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Fleur Blüm

~ writer, performer, musician

Fleur Blüm

Tag Archives: Competition

Auckland Writers’ Festival

29 Wednesday Jan 2020

Posted by toearlyretirement in My Journey, Writing

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Auckland, Auckland Writers Festival, Bushfires, Competition, Inspiration, Kill Your Darlings, Netflix, New Zealand, Perth, Romance Writers of Australia, Travel, Western Australia, Writing, Writing Conference

awf I’m a subscriber of an online literary magazine, Kill You Darlings. They’ve been around since 2009 and I admit I don’t read as many articles as I probably should.

What I do pay attention to are the excellent competitions. One I recently entered was to win tickets to the Auckland Writers Festival 12-17 May 2020.

I recently found out I’d won! Two tickets to the festival, three nights accommodation, and a voucher for airfares! It is a surreal experience to win something that cool.

I immediately went to the webiste only to discover the program won’t be released until March! First world problem, I know, but I wanted to go through and choose my sessions and swoon over the gorgeous people I’ll meet or hear or see.

The added bonus is that one of my very best friends lives in New Zealand and I will joining me at the festival.

It’s looking like my travel for the year will be largely to attend writing conferences. I’m also planning to attend the Romance Writers of Australia annual conference, this year to be held in Fremantle. I’ve never been to Western Australia before, so I hope to spend a week or two taking in the different sights and landscapes of our beautiful west coast.

I had a nice, if short, break away from the day job, and have been somewhat less productive than I had hoped to be with my writing, but with this announcement I have something to work towards and be inspired by.

The period of Christmas and New Years has been hard and weird for many Australians. Although I haven’t been seriously affected by the bushfires ravaging our country I’ve all been dealing with the terrible air quality and constant blanket of smoke along with many other city dwellers. I have no mechanism to deal with the enormity of the lost of life, both human and animal and insect and plant, and the scope of the recovery phase that will be coming. I find myself overwhelmed by the whole thing and just watch comedy shows on Netflix and hide my head in the sand.

I hope you’re all doing what you need to do to take care of yourselves out there. I’ll keep you updated with my adventure across the Tasman.

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Was it Worth the Price of Admission?

12 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by toearlyretirement in Art, Writing

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ABC Comedy, Australian Writers Guild, AWG, Competition, Melbourne Fringe Festival, Melbourne Romance Writers Guild, MRWG, Prize, Romance Writers of Australia, RWA, Sit-Com

A few weeks ago I started working on the new show which Alexandra and I will be performing at the Melbourne Fringe festival in September. Currently titled ‘Fleur and Alexandra are Out of This World‘ it will be a pseudo-sequel to our last show, ‘Fleur and Alexandra Save the World’.

We’ve got a plot and we’ve started drafting the script, so we’re well on our way. I’m getting excited designing the puppets and set dressing and coming up with jokes and then late last week Alex suggested that we submit our script to a competition run by the Australian Writers Guild (AWG). I’d never heard of them, but apparently they’re THE people to talk to about writing for the screen/stage/radio in Australia.

The competition promised a cash prize which was to be used for development of the project, as well as the opportunity to pitch the Head of Comedy at the ABC. It looked good and I told Alex I was keen.

She did all the work to get the script from the first show into a screenplay format and down to 30 minutes, as well as most of the work to come up with plots for additional episodes (we needed to pitch six episodes).

Then we read the fine print – we had to be members of AWG. It was $210, double that of the Romance Writers of Australia (RWA). It didn’t really seem like something I wanted to sign up for, but if I wasn’t a member we couldn’t submit to the competition.

In the end I decided that it was worth it for the prize. I would do my best to get value out of the membership while I had it, but it got me thinking about the value of professional memberships, especially in the arts.

I’m a member of the Melbourne Romance Writers Guild, who meet once a month. The meetings and writing retreats are immensely valuable for both motivation and learning my craft. Writing is so often a solitary pursuit and meeting others in the flesh really helps you not feel alone.

I’ve been a member of the RWA, however the membership expired this month and I haven’t decided if I’ll renew it. I would have access to discounted rates for the conference, which I’m not going to this year, and to the online writing courses, but both of those can be purchased without membership, although one has to be a member to enter their competitions too.

I’ll do some more thinking about the pros and cons before committing. The RWA doesn’t have meetings I can attend regularly, which makes it feel like a much more ephemeral membership.

The tight-arse in me is skeptical of spending money on something for which I don’t earn any in return. Then again, I’ve paid for writing courses, I’ve paid for acting classes, I’ve paid for rehearsal spaces, and I’ve paid to record an EP.

