Tag Archives: National Novel Writing Month

Letters from abroad

04 Sunday Nov 2018

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I am coming to you, dear readers, from the Shinkansen service destined for Hiroshima*. I am travelling again!

This time I’m going around Japan. I’ve been here for just over a week already, I had a few days in Tokyo on my own before I joined a tour group last Tuesday. I had hoped to get to the Studio Ghibli Museum on my second day in the city, but I managed to get food poisoning.

harajuku, tokyo, fashionm japan

Harajuku fashion district in Tokyo

I had thought I would be safe in Japan; it’s a highly developed country with an obsession with cleanliness, but maybe I just got lucky. I managed to get through most of India without any issues and ended up having an issue with the food on the airplane to come home!

My impressions of Japan so far are that it is a highly organised and highly regulated society. The rules are well-known and they are strictly adhered to by most. I’m on a package tour which allows me to have a planned itinerary and tour guide available to answer my random questions.

I haven’t yet had any conversations with him about the state of Japan’s drug problems, or societal problems other than the ageing population, which was discussed briefly.

I had a surreal experience at the train station in Kanazawa. The local police were handing out small packets of tissues which had a leaflet inside with mug shots of wanted criminals. The police were so jolly and polite I wasn’t sure what was going on.

The landscapes here are completely different to those back at home. It’s probably the most extreme difference I’ve seen in all the travel that I’ve done. Geologically I suppose that Japan must be relatively young; it’s mountains are all high and steep, and haven’t yet shrunk with the passage of time and the erosion of wind and water.

It’s autumn here and the leaves are turning. While the pines remain evergreen, the maples, plum and cherry trees are putting on a show of colour; red, magenta, orange, yellow. Hillsides covered in this array of colours are breathtaking and remind me that I’m a long way from the uniform grey-green of eucalypts.

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Maple tree in the Hida Folk Village, Takayama

I have almost two weeks more here, I will try to get time to put up another post or two, but it will really depend on scheduling and energy. I’ve started doing NaNoWriMo again this year and so far I’m keeping up with the daily word counts. Travel time is particularly useful for making up my word counts! The story is slowly coming together. I went into this year’s novel with less plot development than I’ve had in previous years, but I think it will come together in the end. Probably in the second or third drafting stages.

I’m having a lovely time so far, food-poisoning notwithstanding, and I’m looking forward to my next two weeks and the projects I’ll be coming home to after that.

Big Love.

*The train didn’t have wi-fi, so I’m posting later.

Show Review and Other News

21 Sunday Oct 2018

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Dear readers

I’m not sure why I started with that, but there you go. Since I last updated you, Alex found that Milk Bar Mag have put up a review of our little show here. It’s always very gratifying for people  you don’t know to say they enjoyed your work!Nanowrimo

I’m busily preparing to go overseas for a few weeks on holiday AND do NaNoWriMo at the same time. Past Fleur thought this was a good idea, but Present Fleur is starting to doubt her judgement. I will press on though, and even if I don’t get much done, I’ll have nearly two weeks after I get back to catch up.

I attended my monthly Romance Writers’ group today, and we had a presentation from Lauren Clarke on Creating Compelling Characters. She had a great balance of information and activities, although there was a lot to take in. I took notes so I’ll be able to go back and look at it later if I forget.

It was a great opportunity to come up with some new characters, and from that I developed about half a plot for the new novel. It’s a relief to know I can still come up with stuff after taking a while off writing new fiction for the show, and to edit previous work.

I have a fresh new notebook to use for drafting, I bought myself fancy new fine-liner pens, in multiple colours, and I have the bones of a story. I might even make it through this NaNoWriMo with a novel that’s worth editing!

While I’m travelling and drafting, I’ve also arranged for the editor of my first book, Annie Seaton, to have a look at a new 45k manuscript. I’ll look at her feedback in December and aim to have something ready to publish in February. So keep your eyes peeled and on this blog for further announcements.

