I am blank!
There are no words to adequately describe what I’m feeling with everything that’s happening right now so I won’t try.
But please stay tuned. I’m hoping to start documenting my journey to publication right here.
Fongeers crissod. (Oh, that what you get for trying to type with your fingers crossed!!!!) LOL
Then it pours! And no I’m not referring to the latest non-stop rain event. I’m talking about when everything happens at once: the exciting, mixing it up with the mundane, then throwing in a writing competition to manage.
Yep – one year ago (almost to the day) I took an unprecedented ‘strategic’ approach to this whole publishing caper, deciding I needed to give back to the member organisation that has been so good to me – Romance Writers of Australia. While not a ‘genuine’ romance writer (I’m afraid my women’s fiction stories about love, life an second chances don’t always have that essential happy ever after element required to be ‘real’ romance) RWA is a wonderful group of non-discriminatory, caring, sharing writers – both published and aspiring.)
So this year I put my hand up, volunteering to manage one of the many competitions the organisation runs to help and develop members. I figured it was good karma.
PHEW! What a job. Massive.
I’ve entered my share of competitions over the last couple of years, and I’ve always thought I understood how much work was involved for those behind the scenes, but you really can’t appreciate it until you’ve managed a competition that follows the RWA’s comprehensive processes that ensure transparency and accountability.
Oh the pressure!
But as I stare at the computer for hours trying to allocate scores of entries to judges (many of whom request certain genres with or without certain elements – yes, they are allowed, they are also volunteers) I say to myself…
This is all part of the plan. It’s karma – what you do to others will come back an bite you. What you do for others will bless you. I’m hoping for the blessing!
“We’ll build a world of our own that only we can share…” (Oh, you’re probably too young to remember The Seekers!)
As writers we have to build worlds we can share with our readers, layering our manuscripts with info and images, sprinkling a little setting here, a few senses there.
For inspiration, I’m getting out, away from my desk and the imaginary characters and places I create, and into the real world. In other words, I’m doing lots of looking, listening, feeling, smelling and touching (oh la la!!). Seriously, it’s amazing what you notice when you focus on breaking down something as simple as a walk on the beach into touch, taste, sight, hearing, smell.
I also went to Ulmarra the other day. About an hour or so by car, it is a quintessential Aussie country town.
While my Calingarry Crossing is a fictional town, I drew a lot of inspiration from Ulmarra’s hotel (no come on, I mean inspiration from an architectural perspective!!) Even while drawing inspiration from an existing place, I think using a fictional town in your writing is much better than a real town. I recently started reading a novel but in chapter eight the author slams Coffs Harbour as both a place to live and visit.
Why do it? Why alienate readers when you can make up a town that is slightly north or south, give it cute name and get on with a story that keeps people interested?
I stopped reading.
So I’m sticking to building fictional worlds. Here are a few pics of Ulmarra.
