S2E11: Debut author Kerry Jewell on writing dark humour

S2E15: Author Sophie Stern on debut novels, pantsing it and making time for writing when life says otherwise

Season 2: The Home Season The second season of Creative Momentum with Meg, The Home Season, features interviews with Australian writers and artists where I explore how and why people do their creative work. Episode 15: Sophie Stern, Author Sophie Stern is a Sydney-based author whose debut novel What Is Left For Us (Penguin Random House, March 2026) centres on two estranged sisters forced to reunite when they jointly inherit their grandmother’s clifftop house in Bondi. Her manuscript was shortlisted for the Penguin Literary Prize in 2024 and subsequently published this year. Sophie has spent the years since writing while working four days a week in a corporate job and raising a young son. This is a conversation about how to get a novel written when life only gives you one day a week, and what happens when you try to do it differently the second time around. In this episode, we cover: How Sophie built her writing life around one sacred Friday a week The difference between pantsing her first novel and plotting her second How she uses spreadsheets to plan backwards and leave a trail of breadcrumbs Why she stopped feeling like her corporate job and her creative life were in conflict Where her inspiration comes from How growing up in a musical family shaped her relationship with structure, rhythm and creative playlists Whether you are trying to finish a first novel around a full-time job and a small child, wondering whether pantsing or plotting is your thing or just looking for the permission slip to write the way that actually works for you, this episode is full of it. Sophie is thoughtful, funny and completely honest about the messiness of the process, and she makes writing feel possible. Connect with Sophie Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/sophie.e.stern/] - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.e.stern/ [https://www.instagram.com/sophie.e.stern/] Substack: Creative Practice [https://creativepracticenewsletter.substack.com] Website [http://sophiestern.com.au/]: http://sophiestern.com.au [http://sophiestern.com.au/] Book: What is Left For Us [https://www.penguin.com.au/books/what-is-left-for-us-9781761354441] https://www.penguin.com.au/books/what-is-left-for-us-9781761354441 Find all Creative Momentum with Meg show notes [https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley] and interviews: https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley [https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley] A special thanks to Yvonne Morton for the music accompanying this episode. You can find Yvonne on Bandcamp [https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/] (https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/ [https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/]) and Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/].(https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/ [https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/]) Get full access to Musings with Meg at megdunley.substack.com/subscribe [http://megdunley.substack.com/subscribe] Get full access to Musings with Meg at megdunley.substack.com/subscribe [https://megdunley.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

S2E14: Author Lauren Novak on mum rage, debut books + journalism instincts that shape her writing

Season 2: The Home Season The second season of Creative Momentum with Meg, The Home Season, features interviews with Australian writers and artists where I explore how and why people do their creative work. Episode 14: Lauren Novak, Author Lauren Novak is an award-winning journalist at The Advertiser in Adelaide and the debut author of Meltdown: Why Motherhood Makes Us Angry and What to Do About It, published by HarperCollins in 2026. Having spent more than two decades covering family violence, child safety and education, Lauren turned her professional skills inward when she found herself experiencing mum rage and couldn’t find a single book about it. What she built instead was part personal reckoning, part research project, part narrative journalism and all deeply readable. This is a conversation about what it takes to go from journalist to book author, and how the skills that serve in one world can both help and hinder in the other. We chat about: - How surveying 200 mothers from around the world became the foundation of Meltdown - How Lauren used her journalism training to structure a book - The writing routine she built around a four-year-old and a two-year-old - Why she had to unlearn the journalist’s habit of ‘finishing things nicely’ - Why she thinks curiosity, not English skills, is the real key to writing Whether you are working on your first big non-fiction project, wondering how to translate professional writing skills into a book, or trying to find any time at all to write around small children, this episode will give you both practical grounding and genuine reassurance. Lauren is warm, funny and very honest about where she is in her creative life right now, including the parts that are not working yet. Connect with Lauren Lauren on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/laurennovakwrites/] (https://www.instagram.com/laurennovakwrites/) Website with survey links [https://laurennovak.com.au/] (https://laurennovak.com.au/) Meltdown [https://laurennovak.com.au/meltdown/] (https://laurennovak.com.au/meltdown/) Find all Creative Momentum with Meg show notes [https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley] and interviews: https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley [https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley] A special thanks to Yvonne Morton for the music accompanying this episode. You can find Yvonne on Bandcamp [https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/] (https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/ [https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/]) and Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/].(https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/ [https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/]) Get full access to Musings with Meg at megdunley.substack.com/subscribe [http://megdunley.substack.com/subscribe] Get full access to Musings with Meg at megdunley.substack.com/subscribe [https://megdunley.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

