No picture with this one. You wouldn't like me when I'm drafting. 
Folks, I'm in it. Deep in it. Neck-deep in it. I'm writing a novel and simultaneously doing my PhD (which involves, in part, writing an entirely different novel). My words are busy elsewhere, and I fear I've let this site languish for a good minute*. 
* (Year. A good year.)
Let's do a lightning recap:

• Made the Aurealis Award finalist list again, this time for ​Ashes. I'm gratified, and a little surprised, as I didn't think it was my strongest work that year - but I appreciate the love!
  
• Beyond the Shore came out in Lightspeed. I'm very fond of this weird little tale and glad it was well-received.
• It was subsequently featured on io9/Gizmodo...
• ...and became my first work in translation when it was purchased in reprint for Science Fiction World in China. 
• I've done absolutely nothing with the novelettes I wrote at Clarion West, and I'm disgusted with myself. 
• Quite obsessed with the current novel, however. Did I mention I'm working on a novel? Novel.

This is not the post-Clarion-West recap. I'm still working on that one. No, this post is about the frenemy of all writers: money.
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No man is an island, even one who lives on an island at the end of the world, and early in 2022 I found myself in need of help. When the opportunity to attend Clarion West finally came up after two solid years of pandemic-related thwarting, I'd landed in a less financially secure place than I had been when I'd originally said: "Sure! I can totally afford six weeks away from work to fly to America and live that glam writer life!"

Friends, I could no longer afford it. My liquid assets had transformed themselves into a solid house.
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Fortunately for schlubs like me, scholarships, grants and fundraisers exist, and I want to shout out those that carried my butt across the Pacific, covered my lost income, and kept me afloat in the US despite the absolutely brutal exchange rate on the Australian dollar.

On a more macro level, there has been a great deal of discussion lately about the affordability (or lack thereof) of workshops like Clarion West, so I want to openly go through the funding I received to show you how you can get there even if you're starting from zero. I couldn't have done it without the following assistance:

The George R R Martin 'Worldbuilders' Scholarship: Each year, George R R 'Game of Thrones' Martin offers a scholarship to a writer with a penchant for worldbuilding. This scholarship covers full tuition/accommodation for Clarion West, and it was a gamechanger for me. Without this scholarship, I never would have made it. My cohort was lucky enough to be a double-scholarship year, with mine carrying over from 2020, and the wildly talented and hilarious Yvette Lisa Ndlovu receiving the 2022 bequest. Read more about the Worldbuilders Scholarship.

The Clarion West Travel Fund: Clarion West has multiple pools of money to help fund students, particularly international students, who are faced with unmanageable travel costs. They were able to provide me with funding to cover one direction of travel from Australia to the US; I was able to cover the rest with the sheer volume of Qantas points I'd acquired during the pandemic. Read more about the various Clarion West scholarships.

RANT Arts Quick Response Grant: RANT Arts is a local funding body specialising in helping artists take up professional development opportunities. The Quick Response Grant is designed specifically for artists who need to take advantage of an opportunity at short notice - we didn't recieve word that Clarion West was definitely happening until April 2022, less than three months out from the workshop, at which time all the usual Australian grants covering that period had already closed. Fortunately, this is exactly the kind of problem the Quick Response Grant is designed to solve. This grant ended up covering half the income I would lose over the six-week runtime of the workshop. Read about the Quick Response Grant.

GoFundMe: At this point I had a shortfall of three weeks worth of income to make up, so I fired up this GoFundMe. I waited until very late in the day to do this because honestly I didn't think it would work. For over a month beforehand, friends in my cohort had to listen to me waffle on about being terrified it was a selfish thing to ask, and even more terrified nobody would donate and I'd look like a complete nonce with my dick in the wind, but lo: my friends and acquaintances and readers had my back more than I'd dared dream, and we smashed through the initial, conservative fundraising goal and almost made it to the actual, ideal goal. Either way, bam. That was the remainder of my lost income covered. I couldn't be more grateful.

