Category Archives: extracts

scis­sors and paste

By Mat | Published: July 26, 2005

There’s a kind of archae­ology in the edit­ing pro­cess. Hav­ing fin­ished a rough first draft of The Last Monk about three weeks ago, I’ve spent much of the inter­ven­ing time read­ing and re-reading the entire manu­script, pick­ing out everything from typos and bad gram­mar, through inel­eg­ant sen­tence struc­ture to the high-end nar­rat­ive and char­ac­ter lines which should drive the book.

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Fitzger­ald House, Part Two

By Mat | Published: June 7, 2005

As prom­ised, here is the second part of the Fitzger­ald House extract. It’s shorter than the first and takes up the story from Mr. Peabody’s angle. Kate has fled, so there is no one to say whether what is about to hap­pen is real or entirely the product of Peabody’s frac­tured mind.

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New Extract — Fitzger­ald House, Part One

By Mat | Published: May 31, 2005

I’ve pos­ted the first install­ment of a new, two-part extract from The Last Monk, which intro­duces the hot­test young tea-cosy in mod­ern Aus­tralian lit­er­at­ure. As always, feel free to hand it around, com­ment on it or print it for use as the raw mater­i­als of a com­plex ori­gami moose. 

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Trench-coats. Trench coats. Trenchcoats?

By Mat | Published: May 17, 2005

Some days aren’t that news­worthy: the most inter­est­ing thing to hap­pen today was a ten-minute search of vari­ous ref­er­ence texts to answer the ques­tion: ‘trench-coats’ or ‘trench coats’? Although I found the answer, I think it’s safe for me to leave you hanging over this one. You’ll simply have to buy the book to find out.

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