I’ve been busy this week, not only in chipping away at the draft of City of Rubber Stamps, but also with some other writerly events. Firstly, my review of David Whish-Wilson’s excellent Perth crime novel Old Scores is up at Westerly’s Editor’s Desk. My wife and I had the pleasure of attending the novel’s launch at the suitably noirish Buffalo Club in Fremantle on Wednesday night. There I caught up not only with David but with a cadre of Perth crime fiction aficionados and writers like Ron Elliot, Bruce Russell, Michelle Michau-Crawford and Ian Reid. Old Scores is a rip-roaring trip through eighties Perth and highly recommended. You can read more about it and even a sample chapter over at the Fremantle Press website.
Tonight I’m off to my second launch for the week, this one at the Centre for Stories in Northbridge. It’s launch day for Writing the Dream from Serenity Press, which is a book of non-fiction pieces on writing and publishing by 25 mostly WA authors, including the likes of Juliet Marillier, Natasha Lester and Louise Allan. If you are keen on meeting the authors and picking up a signed copy, then you’ll need to head up to the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centrein Greenmount on Sunday 27th November for the second launch date. I’d love to attend this myself, but as I’ll be on my honeymoon in Tasmania it’d be a long way to travel. Writing the Dream is an outstanding and highly practical ‘how to’ guide to writing and publishing as well as being a source of inspiration for aspiring writers. It’s available now from any number of online outlets such as Amazon and Booktopia.

My crime story 'Frank', which won the 2015 City of Rockingham Short Fiction Award, has been selected for publication in Award Winning Australian Writing 2016, which is being launched at the Melbourne Writers Festival on 31st August.

This story has led a charmed existence. Written in October 2015, 'Frank' was entered into the Rockingham competition a few days before the deadline. By mid-November, I'd been informed of its win, so I sent it off to Westerly: New Creative before their November 30 deadline. In February of this year I was informed that it had made the cut, so I sent it off to AWAW, and in July I was told that 'Frank' was in. 

Huzzah for 'Frank', basically. 

Three pieces of recent publishing news: first, my story ‘Frank’, which won the 2015 City of Rockingham Short Fiction Award, has now been chosen for publication in Westerly’s upcoming ‘New Creative‘ online issue. I’m really looking forward to appearing alongside a host of other (as yet unnamed) emerging authors.

Secondly, my baroque future fantasy piece, ‘when the jellyfish rule the oceans’, has been published online in Pound of Flash.

And finally, a non-fiction piece about my (torturous) pathway to publication, ‘Hard Travelin’, will be published later this year in Writing the Dream.
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I’m pleased to be able to report these successes, but I’m still looking for homes for my fourth Tyler Bramble detective story, ‘Epoch O’Lips’, as well as a literary story about obsessive compulsive disorder and a dead ferret, ‘Losing Her Zen’. Hopefully I’ll find suitable homes for them in the coming months.

I’m very pleased to announce that my short story, ‘Frank’, has been awarded First Prize in the Open Section of the 2015 City of Rockingham Short Fiction Award! Competition judge KA Bedford praised the story’s “Intrigue and hijinks, leading to a very satisfying resolution follow,” and said “This was a great piece, and I award it First Prize with no reservations”. I’m very pleased to have won this award, even more so in that I admire Bedford’s Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait, surely the only time travel novel in the history of science fiction to be set in Malaga, Western Australia. A requirement for entering this competition was that stories had to use the above picture, ‘(Light) House of the Rising Sun’ by Julie Podstolski, as a stimulus. In writing ‘Frank’, I also decided to listen to the Animals’ famous song every day before writing to get myself in the mood; hopefully some of that bluesy feeling made it into the finished story. There’s no publication associated with this award, but it hasn’t escaped my attention that this win makes the story eligible for entry into next year’s Award Winning Australian Writing anthology from Melbourne Books.

After my run of outs in recent times, this news comes as a much needed boost to my confidence. This award has been running for a few years now but it’s the first time I’ve entered. Not many writing competitions have free entry these days, and the prizes are pretty generous too. Thanks to the City of Rockingham and Lee Battersby (Coordinator Cultural Development and Arts) for supporting this award.

