Lies, Ink

How to Win a Short Story Competition (Judged by Me)

2012-02-23T22:00:00.001Z

A couple of weeks ago I submitted my decision of first,second, and third prizes for the prose section of the Malvern Writers’ CircleYoung Writer of the Year competition.The organisers are now hard at work, compiling all the stories and poems intoan anthology, which will be launched at the prizegiving evening next month.

I was very pleased to be asked to judge the competition,and I hope that people will feel I’ve done a good job. I won’t pretend it wasan easy task. I’ve never judged a competition before and my first strategy –just read them all, then arrange them in order of how much I liked them – fell flatalmost immediately. Whenever I’ve read a collection of stories before (whetheran anthology by one author, a collection by different writers, or even just arandom bunch of stories on a website), it simply hasn’t mattered which one was “best”.I may have had a favourite, but that isn’t the same thing at all. What does “best”mean, anyway?

In some ways, I was lucky. There were two categories, age13-15 and age 16-19, and in each one I found the story I felt “deserved” to winon my first read-through. It was more of a gut feeling, to be honest. The stories just seemed right. Then camethe tricky part. Who would get second place? What about third? Who’d be goinghome with nothing?

I was stumped. Stories that were strong in some areas didn’tquite cut it in others. There were fantastically realised characters that didn’tseem to go anywhere. There were exciting plots through which underdevelopedcharacters raced frantically, their only aim seemingly to get to the end of thestory. There were beautifully written sections that demonstrated great imaginativeskill and writing technique, but didn’t really add anything.

I ended up going back to the two stories I’d identifiedas winners, and trying to work out what had drawn me to them so strongly. Ithought about my own work, the things I regarded as successful, and otherwriters who’d written tales that had stayed with me. What common factors were there,I wondered. This is what I came up with:

When I read a short story, I am looking for three things.Most importantly, I need to be convinced that what the author is telling meabout actually happened. This meanshaving characters I can believe in, events that fit the story’s internal logic(i.e. no matter how bizarre or surreal the actual plot is, it needs to makesense within the unique world of the individual story), and a sense of place.

Second on the list is a need to understand why I am beingtold this particular story. The writer needs to make it clear why it’s so important I hear about whathappened to this character or group of characters at this particular point in their lives. Reading a short story islike sharing a journey with a stranger. I don’t have to fall in love with them,I don’t have to even like them very much, but I must find them and their circumstances interesting orI’ll soon wish I’d picked a different travelling companion.

Thirdly, I need to feel that the story is taking mesomewhere new, showing me something I’ve never seen before. This soundsdifficult – there are, after all, a very limited number of plots – but in thehands of a skilled writer even the most mundane, everyday activities can becast in a fresh light.

Breaking it down like that helped me get a fix on whichstories were the strongest. Basically, I made story king. A good story told with slightly patchy prose wouldtriumph over a wonderfully written piece that was essentially just a scene orcharacter sketch.

I felt bad because this approach meant that some clearlytalented writers went unrecognised. But then, this is a competition. It’s not ahollow, Everybody-Gets-a-Prize day. I made my decisions and I’ll stand by them.

What I would say to those who didn’t win aprize, though, is simple. Don’t dwell. Dust yourselves off and re-read what you’vewritten. Read through it carefully; read it out loud to somebody you can trustto be brutally honest. If you find flaws, rewrite as much as necessary, and sendit out again. A different judge or editor will evaluate stories in an entirelydifferent way. Keep at it. Somebody somewhere will love your work. I promise.

And the winner is...

2012-02-03T10:06:00.001Z

First things first. The answer I was looking for in the Somewhereto Start From treasure hunt was: “In the night, Helen’s brave friendsdeconstructed the counterfeit hotel”. No, I’ve no idea what it’s supposed tomean, either.

I had a good response to the competition, with over 50correct entries coming in. I had initially thought it might attract a lot morethan that, but as I found out it isn’t easy to motivate people to join in with apromotion like this, even if you’re not charging anything and you’re offering adecent prize. Still, I’m very grateful to everybody who took the time to enterand also to my friends who helped spread the word via Facebook links andTwitter re-tweets. It’s great to know there’s a little network of hugelysupportive people out there that are prepared to step in and help me avoid fallingflat on my face.

So, without further ado... the results, as selected byRandom.org’s random sequence generator!

Congratulations to Jane Retallick from Bristol, holder ofticket number 34 and winner of £50 to spend at Amazon. The second number on thelist was 44, which means Amanda Saint from London received the £10 runner-upprize. Well done to you both; I hope you enjoy your purchases.

Thank you again to all the entrants; I really appreciate theinterest many of you have shown in my writing.

Also, in a lovely demonstration of the theory that what goesaround comes around, I've just won £50 worth of book tokens in the National Book Tokens/ Indiebound UK promotion. Whoo-hoo!

Last Chance to Win!

2012-01-31T16:52:00.000Z

Just a quick note to say there are only a few hoursleft before the end of my treasure hunt competition. Get your entry to me before midnight tonight to be in with a chance of winning a great prize.

It doesn’t take much timeto take part, it’s free, it’s easy, and there is a £50 Amazon voucher up forgrabs. You don’t need to buy the book as the contents page (where all theanswers are lurking) is available to view on the Amazon page for my anthology.Full details are HERE.

Good luck!

Judging – and Being Judged

2012-01-26T08:45:00.000Z

I'm in the middle of judging the entries for the Malvern Writers' Circle Young Writer of the Year competition. It's the first time I've been asked to do anything like this, and I was very honoured to be invited to choose the winners. I'm determined to do a good job of it: to be an open-minded, fair and objective reader, and make the 'right' decision.

The youngest age category is 13-15 years. I can't help wondering about the kind of stories I would have been writing at the time I did my GCSEs. I also think how difficult it would have been at that age to pluck up the courage to enter a competition, to brave the scrutiny of a judge and hope that my work makes the grade. I think that's why I feel a responsibility to pick a story that works as the best example of what I think makes a good story, an example from which the other entrants can learn something about 'the craft'. It will only ever be my own interpretation, of course, but in the judge's report I write I will aim to make it clear why one succeeds and the others fall short of the mark. I want to encourage these young writers to try again, and keep trying, not make them feel like failures because their story didn't win.

Maybe I'm more sensitive to this kind of thing at the moment due to my story, "Just Jeff", going live on Every Day Fiction recently. EDF are one of a handful of markets that leave the stories they publish open to comment from their readers. It's a great feature... as long as people like your story. Just Jeff seems to have gone down pretty well - there are some fairly mild criticisms, but most people seem to 'get' the idea behind the story, and say they enjoyed reading it. But, the readers aren't always so docile, and I've seen some harsh criticism that was in some cases warranted, in others not. Either way, there's a level of tact and diplomacy that should be applied when responding to an author's work, particularly considering these are stories that have already been approved by EDF's slush readers and editors. They've already cleared the most significant hurdles, so in some ways it seems odd to then invite further criticism.

It's interesting to get a glimpse into the 'other side' of a competition. I have already learned the absolute necessity of numbering your pages - and not just putting the numbers on, but using the format Page X of Y. Seriously. Even if you take nothing else from this post, adopt this habit, pronto! It's something I've got into the habit of doing, but now I understand how much hassle it can avoid I will never send a competition entry without it.

Sometimes, though, you can get too much of an insight. A couple of days ago, the Willesden Herald posted a photo on their Facebook page of the folders used for the stories rejected from their competition. You can see it for yourself, HERE. Depending on the size of your screen, you might struggle to read some of the folder titles but, basically, there are thirty or so of them, titled with descriptions such as "boring", "cliched", "hopeless science fiction", "nauseating", and so on.

I'm not sure if this is a bit tongue-in-cheek, and it's entertaining for a while thinking of all the dross the poor Willesden readers are having to wade through - but then it dawns on me that if the story I submitted to the competition doesn't make the shortlist, then it's because it's in one of those folders. It doesn't do much for your confidence to try to work out whether your story might be languishing in "dull", or "mawkish" or whether you really missed the mark and ended up in "hopeless in every way". Or, for that matter, "laughably horrendous" - I'm not sure which is worse.

The problem is that pigeonholing stories in this way gives the impression the categories are indisputable, when most of them are deeply subjective and personal. What's boring for one reader might be fascinating for another; what one finds mawkish, another may find charming. There are no folders entitled "just not my cup of tea", "I've read three like this today already", or "the main character is called Mildred and that's my awful ex-wife's name". With the current arrangement, it seems if your story doesn't make the shortlist, the best you can hope for is that you accidentally broke one of the rules and joined the ranks of the "disqualified".

Whether or not this really is how the WH team filter their entries, it isn't a system I'm planning to adopt. I'm working towards having two piles of manuscripts - "prizewinners" and "not prizewinners this time". Because those are the only truly indisputable categories there can possibly be.

Superheroes... and Self-Doubt

2012-01-18T23:14:00.000Z

As of yesterday, I have a new story up on Every DayFiction. I’m really pleased to have another story up there, as I like the siteand try to visit as frequently as possible. They’re not at all snobbish aboutfiction, which leads to an interesting mix of styles, subjects, and genres.

This story, Just Jeff, is one I wrote a year or so ago.Long-term followers of this blog may remember that, at the time, I had some doubts about whether I was subconsciously stealing ideas from another author. AlthoughI think I’ve come to terms with the fact that it’s just a case of me being moredirectly influenced by something I’ve enjoyed than is usually the case, seeingit on the site has made me wonder whether somebody out there is about to shout “Cheat!”at me. But I think I’m worrying unnecessarily. It’s not the same story, none ofthe characters are the same, and the events have nothing in common. But, still,I’d be interested to hear from anybody who’s read Andrew Kaufman’s “All MyFriends Are Superheroes” and thinks I’ve crossed a line.

Actually, thinking about it, Just Jeff is probablymore influenced by the film Mystery Men than anything else.

