I’ve been enthusiastically re-watching the Australian series Seachange since I unpacked a box containing my old videos – if you don’t know it, it ran in Australia from 1998-2000 on the ABC, starring Sigrid Thornton as big-city-lawyer turned small-town-magistrate Laura Gibson.
In any case, towards the end of Series 2 there’s an episode called Not Such Great Expectations where leading man Max Connors is trying to write a novel. I sympathise. But I’m grateful to have fewer problems than he seems to in getting started. Throughout an entire episode, he …

Incredibly, three months has come and gone since I entered my first Writers Weekly 24-Hour Short Story Contest, which makes it time for another one. Today, I wrote a short story for the Spring 2008 contest, and I’m happier with it than the story I produced the last time round.
I love the idea of this forced creativity, having to use a prompt to develop a short story all within a short time – about 12 hours for me, due to time zone differences (unless I could get up in the …

It’s a common trait down here that if a New Zealander moves to Australia to become famous, we Australians take them over and tend to forget their Kiwi origins. Russell Crowe, for example, or the Finn brothers and their band Crowded House; we Aussies like to claim all the popular exports as our own. And it looks like I’ve done the same again with my discussions of Fishpond, the online bookstore down here.
The reason I noticed is that the second book from my original order arrived today, and my curiosity …

A recent post about why writers should read on FWJ wasn’t news to me – I’ve always presumed that all good writers must also be good readers. But I had an unusual experience last week, which put me off my regular evening reading session for a couple of days.
I’m an avid reader. I read on the train and the bus, in my lunch break if no colleagues are around to chat to, at night before I go to sleep, and anywhere I have time to kill – there’s always a …

Ah, life. So many distractions, so many reasons not to finish writing my novel. From the lows of that quiz which told me it would take years for me to finish a novel to the highs of November when I actually completed a (really very terrible) draft of it for NaNoWriMo, there are some days I can practically see my novel on a bookshop shelf, and others when even finishing one more chapter seems like a Mount Everest level challenge.
But I just have to finish it. Why? That’s a good …

What’s happening to my country? Are we actually supporting literature? This week in my state, a new award was announced: the Western Australian Premier’s Australia-Asia Literary Award. It’s for books published by Australian or Asian writers, or largely set in these regions, published in the preceding year, and the especially nice part is it’s worth A$110,000. This makes it one of the richest prizes of its kind – even the Man Booker Prize is only worth a little bit more.
It was only a few months back I mentioned the new …

Remember how Australia’s attempt to compete with Amazon, Fishpond, cleverly convinced me to order my first books from them? The first book just arrived, in under a week, which is obviously not as fast as Amazon.de used to deliver to me in Germany, but I can accept that the distance across Australia to my isolated suburb on the west coast is a whole lot further than anywhere within Germany. So for speed, they get a check mark.
Packaging is fine too. They don’t use the heavy cardboard that Amazon.de sent me, …

One of the biggest problems I face with making progress on my fiction writing career (I say confidently, because I hope it one day becomes a career too) is organising all the writing I need to do each week – the stuff that pays the bills – as well as squeezing in time to work on novels or short stories. A few months ago I started printing out a weekly “Writing Tasks” table that gets pinned on the board above my desk, showing all the blog posts and articles I …

Remember the Writing Show’s first chapter makeover contest I wanted to enter? The contest is a great idea: the winners will get “professional help” to improve their first chapter, all done through podcasts and stuff online so that listeners and readers can follow and learn something out of it themselves.
You might recall I got my first chapter rewritten despite all the other parts of life happening around me, and sent it off just ahead of the final date. Yesterday I heard back from the Writing Show: my chapter’s not bad …

Everyone knows (or if they don’t, they should) that one of the best ways to achieve goals is to tell the whole world what you’re trying to achieve. Shame is a great motivator. It got me through NaNoWriMo and I’m going to try to use it again.
I’ve already mentioned that my goal for the year is to submit short stories to 20 contests. I’m not exactly on track to do this … I’ve managed two. If you’ll allow me to amend this goal a little, I hope to enter 20 …