I'm pleased to report that I've been selected for a two week Emerging Writer-in-Residence gig at the Fellowship of Australian Writers (Western Australia). I'll be staying at Mattie Furphy House in Swanbourne from April 12th - 25th, which handily for me falls during the Easter school holidays. While at FAWWA, I'll be putting the finishing touches on my current novel-in-progress THIRSTY WORK, which I plan to send off to the Australian/Vogel Award in May. I also have a short story, "The Milk for Free", to work on during this time. Lastly I'll be presenting a workshop at FAWWA on Saturday 19th April, so I'll be a busy boy. More details about this workshop will follow soon.

In April and May of last year, I spent a glorious four weeks at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers' Centre in Greenmount conducting a similar residency. You can read more about my time at KSP here. That was an incredibly enjoyable and productive time for me and I'm sure that the FAWWA residency will be equally successful. Can't wait!

That’s right - Yellowcake Summer has arrived at the Kindle store and is available to purchase for $9.99. You can read the first 3-4 chapters for free by following the above link. For those of you waiting for the physical edition, you can purchase it from Amazon here.  I’ll add links to other booksellers as they become available. To celebrate the release, I’ll be launching the novel with my publisher David Reiter of Interactive Publications at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre in Perth at 3pm on Sunday September 15th – details here. I’ll also be appearing as part of the Avon Valley Writers’ Festival on the weekend of 21-22nd September in Northam and Toodyay. Exciting times!

My third novel, Yellowcake Summer, which is a sequel to Yellowcake Springs, will be released by IP in September.  The novel follows the fortunes of Rion, Sylvia and Peters — all major characters from the first novel — as they swelter through the thirsty Australian summer. I’ve written this story in two parts, so there won’t be a third Yellowcake volume. Everything that is set up in Yellowcake Springs comes to a head in Yellowcake Summer.

To celebrate the release, I’ll be holding launch events at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre in Greenmount and the Northam Regional Library during September. More details on this will follow soon. I’ll also be promoting the novel at the Avon Valley Writers’ Festival on September 22-23 in Toodyay and Northam, where I’ll be presenting a workshop on novel writing.

Check out the media section of this website for some newly-uploaded videos of readings from my recent Literary Dinner at KSP on May 7th. Here you'll find me reading from Yellowcake Summer, "The Dying Rain" and Dan: A Cautionary Tale.

My time as Emerging Writer-in-Residence at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre has been an extremely busy and enormously productive one. I did a short, five day stint over Easter and then a longer, three week block from April 15th to May 5th 2013. My major goal for this period was to produce 40,000 words on a new novel, Dan: A Cautionary Tale. I actually didn’t start writing the novel at all over Easter, so I left myself just 21 days to write this amount, setting myself an ambitious target of 2000 words per day. I’m happy to report that as of today, May 2nd, I’ve written 36,000 words and foresee no problems in reaching my target on or before May 5th. I’ve also had the opportunity to read from Dan at several of the regular KSP groups, including the Tuesday morning group, Writefree women’s group. Thursday Night Group and Speculative Fiction group. I found these writers very welcoming and enthusiastic about Dan, and I got plenty of confidence from that.

I needed it, too, as one of my other tasks was to read from the novel on RTR FM’s ‘Artbeat’ program. This was only my second time appearing on the radio (the other was last year on York FM) and I was very nervous. I had earlier read a chapter from Dan at the Thursday Night Group that had seemed to go down especially well, so I chose this short, 1000 word chapter to read on the radio. The chapter features our protagonist Will attempting to get his forklift ticket so that he can drive the forklift legally at the bottleshop where he works. I managed to read the excerpt live without any major mishaps, and in the end I was glad to have done so. You can listen to this reading here: http://rtrfm.com.au/story/what-a-busy-guy/

In my first stint over Easter, before I got started on Dan, I was busy working on a project called The Tobacco-Stained Sky: An Anthology of Post-Apocalyptic Noir. In 2012 I had been invited by author Andrez Bergen to write a story for this themed collection, set in post-apocalyptic Melbourne, and for this I had written a story “The Dying Rain”. As it transpired, however, the anthology was short a prose editor, and so when I was offered the opportunity to take on this role I jumped at the chance. Thus I had 60,000 words of prose to tweak, as well as an introduction to write, which consumed my attention during this Easter period. The anthology will be out from US publisher Another Sky Press later this year.