Lots of things are bubbling along, as is always the way, here at Fleur HQ. Thank you all for your continued support and love. I couldn’t do it without you.

Next on the list

03 Wednesday Oct 2018

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It was my birthday last week. With all of the goings on for my Fringe Festival show I didn’t have much mental capacity for organising a birthday do, or for contemplating mortality. This week I do! So I’ve been thinking about what it means to be 34.

If I think back to when I was younger, let’s say school leaving age, and what I thought I would have achieved by the time I was in my 30s. It included married/long term relationship, kids, uni, working as a doctor. Untitled design.jpg

I have achieved only one of those things: I successfully completed uni. I have also achieved numerous things that weren’t even remotely on the list: I’ve been in three bands; produced/performed two independent theatre shows; and I’ve published one novel, one zine, and has several short works included in anthologies.

At the end of year 12, when I got my university entrance result, I cried. I had missed out on medicine by less than one point. Sitting at my desk now, I don’t think I would have been very happy as a doctor. I probably wouldn’t have rediscovered my creativity. I wouldn’t have had the self-assurance (or possibly stupidity) to make my own opportunities.

I don’t particularly believe in an all-powerful omniscient being who has a plan for our lives, but I do think some things happen for a reason. I’ve been through some rough patches, and I’ve had some really great patches. Today I’m still trying to refocus my brain from the world of the show into the world of writing. I’m planning to do NaNoWriMo again this November, which will be somewhat more difficult due to spending half the month in Japan. I also don’t have any ideas yet! I’m sure I’ll think of something.

The passage of time has its effect on everyone. I find it interesting to think back on what used to be important to me, and compare it to what is important to me now. I’m proud of the life I’ve created for myself. I hope that my future holds even more stuff that I didn’t expect that makes my life richer. Who knows, this time next year I might have a completely different to-do list.

Get the coffee pot ready

29 Sunday Oct 2017

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It’s that time again, the lead up to NaNoWriMo. Each November hundreds of thousands of writers around the world commit to writing, the goal is to write a 50k word novel over the month, but writers can approach it however it suits them. I’ve done this month long writing sprint five times already (and I got 50k words each time). Talk about glutton for punishment, am I right?

Nanowrimo

It’s only a few days away and I haven’t got a story idea yet. I’m thinking maybe

more of a family saga than the relationship focused stories I’ve done in the past. I’ll put a romance into it, because I like that sort of thing, but the family dynamics is where my interest is at the moment.

A couple of times over the last month I’ve had conversations with people about my writing. I’ve told them them I have five novel length manuscripts in varying states of polish. Four of these have been submitted to traditional publishers but so far no one has chosen to pick them up.

Sometimes it feels hard to explain to people that I’m a writer when I haven’t had my stories published. I feel like they look at it as a badge of worth. Other writers, of course, understand that if is incredibly difficult to have your writing picked up by a traditional publisher. J.K. Rowling, famously, had eleven publishers reject Harry Potter, and Virginia Woolf published herself.

I know my work is developing and my style is becoming more clear with every project I do. People I’ve shown my work to have responded positively, but occasionally I have doubts. I’ve put a lot of hours into writing in the last six so years. It’s been a labour of love; I do it because, as tortured as the process can be sometimes, I like having written. I like that I’m a writer.

Whether I make it to being an ‘author’ with a traditionally published book remains to be seen. I’ll continue to write novels, and maybe only five people with ever read them. But maybe I’ll find an audience and it will make a difference to someone’s life.

For now, I’ll put the coffee pot on and get down to business. I’ll have to say no to social outings, because for the next month I need to write at least 1700 words a day. And I’ll do it, because I’m stubborn like that. You can follow my progress here. See you on the other side.

The Business of Creating

29 Sunday Nov 2015

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Last night I managed to get to the 50,000 word target of my fourth year of NaNoWriMo. Huzzah! I was so pleased to have been able to get it done, two days early, and with only a couple of thousand words worth of story to go. I’m going to wrap it up today and tomorrow and then put it away for a little while to stew.

