Three Writing Resolutions for the New Year

Write at least every other day. It doesn’t have to be pages. Capture the sound of wet leaves squelching as you walk up your drive, or how it feels to be interrupted in the middle of replacing your ink cartridges by some youth selling tea towels.

Keep several notebooks. One by the bedside for when you wake up with an idea. Another within reach of the television as a distraction from Downton. And, essentially, one within grasp on trains and in coffee shops.

Enter a writing competition in 2015. Even if you don’t win or get placed, it will push you to get words down on paper.

May 2015 be the year it all happens…

Writing Opportunities with January Deadline

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competitions

Home-Start Bridgwater Short Story Prize
Up to 2,200 words, open theme.
Prizes: £500, £200 and £100
Entry fee: £7, all proceeds to the charity.
Closing date 20 January
http://www.homestart-bridgwater.org.uk

Bronte Society – Short Story Competition featuring a minor character from one of the Bronte novels, up to 3,000 words.
Prizes: £500, £250, £100
Entry fee: £10
Closing Date 31 January
http://www.bronte.org.uk

Chudleigh Phoenix Annual Short Story Competition. 1,200-1,500 words, open theme.
Prizes: £250, £50, £25
Entry fee £5
Closing date 31 January
http://www.chudleighphoenix.co.uk/2014comp.html

Nottingham Writers’ Club National Short Story Competition. Up to 2,000 words on the theme of ‘water’ for writers who have not earned more than £300 from short stories in 2014.
Prizes: £200, £100, £50, plus 5x£10 book tokens.
Entry fee: £5 (£12 for three)
Closing date 31 January
http://www.nottinghamwritersclub.org.uk

Fish Short Memoir Prize
Prizes: 1st £1,000, 2nd online course with Fish
Entry fee: 16 Irish Pounds
Details and online entry: http://www.fishpublishing.com

Bear in mind, there’s no need to wait for that January 1st Resolution!

A Writer’s Life

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The London Magazine

So I fired up the laptop, and there was this email addressed to me from The London Magazine. Now, six weeks ago, I entered a short story competition of theirs. Could this be details of their short list? Could it mean that I was in with a chance? Visions of success – not bikers speeding to my door with book contracts exactly, but perhaps the possibility of my story being published in a classy magazine – dimmed my vision.

My trembling hand reached for the mouse and clicked. The London Magazine were inviting me to take out an annual subscription…

I know my fellow writers will feel for me.

Writing Challenge

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coffee, Writing Challenge

What is it about coffee shops? Like J K Rowling, I find them hugely conducive to getting words down on paper. There’s nothing but a chair, a table and a large Americano. No interference from family or cat. No access to domestic appliances. And one can switch one’s phone off. With 20,000 words to my target, that looks like £80-worth of caffeine to get there – though I do also write at my desk.

Anyway, I’m currently at 60,000 words.

A Mexican Interlude

¡Hola amigos!
Bienvenida a nueve voces. Son non nueve. No, no. Zey forget las mascotas, animales mucho importantes, no? We are also nueve: Sadie, Daisy, Yuki, Lucy, Archie, Flax, Rumble and Gay (both of santa memory). Also I, Honey. Makes anozer nueve, no?
Zey say “escritores”. No ees verdad. Truth, you say, amigos. No riters. We mascotas see zem when zey meet. Riters, ya,ya,ya! Zey drink cafe and eat, oh, zey eat all, pasteles, tartas, patatas fritas.
“Mi riting ees bad”, zey say. “Ees rubbish. You no want to ear.” Riters, ya,ya,ya! But zey good at food. (Y mi eenglissh es good, si? Maybe I wood be good riter.)
Zis ees Sadie and me listening to ze “rubbish”.

Poetry anyone?

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competitions, Poetry

Entries are invited for the Nature Poetry Competition 2014 run by the RSPB and The Rialto, Britain’s leading independent poetry magazine. “The term Nature Poetry will be given a very wide interpretation” by the judge, Simon Armitage, who is one of the most acclaimed and successful poets writing in English today.

First prize is £1,000, second prize £500 and the third prize a place on a creative writing course at Ty Newydd, Wales’ National Writers’ Centre. Entry fees are £6 for a first poem, £3.50 for each subsequent poem. Closing date March 1st, 2015. Winning poems will be published in The Rialto.

Details from http://www.therialto.co.uk and http://www.rspb.org.uk

Fame at Last?

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Langton Life, local promotion

Our excellent – and free – local magazine Langton Life features Ninevoices in its December/January issue which has just dropped through the letterbox. We are in company with a local award-winning fashion designer, a children’s triathalon, a classic car club, reminiscences of a dogfight between a Spitfire and a Messerschmitt over the village in October 1940, local Nightjar conservation activities, a talk on Sir John Betjeman and much much more..
And all in full colour.

Langton Life is delivered free to 1200-plus households in Langton Green as well as being available in local shops and in some surrounding villages. It is a first-rate source of local promotion and includes coverage of Langton author Edward Tovey’s book THE FIVE HUNDRED YEAR WAR about two Kentish families (the Hollands from Langton Green and the Wallers from Groombridge). Copies of the book (recommended by Peter Sissons) are available in Waterstones, Tunbridge Wells, and from Amazon. The £10 cost includes a donation to the local charity 3H.

Spoilers in the blurb

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blurb, Grace and Mary, Melvyn Bragg, Novel, Reading, spoilers

Perhaps we don’t give enough consideration to the difficult decisions publishers have to make. This unusual (even heretical?) thought occurred when I was reflecting on how my enjoyment of Melvyn Bragg’s splendid novel Grace and Mary had been spoiled by a key plot development being given away in the blurb on the back.

The novel was presumably written in the expectation that the reader, like the protagonists, did not know what was coming. I have tried to imagine how my reading would have differed had I shared their ignorance: my reactions at the key point would have been stronger.

The publisher presumably has to judge how much of the book’s content to reveal in the blurb in order to turn the browser into a buyer. There’s no point in keeping schtum about the plot so as to enhance the enjoyment of the browser who hasn’t bought the book but has just put it back on the pile and is now looking at the next one. In this case the judgment must have been that revealing this turn in the plot would make the book more heart-wrenching, more alluring.

I would’ve bought Grace and Mary anyway, so for me that judgment was the wrong one. But publishers know their trade better than me, so …….

At least I hope they do.