The story went to a few competitions but didn’t bringhome any awards. Every Day Fiction was the first regular ‘market’ I tried, andfrom their comments, the editors clearly ‘got’ it. In some ways it’s an awkwardstory – what actually went on is revealed via descriptions of events that didn’thappen, there’s no real way of telling whether Jeff is a superhero or not, andthe list of the other superheroes may be too much for some readers (at the timeof writing, that seems to be the only criticism coming through in the commentssection). I like stories that play around with convention, take a few risks,etc, but it does mean they can be hard to place.

... Like the story of mine that just got rejected fromSmokelong. Again, there are elements to this one that perhaps limit its chancesof publication. The narrative isn’t straightforward, with a lot of it writtenin future tense. Parts of it may or may not be written from the protagonist’spoint of view, or it may be the narrative voice speaking directly to her. Theevents described in the story might not actually happen, depending on how youinterpret the last line. Sometimes I wonder if I’m making life unnecessarilyhard for myself.

But I think it’s important to challenge yourself. As awriter, you can slip into a groove and just churn out pretty much the same story in variousdifferent guises over and over again, or you can force yourself to tackle storiesthat seem like a bit of a long shot, styles that stretch you, make you rethinkthings you “know” for certain. Staying in your comfort zone may help make you acompetent writer, but how will you ever get better?

Arvon

2012-01-16T23:02:00.000Z

I’ve just come back from a week-long Arvon course. To briefly explain, for anybody who hasn't heard of Arvon, it's an organisation set up to promote and encourage writing in all its many forms, mainly in the form of residential courses hosted at one of four centres around the UK. The courses are tutored by published or otherwise established writers working in a relevant field. I don't know whether they're the best courses of this kind – I've now done two different Arvon courses, but no other residential ones to compare them to – but it's hard to see how they could be improved. There's something about the type of people they attract, the tutors who come to share their knowledge and experience (that sounds a bit airy-fairy, but they're very deliberately not there to “teach” anybody “how” to write), and even the centres themselves, that adds up to a kind of synergy, filling everyone involved with boundless enthusiasm for their work.

The course I was on this time was entitled “Starting to Write a Novel”. It took place at the John Osborne Centre, under the guidance of Sarah Salway and Jim Friel. We also had a mid-week visit from Kate Long, who gave us a remarkably generous insight into the planning and research that goes into her books, read us an extract from her latest novel, Before She was Mine, and even passed around a work-in-progress (something I can’t imagine many authors being brave enough to do!) to show how she goes about refining her drafts.

I had an idea of what Sarah was like from her blog and from having read a couple of her stories (I think the first of hers I read was this one from Defenestration (of particular interest to me because they also published one of mine). I’d also read “Something Beginning With...” – her first (I think), unconventionally structured novel (and which is well worth a look). Jim was a bit of an enigma. I’d managed to get hold of one of his books via the excellent Books & Ink in Banbury, but I hadn’t had a chance to read any of it in advance. All I had to go on was the fact he is a lecturer at Liverpool University, and a photo I'd found online, in which he looked rather stern. I half-expected him to be a curmudgeonly, slightly dusty academic type, who would look down on any of us not slaving over some impenetrable work of highbrow fiction. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Although Jim and Sarah had not taught together before, they are good friends and such warm, funny people it was hard to imagine a better pairing. Both really know what they're talking about, being astonishingly well-read. The writing exercises they set were fun, challenging and really got the creative juices flowing. I came up with at least three viable ideas for short stories, and a whole host of other ‘stuff’ (good lines, neat bits of description, interesting scenes) that I don't have an immediate use for, but might well come in handy later.

The icing on the cake was the group of people I was learning with. Everybody was keen and enthusiastic, regardless of where they were in their own writing ‘journey’ – a couple of us were published, in some form or other; most had a novel started or the beginnings of one in early stages of planning; a few were trying to get back into prose writing after a few years working on other things. The unspoken rule seemed to be that egos were left on the doorstep – nobody tried to dominate the workshops or monopolise the tutors’ time. It’s always daunting signing up for anything that basically means you’ll be stuck with a bunch of strangers for a week with no easy means of escape, but thankfully this was a group that made the whole experience a joy. Incidentally, this was the case with the previous Arvon course I attended, too. I’m not sure how they attract such great people but, whatever it is, I hope they keep doing it.

I set off at the start of the week with the hope that I would come out the other side with a clear idea of what I’d be working on over the coming months. I am closer to that goal, but the main benefit of the course has been the realisation that, actually, it doesn’t matter if I have more than one project on the go at once, and that it possibly wouldn’t suit my general approach to writing to try to fixate on a single idea anyway. I know that keeping more than one plate spinning means I’ll have to work harder at organising my time, but with renewed faith in my work and the determination that 2012 will be a year of real productivity, I feel ready to face the challenge.

Oh, and when it was time to leave, this cat decided it was going to come home with me:

Getting Noticed by The Guardian - Part One

2012-01-06T22:17:00.001Z

Please welcome to my blog my first-ever virtual guest, thevery talented Teresa Stenson. Teresa has clocked up some impressive publicationcredits and competition placings with her short stories, including the WillesdenHerald and the Bridport Prize. But she joins me today to talk about TheGuardian’s Summer Short Story Competition, an annual contest that has resultedin shortlistings for us both – Teresa last summer, myself in 2009. We thoughtit might be interesting / useful to discuss our experiences of this competitionand the way we approached the stories we submitted.

Dan: Welcome to the blog, Teresa. Let’s start with somethingfairly basic. The most obvious difference between the 2009 competition and thesubsequent years was the introduction of a theme. What was the theme in 2011and how did it influence your writing? For instance, did you write Things Which Are Not True specificallyfor the competition, or was it a story you already had that just happened tofit the theme?

Teresa: It was astory I had that happened to fit. I’m not very good at writing to a prescribedtheme, so if I’d sat down to “Write a story about a holiday” I wouldn’t have managedit. But I’d had this story, well – this scene – in my WIP folder since 2007about a woman in an office job going on holiday and no one taking any notice andI knew I liked it, or her, and always felt there was something in it. And Iwanted to send something to the competition. So it was a fairly practicalprocess really, about 2 weeks before the deadline I looked through my folderand thought – okay, here’s an element of ‘Holiday’,this could work. I developed it, added some words, and a sort-of ending. It actuallyended up being an 11^th hour submission. I’m not sure if you’llremember but the deadline was the day we came back from our writing weekend in June(Dan and I are part of a writing group who meet a couple of times a year) and Ispoke about how I had this story for TheGuardian but I wasn’t sure if it was good enough, if the ending was right,and, my usual conundrum – if it was a ‘story’ or still just a scene. But I decidedto go with it and a few weeks later came the good news.

D: I do remember it. Sometimes it’s good to have thatpressure of being right up against the deadline, although it’s not good for theblood pressure. When it’s not a simple matter of running out of time, do youhave any particular way of knowing when a story is ready to send out?

T: I think there’s a time you have to stopediting and tweaking, and at that point, the story might not even be the best it can be– there just isn’t any more you can do for it right now. I always worryabout taking the energy out of the writing. Sometimes you just need to leave itand see what it’s like in a few weeks. It might be saying things you don’t wantit to say, but you’re too close to realise. This all sounds a bit odd. Really,I believe that you know when something is worth being published and read, ithas a truth to it, not in a real-life-story way, it just feels like an honestpart of you. Then it’s ready to go out.

D: What about the way the story came together? Did you ‘get’the structure at the first attempt, or is it something that evolved overnumerous drafts?

T: It’s not a story Ipulled apart, re-drafted, or edited a lot. It’s in a fairly raw form, quite closeto what it was in 2007. I think that’s down to the ‘voice’ of Coral, which iswhere it all began. Specifically it began with her saying ‘I’m just going onholiday for a lark, really’ and embedded in that one line came the idea of herkeeping a list of ‘Words To Say’, and as soon as I had that, Coral was a person.I found it liberating, exciting and easy to write – and it made me laugh. I hadfun with the idea of these intricate and developed and varied lists. It’sactually one of my ambitions, to write a story just out of lists.

D: Your Bridport story, “In a Seaside Café”, made effectiveuse of lists. Jennifer Egan’s “To Do”, one of the ‘professional’ stories in theGuardian’s 2011 summer selection, is an even more extreme example. Egan choseto write an entire story in one list, so you’re obviously not the only writerwho enjoys listing things. What is it about lists that appeals to you and whatdo you think they offer the fiction writer?

T: I think lists cangive a real insight into a character. I work in a bar and one of my favouritethings, when I’m clearing tables, is finding a screwed up piece of paper with alist on it. Even if it’s just food items I love it. As far as fiction writinggoes, list-writing appeals to me because of its brevity, and how much can bedelivered in a few words. The idea of successfully writing a whole story fromlists is exciting because it’d be like putting together a jigsaw, layeringsomething, which is how I approach writing anyway I think – I’m hardly ever alinear writer. It’s taken me a while to realise that.

D: Coral is a very believable character, and the voice ofthe story complements her personality perfectly. How do you go about ‘building’your characters? Do you have a clear idea of what they’re like before you startwriting, or start with a set of circumstances and think, “What kind of personwould find themselves in this sort of situation?”, or do you have another wayof approaching it?

T: In terms of storyideas, I don’t think I’m a ‘what if’ writer. There are a few ways I find my wayinto a story, but mostly it comes from an impulse, a feeling about something, andthat can sometimes be something personal I’m feeling myself, or just somethingor someone I’ve noticed. In the past year or two I’ve used drawing in thoseearly free-writing stages. I’m not an artist, in fact I really wish I coulddraw better, but I like to free-draw in my notebook and sometimes this willbring up an image, or a shape, and a story will come from it. I had a briefspell a few years ago trying certain exercises like interviewing my charactersand building fact-files on them. It didn’t work, and it was really dull. Butthis particular story came from that opening line, and the rare thing happenedwhere it brought the character along with it.

D: I was looking for similarities between our maincharacters and I came to the conclusion that, although very different in mostways, they’re both optimists. They’re both in circumstances they’re not happywith, but they believe things will change for the better, even if they havenothing at hand other than wilful self-delusion to bring about those changes.Do you think this optimism is something readers find easy to relate to /sympathise with?

