Upcoming Australian Short Story Competition

Gooooooooood afternoon everyone and happy Friday! (if you’re in Australia. If you’re in America… I’m sorry.)

I was just made aware yesterday of the existence of (yet another) short story competition. If you want to be a writer and you want to improve / want to start getting your name ‘oot and aboot’, then story/poetry/novel competitions are a good idea – even if it may be somewhat soul-destroying at times because it kind of feels like continuous negative reinforcement. For the moment my focus is absorbed by getting my butt into gear and sorting out my submission for ‘The Richell Prize for Emerging Writers 2016’ which is due on the 1st of June and still needs a lot of work… As well as travelling to Sydney and Brisbane to say goodbye to family and friends before we back all our stuff up and head off for the US. Hopefully the idea of pressure creating diamonds rings true here!

That being said, my brother linked me to this one on FaceBook which is being run by Hunter Writers Centre and is called ‘Grieve Project’. It’s open from now until 26 June 16 to all Australians and is either a 500 word short story or a poem of up to 36 lines in response to the word ‘grieve’… I think the brevity of the submission is likely to prove challenging rather than especially simple, but it forces clarity of speech at least (hopefully), so I think it’ll be a good one to try out. If you’re interested, you should have a look at the link – http://www.hunterwriterscentre.org/grieve-project.html – and let me know what you think.

I’m almost thinking of starting a ‘word of the day’ segment on Twitter / FB or something. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it – there are some crazy, bizarre and awesome words out there that may spice up your life 😉

— A.