Snow outside my building in Bratislava
I’ve had a lot of trouble choosing a title for my current work in progress, the one I simply refer to as my Bratislava novel. But I finally have, and I thought I’d share how it came about, although it’s nothing to be particularly proud of and you probably won’t learn any great tips from this story: although you might empathise, perhaps. Here goes:
Choosing a title is both an important and a nonsensical business. As I understand it, publishers change the title of a novel …

Two weeks ago I told you I was on a roll with my Bratislava novel draft; before that I promised to finish this novel to enter it in the Amazon contest soon. Well, it looks like I’m well on track. It’s been finished for a bit now, and I’ve got into the revisions and editing, and although another month or two would be great, I think I can still make it with a pretty decent version of the way I’ve always imagined this novel turning out.
I’ve been meaning to post …

I’ve mused before about whether writing short stories is really something I want to do. I’m not usually especially thrilled by reading them, and the main reason for this is that, well, they’re short. Just as I’m starting to like (or loathe) a character, and get into the story, then it stops. I think I can safely say that at least as my tastes stand at the moment, I’m really a novel reader.
But – there’s always a but – I recently found the information about an interesting novella contest. It’s …

It’s almost a fortnight since I updated you on the progress I’m making with finishing off the writing of  my Bratislava novel, and I’m proud to say I’m still on track to have it fully written and even pretty well revised and edited in time for the ABNA contest. (Obviously, completed edited with heaps of time to spare would be better, but life just isn’t always like that).
One of my students (thanks, Val!) gave me this mug recently, courtesy of our Margaret River Chocolate Factory – in case you can’t …

Earlier this year I bookmarked a great guest post on The Urban Muse with the title Reignite Your Passion For Words. At the time, my passion for words and writing as a little below par, but the ideas in the post still seemed to ring true.
Now that my writing fingers seem to be flying over the keyboard a bit more regularly, this post is even more useful. And in fact I’ve been unwittingly following most of the strategies mentioned anyway, including:

Read more: Lately I’ve been absolutely swallowing books whole. Partly …

Back in March, before my blogging took a back seat to life for a half a year, you may well remember that my first (as yet unpublished) novel Kanako’s Foreigner had made it into the quarter finals of the Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Award.
What I forgot to tell you – and something I have to admit I’m pretty proud of – is that after that, it reached the semi-finals, too. That means that out of the thousands of novels submitted (they don’t say how many, but the limit was 10,000), mine …

As you know, I was pretty excited earlier this week when I was notified that my first novel has made the quarter finals of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. What I hadn’t expected was that the parts of the day I save for fiction writing business were about to get completely taken over by ABNA, but they have, and it’s been a real learning curve of a week. And a very interesting one!
Amazon’s glitches are my gain
If you’ve gone to the Kanako’s Foreigner page – my novel’s spot on …

About six weeks ago I proudly finished the edit and rewrite of my first novel draft and submitted it to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. They have quite a convoluted procedure for getting from (up to) 10,000 entries down to the final winner, but the exciting news is that I’ve passed through the first two stages.
I heard today that my novel Kanako’s Foreigner is officially a quarter finalist for the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award – that means that from the initial 10,000 entries (well, nobody knows if they got …

No doubt some of you have been wondering how I went with my 15-day creation challenge and my goal of getting my novel ready for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. The good news is: I did it!
Procrastination overcome by short-term goals

I really have to shout out a huge thank you to Zoe at Essential Prose for coming up with this 15-day challenge. The goal was to choose a project and work on it for an hour a day for 15 days. I’m actually pretty amazed at how well this worked.
Perhaps …

It’s that time again: the Writers Weekly 24-hour short story contest is happening today. Right now, as I type, in fact. Each time I seem to get just a little bit better at turning out a half-decent short story within a day; last time I wrote a story that I still actually like, a few months later.
I’m stuck! My story has no ending!

This time round the contest theme connected to a wedding in a small chapel. After a few paragraphs of brainstorming and free-writing, I found some interesting characters and …