S2E13: Linda Atkins on writing the novel that was always waiting

Season 2: The Home Season The second season of Creative Momentum with Meg, The Home Season, features interviews with Australian writers and artists where I explore how and why people do their creative work. Episode 13: Linda Atkins, Author Linda Atkins is a women’s health physician and writer based in Western Sydney who came back to writing in her fifties after stopping as a teenager, and has since written four manuscripts, scored a literary agent, and landed a book deal for her debut crime novel What We Left Behind, due out in November. She started writing again not from ambition but from necessity, sitting down to release a long-held family secret into an essay she sent off to the Calibre Essay Prize, then promptly forgot about. It was longlisted, then shortlisted, and she has not stopped writing since. She is funny, forthright, and completely unromantic about the craft. In this episode, we talk about: - Why doctors end up as writers, and what happens when the science-rewarded part of yourself suppresses the artistic part for 30 years - The essay that started it all: writing a family secret out of her body and sending it off to a prize she then hoped she would not win - What it felt like to pull the plug after 30 years of stored-up words, and why having no craft was part of the deal - Learning to write entirely on the run: reading a bazillion books, sending out short stories, and reaching the critical mass of small wins that made her believe she could do it - How a comment from Candace Fox at a State Library panel became the challenge that sparked her crime novel - Her transition from pantser to plotter, and why crime fiction eventually demands you sort out your plot holes, whether you like it or not - Why the best novel to work with is a finished one, and why writing forward rather than backwards is the only advice that matters - Flash fiction as a craft tool, and short stories as palate cleansers between novels - Why she writes because she cannot not, and her greatest fear that she will not live long enough to say everything she wants to say - What home means to someone who grew up in an immigrant family selected for ambition and dissatisfaction, and how finding safety finally unlocked her creative life Whether you are a writer who came to it late, a creative person who buried their art under decades of other life, or someone who keeps rewriting Chapter 1 instead of getting to Chapter 30, this episode is for you. Linda is practical, warm and clear-eyed about what it takes, and her story is a good reminder that 30 years of unwritten words do not disappear. They just wait. And when you finally sit down, they come gurgling out all at once. Connect with Linda Linda on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/atkinsaudacity/] ‘After’, Linda’s KYD Flash Fiction prize [https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/flash-fiction-prize-2025-after/] Shouting Abortion: A doctor reflects on the politics and economics of terminations [https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2022/june-2022-no-443/shouting-abortion-a-doctor-reflects-on-the-politics-and-economics-of-terminations-by-linda-atkins] Find all Creative Momentum with Meg show notes [https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley] and interviews: https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley [https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley] A special thanks to Yvonne Morton for the music accompanying this episode. You can find Yvonne on Bandcamp [https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/] (https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/ [https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/]) and Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/].(https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/ [https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/]) Get full access to Musings with Meg at megdunley.substack.com/subscribe [http://megdunley.substack.com/subscribe] Get full access to Musings with Meg at megdunley.substack.com/subscribe [https://megdunley.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