T: Well, as a readerof your story, I can say I identified with your main character immediately. The2^nd person POV, which you do so well, transports you right there tothat moment where your character wants to hold someone’s hand – I think we’veall felt that. Your character is full of hope, and Coral is certainly that too.People have responded really well to Coral, when anyone talks to me about thestory they talk about Coral. They want her to be okay, to have a good holiday.I find myself reassuring people, saying it’s all fine because she does meet a French man called Sebastian.

D: Finally, what does it mean to you to have a piece on TheGuardian’s website, and to know it was chosen by well-respected, publishedauthors? I’ve read comments on writing websites from people who think TheGuardian are taking advantage of aspiring writers’ desire to be read by notoffering payment for any of the stories they select. What do you make of that?

T: It hasn’t occurredto me to mind. Maybe it’s because I’m used to not getting paid – or gettingpaid very little – for writing. And, actually, the pay-offs for this comp are prettygood – predominantly, as you say, it’s huge exposure on a respected platform. Whenyou enter, for free, you know the 1^st placed story will be publishedin the Guardian and the 4 runners up will appear on the website. I’ve got somuch from my experience that there is no way I could feel taken advantage of.One of the best, most meaningful outcomes, came when I tweeted one of thejudges, Jon McGregor, a writer I read and admire, to have him reply and offer long,insightful emailed notes on my story and how to develop it. That made the wholething very, I have to use the ‘m’ word again, meaningful. You’ll know this,it’s great being published, placed in competitions and so on, but often, thiscan just involve an email and a contributor’s copy – all wonderful – but tohave a conversation with the judge, about your own writing, was above andbeyond any competition experience I’ve had yet. And, just the other day acomplete stranger tweeted me to say she had read and liked Things Which Are Not True, and that is something even better,reminds me what a great thing the internet is, how we’re all essentially on alevel with each other, and how brilliant, but weird, it feels to be read byothers.

Thanks, Teresa, interesting stuff. For those readers who've enjoyed this, Teresa will be posting Part Two of our "chat", where we swap chairs and she interrogates me, over on her blog, in a couple of days.

Ten-Four Ends with a Bang...

2012-01-04T23:56:00.000Z

... well, a couple of flashes. But more on those later.

I was far busier than I expected over the Christmas / New Year period, and I didn't get to do the whole "looking back over 2011, looking forward to 2012" bit. Still, other people have done that, and made a pretty good job of it. Suffice to say my resolutions for the next twelve months are pretty basic - I'm giving Twitter a go, and I'm aiming to write at least 1000 words each week, with the majority contributing to an as-yet undecided project. My upcoming week at Arvon will, I hope, help me decide what to direct all those words towards.

But enough of the future, you say, enough of this infuriating attempt to delay the announcement of what went on with the Ten-Four Challenge. Tell us what happened!

Easy, tiger... the short answer (and I'm tired, so a short answer's all you're going to get) is that I made it, with two pieces of flash fiction filling the final slots in the Big Ten. I got the ninth submission into Flash500 just before Christmas, sending in an edited-down version of a story I really like, but that's not had much success in either of the comps it's been to already. It's written in an unusual format and I think that may have counted against it. Maybe the shorter, sharper version will do the trick.

Number ten was almost literally eleventh-hour stuff. I don't think Jools Holland's Hootenanny had actually started on BBC 2, but 2011 was pretty much making its excuses and struggling into its coat and hat in the hallway. I sent a new story to a literary e-zine, somewhere I've not submitted before. They've got an excellent reputation and I think the story I sent would be a good fit for them, but obviously I'll have to wait and see.

The Challenge has been good for me, a bit of a stretch, but not too difficult to find (just) enough time to do the required new writing and editing to get those ten stories out there. It's slightly frustrating that it'll be near enough April by the time I know how many of the pieces I've sent out are coming back empty handed.

Although, one result I do have is that Every Day Fiction will be publishing my superhero story, Just Jeff, later this month. I'll write more about it once it's up there, but suffice to say I'm very pleased it found a home.

Lastly, and most important, a Happy New Year to you all. I hope 2012's treating you well so far.

Perfect Weather for Shorts

2011-12-22T21:50:00.000Z

So, then - it turns out it's National Short Story Day. Today's the shortest day of the year (well, it's the day with the shortest period of sunlight. I'm pretty sure we're still managing to squeeze in the usual twenty-four hours), so you might feel like you're a little pressed for time. Ideal circumstances, in fact, for you to wolf down a bite-sized short story or two. After all, it's not like it's worth going outside in the cold and the dark.

There are many story recommendations flying about at the moment, and I'd like to add three more to the mix. One's in an anthology, and the other two can be read by following the links below.

First up is "Circadia", from Rich Hall's book, Magnificent Bastards. I finished reading this collection a few days ago and Circadia is the stand-out story, by my reckoning. It's a fantastically constructed tale in which the narrator meets a man claiming to be terminally ill and finds himself agreeing to be on call, ready to help the guy end his life when the time comes. The eerie, mountainside setting and the odd community living there perfectly complement the uneasy deal the two men strike, and the story is by turns poignant and hilarious as the narrator struggles to find a way out of his obligation.

Secondly, Meditation for the Dead by Jakob Drud. You can read this at FlashFictionOnline.com, a website that has published some great flash fiction over the years. Meditation for the Dead is a brilliant twist on the zombie genre, done in the style of one of those self-hypnosis tapes that were briefly popular back in the day. It manages to be amusing and sinister simultaneously, which is quite an achievement.

And my last selection is Spencer Holst's Brilliant Silence, which I couldn't find online in any official capacity, but did manage to track down this version, which has a handy (perhaps) Spanish translation to go with it. This one's a very short flash piece about two bears who are left to their own devices when the circus they are part of disbands after an accident. In fairness, the story is pretty slight, but the imagery is beautiful and the bears dancing at the end of the story is a mental picture that's stayed with me ever since I first read it, which must be at least three years ago now.

I hope you enjoy those. There's not a lot else for me to add, except the obligatory reminder that there is still plenty of time to enter my competition to win £50 to spend at Amazon.co.uk. Yes, I really am giving away a £50 voucher (plus a £10 runner-up voucher), it's free to enter and you don't even need to buy a copy of my book. Bargain!

Books & Ink, Banbury

2011-12-15T23:30:00.000Z

Books & Ink, Banbury

The past few days have been pretty good.

Last Saturday I was very pleased to deliver a batch of my books to Books & Ink in Banbury. This is a fantastic little shop - well, I say little; they have over 25,000 books in stock - tucked away in the heart of the town but well worth seeking out. Find them on Facebook here, or check out the website here.

It's run by the extremely knowledgeable, helpful, and friendly Sam. She definitely understands the importance of the written word - the shop's mantra is "Read Books, Write Books, Live Books, Love Books", and when you look around the numerous shelves and displays it quickly becomes clear the place is run with the kind of passion for books that is all too often absent from those big chain stores.

With a mix of new, second-hand, and antiquarian books, it's one of those shops that's a joy to browse around, just seeing what catches your attention. Every time I've gone there I've spent more than I intended, finding books I had no idea I needed before I'd set foot inside. And that, my friends, is exactly what I want from a bookshop.

Actual books on an actual shelf in an actual bookshop...

I'm really pleased to get Somewhere to Start From into another bookshop (there are already some in The Press Shop in St Peter Port, Guernsey). I know I don't stand a chance of seeing it piled up on the front tables of Waterstones or WH Smiths, but having a few physical copies out there opens up the possibility of complete strangers picking it up, and hopefully being intrigued enough to buy one. Don't get me wrong, I love that lots of my friends have bought copies, but the idea of my stories spreading that little bit further is a very exciting prospect.

In other news:

I reached Number Eight in the Ten-Four Challenge, with an entry sent to the Willesden Herald competition (you might just have time to squeeze in an entry there).
A few more entries for my competition arrived. It seems to be gaining momentum, which is great. Still plenty of time to enter if you haven't already.
I picked up a Highly Commended in the NAWG open competition. Which is nice.

So, yeah, a good week, generally. How was yours?

The Sound of My Own Voice

2011-12-05T22:09:00.001Z

With Christmas on the horizon, I have decided to get another one of my stories 'out there'. This time it's my seasonal story, Evergreen. I've tried something new with this one, and have recorded it instead of posting the text here or on a writing site.

I struggled a bit with the reading. It felt very strange talking into a microphone, and I made the mistake of trying to do it all in one take. I found I could read for about four or five minutes before stumbling over a word or messing up something simple like turning a page. After a bit of trial and error, I found a way of stitching together separate 'takes', meaning I didn't have the pressure of having to get it right from beginning to end. Eventually I had four sections that I was happy with. I spliced them together, produced a couple of very simple slides to act as a rolling background for the story, and uploaded it to YouTube.

It got rejected - my 2000-word story took around fifteen and a half minutes to read, and YouTube has a maximum limit of 15 minutes for new members (I signed up specifically to upload the clip). So I then had to go through and re-edit, chopping off the introduction I'd done at the beginning and cutting down as many of the pauses as I could get away with. It's not worked perfectly, I thought I'd judged the pauses pretty well in the original version, so the edit sounds a little rushed in places. If I'd had longer to play around with this, I think I'd have edited the story down and done another reading, but I didn't have a lot of time to play with, and I wanted to get it uploaded while it was still relevant - i.e. in the build-up to Christmas.

For a first attempt, I don't think it's too bad. I've learned a lot, and if the story gets a good response, I'll certainly have another go with a different story. I'll try to get a better set of visuals to go with it, too.

I wrote Evergreen in December 2009, too late to submit anywhere in time for that Christmas. The following year I sent it to Linda Lewis's 'Catherine Howard' Winter Competition, and it picked up third place, yet remained unpublished. So I was planning to see if I could find a home for it in time for Christmas 2011. However, when I was putting together the stories for Somewhere to Start From back in May this year, I decided that I'd like to include it, thus limiting my chances of getting it published anywhere else.

Anyway, enough preamble - check the story out HERE.

Or, now that I've realised I can just embed it, listen to it here:

I'd love to know what people thought - did you enjoy it? Or should I keep my mouth shut in future?

