A little bit has been happening over the last couple of months. First up, I’ve just submitted my entry into round 1 of the NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge. You may recall I’ve had success in this competition in the past. This year I was tasked with writing a ghost story featuring an exchange student…
Where has the time gone? It’s been over a year since my previous post. That’s a long time. And I wish I had an excuse for it. I wish I could say my silence was writing related, that I’ve signed some publishing agreement that forbids me from talking about my soon-to-be-published work. Or I wish…
My first foray into screenwriting has been a success! Of sorts. I took part in the 2019 NYC Midnight Screenwriting Challenge, and although I didn’t win (or come close) judges did find my entry worthy of an honourable mention. So here is my short comedic screenplay Catfish, for your (script) reading pleasure. For reference,…
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…