Writing Competitions to Enter in November

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Bath Children's Novel Award, Bluepencilagency Pitch Prize, Caledonian Novel Award, Cinnamon Press Literature Award, Cranked Anvil Flash Fiction Competition, Ecologisers EcoSanta Short Story Santa Competition, Fish Short Story Competition, New Writers Flash Fiction, Paul Torday Memorial Prize, Retreat West Novelette in Flash Prize, TripFiction Sense of Place Creative Writing Competition, Writers Bureau Flash Fiction Competition

Don’t take fright, but if the year looks like drawing to a close without any of your writing New Year Resolutions being accomplished, one of the following competitions might save you from agonies of guilt.

Caledonian Novel Award for the first 20 pages plus 200-word synopsis of a novel by an unpublished writer. Prizes: £1,500, trophy. Entry fee: £25. Closing date: 1 November. Details: https://the caledoniannovelaward.com

Scribble Annual Short Story Competition for stories up to 3,000 words on the theme of ‘Neighbours’. Prizes: £100, £50, £25; publication in Scribble. Entry fee: £4. Details: http://www.parkpublications.co.uk

Blue Pencilagency Pitch Prize. First 500 words of an opening chapter and 300-word synopsis. Prizes: one-on-one meeting with agent for up to ten writers. Entry fee: £10. Closing date: 6 November. Details: http://www.bluepencilagency.com

TripFiction Sense of Place Creative Writing Competition. Stories up to 2,500 words, in which the location is as important as the story. Prizes: £1,000, £500, £250. Entry fee: £10. Closing date: 6 November. Details: http://www.tripfiction.com/sense-of-place-creative-writing-competition/ (Please note that we are unsure about this competition, which is detailed in Writing Magazine as being current, but whose website seems to refer to 2020…!)

Retreat West Novelette in Flash Prize. 3,000-8,000 words total, made up of flashes up to 500 words each. Prizes: £150, £100, £50; publication. Entry fee: £14. Closing date: 28 November. Details: http://www.retreatwest.co.uk

Bath Children’s Novel Award. An international prize for unpublished and independently published writers of children’s novels, picture books and chapter books. Send first 5,000 words and synopsis. Prizes: £3,000, manuscript feedback. Cornerstones online course worth £1,800. Entry fee: £29. Closing date: 30 November. Details: bathnovelaward.co.uk

Cinnamon Press Literature Award for 15 poems up to 500 lines each, 2 short stories or up to 10,000 words of a novel. Prizes: publishing contract. Entry fee: £18. Closing date: 30 November. Details: http://www.cinnamonpress.com

Cranked Anvil Flash Fiction Competition for short stories, up to 500 words, quarterly. Prizes: £150, £75, £30. Entry fee: £5, £8 for two, £10 for three. Closing date: 30 November. Details: http://www.crankedanvil.co.uk

Fiction Factory Flash. Short stories up to 1,000 words. Prizes, £200, £50, £25. Entry fee: £5. Closing date: 30 November. Details: hppt://fiction-factory.biz

Fish Short Story Competition for stories up to 5,000 words. Prizes: 3,000Euros for first, a week at Anam Cara Writer’s Retreat in west Cork plus 300 euros expenses for second, 300 euros for third, seven 200 euro honorable mentions. Entry fee: 20 euros for the first 10 euros thereafter. Closing date: 30 November. Details: http://www.fishpublishing.com

Ecologisers EcoSanta Short Story Santa Competition. Stories for children featuring Santa as an eco-champion, under 2,000 words. Prizes: £100. Entry fee: £5. Closing date: 30 November. Details: http://www.ecosanta.co.uk

New Writers Flash Fiction for flash fiction up to 300 words. Prizes: £700, £200, £100. Entry fee: £6. Closing date: 30 November. Details: https://newwriters.org.uk/flash-fiction/

Paul Torday Memorial Prize for a first novel by a writer 60 and over. Prizes: £1,000. FREE ENTRY. Closing date: 30 November. Details: http://www.societyofauthors.org

Writers Bureau Flash Fiction Competition for stories up to 500 words on an open theme. Prizes: £300, £200, £100 plus Writers Bureau course worth over £374. Entry fee: £5, £10 for three. Closing date: 30 November. Details: http://www.wbcompetition.com

No apologies for keeping you awake at night with guilt. Grab that pen, or keyboard, and start writing… But do, please, double check all details before entry in case of last-minute changes or cancellations.

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

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Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain, Della Owens, Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Where the Crawdads sing

“At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring. Inman’s eyes and the long wound at his neck drew them, and the sound of their wings and the touch of their feet were soon more potent than a yardful of roosters in rousing a man to wake. So he came to get one more day in the hospital ward.“

Wounded in the American Civil War, Inman is a Confederate soldier who turns his back on the carnage of the battlefields and begins a treacherous journey back to his homelands in the Northern Carolina mountains and to the woman he loved before the war began.