The Final Countdown...

2011-12-01T22:54:00.001Z

So, as we plunge headlong into what is looking very much like being the final month of the year we've all come to regard as 2011, the question on everybody's* lips is, "How is the Ten-Four Challenge going, Dan?"

And the answer to that is, "Reasonably". I'm up to seven now, with entries sent (since my last post on the subject) to the NAWG Open Competition, the BBC's Opening Lines, and The New Writer. I don't really have a sense of how I might do in any of these, so hopefully I won't be too disheartened if none of them come to anything. For the NAWG one, Linda Lewis has selected the shortlist (which is, as yet, unpublished) and I've won a second and third prize in the two competitions she organised herself last year, so there's a chance she might have liked the story I sent this time. The final judging is done by a panel of NAWG people, though, so even if I have got through, their tastes are a complete unknown.

The New Writer competition is different again. Jonathan Pinnock is the judge there and, after reading his highly entertaining romp, Mrs Darcy Versus The Aliens, I have a feeling he might enjoy the story I sent in, but the arrangement at TNW is more traditional - and in fact the reverse of NAWG - in that Jonathan will only see the shortlist. So if the initial readers aren't keen on a story about a XXXXX from XXXXXX who finds himself completely XXXXXXXX, tries to XXXXXX a XXXX with the local XXXXXX XXXXXX, gets caught up with all manner of XXXX XXXXXXX and ends up having to XXXX his own XXXXXX, then I'm dead in the water there, too. [Obviously I've had to censor key elements there to ensure I don't jeopardise the anonymous judging process].

It seems kind of audacious sending stuff to the BBC, but I think the story I chose suits their criteria. Well, it's the right length and there's not too much dialogue, which is what they asked for, so I don't think I've fallen at either of the really obvious hurdles.

I will, of course, keep you posted if anything happens on any of these fronts. And I'll be revealing details of where I send the final three entries of the year, assuming I manage to write/edit them in time...

In the meantime, I'm also curating my own competition, the Somewhere To Start From Treasure Hunt! The initial response to it has been more muted than I had hoped, so I would just like to assure everybody that it is a genuine competition, it's really easy to complete (if you can read and count, you'll have it sussed in no time), and the odds of winning a prize are extremely good. It's also free to enter, with a chance to win £50 to spend at Amazon.co.uk - that's got to be worth a shot, surely? Good luck!

*Well, I say everybody. What I really mean is that Teresa Stenson said she was "waiting to see what happens", a couple of weeks ago (in the comments bit).

Competition Time!

2011-11-26T10:17:00.001Z

Just a quick post this time, to let everyone know about the exciting "Somewhere to Start From" Treasure Hunt I've set up to help promote the anthology. One lucky entrant will win £50 to spend at Amazon.co.uk, with a runner-up getting a £10 voucher. Free entry, with a closing date of 31st January 2012.

All you need to do to find out more is view the dedicated page on this blog, by selecting the tab above, or clicking THIS LINK.

Good luck!

In Praise of the Little Guys (and Girls)

2011-11-24T17:53:00.000Z

We live in the Age of Complaint. Recently it seems that everywhere I turn, whether real-world or online, I run into somebody have a good old moan. I'm sure it's all very cathartic, but I can't help thinking that it's not healthy to spend too much time obsessing over the things in life that get you down.

With that in mind, I'd like to take a moment to applaud the efforts of two of the smaller fixtures on the short fiction competition calendar. The Brighton CoW CD turned up a few months ago, and I've been meaning to mention it ever since. The the anthologyof the winning and shortlisted entries of the H. E. Bates Competition arrived last week. It's prompted me into highlighting that, despite the grim times we keep being told we're living in, there are plenty of people out there doing a damn fine job.

The Brighton CoW comps and the HE Bates competition (run by the Northampton Writers' Group) don't have the clout of the Bristol Prize or the near-mythical status of Bridport, but from my experience (a couple of placings at Brighton, a shortlisting at HE Bates), they have something equally important - organisers with a real enthusiasm for writing, and the respect for writers that comes with it.

There's nothing flashy about their websites and the prize funds aren't going to have your local Ferrari dealer beating a path to your door. But what they do have is the right attitude. I've contacted both organisations, either to ask a question or confirm something about my story, and in both cases I've received a polite and speedy response. The HE Bates competition has an awards ceremony where the results are announced, and when the organisers heard I was considering making a round trip of several hundred miles to attend, they were kind enough to let me know that I hadn't actually won anything. I still would have gone along though, if I hadn't been working so far away at the time.

The Brighton CoW bunch in particular seem to go all-out with their 'winners' packs'. In addition to the cheque they sent a certificate, a postcard with future competitions on the front and a hand-written 'Congratulations!' message on the back, and - odd, though possibly handy - a credit-card sized calendar. It's all a bit homespun but to be honest I was rather charmed by the attention to detail and the enthusiasm for their contests all this conveys. When the CD turned up (I wasn't expecting it, although I note they do say something on the website about recording the stories for possible broadcast on hospital radio - I assume, with the amount of swearing in "A Night In with Zil", they'd have to broadcast mine very late at night), it was put together with more enthusiasm than polish, but I really like it. The guy who reads mine sounds a bit like Andy Hamilton of Radio Four fame, and he does an admirable job of bringing the characters to life.

The HE Bates Competition Anthology is again put together in a straightforward way. It's spiral bound and laid outclearly and while it won't win any design awards it still shows the kind of effort going on behind the scenes. Okay, so it's not the ready-for-Waterstones paperback of the Bristol Prize or the slick small-press effort from the Willesden Herald, but even so, the cost of printing and binding, plus postage, is probably more than I paid in entry fees. I'm guessing both these organisations are run on very limited resources, or more likely a voluntary basis, fuelled by the desire to encourage writers and promote their respective writing groups, rather than to make shedloads of money.

The timing of this post isn't ideal, because both current competitions end in the next few days, but if you have something of a suitable length and content, it's worth giving them a go. They're shining stars in a sometimes murky world, and they deserve to do well.

Embracing Your Inner Pedant

2011-11-10T21:54:00.000Z

Hello. How are you feeling? Calm and relaxed? Good.

How about now?

If that picture’s got you grinding your teeth, welcome tothe club. This little tag is, I guess, hanging on every towel rail in everyTravelodge in the country. I see it each week (my day job involves working awayfrom home for three days most weeks) and it annoys the hell out of me. It’sprobably worth pointing out that I have nothing against the Travelodge itself –the one I stay in is very pleasant indeed. But still, they’ve given me a greatexample of clumsy grammar to blog about.

Grammar’s one of those subjects that can turn a perfectly convivialdiscussion about writing instantly frosty. I wasn’t taught grammar in anysignificant sense when I was at school, but I’ve always had a fascination withthe way sentences are constructed, and I suppose I’ve picked up a lot throughjust keeping my eyes open, and asking questions when there’s something I don’tunderstand.

However, some people seem to regard it as a kind of puzzle,as difficult to crack as the Enigma Code. They get annoyed by the jargoninvolved – Oxford commas, semicolons, run-on sentences, clauses and subclauses, verb agreement, passive and active voices (even when nobody’s talking!).There's resentment at what they appear to regard as an in-joke for the self-appointed elite.

It’s a common spectacle on writing websites for a beginnerto post a piece and then lash out at anybody who highlights grammatical lapsesin their work. Accusations of snobbishness fly about; the well-meaningreviewers get told that it’s obvious what the writer meant, and that by concentrating on the way they said it, thepeople giving the feedback are just showing off and being picky, deliberatelyignoring the story. The writing’s the important thing, the beginner willprotest, not how it’s written.

Thing is, the two are inseparable. It doesn’t matter howgreat your story is if the reader is lagging behind thinking, “Now, when hesaid, ‘We went to the zoo and saw a monkey eating a banana and a penguin,’ didhe mean the monkey actually ate the penguin, or were those two separate things –the monkey eating the banana, and the penguin, happily minding its own business?”

Mister Sleep, the Travelodge bear, has a different problem.It’s clear what the sign means, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’sbadly written. Trying something and doing something are different. They mighthave the same outcome – the thing gets done – or they might not. The ‘right’ wayof phrasing it depends on the intent, and which aspect is more important. Trying to do something is different again. It’san attempt, an aim, a target. We alwaystry to do our bit for the planet. We may not get it right all the time, butwe give it our best shot.

If you try and do something, you’ve done it, end of story – thetrying part is redundant. We always doour bit for the planet. That’s a much bolder claim, isn’t it?

Another way to check, if you’re not sure of a phrase, is toexperiment with changing the tense. Shifted to past tense, “try and do” becomes“tried and did”: I tried and did my taxreturn last weekend. See what I mean?

Of course, no rule is unbendable. “Try and do” is adepressingly common turn of phrase in lazy spoken English, and that may be the effectthe Travelodge people were going for. Mister Sleep is, of course, a no-nonsensecockney bear with an inappropriate fondness for spending all day in hisdressing gown. “Try and do” is probably just the kind of thing he’d say.

When it comes to grammar, I don’t think there’sa substitute for learning the rules (I recommend the Penguin Writers' Manual). Understand those rules, experiment with them,master them. Don’t let them catch you out, but above all make sure your grammardoes your bidding. It doesn’t have to be ‘perfect’, because some things justain’t, but make sure it’s achieving the effect you want. Because what you sayand the way you say it are, ultimately, the same thing.

Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 5

2011-11-03T22:24:00.001Z

Okay, first things first: I didn’t pay for this anthology. Iwas lucky enough to win it, my name having been pulled out of a hat over onJonathan Pinnock’s blog. The book was up for grabs as part of Jonathan’sinterview with Stephen Moran – among other things, the organiser of the WillesdenHerald Short Story Competition and editor of this anthology. So I can’t reallyanswer the question of whether it’s worth its asking price (RRP £10), but I’lltry to be as objective as possible.

