Happy 2024! The Christmas decorations are packed away, the chocolate boxes are in the recycling bin and early morning commutes in the dark have resumed. Returning to the day job makes me appreciate my Fridays off even more, when I get to dive back into my creative bubble.

I hadn’t intended to set myself any big writing goals or challenges this month. Really doing anything remotely productive in January is a win for me!

But then my friend Rebecca, aka, designer Dainty Dora (you can check out her awesome website here) tagged me in an Instagram ‘meet the writer’ challenge, created by the writer Beth Kempton over on Instagram (@bethkempton) The challenge runs for 15 days and has daily prompts to encourage writers to post insights into our creative lives. (I realised my first blog post of 2023 also mentions Beth when I referred to her book ‘The Way of the Fearless Writer.’ See here)

Instagram is definitely my favourite social media channel as I like the visual aspect of it. I recently joined Threads but I’m pretty bad at consistent posting. I’m still much more comfortable in a blogging forum such as this when I want to put words out into the world. It makes sense as in the real world I’m much more into one-on-one longer conversations rather than small talk with a hundred people at a party (which social media often feels like to me!).

Anyway, as part of the Meet the Writer challenge I posted some photos of my writing ‘view’, which most often for me is the little pieces of art/quotes I have on my ‘creative/inspiration board’ that hangs above my desk so I’ve included them in this post. (As you can see there is a bit of a Paris theme – I love Paris and picked up the postcards/art magnet on visits).

Over the holidays I was judging a flash fiction competition for Erskine writers and I really enjoyed reading the 500 word stories. I love the challenge of writing a short piece of fiction, and I was delighted to see the range of excellent and creative stories the group had produced. It really inspired me, so when this month’s Furious Fiction challenge (from the Australian Writers’ Centre) landed in my email inbox I decided to give it a go. This challenge runs the first Friday of each month, and you are given specific words to include in a 500 word (max) story, and you have 55 hours to submit. It’s a great challenge to get words down. You can sign up to emails about it here

This month’s Writing Magazine included a 2024 Competition guide and this has also made me determined to write more short stories this year to submit. It’s easy to let novel length work dominate, but I find writing short work keeps my writing sharp and fresh!

Good luck if you have set yourself any 2024 goals.