Participating in the Year of the Novel

Hello again everyone,

Barbara from the Qld Writing Group asked me if I was going to blog about participating in the Queensland Writers Centre Year of the Novel. I was going to when it started but I thought I might just introduce the idea now and let anyone interested know that I will blog about it in March.

I guess March is not that far away, is it?

On March 17 I will attend a whole day, lecture and discussion with other writers and with published author, Venero Armano on techniques and structuring a novel etc. etc.

It will be five sessions over the next year and I am very excited to be spending some time with other writers and with a published author, who reads a section of your manuscript and provides critique.

It looks like it will be a very rewarding process. It sure beats working on your own and not having a clue whether anything is any good, or even at times how to approach certain things.

Since I have been writing short stories for many, many years and reading about it and studying it, I feel I have some grasp on how to approach or structure a short story. However, with novels I have spent less time writing novels, (having only completed one manuscript) and I have only taken one course on writing a novel. So, I am hungry to soak all the information possible about novel writing as I can. This is what I loved to do with short stories and now I ardently desire the same with novel writing.

I have a full novel idea but the execution is always the challenge.

Has anyone else felt this about the jump from short stories to novels? They have different techniques but they also share a lot of similar techniques as well.

Anyway, bring on the Year of The Novel for me. I have been waiting for many years to get the time to sit down and seek to write another novel and now it is here. I am very excited. I will definitely be posting about how it is all going.

I can say, that my first chapter has been a challenge in itself and not perfected as yet.

Amazon Shorts Story Results

Hello

Thank you to anyone who voted for my story on Amazon Shorts Story Competition.

My story The Wall - was in the top 7 places out of the 600 or so entries in the competition based on votes and average. (I received 88 votes, 7.8/10 and 106 comments).

It turns out that the other story called The Wall won the editors pick! That was pretty funny, I thought.

I would recommend people entering these types of competitions. Even though it is very difficult to win, you receive comments from people all over the world and also you find out whether your story and your writing has resonated with people! I found it an extremely rewarding process.

I posted the story on many groups on Gather.com and received comments from people from many different countries. The great thing was it wasn't just people I knew or family, but strangers who read the story and really liked it!

Anyway, I found it an amazing, positive and confidence building exercise to see that you came in the top 8 out of hundreds of people was great for me.

Thanks anybody who voted and commented! I really appreciated it.
Suzanne