Fame and fortune await the winner of the 2024 SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK Short Story Writing Competition.

But as sure as cats have fleas, time is running out.

February 28 is your LAST CHANCE to dispatch your 500 word bejeweled monument to literary genius.

For the details you need to enter, click HERE

NOW is absolutely the time to dust off your best china and serve up a piping-hot, super-delish storytelling morsel.

GO FER IT!

What’s that? You want more? More motivation to step into the SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK writing ring? And enter this comp?

Dedicated to writers of all abilities everywhere, who are fighting the good fight and looking for inspiration: try the soul-kindling three minutes inserted below.

And the biggest mistake you could make? The biggest mistake you could make is getting fooled into thinking this clip is about boxing.

Or even sports in general.

Harnessing a rousing life-force (stop me if this is getting too…er… ‘thinky’) to do or make a start on whatever it is you want to make a start on – writing or other-wise – is what this six star video mash-up work-of-art is all about.

And honestly – motivation-wise – it doesn’t get much better or pitch-perfect than this…

I don’t read finish a lot of novels.

And to be clear I’m talking about READING them, not WRITING them (tee hee).

Starts? Well, there you have a quite different ‘story’.

I’ve made plenty of starts on reading novels over the years. Like, PLENTY. But unless the yarning winds fill my sails pretty early on – let’s say within the first 50 pages – I’ll more often times than not abandon ship and scuttle the slow-moving, leaking hulk then and there at sea.

YELLOWFACE was different.

It blew non-stop tornado-strength storytelling wind gusts from the get-go.

It transported me all the way out to deep blue ocean territory -where the beauty lies – and kept me entertained along the way with hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of magical little narrative umbrella drinks. For the ENTIRE time I was aboard.

It was such a good read I never wanted to return to shore. Why the nautical homology? And what exactly is a homology? Not entirely sure myself but I did enjoy reading this novel.

Actually, enjoyment is too light a word. I LOVED reading this novel.

YELLOWFACE is set within the glitzy literary world of book publishing, million dollar advances and top-of-the-pile bestselling authors. The central character is mildly successful writer June Hayward who is friends with mega-star fiction goddess Athena Liu.

YELLOWFACE is part ghost story and part edge-of-your-seat literary thriller. For it’s biggest part though it’s a gloriously five-star-funny satire on the writing life.

It’s all here: cover reveals – starred reviews on Goodreads – writer’s block – SUBSTACK (if you don’t know go HERE) – author book signings – royalty payments – nutty editors – the pressures of publishing – ‘sensitivity readers’ (yep, they’re a thing) – and a hundred other elements of the world of writing and books up for chin-drippingly funny parody.

Am I gushing? Unashamedly! It’s not every day – every year – or even every decade – something this good comes along. And when it does, well… it’s time to celebrate. It’s time to swoon and gush**(and feel good about doing it!)

The story’s ‘voice’ (or in plain language – ‘the author’s writing style’) is so mind-freakingly entertaining I’m tempted to believe all these glittering words weren’t written but rather somehow channeled from a higher literary plain. And by ‘higher literary plain’ I don’t mean a thesaurus!

The 27-year-old author Rebecca Kuang is currently in the midst of writing her sixth novel. It’s about two PhD students who travel to Hell to rescue the souls of their University supervisors so that they can write their own job recommendation letters. Kuang has called the novel an example of “nonsense literature”.

That type of nonsense I reckon could be my type of nonsense! When that one hits the shelves sometime in 2025 you can bet I’ll be one of the first to go get it.

Oh, and did I mention last year Rebecca Kuang made TIME MAGAZINE’S 100 NEXT list – an annual catalog of 100 ‘rising stars’ and up-and-comers to look out for from all fields of human endeavor. So yeah, kind of a big deal.

I originally borrowed this book from my local library. A hundred pages in, I realized I wanted to go to town on it with my yellow highlighter – to mark the funny lines and ingeniously-worded observations that competed for space on EVERY SINGLE PAGE – so had better go out and buy my own copy. And that’s what I did.

But enough of the swoon. Would you like to judge for yourself. Would you like a taste?

This passage lays out author envy on, well… what you’d have to call a grand scale –

I stare at Athena’s brown eyes, framed by those ridiculously large lashes that make her resemble a Disney forest animal, and I wonder – ‘What is it like to be you?’ What is it to be so impossibly perfect, to have every good thing in the world?

And maybe it’s the cocktails, or my overactive writer’s imagination, but I feel this hot coiling in my stomach, a bizarre urge to stick my fingers in her berry-red painted mouth and rip her face apart, to neatly peel her skin off her body like an orange and zip it over myself.

“And it’s like, she just GETS me, like she’s having sex with my words. Like, mind sex.” Athena giggles, then scrunches her nose up adorably. I suppress the impulse to poke it. “You ever think of the revision process as like, having sex with your editor? Like you’re having a great big literary baby?“

She’s drunk, I realize. Two and a half drinks in, and she’s smashed; she’s already forgotten once again that I, in fact, hate my editor.

There’s more…

If you can somehow manage to get past the unfortunate bored hipster tone of the narrator, this five-minute audio sample will give you the right literary vibe as well…

I have no shame whatsoever (ok, maybe a little shame!) in declaring if I could write even a fraction as well as Rebecca Kuang, I’d be… I’d be… well, let’s face it – I wouldn’t be me! And I’d never want to stop doing that, would I?

And you wanna know the other unlovely truth? If most PROFESSIONAL AUTHORS could write half as well as she does then I’d be reading more novels!

On a scale of one to ten, I’d rate the first hundred pages of YELLOWFACE a ‘near beyond humanly possible’ 15. I’d rate the second hundred pages of YELLOWFACE a seven out of 10. And I’d score the final third of the book another ‘near beyond humanly possible’ 15.

In other words, even a masterwork of this rarest of rare caliber suffered from the ubiquitous SAGGING MIDDLE SYNDROME that afflicts every novel I’ve ever read or tried to read.

Contrast the infinite joy-giving qualities of a literary triumph like YELLOWFACE to the, well… less than joy-giving qualities of another recently published novel featuring writers as the central characters EVERYONE ON THIS TRAIN IS A SUSPECT (2023) and you have a difference as vast as night and day.

EVERYONE ON THIS TRAIN IS A SUSPECT is a fiction story about six authors who are among passengers on a long-distance train journey during which a murder takes place. Sounds interesting, huh? That’s what I thought until I tried actually reading it.

I just could not connect with the story or ‘voice’ of the author. And more than 20 characters in a novel? That’s about 15 too many for my liking.

To be fair, this novel has got nearly 1800 five-star ratings on GOODREADS (HERE) It’s also got close to 200 one and two- star ratings (HERE) as well.

To get your fortnightly hit of HAPPY DAYS go HERE