The ‘breath’ challenge has now closed and our guest judge, Ara Jansen, is hard at work reading the submissions. Good luck to all who entered – picking the winner will be tough. *evil laugh of someone with no judging responsibility*

If you didn’t enter the ‘breath’ round, you missed out on an opportunity to win The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler.

But all is not lost. Waxings is insatiable when it comes to short fiction and is dangling more book-bait in the next 500-word challenge, which is now open.

The new theme is ‘hunger’. Write up to 500 words around the theme and send them to waxings.blog@gmail.com by midnight, 1 November 2011 (AWST, GMT+8) for a chance to win Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott.

If you’re feeling particularly kind, please spread the word about the 500-word challenge among your writing friends. This handy link will tell them all about it.

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Recent Waxing

Melinda Chapman set out to write a 500-word piece for ‘breath’ but the story she came up with needed a few more words. So we’ve published Max and his Incredible Underwater Adventures in Short Fiction. It’s a great read – let us know what you think.

Otherwise, it’s been a little quiet of late. If you have any words you’d like to post and get some feedback on – poetry, prose, fiction, non-fiction – send it to waxings.blog@gmail.com. We’d love to read it.

Don’t forget to have a wander around the other words we’ve already published and give the writers some feedback. What goes around…

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Opportunities for Writers

• New national literature organisation, Writing Australia, has established an unpublished manuscript award of $10,000 plus $2000 for a mentor of your choice. Applications close 13 October 2011.

If you want more of these kinds of links, faster, follow @waxings on Twitter and/or ‘like’ Waxings on Facebook, where we share these bits and pieces as soon as we spot them. (*Bear in mind that we don’t know any more than you do about these offerings – just pass on interesting-looking links.)

If you hear of any other opportunities for writers in your part of the world, please share them with us via email/Facebook or Twitter.