In January this year, I asked a bunch of writers what their writing goals were for 2013. Was their focus going to be novels, short stories, non-fiction… what? I was interested to see what everyone was planning to achieve, so conducted a poll on my Facebook page. Here are the results…
Yay – I won the Glen Miles Short Story prize! What could be better?? Being able to read my winning story for free, of course! Here’s the opening paragraph of “Champions”, the story that just won me my seventh national writing competition (squee!)… “Can you believe it? Twenty-four years ago…
Last weekend, I took my two kids to a book fair. In the interests of book-loving parents everywhere, I thought I’d share with you what made this particular book fair so very wonderful! 1. Stock plenty of kids’ books! Kids love looking at and buying books! If you’ve got a…
As regular readers will know, there’s a lot of practical writing advice, secrets and encouragement on this blog. So today I thought I’d open the vault and create a free ‘Author Writing Toolkit’ from some of fantastic posts I’ve collated over the years. Even regular writer-readers should find something useful…
I’m so proud of *my* writers – the members of the Northern Beaches Writers’ Group. I’m proud of them because they come from many different backgrounds and bring a wealth of experience to their stories. Some of them write crime, romance or speculative fiction, some write children’s, young-adult or teen…
It often amazes me how similar we writers are to one another. Whether we’re confident and smiling on the outside or visibly nervous, on the inside most of us are the same – we’re full of self-doubt, sensitive and highly analytical. We have to be these things in order to…
When I was a little girl, I always thought I had the same chance as everyone else to win a prize, the lottery, votes, competitions, etc. When I was a gloomy teenager, I still hoped this was true, yet felt it wasn’t… Every time I entered a competition and lost,…
