Just before Christmas, a colleague of mine excitedly recommended a book she was reading (thanks, Kath!): The Doorbells of Florenceby Andrew Losowsky. It’s quite a special book to look at – a small hard back with nice quality paper, full of colour photographs, graphics and an attractive font. And it’s not only attractive physically, but the whole idea of it is absolutely adorable.
Basically, it was inspired by Losowsky’s random decision to photograph a bunch of doorbells in Florence. Fortunately, Italian doorbells are a lot more beautiful than my rather uninspiring …

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 …

When it was announced around two years ago that the new government had created the Prime Minister’s Literary Prize worth A$100,000 for the best fiction and non-fiction books of the year, I was pretty impressed. It’s truly nice to see writers getting some monetary recognition of the thousands of hours of work that go into the writing of a novel – or in the case of the 2009 winner, Nam Le, a collection of short stories.
I’ve been having a bit of an ambivalent relationship with short stories recently. I’d like …

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 …

With my teaching load finally reduced (I’ve been doing extra work at that job for the past three months or so – there’s a massive shortage of ESL teachers in Perth!), this week I have actually had two days at home to get my writing work done. Of course, I actually need about three or four, but two days is certainly better than one. And it was great timing because I’ve been trying to write a Christmas-themed short story for a contest which closes tomorrow.
The idea for the story has …

Each time I enter the quarterly Writers Weekly 24-hour short story contests, I try to use a different approach to writing the short story. I’m a little ashamed to say that this year, these are the only short stories I’ve written, but it’s definitely been more of a long fiction year.
Anyway, in the July competition I did a lot more serious plot planning than usual; back in April I did a lot of brainstorming and then a one-hit write. This time round I decided to use a strategy I’d read …

Remember a few weeks ago I wrote another short story for a Writers Weekly 24-hour contest? Well, results are still not in yet, but what I read on the Writers Weekly site today still cheered me up somewhat.
Angela Hoy of Writers Weekly wrote a post this week about the common themes that she found in the several hundred short story entries for this contest. Remember, every story has to be based on the given topic – that’s one of the ways they ensure you really do write it within the …

When I got up this morning, I knew the topic for this season’s Writers Weekly 24-hour short story contest would be waiting in my email inbox. In previous contests I’ve been excited to get to it straight away, but somehow today my enthusiasm had waned. I read all my other email first and checked Bloglines too before finally reading the topic – in summary, it included a strange object in an old toy shop, and a word limit of 900 words, nice and short.
My strategy from here was to let …

Observant readers will know that I have a category tag especially designated for short stories, yet I rarely mention them. Surely short stories are an important part of becoming a fiction writer? So what’s going wrong?
For a start, I haven’t read a short story for ages. I do go through phases where I rather enjoy one of those “Best Short Stories 2005″ kind of collections, but even then I do only read about half of them – unlike novels, I have no qualms about breaking off reading a short story …

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 …