NaNo-2015-Winner-Badge-Large-Square.jpg

I’ve had some conversations in the last little while about my plan for the future. The only problem is I don’t really have a well thought out and detailed plan. What I want is a job that I like well enough, that’s part-time so that I can do my creative stuff on the side, and possibly one day I’ll get a job where I can use my writing skills, but maybe not. That’s the plan.

At the moment I have a job placement which is three days per week doing Human Resources. It’s a refreshing change from the basic office admin job placements I’ve been doing recently so I’m really enjoying getting stuck in. It’s only until the end of the year though, and then I’ll be back to looking for ongoing work.

So here’s the new plan. Starting from now I’m going to work one day per week on my writing. Now that NaNoWriMo is finished for the year I really need to start doing something with my older manuscripts. The one I wrote last year, in particular, needs a whole bunch of structural edits and additional sections.

I’m going to do what I’ve heard other professional authors do, for example Dawn French and Fiona McIntosh, that is set myself a proper 9am to 5pm day of work for my writing. In the morning I will spend my time researching writing opportunities, applying for jobs, finding writing competitions, magazines and periodicals and blogs that are taking submissions and do that. This will be my time to work on this blog. I will also look into networking possibilities in the industry and short courses in writing that I might like to do.

In the afternoon I’m just going to write (and rewrite). I’m going to start with the manuscript from last year’s NaNoWriMo, which needs some big stuff done to it, and spend a couple of hours a week just going through it and fixing it. Editing has never been my strong suit, I’ve always be much more interested in coming up with new material, but I must spend the time revising and reworking. Maybe I’ll set myself a deadline of the end of January to have it done and I can start sending it to publishers.

Some of you may have noticed that that only adds up to four days work. You’re right, and the other day I’m going to keep for my band. We meet once a week usually, and rehearse for 4 or 5 hours. That takes up most of one day of the weekend. I will spend some of the time on the other weekday practicing and the rest of the day getting the chores and life admin stuff done that I would have done on the weekend. We’re also going to start looking for performance opportunities in the new year so I’ll schedule those in too.

My aim in this is to get myself into a routine. I’m not studying anymore and I hope to have a solid, ongoing job by early next year. It’s time to get serious about the business of creating and make sure that going back to uni was not just a frivolous escape from being at work.

Choose Your Own Adventure!

05 Thursday Nov 2015

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It’s November and that means it’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) time again. I got off to a slow start but I’m cracking along now. I have a very dull/not busy/not hard job at the moment and I’m able to do quite a lot of writing while I’m there. It makes the time go faster too. Double bonus!

On some sort of nostalgic whim I decided to write a Choose Your Own Adventure Novel. Remember those? All written in the second person, mostly targeted to tweens and teens, massively popular in the 80s and 90s. Well, I wanted to write one of those, and since I seem to write romance type novels, it’s a Choose Your Own Romance Adventure.

It's true, I have planned 20 failure endings and only 5 successful ones!

It’s true, I’ve planned 20 failure endings and only 5 successful ones!

It’s going great, once I got my head around keeping track of my loose ends. So far I have about nine thousand words and two failure endings. The biggest thing I had to get used to was that I now have to write sex scenes in the second person.

E.g. You run your hand along his jaw. He turns to you and kisses you deeply.

That sort of thing. At first it was very weird to write in second person, but I’m getting used to it. Every time I have to use you as plural, though, I tend to expand it to ‘you and Joe Bloggs do this’ because part of me thinks that You is the main character and therefore shouldn’t be confused with you plural.

Additionally one of my characters is called Felicity, which is apparently very hard to spell. There are going to be so many different misspellings of her name through the manuscript, but as is the motto of NaNoWriMo, write now, edit later. I’m also doing some of my writing on an iPad, which has a very strange and frustrating auto-correct system, so hopefully Future Me won’t be looking at a sentence and think what the hell? That’s not even English.

