This week’s 10 minute writing challenge. Share an excerpt from your response to the photo below in the comments area.
go back to the ocean, back to where you came from, originally uploaded by Rowena R.
Going strong now for over six years, for the first time the Emerging Writers Festival has produced The Reader, a humble collection of insightful dispatches and advice from their 2009 lineup.
Not a reader in the oft-experienced university “photocopy a bunch of articles and bind it with a plastic comb” fashion, the design of The Reader contains more thought and creativity than most novels. The focus on design is consistent throughout, from the striking minimalist cover right through to the interior page layout which is carefully considered for each article.
Contributors range from ‘emerging’ to established writers, poets and journalists commenting on topics such as the ups and downs of freelancing, self promotion, writing practices, editor etiquette, book reviews, research methods, and how to cultivate the perfect author profile pic.
Of all the ‘how to write’ texts I’ve been exposed to (I think I read more how to write books than actually write), this is the first I have come across that specifically deals with the challenges of the emerging writer. Not just a ‘how to book’, but a venting and steady unveiling of familiar frustrations and triumphs by a collection of writers in positions not too dissimilar from our own.
Each article unfolds as an individual experience of the author’s interaction with the subject matter. So when Clem Bastow talks freelancing, she structures her thoughts via a series of… Read more
Given it’s a Monday, perhaps something a little less subdued than the last couple of challenges. So how about some food? 10 minutes of writing on the photo below. Post an excerpt of what you come up with in the comments section.
Today’s #coffeebreak challenge. Write for 10 minutes on the image below and post an excerpt of the results in the comments area. Enjoy!
The T. A. G. Hungerford Award call for submissions opened this week and this year the prize is better than ever. Up for grabs is a $12,000 cash prize and publishing contract with Fremantle Press.
The long running award is open to Western Australian authors of unpublished fiction or creative non-fiction manuscripts of at least 50,000 words. I guess that makes it the biggest literary award out there for WA-based emerging writers, and one of the most lucrative across Australia with this year’s increased prize pool.
In regards to what constitutes ‘creative non-fiction’ the entry form states that non-fiction must “be written with attention to literary style and the techniques of fiction”. They give Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood by way of example. The rest of the conditions of entry are pretty standard. You can download the full T. A. G. Hungerford entry form from the writingwa website.
Oh and I guess I should make the closing date nice and bold: 5pm Friday 30 July 2010.
Sounds Like a Challenge
Is it possible to write a 50,000 word manuscript in just over 4 months? That equates to approximately 396 words a day. Allowing… Read more
Five years ago, IT professionals predicted RSS feeds were going to change the future of web browsing. Welcome to that future. Introducing, feedly.
Before the ipad ‘invented’ electronic newspapers, there was Google Reader. Every day millions of people use Google Reader to build virtual newspapers customised to their reading habits. This process is made possible through RSS feeds; a list of article headlines and summaries fed from a website. Such feeds can be subscribed to through any central ‘reader’ application. In this case, Google Reader.
The saturation of blog content has now reached a sweet point where RSS feeds finally seem to make sense to those outside the interweb sanctum. For writers in particular, using RSS through an application like feedly (more on that later) represents an opportunity to refine and improve the online component of the craft, making the web less procrastination and more production.
Why Blogs are Great (really)
Novel writing, for the most part, is a solitary pursuit. Unlike many who participate in a busy office-based profession, novelists don’t get to rock up to a novel workplace each day and have novel conversations with other novelists… Read more
10 minute writing challenge. Post an excerpt of what you write in the comments below.
As reported yesterday over at Gizmodo, this is what selected Penguin digital books will look like on Apple’s new iPad device.
It seems a given now that an author’s efforts at online self-promotion has become part and parcel of selling books. It seems logical then that if ebooks ever do take off, the online presence of an author and their offline work need to get together more often. Certainly this seems to be the thinking over at Penguin (take a look at the Vampire Academy example).
However, the move to interactive books becomes opportunity for some (particularly authors with cross multimedia skills), but one more hurdle for those less technically inclined.
Who funds the development of this kind of interactivity? For publishers taking a risk on a new author, would they willing to shell out an extra 20 grand for the digital bells and whistles?
I know I’ll be sending flowers on a regular basis to all my webby friends from here on…
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What do you think? Is this just something that will appeal to certain genres? Given the number of awful writer website designs already out there, are we just going to see more… Read more
If you are an unpublished ‘emerging’ writer working on a full length manuscript, anthology or collection, I’d like to hear from you for a new ‘work in progress’ series.
Affectionately titled #wip, this new blog series aims to explore the ups and downs of the new writer journey as they work towards writing and/or publishing a full length manuscript of fiction or creative non-fiction.
I’m less interested in whether your venture is ultimately a success, and more intrigued by what happens along the way. To this end I need writers who are happy to come back to me every few months for an update on their progress (or lack thereof). Whether you are just starting out, struggling with the slush pile or shopping (ie begging) for a publisher, I’d like to hear from you.
The profiles are designed to be intimate and insightful, focused on the writer’s individual experience of the writing life. Each profile will be authored by me in response to a short Q&A process conducted at various points of the manuscript development.
Think of it as the writing equivalent of “Seven Up!”
To participate you need to be:
- Unpublished (in the full length manuscript kind of
It was hot, that was the first thing. Hot enough that the magpies were cooling on the oak lawn with their beaks open. Hot enough that the book covers in the Dymocks tent were curling, drawing away from the pages.
When I rode back to the university grounds on the afternoon of the final day, a column of smoke spiraled up from the direction of campus. This is how it ends, I thought. The Dymocks tent finally up in flames.
Of course that wasn’t the case. The fire was not at the uni at all, but somewhere far in the distance behind. But the sentiment was the same; I had not seen so many hands clutching water bottles since Good Vibrations.
The second thing I noticed was that I was out numbered and out aged by around four decades.
At “Off Like a Shot”, a debut novelist session with Tom Cho, Goldie Goldbloom and Eleanor Catton, the presenter was heckled for improper use of the microphone. “We can’t hear you” the ladies shouted from the front row. The problem was a technical one and unfortunately re-appeared intermittently throughout… Read more