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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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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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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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Aussie Expats Update – Our Adventurous Life!
Helllooooooo everyone! Welcome back to our most recent edition of ‘I left my job and we moved to America and now we’re having adventures’! Not a very catchy title, but I’m sure I’ll eventually come up with something. Highlights of this week’s update include: wanting to buy a cat, making pavlova, a Friday night party, (almost) winning a new car and an expedition to Bed, Bath and Beyond. So last Friday night, our Aussie neighbours, Dave and Lee, held a party to celebrate our arrival. It jointly celebrated Australia Day too; since the weather over here is too terrible to have an Australia Day celebration in January, they moved it…
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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…
