The Adventure Continues

The adventure continues…novels, flash fiction, no agent no cry, to belong, or longing just to  crosspollinate, to write, write, write…

Eleven years ago this site was kind enough to publish my contribution How My Day Job Saved My Writing Life. I was just leaving one day job and starting another.

Several links in that article have since died but I have been able to find the interview mentioned in the Editor´s Note still valid and now at https://darciefriesenhossack.wordpress.com/2011/05/14/sylvia-petter/

My day job today is a part-time one which gets me mentally if not physically out of the house these COVID days, but it will finish next October, so the writer in me might have to grow up, something I have been resisting. But I may not be alone as Mel Ulm on his Reading Life site says in respect of my short story, “Grow Up”.

Mel´s site, celebrating its 10th anniversary, is well worth exploring for it is a veritable treasure trove of creative writing products with emphasis on the short story, and I am proud to find myself included in a section on Australian writers alongside the likes of Shirley Hazzard and Catherine McNamara.

Since I talked to WWWB last, I´ve had erotica published – my agent said I seemed to be skimming the surface – so I figured I needed to do some method writing, if not acting, and I didn´t want to do crime. With my day job at the time, writing “rude” stories wouldn´t have done so the erotic tales were written by AstridL, a little old lady who lived at the back of my garden. AstridL´s work was published on both sides of the pond and in her collection Consuming the Muse in 2013. In the same year, I published flash fiction pieces and short stories that were a bit all over the place in a collection called Mercury Blobs. (I recently heard that the first page of a story (“Widow´s Peak)” in that collection was being used in Geneva in an English class for 14 -year-olds.)

In 2014, I was Co-Director Vienna for the 13th International Conference on the Short Story in English, and a German translation of my stories from my collections, The Past Present, Back Burning and Mercury Blobs was published as Geflimmer der Vergangenheit.

My agent in Australia kept encouraging me until the time came for her to move on to other pursuits. I will forever be grateful to her for having nurtured and supported me for nigh on twenty years and have dedicated to her my debut novel, All the Beautiful Liars, which was shortlisted for the UK Yeovil Prize in 2016 and subsequently published by Lightning Books, UK, as an eBook in March 2002 while my husband and I were visiting our daughter in Australia.

When Vienna closed the airport, we ended up staying in Sydney until early July. During lockdown, I managed to revise the novel I did for my PhD in 2009, and also had a story accepted for Stories of Hope to aid bushfire relief. It was there I heard that my anti-fascism novelette in flash, Winds of Change, had been accepted for publication by a small independent US publisher.

In August, Darcie of the interview above contacted me about a project she was running and since September I am the Fiction Editor for WordCity Monthly. In November, I participated in Flash Nano 2020 with Nancy Stohlman and managed to collect 30 flashes that I have been translating into German to support a local charity upcycling PCs and laptops for families who can´t afford the equipment for their kids’ online learning.

Yes, even in rich countries like Austria, there are families and even schools without the necessary equipment.
A couple of weeks ago, I was proud to zoom launch a series of talks at Arab World Books entitled A writer, a vision, a journey.

Now that I am in my last day-job year, several opportunities are knocking on the door that will open to my future. And last I heard there were positive noises coming from my publisher about novel 2. I´m currently in a flash novel course with Nancy Stohlman, so who knows what will come out of that? Anyway, I´m open to whatever may come along. So all I can say at this point is that I´m grateful to all those who have helped me along the way, that I don´t really mind not belonging anywhere for it lets me do my own thing, which at my age is an ultimate freedom. So, in that vein, let me leave you with onwards!

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Sylvia Petter, an Australian based in Vienna, Austria, writes short, long, serious, sexy and fun., and blogs at www.sylviapetter.com. Her debut novel, All the Beautiful Liars, was published as an eBook in March 2020 and will be out in paperback in 2021.

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