Anyway, just keeping you all updated. I might not be posting here much coz all of my words will be going to the novel, but you never know. Maybe I’ll be procrastinating.

Goodbye to the Fringe

01 Tuesday Sep 2015

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It’s my last day at the fringe*, I’m leaving early tomorrow and I feel a lot of things. I admit a fair whack of what I feel is tired, I didn’t get home till nearly 4am last night after the Crap Music Rave Party, but there are other feelings too. I think if Tomas Ford brought the show to Melbourne I’d get vast portions of my friends to come along. It was an extravaganza of nineties musical mediocrity!

I’m sad that the festival is winding down but in a way I’m relieved as well. It’s been a big, challenging, wonderful, intense adventure. I’ve seen a lot of shows (a total of 55 not including street shows) and while there were a few real duds there were lots of genuine diamonds too.. I’d like to do a show myself sometime. I think it could be good fun, but it would also be a lot of hard work. I have a lot of respect for these people, performers whose lives are lived on tour and with uncertain incomes. I feel like I have a better understanding of the fact that there are a lot of brilliant, creative people out there who still work in bars, or in office jobs because art (mostly) doesn’t pay the rent. I feel like I’m ready to accept that having a job in the ‘real’ world, one that allows some flexibility and secures my ability to pay my rent and to eat, is not a failing. It’s a necessary part of the sort of life I want to have. I can use my time outside of this job to learn and develop my art.

From now until Christmas I want to prioritise working on my performance skills. I know of some improv workshops around town which I want to check out and I’m going to get onto finding some more musicians to jam with. The challenge will be that in November I’ll attempt NaNoWriMo again. I’ve done it the last three years, but along with these two other priorities and working it might be a struggle. Then again, I tend to work fairly well under pressure, at least over fairly short periods of time, and I had other stuff on those other times too.

I’ll be back in Melbourne next weekend and I have some temp work lined up as soon as I get back. After a year of full-time study and a month long jaunt overseas I will feel much better once I’m earning and saving again instead of spending wildly. Well, I guess I haven’t been spending wildly, but it certainly hasn’t been a cheap year.

Despite being a bit travel weary I feel like I’ve been energised to get things happening. The manuscript for the novel I started during last November is almost ready to be sent out, and I think I’ll look into getting an agent this time. If anyone knows a book agent that might want to hear from me, please let me know.  So, while there is certainly nothing like travel to give a fresh outlook on things, there is also nothing quite like being on the way home. See you soon Melbs! I’ve missed you. Did you miss me? XOXO
*I wrote this yesterday, while waiting for a show, and posted it from London.

Guilt + New Projects = Neglected blogging

27 Monday Oct 2014

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I feel like haven’t blogged for a while (even though it’s only been a couple of weeks), perhaps it’s just a part of the cumulative guilt thing that I seem to have going on at the moment. I’ve recently been feeling incredibly busy and part of the reason for that is that I’ve been taking on new creative projects and meeting new people, and I guess I feel a bit like I have a lot of balls in the air and I’m really worried I’m going to drop one of them.

I’m sure that quite a lot of the stress I’m feeling about the new projects is misdirected stress about uni assessments which have been looming large for the last few weeks. Hopefully that source of tension will settle down soon, I’ve finished all the assessments two of my subjects, and the other two will be finished by this time next week (oh god, I have to write 4,200 words by then). But back to reason for my blog, I wanted to tell you all about my new projects! Writing things down makes them feel more real, right?

1. NaNoWriMo 2015

If you’ve read my blog for a while you’ll know that for the last two years I’ve been involved in NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to get a whole bunch of people together, both in person as part of local group activities and online as part of the NaNoWriMo global community, to encourage each other to commit to writing 50,000 words in November (they also run Camp NaNoWriMo in April and July, but I haven’t participate in either of those sessions yet). It sounds like complete, unachievable insanity, but I’ve successfully completed the challenge the two times I’ve been involved, and I feel confident I can do it again this year.

