2018 has been my most successful year of my writing career so far. As a board member of the Townsville Writers and Publishers Centre, facilitator of the Popular Fiction Writers Group, and entering many competitions, I have been very busy while also working on my three manuscripts. It has been a very overwhelming year with plenty of ups and downs, but I have learned plenty from competition feedback and writing workshops. Again, I feel like I've grown as an author this year and cannot wait to see what 2019 will bring me.

This blog post will share some of my writing achievements and memorable moments of 2018.

Popular Fiction is going to be bigger and better this year with interesting workshop topics on the last Wednesday evening of every month. Reviewing the most important aspects of novel writing, I've planned eleven workshops that should be applicable to all novel genres and will help improve the quality of my fellow writers work. Take a look below for a preview of Popular Fiction this year, and I hope to see you there!

This month I led my Popular Fiction writers through a workshop on tension and how to tighten that saggy middle with careful plotting. Tension is key in all novels, but where that tension comes from varies by genre. At this workshop, we looked at the beginning, middle, and ends of books and discussed different ways to increase the tension in our current works.

This weekend I attended a literature festival in Ayr, an hour's drive south of Townsville, to mix with fellow writers and learn from their many experiences. In attendance were the amazing Fiona McCallum, Michael Robotham, and Natasha Lester, plus many other amazing authors and journalists. 

Like all writing events I attend, this weekend gave me the opportunity to find new inspiration, network, and make some lovely new friends. 

The importance of setting is generally overlooked when creating your novel, so tonight at Popular Fiction I led a discussion about how to make your setting mean something. Settings are not just a place in your novel. If you want your reader to feel and experience what your character is, then you need to think about time and place within that scene.

In August I attended my second Romance Writers of Australia Conference, which I approached with much anticipation. Conference is an amazing opportunity for aspiring writers to attend craft workshops, learn about the business of publishing, network, and pitch directly to publishers and agents. With the cocktail party on Friday night and awards dinner on Saturday, I love dressing the part for conference and had a great time spending the weekend with fellow romance writers.

I am thrilled and honoured that my romantic suspense manuscript, Almost a Princess, is the recipient of Romance Writers of Australia's Emerald Award for Best Unpublished Romance Manuscript.

This month, I put together a workshop exploring the key aspects needed in order to start writing a novel. As the Popular Fiction group is filling with writers who are just starting out or hoping to write their first manuscript, I thought this would be a valuable workshop as I took them through plotting, characters, point of view, and 'what is my story about?