I’m excited! Australian Catholics are celebrating 25 years, and they’re featuring my first-ever column in their “Best of Australian Catholics” section. What an honour!
You can read it here:
https://www.australiancatholics.com.au/article/2015—chief-magistrate-mum
Laptop on the Ironing Board 
Congratulations. What was the other article you won an award for? Nola
Thank you for reminding me! It was for an article I will reprint here soon. I got in touch with my editor to see if he was planning to put it up on his website, and he’s pretty busy, so happy for me to put it on mine instead. Watch this space!
Congratulations!
Conflict Resolution – some conflicts are funny and I would sometimes laugh, much to the annoyance of the chidren, lol. I have to admit, I don’t miss those days at all 😀
Thank you, MollyBean! I wrote that column three years ago and I still seem to be in the thick of it!!
Hurrah! So proud! 🙂 exciting for you! Keep up the good work!
Thank you so much, lovely Anna! PS I’ve been watching “When Calls the Heart” on Netflix, so now I picture you as the main character!!
Wow, now I feel all famous and stuff! 😉 I’ll have to check out that show! Huge hugs to you! Xoxo
Haha! Somebody recommended it to me when I said I was disappointed with “Anne with an E”. It’s Canadian, set on the frontier in the early twentieth century. The main character is a teacher with red hair who falls in love with a mountie. It’s all very Hallmark Channel, but I’m addicted…
Mmmm, sounds delicious! Does the red head have a bad temper? Then it’s a perfect fit! 😉
She is a bit tempestuous! She reminds me a little of a grown-up Anne of Green Gables. She comes from a rich family, but has traveled out west to prove herself. It’s the perfect show for folding clothes – and it’s fine to have on with kids in the room!
Nice! That’s sounds like some perfect mom fun. How are your twins? Must be enormous! My littlest girl just started crawling.
Aw! My twins are now 3! I’m going through the joy of toilet training at the moment. I’ve never enjoyed toilet training, and two at once is intense! I’m trying to use a ‘divide and conquer’ method, putting all my energy into training Grace (“Daisy”) and hoping Rose will follow suit eventually…
Oh Kate, I’m super super excited for you – although I’m not in the least bit surprised that you’ve won this prestigious honour. Heartiest congratulations!! Celebrate with your lovely family – only mind you don’t offer Chris, Harry, Annie, Daisy & Poppy the popped champagne, while you & hubby sip on warm milk & sup on stale Tim Tams…
Haha! Don’t forget Matilda! She read your comment over my shoulder and said “Ha! That means I get champagne!” Thank you! I’m excited too!!
Hm. Every sentence of that paragraph ended in an exclamation mark and the last one had two. I need to work on that.
Firstly, you don’t need to reply, ever. I’d hate for you to think, Oh no, there she goes again. Doesn’t she realise I have better things to do with my time – like clean up after darling Daisy, and divide & conquer with the rest of the Moriarty kids… However (and that’s Secondly), you just got me with the exclamation thing. I am Exclamation personified… and then multiplied for good measure. My friends & family know to expect one exclamation in every line I write, two exclamations to remind them that what I said was quite funny if they didn’t get it, thank you; and three, just because it’s kinda exhilarating to go tap, tap, tap, on the top LH key. After all, that key doesn’t get used as often as a’s and e’s and the rest of the AERST group, and it must feel kinda neglected. Okay Kate, I know there’s a limit to even your forbearance – so it’s goodbye from me for now and, if you’re lucky, for maybe the next few days… And a special hello to Matilda-who-knows-how-to-milk-an-opportunity-when-she-sees-one. Miss Matilda Champagne Moriarty… H’mm, has quite a ring, don’t you think? And h’mm again: What I need to work on is BREVITY.
You totally need to get yourself a blog.
Just sayin’
Also: I NEVER groan at having to respond to a comment. Comments are like Christmas!
What an unexpected & lovely surprise to receive not one but two messages from you!! The reason I looked up kate..create tonight was because I’ve decided to visit your blog each night and read one of your older posts – will give me pleasant thoughts to take to bed 🙂 You’d better keep creating, katecreate, or I’ll feel cheated when I’ve read all your work. Something else: I’m learning (slowly but surely) to be more economical with my words: 212 (last night) to 83 (thus far) ain’t too bad. Although I’ve still got a long way to go. Teach me, learned one (that’s you), that brevity – 25 words in your 2 comments – is indeed the soul of wit. PS: Thank goodness for Word Count; what DID they do pre-WC ?? PPS: WC doesn’t sound too genteel, I do apologise… Oh dear, at last “count”, WC (sorry, there’s no other word for it) has reached 154. Full stop. Good night. 159 now!!!! PPPS: Do exclamations count??… and question marks???
How gratifying! Thank you! If you do read my previous posts, you will see that brevity has not always been a strength of mine! I still struggle with it. This piece (Chief Magistrate Mum) was well over WC when I first wrote it. I needed to get it down to 600 words so it would fit on the page. It was so hard! I can remember wailing at my editor “I’ve cut away all the fat! Now I’m cutting into BONE!”. Since writing this one (this was my first), I’ve got better at working out how much content to put in to fit the word count, and cutting things out, even if I really like them! “Kill your darlings!”
Brief is beautiful. I’m brief, ergo I’m beautiful. Irrefutable logic – or so it seems to a chronic insomniac at 3 AM. 🙂
Continuing this conversation at the more godly hour of 10-something AM and ditching the gibberish I spouted in the wee small hours… Kate, doesn’t it just kill you to “kill your darlings”!! Oh well, if ten sentences comprising just 272 words were all it took Lincoln to craft arguably the most memorable address in history, 25 words should suffice for a blog comment. Not quite there yet, I’m afraid – but Gettysburg is my goal.
It kills me! Sometimes I want to put the paragraph I’ve cut into an email to my editors and write “please take a moment to appreciate this gem that ended up on the cutting room floor!”
I feel your pain. They (the editorial executioners) mangle your masterpiece with callous indifference. They heartlessly strip your Christmas tree of its baubles… they will even skim the frothy foam off your cappuccino 🙂
Haha! Yes. I once had an editor who completely rewrote the article I put together for him and made it into something completely bland. It made sense why every article in that magazine sounded the same! But my current editors are quite good. Anyway, I can forgive a lot of cappuccino-foam-skimming if it means seeing my name in print!
Thank you!
I look forward with heady excitement to the day when I see my name as a regular contributor like you, Kate. I too would gladly forgive editorial changes – but with certain reservations. I remember contributing an article on the occasion of our church’s 40th Jubilee – and was crestfallen to discover they had changed my correctly placed apostrophes, substituted ‘I’ for ‘me’, etc, until I felt compelled to explain to my ‘grammar-nerd’ family & friends that I was perfectly aware of the proper position of the apostrophe ’s’, and of the correct usage of subjective & objective personal pronouns, but that the editorial committee evidently were not. OMG, that’s too long a sentence, and editors would have a field day chopping it into three or more 🙂