The Last Bastion
Once upon a time, I wrote a story for the Australian Fairytale Society for their South of the Sun Anthology. They asked their authors to explore the question ‘what makes a story an Australian fairy tale?’ I came up with The Last Bastion, a little story about sentient towers that trapped girls, and [...]
EVOLVED
My short story Evolved was a response to a writing prompt 'Dinovember' by one of my favourite YA podcasts Cast of Wonders. The prompt asked writers to imagine what would happen if dinosaurs weren't wiped out and become the dominant species on earth. Every year, a bunch of animation students and some of the [...]
Queensland Quest: Magpie Flyer
The State Library of Queensland commissioned me to create this interactive fiction work for their Summer Holiday Fun program. It was one of those super fun projects where I got to work with my good friend, artist and illustrator Andi Spark. The platform for the project is Google Forms. We had [...]
Lady on the Dark Side of the Moon
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, here is a short story I wrote about Chang-e, the Chinese Goddess of the moon having a run in with Neil Armstrong during the Apollo mission. There are many variations of the original moon goddess fairy tale (none of which involve astronauts). I never [...]
If the Shoe Fits
At the beginning of the year, I resolved to write one short story a month. It was the minimal amount of work I felt I could do and still call myself a writer. To inspire me, I used prompts from various writers' forums and entered competitions. My work "If the Shoe Fits" ended up winning [...]
The Stolen Button
By Marianna Shek and Leila Honari ‘Hush!’ the gypsy cried. ‘There’s nothing to fear. I’ll take your button in return for your passage home. A navel’s neither an ear to hear nor an eye to see. More a tip than a fee, don’t you agree?’ In a golden oasis, lived a Good Mother [...]
The Backpack
Once upon a time, I wrote a script that won a scriptwriting competition and got funded by Screen Australia. It did the festival circuit and I put it away in the bottom drawer and promptly forgot about it...until this week when I started cleaning out my computer. So here it is, in all it’s [...]
Donald Doing’s House of Verbs
By Marianna Shek, Cody McGrath and Anna Pan Everybody knew Donald Doing’s House of Verbs was the place to go to look for action. He had music boxes for dancing, hat boxes for sashaying and treasure chests for buccaneering. But when little Nora Noisler asks for his help, Donald has to think outside the box [...]
Choose Your Own Death
Goultown. The sort of place where kids could walk down the street in the middle of the night. Or accept sweets from strangers because strangers were just friends you hadn’t met yet. A place where grown-ups got tattoos of smiley faces and if kids graffitied, they were sure to do smiley faces too. That was [...]