Student Success: Vietnam, Ubud, Napoleonic France and MORE!

Spring is well and truly here, and many graduates have sprung into action! First on the brag board is Magazine and Newspaper Writing Stage 1 graduate Linda Moon, whose travel article on Halong Bay in Vietnam made it to the pages of Sydney Morning Herald – great stuff! This was a story written when Linda was first starting and she is thrilled to have found a home for it.

And finding homes for articles is often half the battle – there are so many publications to approach that you have a great chance if your story angle fits that title. Rachel Freeman chose well with her niche pieces and landed her feature profile on Lisa Marshall (founder of Wild Women on Top and Coastrek fundraiser walk) in Pittwater Life’s September issue, as well as a profile on Rugby Sevens player Ellia Green for Sportette.

Rachel wrote to us to sum up what a lot of would-be writers feel after doing a course such as Magazine and Newspaper Writing Stage 1 and getting published. “Australian Writers’ Centre didn’t just help me get published, you were the driving force behind me actually entering the big scary world of publishing that I had dreamt of for SO long but didn’t have the courage to pursue. So thank you!” Awww, warm fuzzies! But it’s true – all that fear is the unknown. Get that knowledge and it’s not scary any more.

Back out on the road, Samantha Brown’s foodie piece on a dessert hotspot in Ubud, Bali found its way onto none other than the Wall Street Journal’s South East Asia ‘food Fridays’ segment. The prospect of being able to drop in that you’ve written for the WSJ is almost as mouthwatering as the desserts she wrote about. Nice work!

And congrats to Lisa Chaplin, who earlier this year sold her historical fiction, The Tide Watchers, to Morrow Books, a division of HarperCollins NY! It is set for release in summer 2015 in the US (and hopefully similar in Australia). Lisa advises the book is set in early Napoleonic France, Jersey, England and Scotland, and is ‘faction’, based on a little-known history about Napoleon’s least-known attempt to invade England in 1803. Wow! Lisa had been working on her book alone for two years prior to attending Kate Forsyth’s wonderful History, Mystery and Magic course this year and loved the interaction and inspiration. While Lisa is no stranger to writing for other genres, this course was invaluable to helping her “unleash a flood of beauty” in her work. Can’t wait for the release!

And finally this week, another future project and Warren Glover reminding us all that boys can write too! His short play, Losing the Plot, won the Judge’s Award for Best Play (and came Runner-up in the Popular Vote) at last month’s Crash Test Drama at the New Theatre in Newtown!

It will be performed again at the final on 15 December, so he’d love everyone to come and see it!

Such a variety of successes – from the peaks of Halong to the literary peaks of a book deal, and everything in between! Congrats to these writers, and be sure to let us know what you’ve been up to since you graduated. (And if you’re yet to embark on a course, let this be a lesson in inspiration to you!)