My current working title for the novel is ‘We Can’t Have Nice Things’ and I’m using characters from a short story that I wrote a little while ago and expanding them into a longer work. The idea is that it will be dark – an exploration of the way people’s lives can go wrong. I’m thinking of it as an anti-romance, I don’t really know if it will work, but I’m going to give it my best shot!

2. I joined a band.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here before, but a while ago, on a whim, I bought a bass guitar. I’ve played it a bit here and there for the couple of years I’ve had it, but I never really prioritised it. Then I met Seth at a party and he asked if I wanted to be in his band, and I thought, why not? And now I’m in a band. That was about six weeks ago. The line-up is still being worked out, and we’re really still trying to find our feet, but I feel really good, conceptually, about being in a band. Since joining the band, I’ve been out to see a bit more local live music and I’ve met some fantastic people, in particular the boys from The Destrends, who are not only phenomenal musicians and performers but also super amazing human beings. I hope to continue getting out to gigs and meeting people in the music industry and really immersing myself in a culture I never felt part of before.

3. and 4. Drawing and Photographing

There are also two other things I’ve been spending time one, but they’re not really taking up as much time/brain space as the novel and the band so I’ll mush them together into one paragraph. Firstly there’s drawing. I’ve been life modelling with the Life Model Society for all of this year and I’ve been meeting fantastic artists at every group I’ve worked with. Meeting these talented people and seeing the beauty they can produce has inspired me to spend more time on drawing. I’ve been to a couple of life drawing classes, the results of which I’ve put on my Instagram account, they need some work, but I think there’s a solid foundation of ‘looking vaguely human’ in there. The second thing is a couple of friends of mine, Woland and Gabrielle, who have appeared in this blog before, have been doing some really outstanding off-the-wall performance art at local events in the last couple of months, and I have been privileged to act as their stills photographer for these performances. It has been challenging, not just artistically, but personally, as their art pushes boundaries in all the best ways, you can watch their latest performance, ‘A Mermaid’s Tale’ here, but I should probably put a (fake) blood trigger and NSFW warning on it, just to be safe.

So that’s what I’ve been doing. I hope I’ll be able to spend some more time on this blog over the summer, without the constant demands of university I hope I’ll have a bit more space in my brain for this, and I’ll have to bring you updates on all the amazing creative adventures I’m having! Every day I’m grateful to the people in my life who encourage and support me in my meandering search for a meaningful and fulfilling life, and every day I am rewarded with what I create, and with what people around me create, and I know that I wouldn’t go back to where I was three years ago for anything!

NaPoWriMo – A Haiku

02 Wednesday Apr 2014

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Just when I thought I couldn’t be busier in April, what with the Melbourne International Comedy Festival gigs I have booked and the awesome stuff on at the Wheeler Centre to go to, along with commitments to work and uni readings and assignments and maintaining a social life, I have, on a whim, decided to add NaPoWriMo to my list of things to do.

NaPoWriMo is National Poetry Writing Month, in the tradition of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, held in November). NaPoWriMo is a commitment to the goal of writing one poem per day for the month of April.

I’ve already started on the backfoot having decided to take up the challenge on the second day of April, but I’m going to power through and hopefully I won’t fall behind.

I plan to publish some of my poems on this blog, the good  ones or ones that have a specific relevance to the blog, and in that vein, I present to you my first NaPoWriMo poem.

NaPoWriMo – A Haiku

One poem per day
Just for the month of April
It can’t be that hard.

Surely I can find
Something meaningful to put
In verse once a day

Each form will provide
A challenge to overcome
Many will be crap

A few will be great
These I will show to the world
Jewels in my crown

So if nothing else
It will stretch my comfort zone
And my poetry skills