KJ Gurney is a Melbourne-based fiction writer, reader, and book reviewer.
By day, a freelancer working from home. By the rest of the day, and most evenings, and probably too early in the morning, a writer chasing the dream, and a reader who has fully lost the plot about books in the best possible way.
The writing
I’ve loved fiction all my life, but it didn’t occur to me that writing it was something I could actually do until a friend of mine did it. A bit like the time I met my first vegan friend, suddenly, the thing I’d never considered becomes possible.
I read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Stephen King’s On Writing, joined a writing group and a writing class, and started making the kind of mistakes you have to make to get better.
I’ve written three novels. None of them are published. The first two taught me I could do better. The third is in editing and might be something, but I’m a hard critic of myself, so the jury is still out. I write short stories too, mostly to keep practising and to have something to bring to my writing group.
Reading my work aloud to a room of people is still genuinely terrifying. I do it anyway. The feedback can be brutal, and I’ve walked out of more than one session wanting to quit entirely, to retreat and never write another word.
But something I heard on the radio has never left me: doubt will destroy more dreams than failure ever will. I’m not willing to be someone who wonders, at the end of it all, what might have happened if I’d kept going.
So I keep going.
The reading
I read a lot. I didn’t always. A few years ago, twelve books a year felt like a reasonable amount. Then I read Stephen King’s account in On Writing of how much he reads—roughly 70 to 80 books a year, which he considers modest, given that writing is his full-time job. I recalibrated. I now read around 60 books a year, which I manage alongside freelancing, a family, a house, kids, and foster pets. I read as much as I can physically manage, and I consider it non-negotiable.
I usually have two books on the go at once: one physical, one audiobook. I try to finish each within a week. I don’t always succeed; some books are enormous, and some are a slog, but I finish one and immediately open the next. Not later that day. Immediately. The more I read, the harder it is to stop, and I’ve reached the point where I genuinely struggle to understand how others don’t feel the same way.
I think I also use reading as a form of deliberate disassociation. Where other people scroll, I read. I find it recuperative in a way that nothing else quite matches. I’m an introvert, and disappearing into another world is restoration, not escape.
I prefer a physical copy and will happily sit on a library waitlist for one. I also borrow audiobooks through Libby and pick up books wherever I find them: street libraries, friends, op shops. I never dog-ear. I will use anything as a bookmark, literally. I do crack spines and curl books back on themselves, but only my own copies or a library copy that someone else has already broken in. I would never do it to a friend’s borrowed book.
Find me on Goodreads. It’s where I track everything I read.
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