So far, so good, I say: it’s still only January and I’ve kicked off my fiction writing year, starting out on point 3 of my resolutions. That’s a whole lot earlier than last year.
This weekend I’ve been participating in the Writers Weekly 24-Hour Short Story Contest for the first time. The concept is quite neat: the topic and word limit are emailed to participants at midday on Saturday (US time – unfortunately that’s 3am Sunday morning here). You then have 24 hours to write a short story and send it …

Somehow in all the Christmas rush I missed the news that the new Aussie government has done something nice for writers, by creating the Prime Minister’s Literary Prize for fiction and non-fiction books. Yay!!! The prize is A$100,000, tax-free, which finally sounds like the kind of money a great writer deserves to get.
At the moment the funding is only in place for the next four years – but let’s hope it goes long enough that maybe in 10 or 20 years one of my books can be in the running …

As I promised, I’ve had a long, cold drink in the living room (under the air-conditioning, because we had temperatures around 40C) and my goals for 2008 are planned.
I think I get better year by year at making them specific and reasonable enough that I actually get a few done – perhaps not in fiction writing but certainly in other areas, and I was so proud to actually exceed my plans for paid freelance writing. But in my heart I’m a fiction writer, so I don’t want to focus …