Ninevoices Summer Competition

Tags

Endangered words, Nature

Last month a Times article highlighted the dwindling use of certain words associated with nature. Featured in a sidebar were eleven such words as follows:

Owl-light Twilight
Roarie-bummlers Fast-moving stormclouds
Shivelight Lances of light cast through a woodland canopy
Petrichor Smell of dry earth and rock that comes before and during a rainfall
Glashtroch Incessant rain
Gludder Fleeting sunshine between showers
Neptunes-uouue Sea mist
Smeuse Sussex dialect for a hole in a hedge left by the repeated passage of a small animal
Landskein Weave of horizon lines on a hazy day
Stravaig Scots and Irish for wandering aimlessly
Nurdle East Anglian dialect for wandering aimlessly

Ninevoices challenges our followers to write a story (not a poem or piece of descriptive prose) of between 99 and 199 words using one or more of these words in a manner organic to the story. For stories of equal quality, your chance of winning will rise if you’ve used more than one of these words or introduced another such word (defined in a footnote outside the word count. The title is also excluded from the word-count).

The deadline is 31st August 2017. The entry fee is £5 payable via PayPal. The prize is £100 for the best story. Entries should be sent to ninevoices@ymail.com.

Any profits above the prize amount will go to the charity PMRGCA-UK

 

—HOW TO ENTER—

Please send each entry separately to ninevoices@ymail.com.

Stories should be sent as Word documents or pdfs.
In the email, tell us:

• Your name
• Your phone number (including country code if not in the UK)
• Your writing name (which is what will be shown if we publish the story)
• The title of your story

—PAYMENT—

Please pay us £5 per entry.

For multiple entries, please pay as separate transactions.  It would help us if you could mention the title of the story in the notes area.

Pay here:

 

 

 

 

Brexit can win you £300, plus a free dinner

Tags

Brexit, Czech, Slovak, the EU, Vietnamese, Writing competition

Brexit – that’s the suggested (but not compulsory) theme in this year’s British Czech & Slovak Association’s writing competition.

Last year’s was the EU, and that resulted in a winning entry describing how a Referendum Night party turns sour for a Czech girl living in England. In 2015 it was migration, and the winning entry put you in the place of the Vietnamese minority in the Czech Republic today.

So let Brexit rip – at least in your imagination, for or against – and go for the £300 prize, the free dinner you get when it’s presented to you at the Association’s annual dinner at a hotel in London’s West End, and the publication of your piece in the December 2017 issue of the British Czech and Slovak Review.

The second prize is £100. Entry is free.

Fact or fiction – both are welcome.  The first second prizes will be awarded to the best 1,500 to 2,000-word pieces of original writing in English on the links between Britain and the Czech/Slovak Republics, or describing society in transition in the Republics since the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

There’s still time – the closing date is 30 June.

For further info go to http://www.bcsa.co.uk/the-bcsas-2017-writing-competition/, or approach the BCSA Prize Comp Administrator at prize@bcsa.co.uk, or at 24 Ferndale, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, TN2 3NS, England.

The Exeter Novel Award

Tags

Briony Collins, Broo Doherty, News

Many congratulations to Briony Collins who yesterday won the Exeter Novel Award with her wonderful-sounding civil rights novel Raise Them Up.  Here she is sitting next to Sarah (front row, second from right).

Our lovely judge was Broo Doherty of DHH Agency. If you’d like to see her thoughts on the six shortlisted novels, go to: http://www.creativewritingmatters.co.uk/2016-enp-award-ceremony-and-judges-report.html

Brexit? Try the 2017 British Czech & Slovak writing competition

Tags

BCSA, Brexit, Czech, Slovak

Brexit? Its effects not only in Britain, but in Slovakia or the Czech Republic as well? Its causes (likely, unlikely, or just plain impossible)? Any aspect of Brexit could be the subject of your entry in the British Czech & Slovak Association’s 2017 writing competition. That could win you £300 (and a free meal at our glittering Annual Dinner!).

Fact or fiction – both are welcome. A first prize of £300 and a second prize of £100 will be awarded to the best 1,500 to 2,000-word pieces of original writing in English on the links between Britain and the Czech/Slovak Republics (at any stage in their history), or describing society in transition in the Republics since 1989. Topics can include history, politics, the sciences, economics, the arts or literature. Brexit is this year’s suggested theme, but is not compulsory.

The writer of this year’s winning entry will be presented with the prize at the BCSA’s annual dinner in London in November 2017. The winning entry will be published in the December 2016 issue of the British Czech and Slovak Review and the runner-up in a subsequent issue. Submissions are invited from individuals of any age, nationality or educational background. Entrants do not need to be members of the BCSA. Entry is free. Entries should be received by 30 June 2017. An author may submit any number of entries.

Entries should be submitted by post to the BCSA Prize Administrator, 24 Ferndale, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, TN2 3NS, England, or by e-mail to prize@bcsa.co.uk.

All entries must be in English, prose, typed with double-spacing and no more than 2,000 words in length. (The recommended minimum is 1,500 words.) For full Submission Guidelines and the Rules of the competition apply to the Prize Administrator at the addresses given above. Details are also shown at http://www.bcsa.co.uk/the-bcsas-2017-writing-competition/.