Starting from the outside in, I’ll just mention the book’s cover.Sure, it’s not the most exciting image you’ll ever see, but there’s an elementof it I thought was particularly apt. It shows an extreme close-up of aroad or pavement, with the bright lights of town off in the blurry distance.The focus is on a few tiny stones, promoted to monoliths by the photographer’szoom lens. This, in essence, is the basis of a successful short story – the writer musthome in on some small aspect of a life, a relationship, whatever they arepresenting to the reader, and make it a thing of consequence. These little blackstones are part of the city, the way the look across the breakfast table ispart of the marriage, or the fleeting lapse of concentration is part of thedisaster.

I read the stories without knowing which had won the prize.It was an interesting game to try to predict which one the judge (Maggie Gee)had chosen, and I was pleased to find out later that one of my ‘top three’ had indeedbagged the prize.

It’s clear that the Willesden Herald takes itself, and itsgoal of delivering quality fiction, seriously. The writing throughout the bookis consistently good, and the themes tackled are weighty, literary ones. Loss,old age, and regret all feature prominently. Death is never far away. It has tobe said it can make the process of reading through this collection quite heavy-goingat times. I’m not a reader who demands fluffy kittens and butterflies at everyturn, but the cumulative effect of hearing about all these dying or dead lovedones did tend to mean I looked more favourably on the stories where the writerused a light touch, and managed to work in a (usually subdued, butcredible) note of optimism towards the end. Perhaps the best example of this isthe winning entry - Mary O’Shea’s story, “Out of Season”, in which a man with an undefined but terminalillness and his wife take a seaside holiday. Neither of them quite know how tocope, the illness has become a barrier between them, and both the weather andresort are pretty dismal. The story switches viewpoint between the two of themas they start to adjust to their new roles, and in facing up to the future theyremember the past that brought them together in the first place. The close ofthe story is a long way from a Hollywood ending, but Mary leaves herprotagonists with a note of hope – an optimistic lift, perfectlydelivered.

I also enjoyed (although that’s possibly not quite the rightword) Nemone Thomas’s “Dancing with the Flag Man”, an unflinching coming-of-agetale in which a teenage girl learns the dangers of judging people by theirappearance. That makes it sound like a fable – which I suppose it is, in aroundabout way – but it comes across as a gritty and absorbing story of brokendreams and lost innocence. I’m in danger of cramming yet more clichés into thisreview, so I’ll just say it was one of those rare short stories where the charactersare so vivid I found myself worrying what was going to happen to them.

The two stories that close the book are particularhighlights, too. Angela Sherlock’s “Set Dance” – a story of two brothers vyingfor the attentions of a pretty girl – and Emma Martin’s “Victor” – in which ananti-abortion protester tries to help a teenager – are both great examples ofwriters taking their stories in unexpected and rewarding directions. It wasalso good to see Teresa Stenson’s “Blue Raincoat” again (I’m a member of thesame online writing site as Teresa and had a sneak preview a while ago). Theshortest story in the book, it’s a poignant study of grief, filled withbeautiful poetic language and keen insights into human behaviour.

It’s not a perfect collection. I wasn’t keen on DavidFrankel’s “The Place” (although I liked the underlying premise), and I’m stillundecided about the oddly supernatural “Overnight Miracles” by A. J. Ashworth.A couple of the other stories could easily have been improved by being made alittle shorter, a little tighter.

On the whole, though, this is an impressive anthology of writingand a fantastic illustration of the storyteller’s art. The Willesden Heraldcompetition has established itself as a bastion of contemporary literary fiction,and judging by “New Short Stories 5” there’s no reason to think that’ll be changingany time soon.

My Kind of Surprise

2011-10-27T22:55:00.000+01:00

The week didn't get off to the greatest of starts. The longlist for the latest Flash500 competition was posted online, and in no way features the story I'd sent in as part of my self-imposed effort to get myself submitting more fiction, the Ten-Four Challenge. That was disappointing. But, I still believe in the story and should be able to find somewhere else to try its luck.

I keep track of all my submissions, successes and 'near-misses' in an Excel spreadsheet, and when I went into it to update the Flash500 result, I noticed I hadn't scored out the story I tried in the Wells Festival of Literature Short Story Competition. I knew I hadn't won anything because the awards ceremony had come and gone a week or two previously, but out of curiosity I dialled up the site anyway. Much to my surprise, I found I'd come third!

At least, it seemed like I had. When I first looked, the results page had my story title, but the author was listed as "unknown". As you can see, the title isn't exactly commonplace, so I sent a cautious enquiry to the organisers. They got back to me incredibly quickly, confirming that all was well, I had won a prize and the cheque was already in the post. So that put a smile on my face.

And then the surprises kept coming... I picked up a copy of November's Writers' Forum yesterday. Iain Banks features on the cover, and yours truly makes an appearance, too. I posted some comments on Sally Quilford's competition blog, and several of them have been incorporated into her column. So there I am, suddenly sounding like an authority on competitions with restrictions on who can enter, e.g. women-only competitions, those limited to a certain geographical locations, etc. Are they necessary? Patronising? Discriminatory? What do you think?

Incidentally, the Ten-Four Challenge is up to four stories out, as I sent a flash piece sent to Every Day Fiction, with two months left of the year. I should hit five tomorrow, as I'm hoping to submit a story to the NAWG competition. It's a bit last-minute (the deadline's Monday), but it's worth a try. Just needs a final proofread...

Notes From A (Very) Small Island

2011-10-12T22:18:00.000+01:00

A couple of interesting things came out of being invited to the Guernsey Literary Festival earlier this year. The first was that it prompted me to self-publish an anthology of short stories. This is something I'd never even considered doing before, and I have to say it turned out far better than I expected. In some ways the book is a CV - it's a record of (most of) my published work, things that have been placed in competitions, and a couple of pieces I felt 'fitted' nicely into the collection. Fitted is possibly the wrong word, as the stories were written for various different markets, in various different styles, so there's no overriding theme or other unifying structure to the book. Everybody who's been kind enough to comment so far has said they enjoyed this variety, but it does make it hard to answer the question, "So, what's it about?"

The second thing was that I actually had to knuckle down and come up with a workshop. I'm not a naturally outgoing person, and my assessment of my own abilities tends toward a sort of painful modesty, so the prospect of standing in front of a room full of strangers and telling them how to 'do' fiction wasn't exactly one that filled me with anything other than trepidation. However, I prepared as best I could, faced The Fear, and got the job done. People said nice things about what I did, and some, such as Martine and Ric, went as far as writing them down.

Eventually, I got invited back, and that's where I've been for the last few days. I did two smaller workshops this time, the first with Guernsey Writers' Circle and the second with a group of students at the College of Performing Arts. The former, on Thursday night, was a lively affair, with an enthusiastic group who were kind enough to listen to me prattling on about editing for an hour. I worked through an example of extreme editing, where I'd taken an 800-word flash and boiled it down to a 250-word piece of microfiction. It was an interesting exercise to go through and it generated a lot of debate about which was the "better" of the two stories, and whether the elements lost from the original to reduce the word count were compensated for by the more direct impact of the shortened version. It was great to chat to the group (three of whom I'd met at the Flash Fiction workshop), and get a sense for the enthusiasm they have for writing and the various projects the island has on at the moment.

The following day, I found myself feeling very envious of the students, nearly all of whom hadn't really done any creative writing other than assignments for school. I took a long break from writing when I was younger, and as I talked to the students about character, plot, and description, I couldn't help thinking that if I'd picked it up when I was their age I'd be a whole decade ahead of where I am now. [Oh, the possibilities!] They were a brilliant group, champing at the bit to get started on their stories and full of ideas for quirky characters and interesting situations to put them in. They were definitely making a great start and I'm sure their finished stories will be well worth reading.

Both sessions were very rewarding and filled me with enthusiasm for my own writing. I even managed to get a little bit done on a new story while I was over there, although whether it'll amount to anything, only time will tell.

Round-Up

2011-10-02T13:22:00.001+01:00

I think this is going to be a bit of a grab-bag of news and general updates, as there are a few things I wanted to cover and they don't really fit to a particular theme. Apologies in advance for the lack of structure.

Firstly, the Ten-Four Challenge continues. I sent an entry in to The Spilling Ink Fiction Prize, which I first heard about after my friend Karen had a story published in the Spilling Ink Review. It looks like a good site, and the competition prizes are impressive, with the added incentive of print publication for the winners and shortlisted stories.

It wasn't the story I'd intended to submit. The one I'd planned to send is a humorous piece that had already gone to the Sean O'Faolain competition without catching the judge's eye, and I thought I could just do a quick edit to knock it into shape. This proved not to be the case, though. I know what's wrong - the beginning needs to be shorter and snappier, the middle needs tightening to bring out the humour, and the end is okay but would benefit from a sharper final paragraph. But I couldn't seem to correct any of these problems in time for the closing date. I made the beginning better, but even longer. I thought up some new jokes to put in, but they meant I needed to change parts of the plot. Before long the whole thing seemed to be coming apart at the seams. I started thinking the story just wasn't 'ready', and that's something I hope to come back to in a separate blog post.

I also submitted a flash piece to MicroHorror.com. This was accepted, which I'm very pleased about. I wouldn't consider myself as a horror writer or reader, although I enjoy the tension the genre requires, and the clarity of the imagery the words on the page/screen must create is another reason for a writer of any discipline to dip into it occasionally, at least. There's a contest on the website at the moment, ending (appropriately enough) on Halloween, with the theme of "Water". So, get your fright on, folks!

I'm not fully sure my MicroHorror début counts towards the Ten-Four Challenge, as it isn't a paying market and the story in question, "Anatomy of a Crime", was one of the 'previously unpublished' stories I included in my anthology, Somewhere to Start From. But for the moment I'm going to class it as half a point towards my total - as 2.5 stories submitted at the end of September is quarter of the way to the target, a quarter of the way towards the deadline.

In other good news, I'm off to Guernsey again towards the end of next week. I'll be talking to the Guernsey Writers' Group about editing and giving a more general writing workshop to Performing Arts students. The rest of the weekend will be spent catching up with my mum and stepdad, walking on beaches and coastal paths, and gorging on the delights of the wonderful Tennerfest. I'm keeping my fingers crossed this sunny weather hangs around a little longer.

