Josephine Moon's Blog, page 2

Why Aspiring Writers Should Focus on Short Stories

Tick Tock! You can join the Summer of Short Stories now at EARLY BIRD pricing!

Q. What’s the biggest mistake I see aspiring writers make?

A. They jump straight to writing a novel without first mastering the art of the short story. That’s like me at 16, dreaming of competing in the equestrian events at Olympic Games. Alas, my beloved horse, Hercules, refused to jump a ground pole, despite being a whopping 17 hands high.

A novel is a marathon, and few of us are genetically blessed to simply get up and run marathons. Most of us, though, can manage a short jog through the park with our dog or kids. That’s the beauty of short stories. They are fast! They are fun! And then… they are DONE!

Seven Reasons to Write Short Stories:

You can practice writing in different genres, points of view, tenses, and about different topics for minimal effort. Most importantly, it helps you learn to find and strengthen your “voice”. Your voice is unique to you and it’s often the thing that secures you fans for life.You can take risks! Ooo, this is such a good one! For your writing to grow and mature, you’re going to need to take risks. You need to find the boundaries of your comfort zone. Short stories let you try before you buy.Log your ‘apprenticeship’ writing hours before you commit to a full novel. Cultivate a habit of writing, editing, writing, and then…. letting go! Writers are often fearful of letting go of their work, afraid of the criticism or perceived failure. This is where short stories matter. You can invest a small amount of effort, submit it, and be like Elsa and let it go. We have to learn to write, let go, and start something new while we’re waiting for feedback.Learn to write to deadline. Short stories can be written in a day, or a week. Then… it’s done! Submit it, and move on.Ask for feedback. Truth? Few people will willingly and joyfully read your full novel manuscript and give you helpful feedback. You’re more likely to find short story readers who can finish by the time they’ve swilled their coffee.You might actually win a competition! Not only is this is a fantastic feeling of recognition and affirmation, these wins or placings build your writer’s CV. Join me for the Summer of Short Stories!

We’ll read stories, write stories, and practice offering and receiving feedback in a structured, helpful way. By the end of the four weeks, you’ll have three short stories ready to submit… or as I like to call it, throw spaghetti at the wall! You never know what will stick.

All the good details about the course are over here.

Jo, Take Off Your Pants

The other day Rachel Bailey looked at me and said, ‘Jo, take off your pants.’

And to be honest, I was having the kind of week where I barely batted an eyelid at that.

This post is AN ALMIGHTY CELEBRATION OF My WRITING COMMUNITY (the importance of which is the very FIRST THING I teach all my writing students in all my classes.) You see, Rachel is not only a wildly clever, witty and talented writer, but the woman I refer to as “the godmother of writers on the Sunshine Coast”, and one of the best human beings you will find on the planet… which brings me to the marshmallows.

You see, I had just rocked up to Rachel’s house (with very little notice) in a bit of a ‘state’. And as I emerged from the car—thirsty, hungry, incoherently exhausted, and carrying a bag of cat litter half my size, I discovered that I also had a marshmallow smeared and stuck to my bum. How? Why?!?! No idea. But stuck it was, clinging to my jeans (and the car seat) like a cranky old barnacle.

Rachel calmly ushered me inside and said, ‘Jo, take off your pants and give them to me.’ She then fetched me some lovely soft corduroy pants to cover my blindly white legs while I greeted my feline fur babies (Rachel’s their ‘bonus mum’) and plied me with tea, fed me biscuits and let me pick her PhD-laden brains about writing techniques, all while she took to my marshmallow-ed pants with the enthusiasm and tenacity of an 18th-century washer woman who would not be defeated.

The majority of the people in my life today are here via books/writing and it’s a precious, beautiful, expansive gift. And, you, Rachel Bailey, mean so much to SO many humans and animals, and I am so glad (and LUCKY) that you found me floating around on the Sunshine Coast as a fledgling author so many years ago and brought me into your nest, and continue to, even when I arrive dragging in my sticky, marshmallow-ed arse (and then repay you by accidentally stealing your phone and taking 3 hours to work out that the photo of Bobby dog is not on my screen due to photo rotations but because it’s not MY phone at all!) Here’s to you, you enormous, shiny ball of light!

The Artist’s Way, LIVE

Do you ever wonder if your life could be different, or feel like there’s more you still want to experience, but you’re not sure where to start?

Millions of people around the world (including me) have followed Julia Cameron’s ‘spiritual path to higher creativity’ and felt the change. Get the most out of this course by sharing the journey with others, celebrating, laughing, commiserating, and uplifting. As Cameron says in her book, artists rise together.

The Artist’s Way changed my life.

