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Burning Out
I’m feeling burnt out. It’s Sunday night and we had a big day today. Though it fortuitously included waffles for breakfast and froyo for a pseudo-lunch, it also included a hike through the Wichita Wildlife Reserve with Kim and her pup Frankie that left me pretty wrecked. Writing Monday’s blog post on a Sunday evening, I feel exhausted. And typically, that leads me to feeling some mild form of creative despair. I’m sure you’ve been there. Raise your hands if you know what I’m talking about (don’t worry, no one can see you guys). Yeah, that’s what I thought: almost everyone in any kind of creative endeavour has. [Disclaimer: I…
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NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge #1 – Redemption
Redemption As a poor teenager on a scholarship to a private high school, Ethan fell in love with a rich, wayward and rebellious Imogen Howard, but knew he could never tell her how he felt. When she shows up unexpectedly as a patient in the rehabilitative nursing home where he works, everything he once felt for her comes rushing back… but will she ever let down her walls to let him in? * * * * * It started off as just another day. “New one in for you, Ethan,” Marie called out as I strode through the foyer. “I hear she’s fiery,” she added conspiratorially, stage whisper bouncing off…
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How I Tackled the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge
Happy Monday everyone! As I mentioned last week, I wanted to do a post on how I approached Challenge 1 of the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge. With only 48 hours to put together a 1000 word short story and three specific constraints (genre, location and object) on what I created, anyone who has done this challenge can assure you… it’s harder than it looks. For a start, 1000 words? Not a lot of words to work with. Creating relatable characters and having them undergo a story/journey in that number is very challenging. Sometimes it’s easier to hide away in the bulk of words we write, rather than pare them…
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Flooded Anthology – Get Aboard!
Helllooo everybody and happy Monday! I feel like I can say that because I’ve just finished cleaning the house (yuck!) and I have this blog post ready to go on time. I’m excited about putting this post up, because I’m really excited about getting involved in the ‘Flooded’ project. ‘Flooded: A Creative Anthology of Brain Injuries’ is the pet project of Victoria Griffin, a writer and editor at Blue Pen Editing Services, who suffered a concussion while playing softball in early 2016. Now, I’m fairly sure most people have heard of concussion. You get them from hard hits to the head and in tv shows, they always shine a light…
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Aussie Expats Update – Curtains, Kohl’s and Burritos
Here we are again everyone! Happy Friday America (and welcome to the weekend Australia). I know that your anticipation over the results of our DIY attempts last weekend must have been simply destroying people throughout the week… But wait no longer! I’m happy to report that, for the most part, our efforts were not in vain. Having gone out for Kim’s birthday dinner on Friday night after a huge home gym training session in the heat, we were pretty wrecked. Despite sleeping in until 10am the next morning (I did some reading, James did the sleeping), we managed to bestir ourselves to get to Home Depot later on to purchase…
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A Post about Networking
Happy Wednesday everyone! There have been a few things going on in the past week or so that have really made me think about networking and building a blog readership, so that’s what I’m focused on today. To start with, I’ve recently started to get a bit more traffic on this blog, so a big HELLO! Hello to everyone who is reading this post or any other, and has made the time to leave a comment or like a post. If you’re a new blogger, you’ll understand just how empowering, encouraging and downright exciting this is; if you’re a more seasoned blogger, you may have forgotten, but let me remind…
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The Battle with the Churn
Happy Monday to all you Americans out there! (Australians, I sincerely apologise for bringing up traumatic Monday memories for you). We’ve had a busy weekend, but this blog post has been on my mind since last week, and I’m keen to share it with you. I want to talk about the ‘Battle with the Churn’. I’m not sure how familiar a term this is to Americans (or even to Australians…?) but it’s a fairly common one in the Australian Army: basically it refers to self-generating work and/or stress. With that loose definition in mind, I’m sure the idea of churning is quite a familiar one. It’s what happens when you’ve…
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Getting Back into the Grooooove
Well everyone, it’s a Monday again. Happy Monday! I’m sure most people are rolling their eyes at that statement, but sometimes we just have to get excited about stuff and today I’m excited about life, so I’m wishing you all a happy Monday. I decided late last week that enough was enough: it was time to start writing every day again. Before leaving Australia, I was fighting to finish our moving admin and finalise all of my uni assignments for submission. The result of that and moving to Oklahoma meant that for quite some time, I only worked sporadically on my novel. Any excuse would do. I couldn’t decide how…
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Are Wednesdays for Writing?
Hey everyone! I know I promised that I would be publishing poetry on Wednesdays, but that idea has recently hit a small snag… Turns out that many magazines and competitions categorise posting your work on a blog as ‘being published’ and since a frequent condition of submission or competition entry is that previously published work isn’t allowed, I’m in a bit of a bind! I won’t be posting much poetry, or short stories up here for a while as a result, since I’m trying to get more involved in submitting my work to magazines and entering competitions. Instead, today I’d like to talk about making yourself write. Wednesdays are for writing. The alliteration is…
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The Storm
Happy Hump Day people! So much is going on for us right now – we got back from Queensland last night and are straight into the swing of things to get the move done. Today our stuff gets packed up to get shipped to America and tomorrow will see the rest of the house packed to go into storage until we come home again. Meanwhile, we both have ongoing uni assessments, I have uni this afternoon and I’m supposed to enter a competition by the end of today, which involves reworking my novel draft… I am nowhere near ready to submit! Still, exciting times on all fronts and we’re starting…
