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Rules Are Made to be Broken
Happy Monday world! Despite my recent failings in terms of keeping this blog post running smoothly along, I have returned with a post: hurray! WordPress reminded me yesterday that it is now 1 year since I first created this blog out of the ether that is the internet, and I thought that, at the very least, I should drag my sorry self together and write a blog post in honour of that milestone. So, I was scrolling through the infinite pages of wisdom, inanity and cat videos that is Facebook (or at least, my Facebook feed), when I stumbled on the below image, courtesy of the Australian Writers’ Centre: It…
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Where We Create – A Space for Writing
Happy Easter Monday everyone!! I realise that I was a tad slack last week: sometimes blogging falls by the wayside… Mostly because last week I didn’t have anything ready, and I felt a bit wiped out just at the thought of having to put something together. So here I am again, back and loud and proud! Thanks to uni, I recently watched a youtube video of John Cleese presenting a lecture about creativity. It was excellent. Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I’m a big John Cleese fan (thanks for that Dad!). I think he’s hilarious, and as someone for whom humour is not a creative forte, I’m always intrigued…
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Finding Ourselves
For those who don’t know, I used to write on another blog. I started it in 2014 post-Afghanistan, when I was ensconced in a new city, in a new world, in a new self defined by confusion and pain and loss; I started it as a way to try and heal myself through a medium that I instinctively knew I belonged to, and that belonged to me. But the truths I found that year, that I fought and bled for in the depths of my soul, are no less true for the passage of time and the healing of those wounds. They still resonate with the parts of me that…
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The Joy of Self-Revision
Hellllooooooo from Lawton, Oklahoma everybody! Since nothing of much interest has happened this week, I decided not to bore anyone with an update post (though, if you’re dying of curiosity to know allll about Derrida, deconstruction and other post-structuralist literary theory—hint, you’re not, I promise you—please let me know). Instead, I’m going to write about the seemingly endless journey that is writing, and bore someone with that instead. For anyone who missed the memo, I entered the Mogford Short Story Prize back in December, and I couldn’t help myself (I never really can) from getting my hopes up about it. C’est la vie, honestly: I’m always simultaneously despairing at the…
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Aussie Expats Update – Road Trip? COMPLETE!
Happy Monday everyone! I decided late last week that since we’d be getting home over the weekend (and I had a 2000 word essay to write) I would delay the final road trip blog post until after we finished. And thus, we arrived back into Lawton yesterday afternoon with 9100 miles total on the car (14,560 km: a third of the way around the earth!), a crack in our damn windscreen (more on that later) and a huge sense of relief because there’ll be no more driving for a while. On to the recap then, and a quick warning that we’ve crammed a lot into the past 10 days: be prepared…
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The Lost
The paper was late again. He peered out the window onto his front lawn, and frowned, then strode onto the porch. The empty wicker chair stood at attention beneath his scrutiny, but the man ignored it, and was rewarded with the sight of the paperboy flying around the corner on a black Avanti. “Going damn fast, too,” he said to himself as the teenager skidded to a halt and pegged the rolled up newspaper towards the front door. It wouldn’t take much for him to hit someone and knock them flying, the fool. “About time,” he said, more loudly, but the boy only laughed. “You’re welcome, Grim!” The kid yelled,…
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Creative Writing Courses
It’s Monday again! I mean, I can be happy about this because I’m currently road-tripping my way through ye olde U-S-of-A (and knowing me, probably drowning in a pile of uni work), but I hope you’re all happy about it too. Especially since you’re reading this post. Yay! Hurray! Read on, brave visitor! So then, enough joviality. To business. The other day, I was scrolling mindlessly through Facebook (as one does when one should be reading, or writing, or studying… or really anything except scrolling mindlessly through Facebook) and stumbled upon a bit of a sales pitch for a writing course. I actually really love the literary page that was…
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Challenges: Proofreading and Feedback
Huh. Well, this one is a bit of a doozy. You write, and write, and write, and you think you’re getting better. In fact, you think your latest piece—whether it’s a story, a poem, a novel, an essay—is pretty damn good. But, you’re also conscientious and maybe you’re entering a competition or putting it somewhere for the world to read, so you ask a few people to read over it for you. Oh man. Buckle in. Where to start with this one? To kick it off, I’d like to say that if you have a small group of talented, painstaking and helpful friends out there who will proofread your work…
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Organisation? A ‘Writing Projects’ List
Greetings fellow humans! So I’m a little bit excited about this one, in part because I took a photo and I used glittery golden pen to jazz up my page. I actually didn’t do a great job (the gel pen wasn’t working properly so I’m blaming my tools), but I stuck it up on my wall in front of my desk because ‘look at my artistic skills’ *cough*. And James said it was nice, so there. But anyway. This idea occurred to me while I was lying in bed in early January and realised my notebooks were jam-packed, my digital filing was all over the place, and my head was…
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Biting the Bullet: to Submit or not to Submit?
You know how sometimes you’re on a roll, getting stuff done, thinking that there is a high likelihood that you may in fact be superhuman… When you suddenly realise you’ve forgotten to write your Monday blog post? Yeah, that just happened to me. I’m feeling pretty chuffed with myself for getting through some time-consuming chores this morning, so I won’t be too harsh on myself; besides, here’s the post! I mentioned last week that I was in the process of working on a piece of speculative fiction, and I actually started writing this particular one as an entry into the The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition (deadline is tomorrow, so if you’ve got…