The Ten-Four Challenge is Go!

2011-09-18T21:51:00.000+01:00

Right. So. Having set myself a challenge (What? You've forgotten it already? Refresh your memory here), I did what any modern, media-savvy writing type would do - I put all my creative efforts into "branding" it. So from now on, my goal of submitting ten stories to different competitions and paying markets in the four(ish) months that remain of 2011 will be referred to as The Ten-Four Challenge. Or I might street it up a bit and go for simply Ten4. Or maybe not - that looks a bit too close to Tena; I'm not entirely sure I want to link my writing too closely with incontinence products just yet.

But, of course, it would be foolish to assume that I'd done nothing except come up with a snappy handle for my self-imposed exercise. I mean, I'm sure it's technically possible for a writer to procrastinate by embracing meaningless but oh-so-slightly writing-related tasks, but that's got to be a pretty rare occurrence, right?

Anyway, I'm happy to report that I have launched myself out of the metaphorical starting blocks, by sending off an entry to Flash500. So, one down, nine to go.

For the Flash500 competition, I have taken something I wrote for a contest earlier in the year and re-jigged it a bit. As those of you gifted with Sherlock Holmes-esque deductive skills will have guessed, Flash500 is a competition for flash fiction with an upper word count limit of 500. The original version of my entry was for a competition with an even smaller word count, so I took advantage of the extra space by developing the central concept a little and fleshing out the central character. I'm always wary of making stories longer; it's all too easy to let the prose get a little sloppy or for the plot to wander off on tangents when you have extra words to play with, but I think in this case it was justified. The new version of the story feels less sparse, and it's hopefully easier to understand what's going on. We shall see.

A Man with a Plan

2011-09-14T23:05:00.000+01:00

I haven’t written much lately. I’ve submitted hardlyanything, either, so I’m feeling like I need do to something more constructive thanjust occasionally update my blog with my thoughts on / excuses for why I haven’tbeen feeling very ‘writerly’ for the last couple of months.

I work better with deadlines, and I like a challenge. So, mytarget for the remainder of 2011 is to submit 10 stories to competitions and/orpaying markets of some kind. Ten stories is hopefully an achievable goal, butit’s a big step up from my current output, so it’ll take a bit of effort. Itmay not seem like a huge number, but I need to be realistic – after all, I’mworking full-time at the moment, which involves a lot of travelling and leavesme with very little free time, so it would be disheartening to aim for anythingtoo ambitious and fail miserably.

This evening, I’ve looked at my list of unpublished stories –some are fighting fit, others need pretty brutal edits before they see thelight of day – and I’ve compiled a list of suitable competitions. I’ve pairedup a few stories with competitions that might offer a good fit, but I do havequite a few empty slots where I’ll need to either drastically rework an olderpiece or come up with something new.

Wish me luck. I’ll keep you posted on the results of myendeavours.

A Quiet Month

2011-08-31T23:22:00.001+01:00

Well, August certainly seems to have flown by. Not a great deal has happened, as has been reflected in the paltry number of posts I've managed to put up this month.

On the writing front, I've found it very difficult to make any real progress. I've been working on a reading for my sister's wedding, which I am very honoured to have been asked to do and only slightly freaked out by the prospect of having to stand up and read it out in the church in a couple of days' time. Other than that, I've made a few tentative steps with a couple of short stories, and am kicking around a few ideas for something a bit longer.

My confidence has taken a knock this month as the results for a couple of competitions I'd been quite excited about were announced, and my name was conspicuous by its absence. It feels like quite a while since I had anything accepted or placed, and I've started to worry that I've lost most of the momentum I'd built up earlier in the year. However, all writers have dry spells, and if I'm honest the most significant reason I've not had much success is because I've hardly submitted anything over the last few months. I'm promising myself that September will be different...

As a sliver of good news, I was pleased to discover that I've had my first sale of my anthology via Amazon. Thank you, mystery shopper, whoever and wherever you are! Although it's great to be on Amazon, I wasn't really expecting any sales via that route, so I'm chuffed that I've chalked up at least one. Hooray!

I also stumbled across a new competition listed on Linda Lewis's blog - it's run by the NAWG (National Association of Writers' Groups). Closing date is 31st October 2011, word count 500 - 2,000, prizes of £250/£100/£50. £5 entry fee with optional critique at an extra £3. Full details are here. Sounds like it might be worth a shot.

Listen Up

2011-08-11T19:12:00.000+01:00

I’ve been meaning to put together a post on this subject for a couple of weeks. I’m fairly late to the party, so apologies if I’m just going over old ground here.

Radio 4 has announced a reduction in the number of short stories it broadcasts. For years, the station put out a story every day, then more recently this dropped to three a week. Now they are looking at an output of just one per week. There are suggestions that some of the displaced stories may end up on Radio 4 Extra, although at the moment this seems vague and nobody seems to have a clear answer on whether these are going to be new works or repeats dug out of the archives.

Understandably, this decision hasn’t been well-received by the writing community. Radio 4 allows your work to be heard by many thousands of people and they always looked to source stories from both established writers and ‘new voices’. Nothing else offers that kind of exposure for a writer’s work. People whose blogs I follow have been encouraging fellow writers and radio listeners to join forces to try to overturn this decision. Tania Hershman and Jonathan Pinnock (who have both had stories broadcast on Radio 4) urge people to sign the petition against the proposed reduction. There is a campaign running on the National Short Story Week website.

I added my name to a letter sent to the Controller of Radio 4, Gwyneth Williams, penned by Susie Maguire and Ian Skillicorn. The letter asked for clarification of what was happening and why. As far as I can tell, there as yet has been no specific response from the Beeb.

However, I’ve not signed the petition. Not yet, at least. I think my attitude to the cuts is similar to Nik Perring’s. I feel a bit hypocritical bemoaning the loss of the stories. After all, they’re broadcast at 3:30pm and I spend most of the working week in an office, where there’s no way I could listen to the radio. On the rare occasions when I find myself at home at that sort of time, I’m unlikely to remember to switch the radio on. The last time I heard one of Radio 4’s afternoon readings was months ago, when I was driving home from a meeting that finished early. I switched on the car stereo just as the story was introduced, and was delighted to find it was by Adam Thorpe, one of my favourite writers. I thought it was brilliant, and really well produced, but it was weeks before I could have listened to another reading.

The one thing I haven’t seen amongst all the advice being dished out about how to respond to the situation (“Campaign!”, “Complain!”) is anybody suggesting we actually listen to the stories. After all, they are available at any time you like over the internet via Radio 4’s Afternoon Reading page. A surge in audience figures for the stories would undermine any assertion that they aren't a popular feature and could therefore be cut back without upsetting anyone.

So that’s my plan. I’ll make more effort to actually listen to the stories before I complain that they’re being taken away. I will sign the petition, but I will do it as a listener who has enjoyed the programmes and wishes them to continue, rather than as a writer with vague dreams of someday hearing one of my stories read out but otherwise showing no interest.

Who’s with me?

Hooray, it's the G.S.S.S.S. (Guardian Summer Short Story Special)!

2011-07-25T21:50:00.001+01:00

Last weekend, the Guardian issued its annual Summer Short Story Special. This is becoming a bit of an event for me, as if nothing else it marks pretty much the only time when I make a real effort to buy a newspaper. They always seem to have a good selection of writers and even if I don't actually like every one of the stories I usually feel like I can learn something from them.

This year it's an extra special one because my friend Teresa Stenson was picked as a runner-up with her story "Things Which Are Not True". Only the winner gets a place in the printed magazine alongside all the established authors, but the runners-up get a slot on the Guardian website. Do check Teresa's story out, it's excellent.

It's been a while since I had any success of my own to report so it's nice to be able to relive my own Guardian experience through somebody I know. It's been a couple of years, but I remember the dry mouth, the racing pulse and the rollercoaster of elation and being-utterly-convinced-it's-all-a-horrible-scam that came along with the notification email.

I know it means a lot to Teresa and I couldn't be happier for her. The best bit is that she predicted we'd be swapping successes this year, which means I get a prize at Bridport. I can't pretend I'm not excited about that prospect.

A Little Bit of Awesomeness

2011-07-14T22:30:00.000+01:00

I enjoyed Aubrey Hirsch's recent article over on Flash Fiction Chronicles, in which she offered up a few tips for dealing with the negative feelings that come from having your work rejected by editors - or, for that matter, seeing it disappear without trace in competitions. The most valuable piece of advice, by my reckoning, was her recommendation of making the effort to celebrate everything positive that happens to you, no matter how small. I think that's really important. It's all too easy to focus on the bad stuff and before you know it, you've convinced yourself you're a terrible writer and the path back to the keyboard/pen has become an arduous and intimidating struggle.

With that in mind, here's something relatively minor that brings a smile to my face:

Yep, it's my name, dropped casually into a list of authors and looking, dare I say it, very much at home. Dan Purdue, Author. I like the sound of that.

One of these days I'll get used to seeing my name in the paper. Until then, I'll be clutching my clippings and grinning like the Cheshire Cat and thinking, "So what if I didn't win that competition? I'm still an author."

After all, it's in the Guernsey Press. It must be true.

Missing something?

2011-07-04T13:47:00.000+01:00

Astute blogvisitors will no doubt have noticed that my competitions listing page is nolonger accessible. I’m assuming there are echoes of it drifting about in Googlecaches and the like, but in terms of an active page of contest details, it isno more. It has ceased to be, etc, etc. (I shall spare you the full MontyPython “Parrot Sketch” pastiche I could happily launch into at this point).

This is, I’mhoping, just a temporary situation. I am a fan of writing competitions and liketo support smaller ones as much as I enjoy daydreaming about the boundlesswealth that hitting a winning streak with some of the bigger contests wouldsurely bring me. And I like to share this enthusiasm.

But it alltakes time, and due to a number of other commitments I have at the moment I can’treally spare enough time to do the research, data gathering, and maintenance thata listings page requires. I know there’s nothing more frustrating than findinga webpage that would be useful except that it is four months out-of-date, sountil I have enough time to do it properly, I won’t be running the page at all.

