Writing Competitions to Enter in September

Thank goodness the coffee shops are open again. Those of us who write and edit best when removed from the distraction of household chores can finally get back into writing mode. And at Taste Well, in Royal Tunbridge Wells, there’s a free chocolate mint – which can be saved as a reward for completing a fresh page of work.

The Adventures in Fiction New Voices Competition is aimed at writers who have started a novel and completed at least fifty pages of a manuscript, with the prize being a start-up mentoring package, including an appraisal of up to 50 pages (16,000 words), guidelines, a development strategy and a consultation. The package is worth £500. To enter, send a one-page synopsis and the first page of the novel manuscript. To be eligible to enter, you should not have been commercially published, though self-published writers may enter. Entry fee: £10. Closing date: 14 September. Details: https://adventuresinfiction.co.uk/

Hammond House 2020 Literary Prize. Short story: 1,000-5,000 words. Poem: max 40 lines. Screenplay: max 10 pages. Theme: ‘Survival’. Entry: £10 per category; £5 for members. Prizes: £500 short story; £100 poem, screenplay. Deadline: 30 September. Details: hammondhouse-publishing.com/competitions

Telegraph ‘Just Back’ Weekly Travel Writing Competition for a travel article of maximum 500 words. Prize: £250 plus publication – with the potential to win an annual £1,000 prize. Details: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/just-back-travel-writing-competition

Poet Aurelien Thomas is inviting poetry and flash fiction with the theme of fatherhood for a new anthology with the object of donating all profits to Families Need Fathers. Submissions are open to UK writers and there is no word count for poetry, but flash fiction should be no longer than 1,000 words. A fifty-word biography should be included. As a charity anthology, there is no payment – but you are contributing to a good cause. Deadline: 30 September. Submissions should be emailed to Aurelien Thomas at celebratingfathersanthology@gmail.com

The Manchester Writing Prize – given by the Manchester Writing School at Mancheste Metropolitan University, has £10,000 awards for fiction and poetry. The Manchester Poetry Prize is given for the best portfolio of three to five poems (maximum total length 120 lines)and the prize is £10,000. The entry fee is £18 per portfolio. The Manchester Fiction Prize is for the best short story up to 2,500 words. The prize is £10,000 and the entry fee £18. All entries must be original and unpublished. Closing date: 18 September. Details: http://www.mmu.ac.ul/writingcompetition/

Mslexia Fiction and Memoir Competition. Short Story, up to 3,000 words, with a first prize of £3,000, an optional week at an Arvon writing centre and mentoring by an editor at Virago Press. The winning entry and three finalists will be published in Mslexia magazine. Entry fee: £10. Flash Fiction, up to 300 words, has a first prize of £500. The winner and three finalists will be published in the magazine.Entry fee: £5. Children’s & YA Novel – submit first 5,000 words only – finalists will be invited to a pitching and networking event with agents and editors, and will receive manuscript feedback from TLC. Entry fee: £25. Memoir & Life-Writing is for prose of at least 50,000 words that narrate events in the writer’s life and/or a quest or investigation she undertakes by women who are previously unpublished. Finalists are inviting to a pitching and networking event with agents and editors and will receive manuscript feedback from TLC. Submit first 5,000 words only. Entry fee: £25. Deadline: 21 September. Details: http://www.mslexia.co.uk/competitions

Caterpillar Story for Children Prize. For stories up to 2,000 written by adults for children aged 7-11.Prizes: 1,000 Euros. Entry fee: 12 Euros. Closing Date: 30 September. Details: http://www.thecaterpillarmagazine.com

Crowvus Christmas Ghost Story Competition for ‘Spooky stories, up to 4,000 words’. Prizes: £100, £75, £50. Entry fee: £3, £5 for two. Closing date: 30 September. Details: http://www.crowvus.com/competition

We live in strange times, which is perhaps why there seem to be less creative writing competitions on offer, so perhaps it is time to work on that long-planned novel, if nothing here appeals.

As always, do please check with the relevant websites before entering, in case entry details have been changed.

 

Sexual Exploitation in 18th Century London

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18th century sexuality, Boswell, Dr Johnson, Harlots, Maggie Richell-Davies, Maggie's blog, Pepys, The Servant

 

If that headline has caught your eye – and you’ve maybe been watching Harlots on the television – you might be interested in Maggie’s blog on this subject on her new website, which was created to coincide with the publication of her debut novel, The Servant, this spring.

https://www.maggiedaviesiswriting.com

It is sad but, sadly no surprise, to learn that from Pepys, to Boswell to Johnson, the leading figures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries considered female servants existed for their convenience, in more ways than one.

Maggie would have copied her piece here on the ninevoices’ blog, but hasn’t quite mastered the technology involved…

…she would also be more than pleased if you chose to follow her blog. No cost is involved, and any comments on what you’d like her to write about in future would be welcome.

