Where has the time gone? It’s been over a year since my previous post. That’s a long time. And I wish I had an excuse for it. I wish I could say my silence was writing related, that I’ve signed some publishing agreement that forbids me from talking about my soon-to-be-published work. Or I wish…
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My first foray into screenwriting has been a success! Of sorts. I took part in the 2019 NYC Midnight Screenwriting Challenge, and although I didn’t win (or come close) judges did find my entry worthy of an honourable mention. So here is my short comedic screenplay Catfish, for your (script) reading pleasure. For reference,…
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Since the beginning of the year, by popular demand*, I have been blogging about my entries into the Australian Writers Centre’s Furious Fiction competition. In May’s Furious Fiction, I finally cracked the winners’ circle. No, I didn’t win the five hundred dollars. But my entry, CARDIAC ARREST, was long-listed for the big bucks. (For my…
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If you haven’t read Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic Dracula, go out and find a copy now. My friend had been recommending it stridently for many years, but only recently did it catch my eye in an airport bookshop. I was looking for a romp that would keep me distracted on a long flight, which pitted…
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(Shortcut to story: Holidays with Rover). When the email announcing the first Furious Fiction of the year popped into my inbox, I was in a car with my little family driving to a caravan park on the South Coast of New South Wales. I doubted I would have time to submit an entry, so all…
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Long sentences are bad, we are told. The enemy of plain English. Today the average sentence is 14.4 words long, and that’s less than a quarter of what it was 200 years ago. The UK Government has gone as far as to mandate a maximum count of 25 words in official publications. (For reference, if…
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Next up is my first Furious Fiction entry for March 2018: Walpiri. This is my first entry into the competition. I’m not sure I quite captured what I was after, but I only had 500 words and three days, so maybe I was shooting too high. I’ve simplified since. The elements for this month: The…
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For the past little while I’ve been entering a flash fiction writing competition run by the Australian Writers Centre. At 5pm on the first Friday of each month, the AWC reveals three elements that must be included in a story with a maximum of 500 words. You’ve got until midnight on Sunday – just over…
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I want to say a few quick words about Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy (aka The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and friends). It took me a while to figure out why I’ve been enjoying these books so much, but I think I’ve finally nailed it. It’s the characters So many novels these days are based…
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It was nearly three years ago that I wrote this article in praise of the music in the 2015 war-on-drugs thriller Sicario. Sicario: Day of the Soldado is the sequel to that film, and it was with great excitement that I fronted up to my local cinema to see what could possibly be done to…
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