I am excited, grateful, giddy even. I wrote a novel and some charitable people have agreed to publish it. Since then we have conducted a structural edit to the text and all is well. Some fictional events changed place in their fictional timeline. Some relationships came into sharper focus, others pushed back. The scene with the puns was vetoed. All is well. It’s now some time since then and I’m anxious for my editor to deliver the copy edit, the line-by-line dissection, the nitty-gritty.    

An ideas piece by Lauren Fuge on how being immersed in a new language re-ignited an old flame.

I rocked up in Munich with a year and a half of language learning under my belt, knowing I wasn’t going to cut it. With a reading level of seven-year-old, I felt my age acutely—in bakeries I stumbled over asking for Brötchen (bread rolls); I frantically typed into Google translate at restaurants and ticket machines; and I spent anxious evenings in a many-cornered classroom at the local Volkshochschule (adult learning centre).

This is a creative nonfiction piece by CB Mako showing a real-time response to critique, and its interaction with mental health.

“I have a non-fiction piece to read out loud,” I enthuse, catching my breath from cycling. I settle in the large mahogany table where my writing group is waiting for other members to arrive.

What's in a name? Irene Bell explores a history of authors obscuring their identities with pseudonyms. 

“Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life”—so proclaimed poet laureate, Robert Southey, after Charlotte Brontë gave him her work to read. After this encounter, she published her literary masterpiece Jane Eyre under the pen name ‘Currer Bell’.

Claire Rosslyn Wilson on decluttering and detangling the relationship between emotion and objects.

I sat with my things and heard them breathe in a Melbourne house. I had choices to make. It wasn’t that my things were stuck in the dark, a dusty encumbrance that hung on my mind, but I felt the collection lurk in my background as I travelled light. I had a twisting root that pushed the foundations out of shape where I left my stuff.

Fiona Murphy on how the benefits of a book club stretch beyond sharing a wine and a wheel of cheese. 

Scarlett Harris on the pros and cons of getting behind the paywall.

These days, publishing is an increasingly paywalled industry in which some of the biggest and best quality publications are pay for play. Writers who want to write for and get paid by them are in a quandary: how much of a writer’s pay should go back into their client’s pocket?

Britt Aylen on her history of failing National Novel Writing Month -- and why she keeps going back for more. 

In this ideas piece, Cameron Colwell looks at how longform fiction expands the scope for more nuanced exploration of important topics. 

In its latest issue, #108, youth literary magazine Voiceworks published its first longform piece of short fiction. Earlier in the year, in addition to its usual callout for stories ringing in at 3,000 words or less, the magazine opened up the field to longer work, asking for pieces between 7,000 and 10,000 words.

Rebecca Varcoe on Jennifer Down's Pulse Points, and the complexity of critiquing the work of a person who exists in your real life too.