Storybook Perfect

Always quirky, sometimes sweet speculative fiction

Month: January 2014

Doesn’t This Sound Fun

January 26, 2014 / / 0 Comments

One of my critique group buddies shared some info from a writing magazine she’s subscribed to with me and that’s how I came across Found Fiction.

The idea is a story or poem is slipped in an envelope marked ‘read me’ and left places. Any place, a bus stop, a cafe, inside a book at a bookstore. Some one will spot it and (assuming they don’t watch too many horror movies where this sort of thing doesn’t end well) they open it and read it. Ideally they will then tweet or post about it on Facebook so Found Fiction know their fun is spreading.

Of course I love the idea. I’m already looking into how to become a distributor and certainly wouldn’t mind getting a story or two dropped in random places around the world either.

I’d love to drop a slew of Found Fiction around at writers’ festivals (like BWF and BBWF) that I go to this year, and trust me, even though my vertigo is back and I have hardly managed to walk all week (oh and my doctor says no driving >:( ) I’ll still find ways to get some fiction into new hands.

If you’d like to check them out yourself you can find Found Fiction on Facebook and Twitter.

Accountability and Productivity

January 10, 2014 / / 0 Comments

five year diaryI was reading a great friend and amazing author Talitha’s blog the other day. She’d written a post on productivity tools, a lot of which I use or totally wish I did) and I thought of my biggest productivity tool: my five year diary.

I’ve brought this up before, but for those who don’t want to go back and read the post, a five year diary is a diary where the same date (eg/10th of January) takes up a whole page, but that page is broken up into five sections of five lines each. One section for each year. There’s just enough space for some quick notes like ‘bought my tickets for the Brisbane Writers’ Festival. Wrote a new 4,200 words in Keys, Clocks, Quests (total count now 75184). Tried fixing start of Nightfall based on group feedback, but everything I think of just doesn’t work.’ (actual entry from August 5, 2013).

The diary helps keep me accountable for what I did that day. If I did enough with my family or at my day job to fill the space I don’t feel guilty about doing less writing and editing, but if I can’t fill up those five measly lines, I feel bad – real bad – and I work harder to ensure I do something the next day.

I think productivity and accountability are wrapped together very tightly. It’s like setting goals (or making New Years resolutions). They fall apart if you don’t work on them and if you don’t recognise you aren’t working on them, hold yourself accountable and pick up your game then of course you’re going to fail, because you gave up.

That’s not to say incentives aren’t a handy method too. I was super excited at the NaNoWriMo camp last year to get stickers for every 5,000 words I wrote (yes, I’m over 30 and I love stickers, people who say they don’t love stickers are LYING).

Talitha has a very interesting method of shifting marbles from one jar to another each thousand words which combines incentives (a visual representation of how much you’ve achieved) and accountability (all those marbles you haven’t ‘written’ stuck in the unborn jar making you feel guilty). If you want to know more, go read her post.

Do you have a productivity tool which you find particularly helpful, even if it’s not for writing productivity?

Pretty Damn Cool

January 8, 2014 / / 0 Comments

A quick one today, just because I thought this was a very interesting read.

Scientists Say Great Novels Can Change Your Brain’s Biology

I want to write the kind of books that make your brain better 😀

Let’s Make It BIG!

January 7, 2014 / / 0 Comments
Hunting the web for a cool picture of the Australian flag, totally found this instead and had to share

Hunting the web for a cool picture of the Australian flag for this post, totally found this instead and had to share

This is a call out to all my lovely readers. I want to share The Australian Speculative Fiction Authors Challenge with as many people as possible. I want to challenge everyone!

So please, share it in your online spaces, blogs, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter whatever you have. EVERYTHING you have!

I really want to see how many people we can get enjoying the challenge.

Click to tweet: The Australian Speculative Fiction Authors #ReadingChallenge http://wp.me/P2f5ib-kV I challenge you!


Share This Challenge on Facebook

Copy and paste this link to share on other platforms: https://www.storybookperfect.com/the-aussie-spec-fic-author-challenge-2014/

Also, if there is anyone with more talent in graphic design than I who would like to spiff up the button for the challenge you’re definitely welcome to – my photoshop talents are… hmmm how to put this nicely… Non existent.

2013 Rounded Up Plus Goals For 2014

January 1, 2014 / / 2 Comments
The cover of Oomph, the first publication I received an acceptance letter from

The cover of Oomph, the first publication I received an acceptance letter from

I started 2012 expecting little then achieving lots, so when I made my goals list for 2013 I aimed high. A tiny bit too high, but that’s no matter I still achieved plenty. My 2013 achievements include:

  • Being Shortlisted in a Writing competition (2013 Redlitzer)
  • Being published for the first time (and going to the gala event to launch the anthology)
  • Being published for the second time
  • I wrote 2 novellas(14,000 and 17,000), 8 short stories (defining short as under 10,000 words as half of these stories are between 5-8,000) and 5 flash fiction pieces (four of which you can read right now by clicking the ‘Free Fiction‘ tab in the menu above. To learn more about these stories you can check them out in my ‘Current Projects‘ page.
  • Learned how hard it can be to edit a novel you wrote in two months as compared to a novel you spent years tinkering with.
  • Wrote roughly 80,000 new words in novels (split between Key,Clocks, Quests and this years NaNo novel Between Blinks). When added to my short stories written this year I have a total word count of 146,400.
  • Learned it’s not always about what you write in new words, but that there’s a lot of editing, proofing, and effort writing submissions and sending them that takes up your time as well. Now I will no longer be discouraged if I don’t have a high word count for the month as long as I can see I was still working hard.
  • Became listed on Goodreads and Amazon as an author (still get all squiggly in the tummy about that)
  • Went to a lot of writers’ festivals

Did a fair bit of learning didn’t I? ;p

2013 felt a bit like the year of the short story to me, because I wrote so many, and 2012 was all about the novels, so this year I’m thinking of trying to find a middle ground in 2014, so my goals are as follows:

Goal #1: Finish editing ‘Written By The Stars’ and start submitting it. This goal rolled over from last year because it was harder than I thought and I kept getting distracted by shiny new ideas

Goal #2: Finish first draft of Key, Clocks, Quests. and totally come up with a better name for it.

Goal #3: Keep writing and submitting short stories.

Goal #4: Keep learning.

Yes, it’s a shorter list than last year, hopefully so I can hit all the targets this year instead of just some, and you can be sure if I hit all my goals I’ll add a few new ones.

Well everyone, I hope you have a happy (and productive) new year 😀

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