S2E12: Author Susan Green on finishing the crap first draft

Season 2: The Home Season The second season of Creative Momentum with Meg, The Home Season, features interviews with Australian writers and artists where I explore how and why people do their creative work. Episode 12: Susan Green, Author Susan Green is a children's and adult fiction writer with a career spanning nearly four decades. Best known for the Verity Sparks series, which began with The Truth About Verity Sparks (a CBCA Awards runner-up in 2011), she has also written picture storybooks, non-fiction, one adult novel, and five teenage romances under the name Susan Lennox. After nearly a decade away from completing projects, the writing bug has returned, and Susan is now deep in a 1950s espionage novel and preparing a submission for a Varuna residency. In this episode, we talk about: - How a walk through Melbourne’s grand Victorian architecture sparked the first Verity Sparks novel - Why having a contract focused her writing life, and what happened to her routine without one - Her pantser approach: starting with a character, worrying at a first sentence, and trusting the story to find itself - The breakthrough she had in her 20s for dealing with the voice that says this is crap - What a great editor taught her about killing your darlings - The Little Bo Peep theory of creative problems, and why she no longer worries too much - Why she stopped thinking about publishers and markets, and what that freedom has meant for the book she is writing now - The grief that comes when your characters stop speaking to you Whether you are a writer finding your way back after a long break, stuck in the middle of a draft, or wondering what the point is without a contract or a deadline, this episode is for you. Susan is funny, generous and disarmingly honest about the messiness of creative life, and her story is a good reminder that beingness, including creative beingness, is enough, and that the characters always come back wagging their tails. Connect with Susan * Susan’s website [https://veritysparks.com/] * How Bright Are All Things Here [https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781760555627/] Find all Creative Momentum with Meg show notes [https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley] and interviews: https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley [https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley] A special thanks to Yvonne Morton for the music accompanying this episode. You can find Yvonne on Bandcamp [https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/] (https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/ [https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/]) and Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/].(https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/ [https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/]) Get full access to Musings with Meg at megdunley.substack.com/subscribe [http://megdunley.substack.com/subscribe] Get full access to Musings with Meg at megdunley.substack.com/subscribe [https://megdunley.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

S2E11: Debut author Kerry Jewell on writing dark humour

Season 2: The Home Season The second season of Creative Momentum with Meg, The Home Season, features interviews with Australian writers and artists where I explore how and why people do their creative work. Episode 11: Debut Author Kerry Jewell Kerry Jewell is a nuclear medicine physician and writer based in Melbourne whose debut novel, A Little Unwell, is a darkly funny look at life inside the Australian hospital system. Kerry began the book in 2015 during a night shift, venting a bureaucratic frustration into a Word document she almost never opened again, and finished the first complete draft seven years later. Her first three chapters were shortlisted for the Richell Prize in 2020, and the book is published by Hachette. She is also, it turns out, a genuinely funny person to talk to at an early hour of the morning. In our chat, we discuss - Why so many doctors end up as writers, and what medicine and creative work have in common - Dark humour in medicine: why healthcare workers rely on it, and why Kerry was surprised to learn hers was dark - Kerry’s deliberately routineless approach to writing and why attempting a routine makes things worse - The car as creative space and how a one-hour commute does more for plot and character than sitting at a desk - How the book moved from vignettes and loose notes to a complete manuscript across seven years - Why Kerry chose fiction over non-fiction to tell these stories, and what fiction allows that non-fiction does not - The connection between creative practice and showing up well at work and for patients Whether you are a writer who has been sitting on a half-finished manuscript for years, a creative person trying to balance a demanding day job with the work that feeds your soul, or someone who simply needs permission to stop trying to have a routine, this conversation is for you. Kerry is warm, funny, and bracingly honest about the messiness of the creative process, and her story is a good reminder that the gap between venting into a Word document at 2am and holding a published novel is mostly just time, stubbornness and a willingness to let the work find its shape. Connect with Kerry A Little Unwell [https://www.hachette.com.au/kerry-jewell/a-little-unwell] https://www.hachette.com.au/kerry-jewell/a-little-unwell [https://www.hachette.com.au/kerry-jewell/a-little-unwell] Website [https://www.kerryjewell.com/] https://www.kerryjewell.com/ [https://www.kerryjewell.com/] Substack [https://substack.com/@drkerryjewell/notes] https://substack.com/@drkerryjewell/notes [https://substack.com/@drkerryjewell/notes] Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/drkerryjewell/] https://www.instagram.com/drkerryjewell/ [https://www.instagram.com/drkerryjewell/] Bluesky [https://bsky.app/profile/drkerryjewell.bsky.social] https://bsky.app/profile/drkerryjewell.bsky.social [https://bsky.app/profile/drkerryjewell.bsky.social] Find all Creative Momentum with Meg show notes [https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley] and interviews: https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley [https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley] A special thanks to Yvonne Morton for the music accompanying this episode. You can find Yvonne on Bandcamp [https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/] (https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/ [https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/]) and Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/].(https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/ [https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/]) Get full access to Musings with Meg at megdunley.substack.com/subscribe [http://megdunley.substack.com/subscribe] Get full access to Musings with Meg at megdunley.substack.com/subscribe [https://megdunley.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]