Since the beginning of the year, by popular demand*, I have been blogging about my entries into the Australian Writers Centre’s Furious Fiction competition. In May’s Furious Fiction, I finally cracked the winners’ circle. No, I didn’t win the five hundred dollars. But my entry, CARDIAC ARREST, was long-listed for the big bucks. (For my…
If you haven’t read Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic Dracula, go out and find a copy now. My friend had been recommending it stridently for many years, but only recently did it catch my eye in an airport bookshop. I was looking for a romp that would keep me distracted on a long flight, which pitted…
(Shortcut to story: Holidays with Rover). When the email announcing the first Furious Fiction of the year popped into my inbox, I was in a car with my little family driving to a caravan park on the South Coast of New South Wales. I doubted I would have time to submit an entry, so all…
Long sentences are bad, we are told. The enemy of plain English. Today the average sentence is 14.4 words long, and that’s less than a quarter of what it was 200 years ago. The UK Government has gone as far as to mandate a maximum count of 25 words in official publications. (For reference, if…
Next up is my first Furious Fiction entry for March 2018: Walpiri. This is my first entry into the competition. I’m not sure I quite captured what I was after, but I only had 500 words and three days, so maybe I was shooting too high. I’ve simplified since. The elements for this month: The…
For the past little while I’ve been entering a flash fiction writing competition run by the Australian Writers Centre. At 5pm on the first Friday of each month, the AWC reveals three elements that must be included in a story with a maximum of 500 words. You’ve got until midnight on Sunday – just over…
I want to say a few quick words about Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy (aka The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and friends). It took me a while to figure out why I’ve been enjoying these books so much, but I think I’ve finally nailed it. It’s the characters So many novels these days are based…
It was nearly three years ago that I wrote this article in praise of the music in the 2015 war-on-drugs thriller Sicario. Sicario: Day of the Soldado is the sequel to that film, and it was with great excitement that I fronted up to my local cinema to see what could possibly be done to…
Where have I been? You may have noticed it has been months since my last post. I would love to be able to reveal that my silence was because I was on a highly classified government mission to deepest Antarctica, or I that I finally took part in that round-the-world blimp race I’d always had…
To start 2018, Matthew is writing a blog series on masters. Not revered historic figures, but everyday people in the modern world who excel at what they do, whatever that may be. Each will teach us a little about how we, too, can pursue our own version of greatness. What better way to kick off…