Five-minute satay sauce. Srsly.

And, gentle reader, since I basically made it up, it is my gift to you.

• One cup of crunchy peanut butter
• Half a cup of water
• A tablespoon (or so) of sweet chilli sauce
• A teaspoon of curry powder

Put the peanut butter and water in a small saucepan and bring to the simmer so that the peanut butter dissolves in the water. Chuck in the sweet chilli and the curry powder, stir it in, and you're done. Literally five minutes. 

You could probably put a dash of coconut cream in at the end if you had it handy, but I'm not sure it's necessary. 

Enjoy! We'll be dipping Vietnamese rice paper rolls in ours.

Which Abbott would we prefer?

Tony Abbott must be either breathtakingly stupid, or deeply dishonest. To illustrate this point, I offer two examples.

First, let's look at his claim that when he spoke of the government “dying of shame” barely a week after the Alan Jones imbruglio, he was not referencing Jones’ deeply offensive comments, but rather using a phrase he has used “seventeen times in the past.”

Perhaps he has. Even so, should we not realistically expect that someone aspiring to the highest office in the land might internally process the ramifications of using such a highly-charged term? That's what his frontal lobe is for. So, either he was too stupid to make that connection in advance, or he knew what he was doing and is now lying about it being inadvertent, a mere slip-up. (It is tempting to offer a third possibility: that he fully meant it, and he intended it to hurt the Prime Minister – to inflict actual emotional pain upon her. But I can’t bring myself to countenance the hideous possibility that someone so cruel could be our next PM, so I’ll try to assume that it’s one of the first two.)

My second example is from yesterday (10 October, 2012) when Mr Abbott produced a power bill sent to him by a disgruntled Perth retiree. Her power bill had doubled! Doubled, I say! He related how she’d almost “had a heart attack” when she saw that her bill had increased from $736 to $1,563. “See, I told you so!” he effectively gloated. “It’s the carbon tax! I told you it would have a crippling impact, and look now! Look now!”

When he tabled the document at Labor's urging, the reason for the woman’s power bill doubling soon became apparent. It was because her power usage had doubled. 

So, once again, which is it? Is Mr Abbott too stupid to notice such a non-trivial error in his reasoning, or has he been caught passing off a deliberately misleading data interpretation?

I suspect it’s the latter – after all, Mr Abbott was a Rhodes Scholar, and they don’t make a habit of handing those out to half-wits. Which would mean that it’s the other option – that he’s happy to say whatever he thinks is politically expedient, and then play the “woops” card when he’s busted.

There’s an additional component to this that should be mentioned. If Tony Abbott’s not stupid – meaning we must therefore assume that he’s being dishonest – we need to draw a clear line to a more troubling conclusion: he thinks that more than fifty percent of Australian voters are breathtakingly stupid. And since we’re talking about someone who wants to lead all Australians after the next election, it's a point that needs to be made, and made often.

A lovely poem I wish I'd written.

No Time

BY BILLY COLLINS

In a rush this weekday morning,

I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery

where my parents are buried

side by side beneath a slab of smooth granite.

Then, all day, I think of him rising up

to give me that look

of knowing disapproval

while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.

Source: Poetry (December 2000).

Edsel Grizzler Book Gig

Great news! As part of this year's Brisbane Writers Festival WordPlay schools program, students from the Queensland University of Technology, under the direction of Carolyn Heim, will be doing two Book Gig performances of Edsel Grizzler. The dates for the performances are Wednesday 7 September (12.30pm), and Friday 9 September (12.30pm). I'll be there to answer questions and enjoy the show, so get along if you can! I'm also doing a whole bunch of other sessions with the festival. It's always a great program up there: all your details can be found here.

NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2011

The venue was the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House. The date was the 16th May, 2011. And the event was the announcement of the NSW Premier's Literary Awards.

This was the first year that the winners haven't known prior, making it more like the Oscars, except that the presenter read something about the winner in each category before reading the name, thereby giving a ten second heads-up to anyone paying attention.

It's good to see this morning that the mainstream media has broken with tradition and published the names of the winners in all categories, rather than just the 'big' ones. And those big ones were Alex Miller for Lovesong, and Malcolm Fraser and Margaret Simons for Fraser's biography. But of most interest to many of us were the winners of the Ethel Turner and Patricia Wrightson prizes, won by Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon) and Sophie Masson (The Hunt for Ned Kelly) respectively. Both shortlists were stacked with potential winners, but unfortunately there could only be one in each list. I have to say that those who missed out took it in very good grace. I admire their nerve - I don't know if I could have been quite so calm during the tense wait.

But the biggest cheer (and a standing ovation) was for Libby Gleeson who, in a huge surprise to her, won the $20,000 Special Award for her past and ongoing contribution not only to young people's literature, but the literary community at large, especially her efforts in establishing the Lending Rights scheme that we all look forward to each year.

It was also a great night for the Western Sydney Young People's Literature Project, soon to be renamed Westwords. This project, overseen by Judith Ridge, kept getting mentions all night, including from Libby in her acceptance speech. From memory, Libby (who chairs the project's board) said something like, 'Watch out for us - we're going to be big.'

A weekend in Gloucester

Seems a lot of new writers festivals are popping up all around the place. More and more schools are putting them on, mostly modelled on the marvellous Somerset Celebration of Literature on the Gold Coast. Then there are the community festivals, such as the new Bellingen Writers Festival.

And there's this one - the Gloucester Writers Festival, held for the first time during the weekend just past. It wasn't a bad lineup of presenters, either - Pamela Freeman, Pam Rusby, Anthony Lawrence, Les Murray and Barry Maitland, to name but a few.

We all had a great time, with a number of events on offer, including a poetry sprint, a young writers' short story competition, and a number of workshops in addition to the panel sessions. I met a number of new people, like the lovely Julie Ditrich, who presented on the topic of graphic novels, and Jesse Blackadder, as well as the organiser, Lindy Dupree.

Then there were the CWA ladies and their pumpkin scones.

And the place! Oh, the place! Anyone who's never been to Gloucester should do i

t, and do it soon. On the drive up there on Friday, I found myself driving past the first day of the Stroud show. Now, I just want to say this: I very rarely go to the Royal Easter Show. I pretty much hate it. Too many people spending money they don't have on things they don't need and food they don't really like while they look at things they don't really understand. But proper country shows are great. I spent a lovely hour wandering around, looking at the campdrafting and the cattle dog trials and the produce displays. They even had a competition for "Best afternoon tea tray with food for one".

And pumpkin scones.

Writing quote XII

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.

(Raymond Chandler)

To some extent, this is why I write the way I do; unplanned, at least at the very early stages. To plan and follow the blueprint is, for me, rather unadventurous. Ergo, it's also pretty boring. I'd never heard it put the way Chandler put it here, but I think I get it. Pushing words means that you're forcing something to happen. You're being the primary agent for change, or for creativity. And of course, the urge to scratch that itch to create something is why we do what we do. But I think there has to more than that. There has to be the feeling of being taken on the ride with the characters. Because if we can't inspire ourselves to invest in our characters and their journey, what hope do our readers have?