Author: Zoë (Page 1 of 7)

What a difference two months makes

28th January, 2019 / Zoë / 4 Comments

My last post was about staving off depression by posting exclusively positive content on social media throughout November. Shortly after November ended, I hopped a plane to Australia for Christmas and had one of the best visits “home” in my almost-13 years of living abroad.

After three amazing weeks of sun, family, laughter (oh, the laughter!) all my favourite nostalgia foods and finishing it all with a new year’s eve karaoke pool party, coming back to cold, dark Norway hit me pretty hard. My daughter went straight back to her dad, and thanks to jet lag, I worked from home those first few days back, which meant being alone at home with only my kitties for company. I started to sink again, hating my adoptive country for taking me away from the warmth of the Australian sun and my Australian people, who took such good care of me while I was away.

Oh, November

13th November, 2018 / Zoë / 5 Comments

It’s no secret that I hate November in Norway. It gets cold, but hovers above zero with moisture that hangs in the air until it finds hair to frizz, at which point it turns me into Cyndi Lauper circa Vibes, but without the invisible best friend.

Design and Copy: Secret Best Friends

27th June, 2017 / Zoë / 0 Comments

Recently, as part of my job as a UX copywriter, I was asked to give a talk at a UX (User Experience) event that focused on impact. Since copywriting and UX don’t get paired all that often, I thought it was a great opportunity to share my thoughts about why they belong together.

My talk was really well received, and I’ve been asked about it by many friends and colleagues who weren’t at the event, so I thought I would share a version of it here (imagine the headings, pictures and quotes are slides and you’ll get the idea). And, if you have thoughts, please do share them in the comments.

A True Throwback Thursday

16th April, 2015 / Zoë / 3 Comments

What is it about being in your thirties that makes you particularly nostalgic? It can’t just be that it’s the most likely time to be raising children and therefore thinking about your own childhood; previous generations were equally susceptible, and most of them were well into parenthood by the time they were in their thirties.

I can remember growing up in the ’80s amid a wave of ’50s nostalgia, echoed in movies like Back to the Future, The Karate Kid II, and Grease. I remember a car commercial [see the whole scary thing here] featuring a woman in ’50s style polka-dot dress over layers of tulle singing “Gotta Get a Holden Nova” to the tune of Blame it on the Bossa Nova on which I based my primary school graduation dress—with the inevitable addition of 80s iron-crimped hairdo. Poodle skirt + poodle hair = cringe-factor one million. But I was twelve, so I’ll give myself a pass. The ’50s were everywhere in the ’80s.

Year Seven graduation

The Journey to Feminism

14th April, 2015 / Zoë / 0 Comments

I would love to be able to say I’ve always been a feminist. And, in fact, if you had asked me fifteen or twenty years ago if I was a feminist, I would have said yes. I was never one of those girls or young women who think feminism belongs to some mythical hairy-underarmed, bra-burning, man-hating monsters. But honestly, I didn’t even know what the word meant back then. I would have said yes because I was a Lisa Simpson-esque goody-two-shoes who would identify with, and pledge allegiance to, any social justice-related cause. I wanted to save the world, even though I had no idea what I was saving it from. But if you look at some of the life decisions I made back then (case in point, moving in with an idiot right out of high school because he said all the right adoring words), you’d know I was clueless at best, a hypocrite at worst.

A Woman out of Tech

17th March, 2015 / Zoë / 0 Comments

An ode to women still in the game in 2015

Writing this post feels like playing a game of Bloody Mary. Put your finger on a keyboard and say “Quinn, Wu, Sarkeesian!” and a bunch of gamerbros will appear as if by magic to take your life and/or your sanity.

Before I was an author, I was a Woman in Tech. Yes, capital letters are needed these days, because it’s a Thing. It didn’t feel like much of a thing then, and I don’t know if that’s because I worked for a company that never made it a thing, or because Our Time hadn’t come yet, but there is something happening in the tech world that makes me glad I’m no longer part of it, and yet simultaneously sorry I’m no longer part of a solution that needs to be realised.

Seasons between seasons

10th March, 2015 / Zoë / 0 Comments

The Norwegians I know who have been to Australia, even lived in Australia, say one of the things they missed the most was a sense of the seasons changing, something they felt was demonstrably absent from their time down south. Being from the south of Australia, I never really understood this claim; it’s only way up north that they talk about “The Wet” and “The Dry” as opposed to the four seasons. But after nine years here in Norway, I begin to see the difference with greater clarity, and it is not really about four seasons at all, it’s about at least eight.

Now, in early March, there is often still snow and ice about, and not only that, there is frost that reaches deep into the soil, reminding the dormant seeds and bulbs to go back to sleep; it’s not yet dawn. This year, however, almost all the ice and snow has melted after an unusually warm February, with a lot of rain and—very unusual for this part of Norway—wind. But, spring has not come yet. Spring, as I describe it to my almost-five-year-old daughter, is when the trees get their leaves back, the birds and animals bear the results of winter snuggling, and colour returns to the earth in a confetti-like spray of flowers and fresh, green leaves. This is not what we have now. We are in between, balancing, waiting . . .

Two lives and homeless

20th January, 2015 / Zoë / 6 Comments

I lead a double life. One life, the one I was born to, exists in the heat and dust; the other, the one I chose, stands knee-deep in snow. Once every two years, I forsake one for the other, give up my knee-high, wool-lined boots for sandals, and expose my pale, vitamin-D deficient skin to a sun that is as ferocious as it is glorious.

The flight, thanks to new routes, is now down to a minuscule twenty-two hours, but those twenty-two hours are spent in the sort of limbo that separates one life from the other as surely as sleep is separated from waking; whenever I am in one place, the other is like a dream I can’t imagine was ever real.

YA and Proud

2nd December, 2014 / Zoë / 0 Comments

When an author says, “I write children’s books”, the reaction is often one of approval and respect. After all, what more noble pursuit in literature could there be than creating the foundation for future generations of life-long readers?

But when a writer says, “I write young adult books” the reaction can be, sadly, quite different. And the more I talk to other writers of young adult fiction, the more I discover how many of us are still having to defend our choice to write it.

NaNoWriMo. Again.

6th November, 2014 / Zoë / 0 Comments

It’s November again, and for the second year running, I’m attempting NaNoWriMo. That’s the thing where you write a whole novel draft in thirty days. Okay, technically you only need to get to 50k words to “win”, but we call it a novel. Last year I wrote daily throughout November and December and completed the fourth book in my Eidolon series, but this time I’m attempting something completely new. And something I’m keeping completely under wraps until it’s finished, my agent has had a look, and we decide what to do with it. All I can tell you is that it’s contemporary (i.e. no dead people walking among us like those cheeky eidolons), and that I’m very excited about what it might become. For the first time, I’ve decided to write about something I’m personally passionate about—which is kind of terrifying.

An ode to women still in the game in 2015

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