Pride: The Journey to Publication
After I serialized Pride on my website, I submitted it to a few publishers without any luck. That I had no idea what I was doing didn’t help. Come 2009, I applied for the Olvar Wood Fellowship – a program run by Queensland writers Inga Simpson and Nike Bourke that involved mentoring and workshops. At the time, I was struggling with the beginning of chronic neck issues – the result of hunching over a laptop while editing all day. I went to bed after one lengthy editing session with a tightness in my right shoulder blade. The next day I woke with spasms to the right side of my neck.…
Just Another Week in Suburbia and The Hachette Manuscript Development Program
The Hachette Manuscript Program is a joint initiative between Hachette Australia and the Queensland Writers Centre, which involves a week of workshops on writing, editing, publishing, marketing, agents, among other things. Entrants submit fifty pages. If they’re chosen, they submit the rest of the manuscript, then go to Queensland to participate in the Program. In 2013, I submitted Just Another Week in Suburbia and “Prudence” (the book I wrote immediately after) and, as had become my wont, didn’t expect anything. However, Just Another Week in Suburbia was shortlisted. It was gratifying given it was the novel I’d designated as THE ONE (as in the one where I was determined that…