Wedged between my Writer-in-Residence stints was KSP’s ’2013 Writers and Performance Festival of the Asian-Australian Voice’, which I’ve written about more extensively here: https://guysalvidge.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/wrap-up-on-ksps-festival-of-the-asian-australian-voice/ This was an amazing weekend and a great opportunity to meet and mingle with a whole host of talented writers including Benjamin Law, Oliver Phommavanh, Lily Chan, Nadine Browne, Jackson and plenty of others. The festival ended on Sunday April 14th, meaning that I was literally moving into KSP the day those talented writers were moving out.

Writers-in-Residence at KSP are treated very nicely: they are afforded accommodation in one of three newly-built retreats: Aldridge, Clarke and Phillips. I stayed in the Aldridge chalet and I found this to be a very cosy writing space indeed. For cooking, not that I did a tremendous amount of it, I had the use of the main kitchen up at Katharine’s house. During my stay, I also had the opportunity to attend several book launches in Perth and Fremantle, including those for Lee Battersby’s novel The Marching Dead and Bruce Russell’s Reunion. This Sunday I’m also off to Rockingham to meet author Kaaron Warren, who will be in Perth hosting a number of events, including one organised by the very same Lee Battersby, himself previously a Writer-in-Residence at KSP.

One of my major tasks as Writer-in-Residence was to prepare and run a three hour workshop. My workshop, “Sail into Publishing: Charting a Course for Your Writing Career”, was held on Saturday 27th April and by accounts it went well. I went a little overboard on the slides (83 in all, even though a lot of them were pictures) and thus I had to rush through my presentation toward the end. I covered an awful lot about what I’ve learned about publishing in this presentation; if you’d like to download it, you need only to paste this link into your web browser and the presentation will start downloading: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53426575/Sail%20into%20Publishing.pptx

Earlier today, I had the opportunity to assist Dr Melissa O’Shea in running the third day of this year’s Write-a-Rama, a workshop for 10-15 year-old students. I first participated in this program last year, so I knew pretty much what to expect. My task today was to assist students in learning how to properly edit their own work, although I did manage to work some theory on writing into my talk as well. I was very impressed with the calibre of writing on display and I thank Melissa for giving me the opportunity to work with these students again.



Lastly, on Monday I gave an interview to students from Eastern Hills SHS who had come to KSP to make a documentary film for a school assignment. I spoke to them about my time at KSP and also provided a little history about Katharine Susannah Prichard and Hugo Throssell. Here I was assisted by KSP stalwart Chris Oakeley, who helpfully produced some speaking notes for me. I’d also like to acknowledge the amazing work done by KSP’s Co-ordinator Shannon Coyle and its Chairperson Renee Hammond. While I’m at it, thanks must also go to Treasurer Robert Perks and Management Committee members Danika Potter, Karen Treanor and Mardi May. Each of these people has assisted me in some way over these past weeks and months, and I thank them for their tireless efforts in working for the benefit of KSP.



I’m nearly done now: I have just 4000 more words to write on Dan, as well as a Literary Dinner to read at this coming Tuesday. This will be one of KSP’s series of literary dinners for the year, at which the Writer-in-Residence reads for three lots of ten minutes. I’ll be reading excerpts from my soon-to-be-published third novel Yellowcake Summer, “The Dying Rain” and Dan. My final task as a Writer-in-Residence will be to mentor a promising KSP writer, and for this I have chosen to assist Tuesday morning group regular Franci Leibenberg. Franci and I have been competing of late to see who can hit 40,000 words on their novel the quickest, and my plan is to assist Franci in structuring her work-in-progress over the coming weeks and months.



I think that’s it. For exercise I’ve been walking up Old York Road, quite a steep climb, and on occasion I’ve made it to the nearby John Forrest National Park. But frankly, a lot of the time I’ve been too busy to stray far. It’s not often in life that one gets the opportunity to do what one truly wants to do for an extended period of time, but that’s exactly how it’s been for me here at KSP. It’s been an amazing time.