Firstly, let me be clear:

You don’t have to be an artist or creative of any kind to do this course.You don’t have to have ANY special talents, training or skills to do this course.

This course is not about:

developing skills or talents of any kind.

This course is about:

fun, play, joy, experimentation, being brave, following your intuition, listening to yourself, being gentle, connecting with others (if you want to), feeling, honouring, being generous, and deepening self-care.

This course might be right for you if:

you’re burnt out from your job, career or just all the things in lifeyou’re working on a creative field but you feel like you’ve lost the joyyou’re feeling dispirited because the realities of pursuing your creative passion just keep getting squashed by time, money, and a culture that does not value and prioritise creativityyou’re feeling disconnected from people, and feeling lonely or isolatedyou just don’t know what to do with yourself anymore.

(Ech… if this is you, I’m sorry, lovely. These are big feelings and ones that (I know) are difficult to deal with.)

This course might also be for you if:

you’d just like to find more fun and joy in a life that has become weighed down by the daily grind and awful news cycle.you know you need more restorative practice in your life, but you can’t see even a tiny moment in the day or week to find it.

Trust me – this course is for you. Yes, you!

Have questions? Want to hear me chatter on about the many ways The Artist’s Way changed my life? Email me. hello@josephinemoon.com

Like most things in life, the best way to get the most out of this course is to join a cohort of fellow recovering creatives who will keep you motivated.

Over three months, The Artist’s Way (the bestselling book written by Julia Cameron) will lay out how to recover your creative birthright – even if you think you can’t do anything even remotely “artistic”. If that’s you, you’re not alone. Many people feel that way. But if you’ve ever watched small children (or puppies or kittens!), you’ll have noticed that one of our first instincts in life is to play. And that’s all that creativity is: play. Sadly, though, must of us have (temporarily) forgotten how to do it. That’s why we need The Artist’s Way.

Twenty years ago, I completed The Artist’s Way to recover my innate creativity. I met with a small group of people every Thursday evening and we shared what we’d done during the week – the struggles, the breakthroughs, and the camaraderie of shared experience. We also brought our posters and other various practical activities to ‘show and share’, which was tremendous fun. We wrote our morning pages and we went on artist’s dates. And during that time, I figured out how to be a writer and live as an artistic being.

Since the day I got a book contract, I’ve been telling anyone and everyone about The Artist’s Way. This is the book that made me a writer. Yet, it’s not a book about writing, it’s a book about creativity and right to have it, use it and enjoy it, whatever your passion or special interest might be, and whether or not it sells, is financially successful, or has an ‘important’ outcome of any kind.

Since then, I have opened the book to revise a section of The Artist’s Way every year that I’ve been writing professionally. It’s just that good.

Finally, I know it’s time for me to go back and do The Artist’s Way again and this time I want to share it with you too.

Nurturing the Artist Child Within

Yesterday, I was chatting with my coach and our conversation turned (as it often does) to creativity. The maddening thing about creativity, for me, is that the more difficult life gets, the more I need to lean in to my creativity… and yet, my first reaction to stress is usually ‘freeze’… ‘hide’… or, ‘work harder’ (or eat cheese). Why do I find so many ways to self-sabotage myself? My logic tells me one thing but my adrenaline tells me something else. I should certainly know better by now because I do know better.

Let me diverge here for a moment, taking you all the way back to 26th January, 2013. I had a young baby, my first literary agent, and my first two-book deal. We were living ‘out in the sticks’ but had bought a property (a ‘renovator’s delight’) on the Sunshine Coast, and spent an excruciating amount of time on the road between the places, contstantly exhausted. Add in eight months of serious sleep deprivation, eight months of (late-diagnosed ) hyperemesis gravidarum before that… and a whole bunch of other stuff… and things were tough.

And right now? Life is tough, again, for so many reasons. So I went back through my old posts to see if I could find some wisdom, and came across this.

“This weekend, my inner child was horribly disappointed. We’d planned our first party for our eight-month-old baby — a ‘bush welcoming’ under the enormous fig trees on our new property for over forty people. I’d planned a time capsule, face painting, bubbles, rope swings in the trees, a barbecue, play equipment, icy poles and more. My sister had baked cupcakes with wee frog pictures on top and made lanterns for the trees. I’d ordered a helium balloon in the shape of a frog prince.

And then it rained. And rained, and rained and rained. Large parts of Queensland are flooded right now. Our new property (still a virtual construction site while we’re renovating) was running rivers of water and mud. We had to cancel. And I was somewhat heartbroken. Wondering why I was teary, it suddenly struck me that my inner child was heartbroken.

