Tag: Writing Life

• February 3, 2023

  January: In which a plan was made

  

  The first month of 2023 has come to a close. How are we all feeling? Somehow I already feel burnt out. But I’m also invigorated and excited about the year ahead. I spent most of this month setting goals and targets, formulating a five year plan and creating spreadsheets. As a result I’ve updated the […]
• January 30, 2023

  How many spreadsheets does it take to get published?

  

  Truth be told, the answer to that question is none. When I was first published I had zero spreadsheets. No submission tracker or pitch tracker. Nothing. I didn’t even know how much I liked spreadsheets yet. These days my love affair with spreadsheets is in full flight (I had one for my son’s first foods […]
• April 7, 2019

  Writing on the Train

  

  If you use public transport to get to work each day, chances are you have a chunk of free time in which to write. When I was working full time in Sydney my commute was more than 2 hours each way. When people heard how long my commute was they always assumed it was a […]
• January 4, 2019

  2018 in Review

  I write this on the early train to Sydney. It’s my first day back at my new job, at a major publishing company, after Christmas. It’s the second of January 2019 and I already know this year is gonna rock my life like no other… But lets not get ahead of ourselves. This post is […]
• July 27, 2018

  Writing Practice, Like Actual Practice

  I’m a lazy writer. Sometime in the last year, I don’t when, I decided I didn’t need to work at writing anymore. I had a few publications under my belt, heck, I’d won a competition. My work was good, I was good, everything was good.   And so I got complacent.   I stopped getting […]
• June 22, 2018

  4 questions to ask before you give up on a story

  I get it. Rejection is tough. Sometimes you start to wonder, is my story good enough? Is it good at all? Should I just give up and move on to the next thing. I’ve talked about rejection before. I’ve talked about how sometimes a rejection letter can be the most motivating thing you receive, I’ve […]
• May 11, 2018

  How I wrote a crime story when I’m a fantasy writer

  When I won the Thuderbolt Prize for Crime Writing last year a lot of people started to think of me as a crime writer. If any of you have read my other published short stories you’ll know I’m much more of a speculative fiction writer. So, how did I come to write a crime story? […]
• May 1, 2018

  Stop Being a Suffering Artist

  I want to talk about this idea of the suffering artist. I’ve been thinking, and this might sound harsh but, we bring it on ourselves. I think that part of us love the suffering, we love the idea of being a martyr for our art, we love being able to tell people how much we’ve […]
• April 16, 2018

  I’m Writing a Short Story Collection!

  Hey Dreamers, I’ve been working on a short story collection lately and I really wanted to share with you a little of my process so far. It has been a major goal for me this year to gather all my short stories together into a cohesive collection for publication. I spent the first few months […]
• March 28, 2018

  Making Money From Writing

  

  The age old question. Can anyone really make any money from writing? Whether it’s freelance or fiction plenty of people will tell you the answer is a resounding NO. Once when I was volunteering at a literary even I got chatting with a published author who was sitting on the panel. When I told her […]