shaken me deeply, and I pay tribute to the memory of the writers, cartoonists, police officers and others who were so viciously murdered in the cruel attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

And I hope and pray for the injured, such as Simon Fieschi, beloved boyfriend of Maisie, daughter of my very good friend and fellow author, Ursula Dubosarsky. Simon was badly hurt after being shot in the attack and the family is still waiting on news of his prognosis after he was put in an induced coma.

We know this area of Paris quite well. My sister lives only a minute or two’s walk away, and she often goes that route to the shops. In fact, as my brother in law told me yesterday, she almost went that way, at that time, on the 7th–it was sheer chance that she decided to go another way that morning.

The irreverence of Charlie Hebdo was not to everyone’s taste. So what? Why should everything be to everyone’s taste, and offend no-one? Mockery is a salutary thing in any culture. The magazine is in a great French tradition of calling everything into question, and not taking anything for granted. And the brave and witty people who worked there were upholding one of the great rights of a truly civilised society.

Those who think to silence free speech can never win if we stand in solidarity against them.

Life imitating art: just caught up with an extraordinary story from the Wall Street Journal by journalist Bradley Hope, about a Russian mystery revolving around a business, and which rang some Trinity bells for me! You can read the full article here, but here’s the beginning:

Blackfield Capital CJSC was one of Moscow’s hottest hedge funds, hosting glitzy parties and embarking on ambitious plans to expand to the U.S.

The firm’s founder in 2013 even rented a Manhattan apartment for a record-setting price, according to a real-estate broker, and instructed his U.S. staff to buy a $300,000 sports car.

Now, the founder is missing, allegedly along with all of the firm’s assets, according to former employees, in an international mystery that has captivated Moscow’s investment community.

The firm’s employees didn’t know anything was amiss until mid-October, when three men charged into Blackfield’s offices in an upscale complex along the Moscow River in central Moscow, said people who were there.

Incidentally, the central mystery around the deaths of the three Trinity founders was inspired by yet another weird Russian enigma, this time set in Australia: the unsolved murder of ex-KGB colonel and shady businessman Gennady Bernovski on the Gold Coast in 2014. Police have recently re-opened this cold case, but without success so far. Read more here.

I have the honour of having been nominated in Booktopia’s Favourite Australian author poll, and am in Heat 1, so if you feel like voting for me–and any of the other authors in the heat, go here.

Every year, Christopher Cheng, wonderful children’s author, runs a fantastic series, The Twelve Days of Christmas, on his blog, in which he invites fellow authors and illustrators to contribute a piece about their favourite Christmas memory.

And I’m one of the contributors, writing about some favourite childhood Christmases. You can read my piece here.

Today, a piece of mine about the watery joys of a bush summer appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, in the first edition of their Summer Herald special section.

Here is a short extract:

So much has changed in the country – farms are bigger, shopping streets smaller, the coffee’s got better, the milk bars have vanished. Because many people shop online, the post office is often the busiest place in town with long queues for Ebay and Amazon parcels, while local retailers languish and struggling local newspapers just as often get news tips by text and tweet and email as on the traditional grapevine.

Yet through it all one thing doesn’t change, and that’s how summers, especially for kids, revolve around water. Some of that is about the town swimming pool, but a good deal is around natural water-courses. And that’s quite a different experience to the beach-centred summer culture of Sydney.

You can read the full piece here.