The winning entry in the 2016 competition was Ms Bernhardt’s Brexit, by Jennifer Moore, and can be read by following the link at http://www.bcsa.co.uk/competitions/.   The runner-up was The Pig, the Cupboard and the Reichsprotektor, by Jack Mullin. See https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2016/12/22/brexit-night-and-a-hidden-pig-bring-czech-slovak-writing-prizes/ for more info.

Shortlist Success

Many congratulations to all those who made the shortlist of Adventures In Fiction’s ‘Spotlight First Novel Competition’ – announced today.  A special well done to Maggie for her well-deserved place on it with The Gingham Square: https://www.facebook.com/AdventuresInFiction

Check out the competitions

Tags

News

There’s a scene in Chariots of Fire where a disheartened Harold Abrahams declares that if he can’t win he won’t run – to which his girlfriend replies that if he won’t run he can’t win. I don’t have Olympic gold in my sights but without my writing pals’ encouragement I’d never have entered my novel for this year’s Exeter Novel Award. Which means I’d never have received yesterday’s email telling me it had been shortlisted. This is a first for me – so I hope our blog-readers won’t just think ‘smug git’ when they read that! I feel so grateful (as well as amazed) that I want to encourage everyone to listen to the positive voices in their lives – and act on what they hear.  Maggie’s monthly round-up of competitions (below) is a particularly helpful spur for me.

Fear of longlists …

I’ve lost count of the number of writing competitions I’ve entered. With a couple of exceptions I’ve got nowhere. Even though writing is something I love, the number of hours I’ve clocked up, not to mention the so-called opportunity cost, can feel pretty dispiriting without a readership (beyond my wonderful writing group). Which is why I decided I wouldn’t bother checking the latest ‘longlist’. If I was on it, the organisers would let me know. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have to go through that heartsink scanning-to-no-avail thing. Liberation! On Valentine’s Day I woke up to an email: one of my lovely writing pals thought she recognised my novel on the Exeter Novel longlist but she wasn’t sure; there were no authors’ names. I jumped out of bed and got checking. Feverishly. And …

… she was right!

Whoop! I felt so encouraged I got working on a short story to enter into another competition. But if my friend hadn’t told me, I’d still be in the dark. I was wrong about the organisers being in touch.

So in future I’ll be checking longlists, however much my poor old heart has to sink!

Selfishness and Jane Austen: an irresistible competition

Tags

Hampshire Cultural Trust, Jane Austen, Jane Austen's House Museum, Selfishness

Occasionally a short story competition comes along that gives you a thrill of creative excitement.

The competition set up by Hampshire Cultural Trust in association with Jane Austen’s House Museum is like this. Perfect for all of us who can’t get enough of our idol, even in this 200th anniversary year of her death. Aren’t we so steeped in Jane Austen that we might have a chance this time of writing something which will catch the judge’s eye?

Stories must be no more than 2017 words and respond to the quote from Mansfield Park ‘Selfishness must always be forgiven you know because there is no hope of a cure.’

One snag – the closing date is 28th February. Website: http://janeausten200.co.uk/competitions

 

Competitions

Tags

The Book Guild, Writing Magazine

There was an important omission from our recent Competitions to Enter in January post for those keen to see their book in print.

The Book Guild, in partnership with the excellent Writing Magazine will pick one winning book, which will be published by The Book Guild later in 2017, subject to the winner signing a contract with them.

They need:

• The first chapter
• A one-line elevator pitch, or tagline
• A 500-word synopsis of the entire story
• A brief account of your publishing/writing experience to date
• A 500-word plan of any promotional opportunities and how you see your book fitting into the marketplace.
• Your novel manuscript to be ‘finished and ready to go’ at 60,000-100,000 words

The closing date is 31 January 2017.  Entry is £5.  So, only two weeks in which to get your act together.

The Book Guild will provide a copy edit, cover design, full text design and layout, one set of proofs for the author to check, ISBN allocation, bookshop sales representation, marketing to the trade and media and distribution to the trade for one year.

Whew! Too good an opportunity to miss. PLUS the winner will also receive £1,000 in cash, courtesy of the David St John Thomas Charitable Trust.

Paste each of the five required texts into a single document and enter through the website: http://www.writ.rs/winabookdeal which gives full details. You do not appear to need to be a subscriber to the magazine.

Time to hit the keyboard – though you should maybe use something more up-to-date than this old typewriter, photographed on a freezing pre-Christmas visit to Knole, where it sits in the office of the estate’s agent.

 

 

 

Don’t Miss Out on Your Chance To Win the McKitterick Prize

Perhaps I need new glasses. It’s been drawn to my attention by fellow members of ninevoices that I somehow failed to see (and therefore mention) that the deadline for this prestigious and financially rewarding prize is October 31st. VERY SOON. Entry is free.

The McKitterick Prize is for the author of a novel who is over the age of 40 on December 31st 2016. (One or two of our group might just qualify) The work must either have been first published in the UK in 2016, or be unpublished. First prize is £4,000; second prize is £1,000.

They are looking for the first 30 pages of the novel. Shortlisted authors will be notified by the end of May 2017 and invited to submit the entire manuscript.

It is essential to study the entry details and to download and complete the entry form from The Society of Authors:

http://www.societyofauthors.org/SOAMediaLibrary/SOAWebsite/Documents-for-download/McKitterick-2017-(new).pdf

You will see from the above illustration (courtesy of young Ellie-Mae Davies) that my fingers are poised ready to attack the laptop and complete my own entry. Would that my hips were as slender as represented…