If you follow my writing, you’ll know how much I adore Julia Cameron’s wise words from her internationally bestselling book, The Artist’s Way. And you’ll know that her sage observation of we creative types is that our inner artist is a child, and to get the most out of our inner artist child we need to let her play. ‘Our artist child can best be enticed to work by treating work as play,’ she says (The Artist’s Way). Turning up to ‘work’ has ‘more to do with a child’s love of secret adventure than with ironclad discipline’.

The only compensation for an injured heart is to offer more love and fun.

So hubby and I packed up our lovely bubba man and drove to an even tinier town than ours (Moore) to visit an art show in the local hall with entry by gold donation. We wandered the many aisles marvelling at people’s creativity (the way someone could get so much expression into a tiger’s face, or the many uses of teabag tags), allowing our brains to stretch and grow while bubba man crawled and shuffled on the timber floor and tried to pull down the temporary display stands. Then we had ice cream. All while the rain drummed and drummed on the roof.

My inner artist was mollified. I’d had fun. I’d had a small adventure. I’d seen totally new things and thought of totally new ideas.

It’s what we must do as artists, to always seek a new adventure.”

Back to today, 2024, and I returned home from my coach and spent some time with art. I pulled out an unfinished drawing I’d started and spend some time with it to see what else might like to develop. When writing, this would be called ‘drafting’. Here, though, it’s just ‘play’.

Does this lady have a great role to play in the world? No. But she did her job for today. She reminded me to start with the ‘work’ that fills my well – because we cannot draw from an empty well.

And after saying it for the past twelve years… I am going to, finally, share the life changing work of The Artist’s Way with you. Stay tuned for more details.

I’ve Been Visited by the Easter Pony

Sparky is 33 years old (at least).

Easter ponyWhere do I start?!

Happy Easter from me and my Easter pony, Sparky. He is enjoying a themed party just for him for no reason other than it’s fun. He is (at least) 33 years old. I have no idea if this is his first Easter party. As a pony, he’s likely had many homes in his life. Ponies are frequently bought, enjoyed for a year or so, then sold… but I have had him since 2010 and he won’t ever go anywhere again.

Ponies tend to have a bit of a ‘oh, yeah, I already did that back in 1999’ kind of attitude to life and consequently he did take it all in his stride. Still, it was beautiful to watch and his eyes did widen with delight many times, which filled my heart with joy.

Wishing you and yours a peaceful and gentle Easter weekend.

Jo X

I have a retreat hangover

This weekend, I got to spend it doing one of the things I love most in the world – writing retreat! There quite simply isn’t anything that compares. What writers crave, more than anything, is (usually) time – but not just any time. Most of us are well skilled at writing in the car while our kid plays soccer, or getting up early to bash out a few hundred words before breakfast, or writing on the train. We pull these scraps of time together week after week, year after year. And we get things done.

What we yearn for, though, is a long stretch of uninterrupted time, the kind of time that has no alarm going off at the end of it to remind us to go do the school run or get to the next appointment. In these long, quiet, non-managed spaces, our brains run free into directions they don’t normally get to go. It is the gift of finishing an hour’s work at the keyboard, then getting up to make a cup of tea and being able to allow our imagination to continue wandering, gathering, solving and birthing new work. We can return to it, again and again. We don’t have to solve the Maths homework, or the electricity bill that just arrived, or find a way to entertain the dog when it’s pouring rain. We can just be.

The one thing that make retreats even better is good company. Gosh, I was blessed with brilliant retreat partners this weekend. We laughed, we slept, we ate, we drank tea, we rambled in nature, we wrote by hand, and on keyboard, we wrote alone and in company. We ate a heap of chocolate. (And fluffy socks are a must-have item.)

Post retreat, there is always sadness. A yearning to go back to the magical world. But I know that the only thing that can cure a writing retreat hangover, is to book another one. And book it, you must! Because we are too good at making excuses not to prioritise our writing, not to honour the story waiting to come through us, not to invest in ourselves. Book it in while you still have the feeling with you – the real feeling, the one you should lean into, not away from.

If you are interested in hearing about the next retreat, let me know and I’ll pop you on the list for updates.

Tick Tock! The Clock is Counting Down to “Write Your Novel”.

Write Your Novel meets in just two weeks time! You can still join in up to the first meeting, though the sooner you book, the sooner you’ll get your materials to get you started

All genres are welcome. Don’t miss out on the chance to make this year YOUR YEAR to write that book you’ve been dreaming about.

Jo X

My Word of the Year is a Challenging One

This year, I’ve set myself a word that is attainable, yet still challenging, for me.

