Hurrah! A literary event in Sydney! Elena from With Extra Pulp let me know about this one last night, so I went along and got to meet her as well. We talked about writing, drinking wine and getting distracted by graphic novels. Lovely!

Mic Looby (who I know better from his Big Issue column) was talking about his book, Paradise Updated, with Ben Groundwater. We were treated to a reading from the book, describing one of the older, jaded travel writers; and the conversation largely focussed on what a terrible job being a travel writer really is. I’ve been as guilty as anyone, assuming that travel writing would be a great, glamorous job. When it’s explained more fully (think covering an entire country on a two month deadline) it doesn’t sound quite so fun.

Elena, having read the book (and reviewed it, in fact), has a slightly more informed and amusing review of the night up here. Hopefully there’ll be some more events like this one for us to go to soon!

Going off on a bit of a tangent for a moment, the venue where last night’s event was held also happens to house my preferred cafe to write in, so I was there this afternoon making notes and scrawling down outlines. I have high hopes for this place: a jazz quintet set up and played a set or two while I was there, and the beginnings of some kind of art exhibition became apparent as I left and tables full of wine bottles were set up. I’ll have to keep a close eye on this place.

I recorded a small snippet of what I heard at Da Caff (as I’m now calling it) to share here. Unfortunately I’ve got no idea how to convert it to the kind of file I can actually upload… so for now it’s sitting on my desktop. Any help in that regard would be greatly appreciated!