In themeantime, I will aim to flag up any interesting competitions I come across, andwill keep you posted on any successes I have in them, or any hot tips forsuccess that I pick up along the way.

Writers, Give Yourselves a Break!

2011-06-23T22:59:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I spent a fantastic weekend holed up in an ancient cottage in the Yorkshire Dales. My companions were five other writers - talented, funny, warm and thoroughly good company, every last one of 'em.

Our mission was simple: write stuff, critique stuff, gorge ourselves on cake and excellent home cooking, wash it all down with lashings and lashings of wine, and then launch into a nightly no-holds-barred, to-the-death "Articulate" grudge match.

It was great fun, and I got a lot out of it in terms of finding proper focus for my writing. The pieces I submitted for critiquing were old, and in some ways I felt I was doing both them and myself a disservice by not offering up something a bit fresher. The problem is that with very small chunks of free time available, I have struggled to produce much in recent weeks (if not months), so I've been digging up old stuff to edit and buff up - in the hope that it will at least keep whatever part of my brain generates fiction ticking over for the time being. Getting together with fellow writers has reminded me that we all have our obstacles in the way of sitting down and bashing out words, and that the only person who can do anything about it is me.

I drove back home with a much more determined head on, and I have so far written a couple of new, short pieces that I'm pleased with. So, if your writing could do with a boost, and you know of a few like-minded individuals, then round them up and get yourselves off to somewhere remote. You won't regret it. Unless they turn out to be axe murderers. You should probably check that before sending out the invites, actually.

The thing that really struck me during the critiquing sessions was how stupidly self-deprecating we all were about our work, almost apologising as we handed our stories around for what an appalling burden the others were about to receive. Which was nonsense, because - elbowing group modesty aside for a moment - we're actually reasonably good at what we do. Between the six of us we've got somewhere around 100 stories in print or online, we've notched up placings in highly regarded competitions, and have won hundreds of pounds in competitions. So we can't actually be as crap as we tend to think we are.

I've noticed a kind of contradiction in the world of writing - at least in the realm of online forums and writing classes - in that those who regard themselves as good writers, who feel they have learnt all they need and are simply waiting for the world to wake up and acknowledge their genius ... are, almost without exception, unspeakably awful. On the other hand, those who agonise over their words, who are never satisfied with what they've done, who are embarrassed by the gulf between what they wanted to say and the words they've managed to get down onto the page, are usually pretty good, or at least well on their way there.

It's good to question, to challenge your own work, and to strive for better. But that can be at the expense of looking back once in a while and thinking, "Yeah, actually, I can do this. I'm better than I was yesterday, not as good as I'll be tomorrow. I'm not perfect, but I can write."

Take pride in your achievements, but see them as stepping stones to where you want to be, not badges of honour to wave in people's faces. The inevitable rejections and those stories that sink without trace in competitions are steps on the journey, too. That's all, they're not a judgement on you as a writer or a person. So keep moving and don't beat yourself up about them.

In short, writers, give yourself a break.

Liquid Prose

2011-06-08T20:54:00.001+01:00

Most weeks, I go to a writing group in Leamington Spa. Usually it's more of a reading and critiquing group, but once in a while we kick things off with a spot of writing. Yesterday was one such occasion. Our task was to spend ten minutes writing about water. Yep - normal, boring, colourless, odourless water.

I'm usually quite resistant to this kind of thing, the whole "free writing" idea of exploring a topic as you go often feels unnecessary. I'd much rather spend the time writing up one of the many ideas that seem to form a permanent traffic jam of stories in my head. But, this time, after getting over the initial hurdle of trying to describe something you can barely see, I found myself getting quite into it.

It was interesting to see how different members of the group approached this. Some came up with lists of words that evoked the taste or feel of water, some wrote fragments of prose that were quite poetic, others described it in terms of pouring out a glass and drinking it. There were a few mentions of the relief brought by taking a long, cool sip on a hot day.

I'm not quite sure how I'd describe my take on it. I think I aimed to give a sense of the water as an entity in its own right, to set it in motion and try to give it a sense of personality. I was quite pleased with the way it turned out, and so - as I can't think of anything else to do with it - I thought I'd post it here.

H₂O

The liquid diamond fills a glass, a bath, a wellingtonboot, rushing to steal the shape of anything bold enough to contain it. Lightbounces off it, bends through it, rides its surface in an ever-changing danceof glittering fragments.

Hold it up, tip it out, let it fall in thick moltenstrings. Watch its joyous reunion with itself, see it kick up an fleeting crownto mark the occasion.

Take a sip of this fishes’ tipple; chase its cold surge acrossyour tongue. Taste a speck of a distant, peaty field, a grain of a chalk cliffyou’ve never seen, a tang of an ancient clay pipe. Swallow its past as a pond,as a sea, as a gentle drifting cloud. Take your place in its eternal cycle.

I almost forgot to mention ...

2011-05-26T17:13:00.000+01:00

... that there are a few copies of "Somewhere to Start From" for sale in the Guernsey Press Bookshop on Smith Street.

So if you're in Guernsey and don't have a copy, pop along and save yourself the P+P cost of buying one from Lulu.com.

The (Very) Late Review - Part Two

2011-05-25T23:16:00.000+01:00

So, at longlast, here’s what happened on Sunday. In the morning I went to a veryinformative talk entitled “Getting Published: Four Things Nobody Tells You”, givenby Tony Booth. Tony is a Guernsey-based writer with a number of non-fictionbooks to his name and a refreshing, no-nonsense approach to the business ofgetting published. The focus of his talk centred on the submission package yousend to prospective publishers and/or agents – the bundle of cover letter,synopsis, and sample chapters.

This is onearea of the process that I find fascinating and terrifying in equal measure. I’veread a lot of books, websites and heard different people talking about whatpublishers “really want”, and the overall impression I’ve been left with isthat nobody really knows. Tony’sguidelines made a lot of sense, though. His core message – that, above all else,publishing is a business and your job as a writer looking to get a book deal isto give the agent/editor all the information they need to make an effectivebusiness decision – may seem slightly cynical to those more interested inliterature as an art form. But as an unknown author approaching a publisher,your chances of being offered a contract are slim, if for no other reason thansheer weight of numbers (Tony quoted a submission to acceptance ratio of 5000:1for UK publishers), so it makes sense to do everything you can to make theeditor’s life easier. If the cover letter is concise and conveys all theinformation he or she needs to decide whether it’s their type of book, they’remore likely to read the synopsis. If that shows you know how to structure astory, control plot and character development, they’re more likely to read thesample chapters. After that, you’re on your own, but at least you’ve got thatfar; you've got your metaphorical foot in the door. It was an interesting talk, and some of the details Tony included abouthis own working methods gave a real insight into his approach to the craft –the thing that stuck in my mind most of all was his admission that he employed narrativetechniques used in 1980s rock videos to shape the structure of some of hischapters. Just goes to show, inspiration can come from anywhere.

After lunch,zero hour arrived and it was my turn to contribute something to the festivalrather than just sitting back and soaking it up. I arranged my stack of books,checked and double-checked my notes, ran through my timings once again, andwaited nervously for my class to arrive.

... And whatan enthusiastic and talented bunch they turned out to be! And friendly, andpatient (I lost track of my timings within about 30 seconds of starting, andthe start of the workshop veered wildly off-course as I realised I’d forgottento introduce myself before starting to talk about short fiction). Having neverled a workshop before, I was uncertain whether I’d done enough to get thecreative juices flowing by the time I handed out my ‘ice-breaker’ exercisesheet. It was a short characterisation exercise, and although I think a coupleof people didn’t quite get what I was trying to achieve with it, it seemed todo the job and get people thinking about character – and it got the pens movingif nothing else.

I’dstructured the rest of the class with the idea that I’d talk for a while aboutshort fiction and the essential elements of a short story, as well as someflash-specific tips on how to pare the word count down to an absolute minimum,then let people write for 25 minutes, then talk a little about editing, thengive everyone another 25 minutes to either edit what they’d already written ortackle a new story if they preferred. At the end there was time for people toshare what they’d written with the rest of the class. Knowing that it can betough to write under pressure I’d also prepared a series of prompt cards togive a gentle nudge to anybody who needed it.

On thewhole, it seemed to work pretty well, with a fascinating range of subjects andstyles in evidence. We had dark stories, light stories, a couple of tales ofcanine revenge, a madcap tour of Russia in a mobile museum, and one man’s desperatesearch for green food colouring. I was impressed by the quality of the writingand the fact that so many of the class were able to produce finished work withinthe workshop’s limited timeslot. For those who didn’t manage that, or who didn’tfeel comfortable reading their work out; don’t worry, it’s extremely difficultto write stuff “on demand”, and it can be intimidating to share your work witha room full of strangers. All I can say is stick with it; it gets easier withpractise.

I reallyenjoyed the workshop – once the nerves had settled down – and one of the bestaspects was meeting a whole new bunch of people passionate about the writtenword. I must say a quick hello to a couple of people with an online presence.Firstly, Martine Ellis, a newcomer to short fiction and curator of the iMakeblog. She’s been kind enough to give the workshop a very favourable mention onher blog, even though I caught her unawares with my demands for short storiesto be written there and then. Also, I had the privilege to meet Ric Carter, avery skilled writer with a real flair for quirky and imaginative flash fiction. Iurge you to check out his website – he wrote Grand Gestures during theworkshop, and I think it’s great. Ric also made a grand gesture himself,presenting me with a copy of The Second Beestung International, one of hisbeautifully handmade mini-books. I didn’t get a chance to take a proper look atit at the time, for which I apologise (the library was closing, so I was hurriedlypacking everything away) – but now I’ve had a proper butcher’s, it’s afantastic thing and a brilliant couple of stories. Thanks again, Ric, I’mhonoured.

Also deservinga special mention is Ed Jewell, the Customer Services Librarian, who couldn’thave done more to make me feel more welcome and supported, despite mydiva-esque demands to have the desks laid out half a dozen different waysbefore deciding on the correct one (which was, as you’d expect, the way we’d setthem out at the beginning). Thanks again, Ed!