Charles Frazier’s story also portrays a parallel journey for her – Ada – as she struggles to wrest a living from the neglected land that was her only inheritance on her once-prosperous father’s death. A young woman raised in the niceties of Charleston society, relocated by her pastor father’s ill-health to the backwoods, she might be well-read and able to play the piano, but without servants is reduced to digging undergarments from the bottom of the laundry pile in the hope time has rendered them less stale. She survives on dried-up biscuits and eggs scavenged from hens left to run wild and guarded by a bully of a cockerel who terrifies her.

“The rooster cocked his head at an angle and fixed a shining black eye on her…Ada waved her hands and said, Shoo! When she did, the rooster launched himself at her face, twisting in the air so that he arrived spurs first, wings flogging…Ada hit at it with open-handed blows until it fell away and then she ran to the porch and into the house.”

A sympathetic neighbour sends the intrepid young Ruby to help. A wonderful no-nonsense character, Ruby announces that she will teach Ada how to manage the farm, but has no intention of emptying her chamber pot. She reminds me of the heroine of Della Owens’ book Where the Crawdads Sing, with a mother absent since her earliest years and a wastrel father intermittently abandoning her to her own devices

“The yellow and black rooster walked by the porch and paused to stare at them. I despise that bird, Ada said. He tried to flog me.“

“I wouldn’t keep a flogging rooster.“

“Then how might we run it off?” Ada said, looking at her with puzzlement.

Ruby rose, stepped off the porch and in one swift motion snatched up the rooster, tucked his body under her left arm, and with her right hand pulled off his head.

“He’ll be stringy, so we’d best stew him awhile,” Ruby said.

Frazier’s writing, to my mind is impressively descriptive, whether showing us the rugged beauty of Inman’s homeland or Ada’s exhaustion at unaccustomed work in the fields:

“Her arms were mackled red like a measles sufferer from being pricked and scraped with the cut grass and she had a blood-filled blister in the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger..near collapse…in a fretful hybrid of sleep and wake…she felt she was pitching hay all through the night.”

I have recommended this book to several friends, none of whom have been disappointed. This is actually my third reading of Cold Mountain. It will not be my last.

(P.S. An excellent film of the book has also been made, starring Nicole Kidman and Jude Law)

An Old Book Revisited

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Elizabeth Woodville, Henry VII, Josephine Tey, Philippa Langley, Richard III, Sir James Tyrrel, The Daughter of Time

I read The Daughter of Time as a teenager and it fueled a lifelong fascination with history and an interest in Shakespeare’s misshapen king. It also led me to read a number of weighty tomes about Richard III and the House of York and, this August, to visit Leicester to see their new Richard III Visitor Centre. Our trip included attending some lectures about the finding of Richard’s remains and on our return home sent me onto the internet to hunt out a second-hand copy of Josephine Tey’s novel.

Read today, the book’s language, with two stereotypical nurses and descriptions of hospital visitors allowed to smoke beside the beds of patients, sounds dated. Yet the story – of a bored and bed-bound detective conducting a cold case examination into the case against Richard – still grips. I found it as impossible to put down as I did all those years ago. My husband is currently devouring it with equal enthusiasm.

With both the book and our August trip fresh in our minds, we recently went to see the film – The Last King – about the amateur historian Philipa Langley’s struggle to persuade archaeologists to dig up a Leicester Social Services Car Park. There were things in the film that jarred and I questioned the indulgence of having the shade of Richard III appearing at Ms Langley’s shoulder – a fanciful invention of the makers of the film. It was also somewhat harsh to the professionals involved in the exercise. Yet one cannot deny that the finding of Richard’s skeleton was due to the dogged persistence of an amateur about whom the professionals were at times dismissive. The archaeologist in charge of the dig, Dr Richard Buckley, when the project was finally agreed and funded, said he expected no more than to establish the location of the Greyfriars church. Were they to find any trace of Richard, he pronounced, he “would eat his hat”. (My earlier post on this subject, on September 3rd, The King in the Car Park, mentions his subsequent consumption of a hat-shaped cake)

I heartily recommend The Daughter of Time to anyone who enjoys a good detective story. The book might even give you a different perspective on Shakespeare’s portrait of the King whom Philippa Langley feels was maligned. Josephine Tey’s novel also raises fascinating questions about what happened after Bosworth. Why, for example, did Henry VII deprive the strong-willed Queen Dowager, Elizabeth Woodville, of an honoured place at his Court? Instead, eighteen months after his accession, he stripped his mother-in-law of everything she owned and ordered her into a Bermondsey nunnery for the rest of her life. Could there have been a need to keep her quiet? And why did it take him so long to question Sir James Tyrrel about the alleged murder of his wife’s young brothers? Why not publish his damning confession when Tyrrel was beheaded, without trial, some twenty years later? A confession which has never subsequently seen the light of day?

We will probably never know the truth of what happened, unless perhaps another Philippa Langley happens along. But both book and film remind us that fact can sometimes be stranger than fiction.

If members of Ninevoices ask me nicely, I will certainly lend them my copy of The Daughter of Time...