I can now say that I've "done" the famous Adelaide Writers Week. I have a long way to go to catch up with my friend and hostess Annalou, though, as she's been a regular attendee for a couple of decades and is an old hand now. Of course, every year is different, since the organisers invite a wide variety of guests each time. This year we were regaled by speakers as disparate as William McInnes (who is probably better known to most people as an actor) Germaine Greer, Ian McEwan and Gabrielle Lord. One surprise was the presence of Sister Veronica Brady, who was launching her book The God-Shaped Hole. I have long admired Brady: despite being a nun, she was already known as a feminist and an activist when I was doing my Religious Studies degree twenty years ago.

It's simply not possible to hear all the speakers, since they run a double program, split between two massive tents. Furthermore, the weather was not kind: it was in the high thirties Celsius (that's around the century in old money) and I didn't go in every day. Even Annalou took one full day and a couple of half days off. One could become exhausted through over-stimulation otherwise, quite apart from the unfriendly weather.

I could only identify two Speculative Fiction writers: Margo Lanagan and Lian Hearn (Hearn attracted a bunch of SF fans who brought a breath of fresh air to the rarified atmosphere with their enthusiastic questions and cheering of their favourite) although we must not forget that Gabrielle Lord put a toe or two into SF before she finally settled on Crime as her favoured genre. One of the last panels was called "Friday Crime", and it included Marshall Browne, Garry Disher and Denise Mina as well as Ms Lord. (Mina, by the way, is a hoot, and she also has a delicious Scots accent with a hint of her Irish heritage thrown in.) It was a breath of fresh air to hear this quartet jibe gently against their literary brethren, who, I regret to say, did sometimes come across as more than a little precious and snobbish. On another panel, Margo Lanagan obviously felt she'd had enough of it when she said, "You were supposed to get Amanda Lohrey on this panel. If she'd been here, when all the penises were out on the table she could've put her brain down alongside them". This brought a huge round of applause as well as a good laugh.

Not that laughter was lacking: most speakers were intelligent, amusing and not at all wanky. One of my favourites was Tim Parks, a British academic now living in Italy. He spoke with humour and sincerity on the art of essay writing and on translation. Nor did Lanagan need to apologise for not being Lohrey: she spoke extremely well on a panel called "Rules and how to break them". She assured us that rules - which are always changing - are secondary to good writing. "The cream," she assured us, "will rise. If you're not rising, you're not cream yet," which is as sound a piece of common sense as I've heard in a while. One "rule" she did mention, quoting Kurt Vonnegut, was Every character should want something, even if it's only a glass of water. Again, sound advice, especially to someone like me who has trouble carrying the tension forward. The following speaker, Matt Rubinstein, agreed that following rules is not as important as writing well. "By the time you've worked out the rules," he said, "they will have changed".

Now that, friends, is Bad News for me, since I feel I've only just got a handle on how to use the currently favoured Close Third POV with any degree of competence. That was the subject of the talk I gave to the Mount Gambier U3A writers a week or two ago, but I've rabbitted on enough for today so I'll expand on that next time, as promised. By then I'll be in Perth - huzzah and halleluia!

BTW, forgive my lack of blog-visiting. I've had only limited computer access and every different computer I use seems to present me with a new set of difficulties! All being well, I'll be back on the rounds next week.