Emily of New Moon – a chaser of rainbows

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L. M. Montgomery

I have never pretended, nor ever will pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them. (L. M. Montgomery Emily Climbs)

Anne of Green Gables when it was published in 1908 was an instant success and established L M Montgomery’s career as Canada’s leading children’s author. Yet it’s Emily of New Moon, published in 1923, that L M Montgomery described in her journal as  ‘the best book I have ever written … I have had more intense pleasure in writing it than any of the others—not even excepting Green Gables. I have lived it…’

Both Anne and Emily are highly imaginative girls, intensely receptive to the beauty of the natural world, in love with writing poetry and stories; characteristics shared by their creator. But  Anne’s early literary ambitions – which include a comic episode when she wins a short story competition and wishes she hadn’t – are sidelined in the sequels which follow her life at college, working as a teacher and finally as a wife and mother.

Emily is altogether more driven, a fiercer, more complicated character – and possibly to a modern reader more interesting and satisfying. The three books in the series Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs and Emily’s Quest tell Emily’s story from early childhood as she struggles to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. L. M. Montgomery knew about rejection; Anne of Green Gables was rejected many times before being accepted for publication. It’s not surprising that Emily’s courage and self-belief remain an inspiration for girls all over the world.

From early childhood Emily experiences what she calls ‘the flash’ – a moment of visionary awareness when she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside – but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond – only a glimpse – and heard a note of unearthly music.

L.M. Montgomery was only 21 months old when her mother died. Lucy was packed off to live with her Presbyterian grandparents in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, and would later marry a minister. It was a childhood and adulthood she would mine for her novels and short stories.

Even as a small child, Emily has her own ideas about God. When her beloved father dies and as a penniless orphan she is wished onto unknown relatives, she scorns the advice of the housekeeper who has looked after her: ‘There’s one thing I’d advise you to do,’ said Ellen, determined to lose no chance of doing her duty, ‘and that is to kneel down and pray to God to make you a good and respectful and grateful child.’ Emily paused at the foot of the stairs and looked back. ‘Father said I wasn’t to have anything to do with your God,’ she said gravely… ‘I know what your God is like…I saw His picture in that Adam-and-Eve book of yours. He has whiskers and wears a nightgown. I don’t like him. But I like Father’s God.’ …‘Well, you’re bound to have the last word, but the Murrays will teach you what’s what,’ said Ellen, giving up the argument. ‘They’re strict Presbyterians, and won’t hold by any of your father’s awful notions.’

It’s Emily’s ability to withdraw into the world of her imagination that save her in her new life at New Moon – this, and the pride for which all Murrays are renowned. ‘You ought to be thankful to get a home anywhere. Remember you’re not of much importance.’ ‘I am important to myself,’ cried Emily proudly. L. M. Montgomery was writing at a time when children were much more powerless than they are today, and the way Emily gets the better of tyrannical grown-ups with her use of language makes up much of the comedy in Emily of New Moon and Emily Climbs.

Perhaps many older readers like myself will remember a cruel teacher who used sarcasm to destroy our self-confidence and reduce us to misery. The scene in Emily of New Moon where the hateful Miss Brownell mocks Emily’s poetry in front of the class always takes me straight back to when I was caught during prep time at boarding school writing a story when I was meant to be doing maths, but thankfully escaped with only a detention and without the teacher reading it. The unbearable horror of an unsympathetic adult treading on those so sacred words!

But L. M. Montgomery gives us inspirational teachers too in her novels, and the unorthodox Mr Carpenter, though regarded by some as an alcoholic failure, is one of them. He makes Emily promise not to write to please anyone but herself, and his last words to her are ‘Beware of italics’ – today would he say exclamation marks or adverbs?

The delightful Irish Catholic priest Father Cassidy is another of the eccentrics L. M. Montgomery is so gifted at portraying and he too perceives Emily’s gift for words. To the end of her struggle for recognition Emily never forgot Father Cassidy’s ‘Keep On’ and the tone in which he said it. Significantly, when narrow-minded, domineering Aunt Elizabeth dismisses Emily’s ‘writing nonsense’ and even kind Aunt Laura doesn’t understand her compelling need to write, it is so-called simple-minded Cousin Jimmy, the composer of a thousand poems in his head, who is always on her side.

L.M. Montgomery went through periods of depression, made worse by a difficult marriage to a man suffering from some kind of mental illness. She never had the happy life that she gives to Anne in the Anne of Green Gables series. Something of this comes across in the sombre, almost tortured tone in part of Emily’s Quest, where Emily for a time loses her will to write and gives in to the controlling desires of a much older man. It’s hard for readers today to see Dean Priest as anything other than creepy or to forgive him for what he makes Emily do to her first book The Seller of Dreams.

It’s pride that keeps Emily from falling apart during the years of brutal rejection slips and the awfulness of faint praise; it’s also what keeps her estranged from the man she loves. But literary success comes by an unexpected route, and even Aunt Elizabeth (like Marilla Cuthbert in Anne of Green Gables she mellows in her later years) can remark ‘Well, I never could have believed that a pack of lies could sound as much like the real truth as that book does.’

It’s a judgment any writer might be proud of…