Instead of setting new year’s resolutions, I have long chosen a ‘word of the year’ as an aspirational goal. It’s a word that might be about bringing something into reality, such as ‘abundance’ (that year worked out quite well for me, actually). It might be a word that sums up my highest pressing need, such as ‘rest’. That was my word for 2023, but I’m sorry to say, it was the absolute last thing that defined my year. 2023 couldn’t have been more at the opposite end of the ‘rest’ spectrum if it tried. Some years, I labour over choosing a word for a long time. This year, though, there was pretty much only one word that leapt to my mind.

FUN.

While last year’s hope for rest was a serious dumpster fire failure, fun is the antidote. If you can’t rest (and I’m pretty lousy at resting at the best of times), then the next best thing must surely be fun because fun gives you energy. Fun lightens everything. Fun flies in the face of dramas and difficulties and says, yeah, okay, that’s rotten, but I refuse to stay down there. Fun says ‘yes’ to life. Fun pulls us into the present moment. If scary roller coasters are your idea of fun, you’ll not be spending a second of that ride thinking about your debt, or the assignment you have due, or the fight you had with your spouse. Instead, you’ll be fully there, hanging on for dear life.

Of course, if you’re the kind of person who has fun easily and frequently, then that might not be the right word for you. I think the power of a word for the year lies in its ability to take us into areas we are struggling to reach, opening our minds and bringing in new experiences. The added benefit of fun is that it can be shared; it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Did you know that having fun is not an additional luxury but a basic human need? I read that recently (because now that I’m talking and writing about fun the internet is doing its thing and bringing me more things to read) and it kind of shocked me. I actually had a moment of feeling bad for my mind and body that I had denied it so much fun last year. This year, I will do better. But how? Practice, I assume.

Recently, I was chatting with Cheryl Akle from Better Reading and I mentioned my word of the year being fun and she quite reasonably asked me how I made sure I kept focus on my chosen word. I don’t, I confessed, which is why some years I just ‘get lucky’ with my chosen word and other years I ‘fail’ miserably. Thanks to Cheryl’s query, I have been putting some things in place to ensure the fun gets to be had. I might pop back and update you on that as the weeks go on.

For now, though, I wish you a happy new year that brings you the things you need this trip around the sun. And if you do have a word of the year, I’d love to hear it.

Jo x

Write Your Novel This Year

Join Me on Feb 18th, 2024

Have you always wanted to write a novel, but just haven’t found the right time or motivation? Maybe you’ve tried before and found it too daunting or you’ve got so many ideas, you don’t know where to start. If this sounds like you, then I invite you to join me on February 18th, 2024, for a transformative journey where we’ll take your ideas and bring them to life.

I’m Here to Guide You Through the Process

Writing a novel can be a challenging task. It’s not just about stringing words together, it’s about creating a world, developing characters, and weaving a story that engages and captivates readers. It’s a craft that requires skill, patience, and a whole lot of creativity.

That’s where I come in. With years of experience in the world of fiction writing, I can guide you through the process of turning your ideas into a compelling novel. Whether you’re a first-time writer or a seasoned veteran looking for a fresh perspective, I’m here to provide the guidance, feedback, and support you need to bring your novel to life.

And…

Over the course of our journey together, we’ll explore the fundamentals of novel writing, from character development and plot structure to pacing and dialogue. You’ll learn how to craft a narrative that not only tells a story but also resonates with readers. By the end of our time together, you’ll have a solid foundation in the craft of novel writing and the confidence to take your work to the next level.

Ready to Join?

Are you ready to bring your novel to life? To join me on this exciting journey, all you need to do is book your spot via https://josephinemoon.com/write-a-novel-in-a-year/ Places are limited, so be sure to secure yours early. I can’t wait to see what stories we’ll bring to life together.

Lastly…

Writing a novel is a journey that requires passion, commitment and, importantly, guidance from an experienced author. Don’t put it off for another year! Let’s embark on this adventure together and make 2024 the year you write your novel. I look forward to meeting you and helping you achieve your writing dreams.

Jo x

Special Commendation for The Wonderful Thing About Phoenix Rose

Last week, I was honoured to be invited to Government House in Paddington, Brisbane, to attend the Autism Queensland Awards for 2023. I was a finalist in the category of Individual Achievement (18 years and over). The winner of that category was Dr Chris Edwards, who’s been doing some fantastic work with children and the organisation, Aspect. I was proud to receive a Special Commendation, after being nominated for my work on my novel, The Wonderful Thing About Phoenix Rose, and its contribution to opening pathways for more own voices stories to follow. Thank you, AQ, for this recognition and thank you to Her Excellency, The Honourable Dr Jeanette Young AC, and her impeccable staff for such a warm welcome to me and my family.