Success! – Furious Fiction May 2019

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…

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It’s time you met the real Dracula

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…

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Furious Fiction – Holidays With Rover

(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…

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In Appreciation of Long Sentences

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…

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Furious Fiction – Walpiri

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…

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Furious Fiction – Gate 47

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…

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MOVIE REVIEW: Sicario: Day of the Soldado

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…

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Signal interrupted

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…

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The Masters Series – Episode 3: The Snow Fox

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…

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