A holiday story

Photo Credit: Kelvin Anton Carlsson

Inspired by a photo presented at my writing group, here is my short story response.

Plaza Life

Advertisements

Tall Tales and True

The folks at the Fellowship of Australian Writers sent me this certificate in the mail. It is for my short story Tall Tales and True.

 

Two Short Stories Recognised

Very happy to announce that my story “An Old Fashioned Girl” gained 2^nd place in the 2017 Port Writers Open Literary Competition 2017. I also gained a Highly Commended in the same competition with my story “The ‘D’ Word”.

Judge’s comments:

An Old Fashioned Girl – A highly amusing and well-crafted story, particularly in your summing up of the different types of people who feature in the story, from the yuppie parents to the trendy schoolgirls and the old fashioned Yvonne and Henry.

Wonderfully entertaining.

Judge’s comments:

The ‘D’ Word – A well written and touching story. Although it doesn’t meet the standard definition of a short story, I feel it deserves recognition.

Submission

No, not the Sex Pistols song. Nor, my current position on neo-liberalism. It’s the story I wrote for the 2017 Peter Cowan 600 word Short Story Competition.

And yes, I did brag before about how it was awarded a Commended Certificate.

Read all 598 words HERE.

Bit of a Yarn

The Fellowship of Australian Writers Queensland awarded my story Tall Tales and True a Highly Commended Certificate. Click HERE to read all about it.

I’ve been to Bali too.

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.

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?