I’ve been to Bali too.

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Yeah I know, it’s not like it was back in the ’70s, man. Regardless, I had a great time and got some inspiration for my next writers group meeting. Such as:

You can smell Asia as soon as you step out of the sanitised aircraft cabin. It’s that exotic mix of tropical foods, equatorial spices, religious incenses, rice paddies, burning plastic, open drains, and human excrement all lightly steamed at 30 degrees Celsius for 365 days of the year.

Read the whole story here.

Peter Cowan 600 word Short Story Competition.

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In the early nineteen nineties I did a two year post graduate diploma of the arts specialising in religious education. I was a science teacher in a catholic school in NSW and they paid the HECS fees. It didn’t matter that I was, and still am, an atheist, they just wanted the baptised Catholics who they shanghaied into teaching religion to be qualified. The other interesting thing is that I did this qualification by correspondence at Edith Cowan University, home of the Peter Cowan Writing Centre. And, in the whole two years I didn’t speak to a single person. This was before the days of the internet being used for distance education, the whole deal was accomplished on paper and through the mail in envelopes with stamps on them. So don’t let anyone tell you that it is the internet causing a lack of face to face connection. It’s been going on for yonks.
Even though the HECS debt was paid, I still had a mortgage and three kids. I left teaching and did a whole lot of jobs that paid less but made me happier. The long and the short of this is that it wasn’t until I was about fifty two that I finally had the time to sit down and do any sort of serious writing. I joined the Palmwoods Writing Group in 2014 and started having a shot at fiction. Every second meeting we have a theme or prompt to write to. One time the idea was to write from the perspective of an object. And that is how I came to write ‘Submission’. It is my take on the tension between writing for fun and creativity and self, and writing to get published or acknowledged by others. There shouldn’t be that tension, but it happens and afflicts, to some extent, all writers – I think?
PCWC cert_FotoSketcher

Blanket Rules

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This story first appeared on the Needle In The Hay website back in March 2015.

 

Here’s what they said:

 

In cricket they have a saying. “Well in.” It’s something you might say to your teammate after a particularly good ball. It’s also something you might say say to the opposition’s batsman if they play an impressive shot.

That’s the sort of game cricket is, at it’s best, competition without ignominy.

Sometimes you look around and think that some of the stuff going on in the world and think ‘It’s just not cricket’. But all we can really say about this next short story by Sean C is “Well in”.

 

Originally on the shortlist, and then winning the COMFORTABLY ANON contest , Sean C delivers the kind of dystopian short fiction that feels very near future 21st Century. Drawing on current events and technologies and placing them in the social context of a high speed train ride, Sean captures the justified paranoia and modern anxiety of a technological age.

 

You can now check this out HERE on my own page.