Perhaps thinking of these things as strictly transactional is not helpful; measuring what’s put in against what comes out. It’s also possible that these transactions will have payoffs down the line. Networking with people in these memberships could end up creating an opportunity which bears fruit, or one day I’ll be rich and famous and all the money and time I put in will pay dividends.

We’ll have to wait and see, I guess. On the plus side, I now have a membership to AWG, an opportunity to win a sweet prize, and the seeds for four new shows. At least we won’t run out of material!

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Radio Silence

17 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by toearlyretirement in My Journey, Writing

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bosses, Competition, Creativity, crisis, Easter, Hannah Kent, homelessness, Kill Your Darlings, manuscript, Moving house, New Opportunities, resilience, work stress, Writing, Writing goals

It’s been two months since I last posted. That sounds like what you’re supposed to say at confession: ‘It’s been two months since my last confession.’

I’ve had a pretty full on time since then, some of my own creation and some outside of my control.

I’ve managed to achieve two important creative goals that I set myself. On 14 February, Valentine’s Day, I got my latest genre romance manuscript to 80,000 words. I had planned to have the first draft finished by 80k, but the story was still going and I had to move on to the next goal. There is still some work to be done to tie up the end of the story, I’m back to working on this now, and then the editing process begins.

Then, on 31 March, I submitted a previously completed manuscript to an unpublished manuscript competition run by the Kill Your Darlings literary magazine. I spent six weeks thoroughly editing it. I feel like there might be more work to be done on that manuscript but if I win the competition I’ll have a mentor to do that with. The competition has prize money and the mentor is author Hannah Kent. The shortlist will be announced 1 June, and the winner on 3 July. I have my fingers crossed.

I’ve also had a couple of pretty intense things happen outside of my creative stuff. Firstly, I was evicted from my home with three days notice when the council declared the building unsafe to live in. I managed to find alternative short term accommodation within those three days and I have secured a new place to move into at the beginning of May.

All in all the whole thing went pretty well all things considered. I had to pack up my life, move it to my mum’s for storage, run around trying to find somewhere to sleep, and go through the search for a new share-house all in about a week. It was tough and draining and took up all of my brain space. I’m exhausted just thinking about having to move my stuff again – from Mum’s into the new place.

In addition to being evicted I had a particularly stressful couple of weeks at my job. I work in a not-for-profit organisation doing Quality Assurance and we had our annual external audit. It was my first audit and I didn’t know what to expect, or a have good idea of how to prepare. In addition to the audit my direct manager left the organisation suddenly, which left me, relatively inexperienced, and my boss one step up, the General Manager to manage it all. Everyone pulled together and we managed to get through without too much trouble, but it was incredibly stressful. Now we start planning how to get ready for the audit next year, which is an even bigger project.

I’ve spent the last week and the Easter break trying to regain my calm. I’m still recovering after so much stress. I’m tired and don’t feel at home in the temporary accommodation; more like a guest in a hotel.

The new house, once I’m settled in, will be an opportunity to build a space to create and socialise and live in. It wasn’t my choice to move, but now that it’s happened I think it will be good.

I like to have things planned out. I like to have things settled and stable and reasonably predictable. But the last few weeks have shown that I can cope with a lot. I can have a little cry, and then I knuckle down and do whatever needs to be done. It’s reassuring that even when everything is falling apart around me, I can keep putting one foot in front of the other. Yes, it’s hard, but it’s possible. And that’s very reassuring.

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School Holiday Projects

30 Friday Mar 2012

Posted by toearlyretirement in Art, My Journey, Writing

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Competition, Holidays, Inspiration, Photography, Projects, Short Stories, Writing

Some of you may know that the hospitality job I have is working in a school, as a result I have no work over the school holidays (which started today) – this is both a good and bad thing. Good in the sense that I will have lots of time to devote to artistic projects, and bad in the sense where I have no money for two weeks.

I have been reading on one of the blogs I follow about some awesome sounding short story competitions coming up in the next 3 months or so. There are quite a few there that look interesting and I am hoping to submit something to all of them (yes I’m even going to have a crack at the novella one but I’ve never written 15,000 words so we’ll treat that more as an experiment than anything).

My task over the next two weeks is to blog, write first drafts of all of my submissions, go on a day trip with fellow photographer friend Wade to Ballarat (negotiable) to get some awesome nature shots and catch up/get ahead on some of my uni homework.

I would encourage others to also submit things to some of these competitions; I would be happy to work with you on your drafts if you would return the favour. I am excited mostly by the idea of being ‘forced’ to write something in parameters; I find parameters are good for my creativity because otherwise I stare at the blank page for hours.

So who’s in?

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Melbourne, Australia
fleurblum@hotmail.com

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