Ultimately, fundraising took care of my Clarion West tuition (including accommodation and most meals), most of my travel cost, and all of my lost income. Of course, it would be naive to suggest that these are the only costs involved in attending. We had to feed ourselves on weekends, take care of our own travel costs within the local region, and cover any social outings or book-buying we wanted to engage in (and folks, there was SO MUCH book buying; I was not adequately forewarned about Seattle's incredible bookstore scene). But I was able to bridge this gap myself, and in enough style to travel around the US on the cheap (Amtrak! It's the best) for a full month afterwards, doing the digital nomad thing to cover my costs, and mostly crashing with friends and sleeping on the train. The upshot here is that the financial barriers involved in getting to Clarion West are not insurmountable. They're difficult, yes. I sank about as much time as you'd expect into all the above fundraising methods, and there's still an element that feels uncomfortably like begging when it comes to seeking funding for creative ventures (you need to spell out, in detail, your financial situation), and grant applications eat up a hell of a lot of time and effort for a return that is uncertain at best. Even if you get as lucky as I did, and all your funding sources pan out, you still need to deal with questions of whether your job will let you go for six weeks (I'm a freelancer, so try and stop me) and how to manage family and other home responsibilities while you're gone.

But if money is your main hurdle, know that there are options for you.

And if you have any questions about the process of fundraising through official and/or personal channels, feel free to reach out to me using my Contact form. I'd be happy to talk you through it.

The Woods Echo Back has been honoured with two shortlistings in this year's Aurealis Awards, in the Fantasy Short Story and Young Adult Short Story categories. I've never made the shortlist before, so I'm absolutely boggled to be a double finalist this time around, and honoured to be in the company of talented writers and friends like Tansy Rayner Roberts, Alan Baxter, Angela Slatter, Emma Osbourne, and Sean Williams - who is also my heroic PhD supervisor because, despite its vast size, Australia is a small country. 

You can check out the full shortlist over at the Aurealis Awards website. The ceremony is on Saturday the 28th of May at the Hellenic Club. I'm not sure I can afford the epic journey from Brisbane to Canberra with all the expense of Clarion West looming on the horizon, but if you go, I'll live vicariously through you. 

I'm going to Clarion West! This isn't news, exactly. I found out I was going in early 2020. You know, 2020, that year when nothing unprecedented happened at all. Because of COVID, the Clarion West organisers wisely rainchecked our year - I believe it's the first time this has happened in the history of the workshop. So my cohort became variously known as the 'Ghost Class' and the 'Plague Year', and entered a holding pattern that, for most of us, lasted over two years.

After the 2020 cancellation, all our places were held with the hope that we'd be able to go ahead in 2021, but when the time came, vaccines weren't yet widespread - unlike the pandemic. So when the 2021 workshop went ahead, it was online-only. We were given the choice of doing it that way, or waiting it out another year to see if an in-person workshop was a possibility in 2022. I don't mind telling you I cried when the 2021 decision was announced. Clarion West felt to me like the next logical step in my career, and an opportunity to develop my craft in ways I couldn't alone, and a chance to meet the writers I'd now been working with and sharing critiques with for a year, and to have all that put on hold again was heartbreaking.

But here we are! It's 2022! The workshop is going ahead - in person! I have more publications under my belt (including the story that got me into the workshop, which is a nice coda). I have... well, zero savings left, which is a problem, especially with a nine-week lead time between confirmation CW 2022 is going ahead, and the actual start date - argh! (Friends, I am working my ARSE off, but due to current life circumstances, it probably won't be enough. This will be the subject of a different update.) And all the anticipation has build up a mighty compulsion to be locked in a building with some brilliant brains for six weeks, hopefully turning out some of the best fiction of my life. 

And I have some mixed feelings. In the past two years I've become close with some of my cohort, and I'm beyond excited to finally meet with them and work with them. But half of them, I'll likely never get to meet. Some opted for the 2021 online workshop. Some took a final raincheck to 2023 due to changed life circumstances. We are a cohort divided, and I suspect that's part of the reason a lot of us Ghosts describe ourselves as 'Clarion West 20/22'' or "20/21", throwing both years in the mix. There's the year we went, and there's the Year That Never Was. There's our cohort, and then there's our Ghosts.

​But as the kid from the Sixth Sense said (probably, idk), "Por que no los dos, baby!"

New stories? In YOUR eyeballs? It's true! And you heard it here firs-- well, you might have heard it over on Twitter first, but if so, shhhhh. 

I've got two new stories coming out midyear. The first, in Lightspeed, is about climate change, adaptation, and knowing when to let go. The second, in Aurealis, is about an imported phoenix seriously messing shit up in the exceptionally flammable Australian bushland.

If you're keen to read these when they land, and you don't follow my twitter over at @TaniaWalker, feel free to sign up to my newsletter at the bottom of this page. Don't worry, you won't get spammed. I'm WAY too lazy to send more than one email per quarter, maximum. That's my guarantee to you.