News & Blog by Adriana Koulias
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We have reached our destination and the final sixth key to writing The Sixth Key and I couldn’t end without speaking about Don Quixote, Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe. When I was a young girl, my birthdays were celebrated in my house by going to the movies. On my twelfth birthday I was taken to see the film, Man of La Mancha, with Peter O’toole and Sophia Loren and I enjoyed...
In a story written by Schiller, a young acolyte sneaks into the temple and steals a peak beneath the veil of the Goddess Isis. He falls down dead. What was hidden behind the veil? Something beyond time and space, something very dangerous…ourselves, or rather, what we were in past lives. In my latest novel I play with the concepts of time, space, life, death and even reincarnation. Like...
The Roman God, Janus, is depicted with two faces staring in opposite directions: one face looking into the past and the other into the future. The past can tell us a lot about who we are and what we will one day create, or do. That’s why I find it essential to retrace the steps that led me to a new novel and in so doing the fourth key to writing The Sixth Key is closely linked to my love...
The Third Key to writing The Sixth Key has to do with the fact that some people belong to their time and others do not. What do I mean by this? Like Otto Rahn, my protagonist, I realised at an early age that I didn’t belong to the Australia of the 1970’s but to the America and Europe of the 1930’s and 40’s. I didn’t fit in at all. While my friends were listening...
I’m often asked how long it takes to write a book and I have to restrain myself from answering, ‘How long is a piece of string?’ There is so much more to a book than those hours that a writer sits plying the craft in glorious abandon. But I’m not talking about those nights one can’t sleep because a particular plot line isn’t working, or a character just isn’t developing. I’m talking about the...
My latest novel The Sixth Key is published and in bookstores and now, as I bask in the warm afterglow of past labours, I find myself turning philosophical. You see, its my habit to retrace my steps, to search beyond those numerous drafts, sleepless nights, moments of self doubt and, of course, the usual last minute panic, to find the impulse that led to the book: the epiphanic moment – the birth of...
