Sometimes there’s nothing better than opening a new novel and seeing the world spread out over the first few pages. Maps to show people the shape of the world you’ve created are a staple of many a fantasy novel. This month, we asked our resident expert on maps, Russell Kirkpatrick, [...]
The CSFG has once again partnered with Conflux Inc to bring you this year's Conflux Short Story Competition. There's some awesome prizes on offer, but it closes soon! (Note the below is directly re-posted from the Conflux website.) This year’s theme is: The Unconventional Hero! We want your tales of [...]
Last month Alis Franklin, Elizabeth Fitzgerald and Chris Andrews gave us a fantastic insight into author platforms: creating them, advantages and things to watch out for. It was interesting and insightful, and certainly made me think about ways I could increase my online presence. But if you missed that great [...]
Last CSFG meeting Nicole Murphy gave us fascinating insight into character arcs. This included the two types of characters (steadfast and changeable) and the roles these serve in your story, the use of character arcs in different genres, and the importance of conflict. Nicole illuminated the importance of character arcs [...]
You might ask what we've been doing lately... For our April 2018 meeting last month, we had a fantastic workshop delivered by Rob Porteous on 'Putting science into Science Fiction'. Rob is the organiser of the CSFG Novel Writing group (see the 'what we do' section to find out more) [...]
CSFG received a huge pile of story submissions to our upcoming anthology, A Hand Of Knaves and our editors Chris Large and Leife Shallcross had some very tough decisions to make in deciding on the final cut. Thank you to everyone who trusted us with their work. We are now pretty damn [...]
If you missed our November meeting, you missed a wild time. Leife and Louise traipsed us through the woods and the wilds with a view to learning a little more about all creatures big and small, and how an understanding of animal folklore can enrich the stories we write. We [...]
A quick note to formally advise that next month’s meeting, to be held on Wednesday 18 October, is the CSFG Annual General Meeting. Generally, the AGM will take up some of the first hour of our normal meeting (from 7:30 pm). The outgoing committee will report on the activities and [...]
And our A Hand of Knaves submissions window is open! Check out our guidelines (for the love of all that’s holy, please read the guidelines) on our submissions page, then submit your word sorcery to knaves.anthology.csfg[at]gmail.com. And check out our fabulous art from Shauna O’Meara. If you love it like we do, keep an [...]
July For our July meeting, Ian McHugh took us to market, to market to buy … well, to sell our short stories. Ian provided insight on the short story market for speculative fiction, and the process of getting our work out there, and published. It all boiled down to a [...]