"My story has been told..." from "I'm Still Remembering" by the Cranberries

I decided to be an authoress when I was about five years old (before then I was going to be a ballerina) and it's still what I want to do. I used to write (well, type) long novel-length stories set on other planets, which never got finished - usually by the time I'd done about 20 pages my writing had improved so much that the beginning seemed terrible. Now I've been going to creative writing classes run by the WEA for about five years, and I can write all sorts of short stories and poetry. The classes are every second and fourth Saturday of each month, and are very friendly and informal - email me if you live in the area and would like to know more about the classes.

Other than that, I have had some success with my writing - when I was 11 I won the New Zealand section of the Commonwealth Essay Competition for my age group, and in 1995 I won the Young Writers' section of the Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Memorial Writing awards (a big competition with a big name.) You can see some scanned articles about that in my 'fame' section, here. With some of the prize money I bought a modem and my first year of internet with PlaNet North Shore, now called Kiwilink. (After three years I stopped using Kiwilink, but not because of anything being wrong with the company.) I have also had a poem published as a result of another competition, and I have had a lot of work published in the Write Now magazine. I don't mean to brag about my success, but when I first got on the internet I was interested in contacting other people who had won these competitions, and couldn't find any information anywhere - so I'm putting this information here in case some other winners (or Write Now readers, or any other writers for that matter) might want to contact me.

Lately, along with a friend of mine, I've been doing a lot of another sort of wordplay - 'acronymising.' That is, taking a word and finding a phrase using the letters in the word as initial letters. It might not sound too exciting but when trying to acronymise a particularly long phrase, and keeping the expansion on the same subject as the word/phrase itself, it can be quite challenging and amusing. The two of us made a HyperCard stack to contain our acronyms, which also can generate web pages so now there's a whole website full of thousands of acronyms (by us, our friends, and other people who've come across the stack) and information about them. I update the website weekly and also send out an email containing the new acronyms to whoever wants it. Anybody can send us new acronyms to be included in update lists which people can download and import into the stack. As a spin-off from all this acronymising, my friend and I have also come up with some interesting characters about which we might start up another website, but for now the ideas behind that are a secret. Watch out for new links appearing on my homepage!