The (Very) Late Review - part one

2011-05-23T23:44:00.000+01:00

Okay, so I'm back at home and very much back to reality after my time in Guernsey. Or should that be "on" Guernsey? How big does an island need to be before you are in rather than on it?

Semantics aside, I'll get on with the much-delayed business of reporting how the remainder of the weekend went, after the glittering showbiz of Thursday night. Friday was a day of preparation for me; I spent a few hours getting my notes in order and sorting the handouts for the workshop, reading through my book to decide which stories to read out, and generally chilling out in anticipation of a considerably more hectic weekend. In the evening, I had a lovely meal at La Perla, an Italian restaurant in St Peter Port, and afterwards walked over to Castle Cornet. The castle is one of my favourite "touristy" things to do on the island, and the novelty of visiting it in the evening added an extra level of enjoyment. Particularly in that it meant I could watch the sun set over the town of St Peter Port, which - it has to be said - is a very attractive place (although my phone's camera struggled to do it justice).

Saturday morning kicked off with a very interesting talk and reading from author Tim Binding. Tim has written several novels, both for adults and children, but the talk I went to focused on his Guernsey-set work, Island Madness. I started reading the novel a couple of weeks before I went, and even now I'm only about halfway through it - I'm just not getting enough time to read any more than a few pages at once. It's very good, and conjures up the atmosphere of Guernsey during the Nazi occupation extremely well. Tim talked about his inspiration for writing the book (essentially the photograph that now serves as the book's main cover image), the research involved in putting it together, and some of the perils of writing fiction. The main example he gave was in the opening chapter, where he talks about the damage caused to the Major's lawns by the local moles. Several years after the book came out, a Guernsey girl working at his publishing house calmly informed him that there are no moles on Guernsey. It's risky taking anything for granted, it seems.

Next up was a dash to the cake shop and then back to the Hub to catch a poetry reading from Richard Fleming and Peter Kenny. The two of them go by the name "A Guernsey Double" and offer two different perspectives on island life. Richard is an Ulsterman who moved to Guernsey, and Peter was born and grew up on Guernsey and moved away. Their poetry revolves around themes such as the concepts of home, safety, travel, and many more. They have a book out, a back-to-back anthology of poems called The Boy Who Fell Upwards / The Man Who Landed. From the snippets they read and the reviews the book has garnered, it sounds well worth investigating. I'm hoping to pick up a signed copy next time I'm over, which should be later in the year.

The last engagement of the day was an evening performance in the town church. Here, Olivia Chaney performed a fantastic set, showcasing her beautiful voice and musical talent on the piano, guitar, and harmonium (I think - it was something like an accordion, but more of a box). Olivia plays a variety of styles, from folk to operatic, traditional and more contemporary songs. She writes her own songs, too, and said she was putting an album of her work together. It should be worth tracking down. In addition to Olivia's songs and music, the winning writers from Guernsey's "Poetry on the Buses" competition read their work. I struggle a little with poetry sometimes; it's not a form that always 'clicks' for me, but most of the work was accessible even to a dullard like me, and it was great to hear the poets read their own work in the impressive setting provided by the church.

I've run out of time now, so I'll leave Sunday's details for another day. I'll try not to leave it too much longer.

Books, books, and more books...

2011-05-16T13:24:00.001+01:00

(This post was delayed from Friday due to some sort of problem with Blogger. I'll post an up to date report later.)

So, here I am in the first full day of the literary festival. It's a pretty quiet one for me, most of the events I'm going to are happening tomorrow. I attended the sponsor's reception yesterday evening, which was a new experience for me. One of the first people I met was Annie Barrows, co-author of the massively best-selling The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society, and the top celebrity author here at the festival. She was very friendly and down to earth, and we talked about the strange leap of faith it takes to start calling yourself "a writer". It good to know that even hugely successful authors struggle with that one from time to time.

Today's main task was to deliver a stack of my books to the Luna, an inflatable pod thing in the Market Terrace. It was a slightly surreal experience to see copies of it alongside other books, but hopefully people browsing the stall will be sufficiently intrigued to pick up a copy.

If you're in the neighbourhood, why not go along and take a look?

The Magic of Wood Pulp

2011-05-11T10:31:00.000+01:00

Last Friday was a big day for me. The first copies of my anthology arrived from Lulu. I have to admit to being quite nervous as I prised open the cardboard packaging. Would the black-and-white cover image look too drab? Would the orange title seem washed-out or garish? I fretted over the inside most of all - the choice and size of fonts, the layout, and the running order of the stories.

But, happily, the end product exceeded all my expectations. The cover image is crisp and clear, and the overall effect is just what I was aiming for. Inside, the text looks great and, in my opinion at least, presents the stories in a very professional-looking way.

It's been great revisiting these stories, and an interesting insight into how my writing has changed over the last couple of years. But, more than that, it's rewarding to see my work in a fresh light, particularly those stories that were published online a while ago and had faded a little from my memory. Here, assembled and lined up together, it's almost as though my stories have gone on parade in full dress uniform, primped and polished and keen to impress new readers (hopefully!).

There is something undeniably special about paper. Although I was excited to find a half-dozen or so e-books pre-installed on my new mobile phone, I'm yet to fully embrace the concept of electronic fiction. I do read short stories online, and appreciate the accessibility and variety the internet provides both readers and writers. But I'm not going to be giving up my coveted bookshelves just yet. The sensory, tactile elements of printed matter are something that I associate so strongly with reading it's hard not to miss them when they're not there.

Perhaps the printed book form is even better suited to short story collections than novels? It's so much easier to pick up a book, flick through it until a title or first line catches your eye, and then settle back with your mug of tea and a biscuit or two for a well-deserved bit of escapism.

I hope people will be inclined to pick up "Somewhere to Start from" when it makes its début appearance on the booksellers' stall at the Guernsey Literary Festival. I'll also have a few copies with me at the Flash Fiction Workshop, just in case anybody fancies a signed copy. I'm looking forward to seeing how new readers respond to these works and I hope people will get in touch to let me know what they think.

Adventures in Self-Publishing

2011-05-03T12:57:00.000+01:00

Despite my intention to blog more often, the observantamong you will no doubt have noticed that posts here have been, at best,infrequent. Part of the reason for this is that I’m now working full-timeagain, but more recently I’ve been putting whatever spare time presents itself towardsa new project.

As my workshop at the Guernsey Literary Festival draws ever closer, I’ve been conscious of the fact that if somebody wanted toread a collection of my stories I’d need to direct them here, or give them alist of URLs to work through and a few photocopied pages from magazines andbooks. Fine in some respects, but not really something that fits with myintention to present myself as a professional writer (if not in terms of how I make a living, at least in the sense of my attitude towards my writing).

There’s nothing wrong with stuff being online,it’s just – even in these days of mobile internet, wi-fi hotspots and horselesscarriages – sometimes it all feels a little remote. So, with the intention ofhaving something glossy to brandish in front of my workshopees, I’ve spent thelast couple of weeks pulling together a selection of my stories that have beenpublished, online or in print, those that have done well in competitions, plusa couple of tales seeing the light of day for the first time (Yes! Exclusivebonus material!)

Having gathered all this together, it was then amatter of using Lulu.com to fashion it all into a book. This process was prettystraightforward, and I was impressed by the user-friendly set-up Lulu operates.I did hit a couple of problems, but these were mainly due to me trying to avoidanything that would howl “Self-Published!” at anybody who picked up the book. Thisinvolved much messing about with typesetting, trying out different coverdesigns, and a lot of agonising over the ‘correct’ running order for the stories.

It was good to revisit my back catalogue and thesearch for suitable stories unearthed a few that I’ll be revisiting in thefuture. And although I’ve only seen it in PDF format, I’m very pleased with thefinished result, too. It looks – dare I say – just like a proper book.

Have a look for yourself and see what you think.Note that the preview image quality is pretty ropey on the Lulu site – the actualcover and text are far sharper.

Some Thoughts on Flash Fiction...

2011-04-17T23:07:00.000+01:00

Website stats are wonderful things, although they can steala huge amount of time as you puzzle over what it is that made one post morepopular than another, or why people click on one link you posted but not theone next to it. Anyway, I’ve noticed that a fair bit of traffic to this sitehas been coming from Guernsey recently, and just in case that’s down to peoplereading about next month’s Flash Fiction workshop and wondering what exactlythat might involve, I thought I’d post something to elaborate on the subject. Ihope it helps.

I was originally going to call this post “A Guide to FlashFiction”, or something similar, but realised this would be misleading. For astart, having a guide to something suggests that thing is fixed, that it can bedefined and whatever you say about it can be proven, or at least backed up withplenty of evidence. You could write a guide to a town, for instance, andalthough people could debate whether or not you’ve highlighted the best or mostimportant aspects of the town in question, it’s very unlikely that somebodywould come along and say that you’re actually writing about the wrong placeentirely, or that what you’ve described as historic shop fronts are in factmodern factories.

Flash fiction isn’t easy to pin down. As a definition, itisn’t fixed, it warps and changes according to individual interpretations. Itgoes by several aliases, too – short-short stories, microfiction, quick reads,coffee time stories, etc, etc, depending on the market for which it’s intended.And flash fiction can also be taken to mean fast fiction - stories and othercreative writing created within a set length of time, typically half an hour orso. This alternative definition (with the “flash” referring to the writing,rather than reading, part of the process) can be a useful means of generatingideas and the occasional killer line, but for me work produced in this way canonly ever be a first draft, it never feels like a finished article. So, I’mfocusing on the more usual interpretation, with the emphasis on the number ofwords rather than the speed of the story’s creation. As an example of this, mystory, Falling From Grace, which wonthe October TxtLit competition last year, is 28 words long but took a wholeafternoon to write.

So, where does the boundary lie between short fiction andflash fiction? Opinions vary. Basically, there is no hard and fast rule thatstates a story is flash up to a certain word count and a short story above thatlength – in the same way as there is not really a clear definition of how muchlonger a novel is than a novella. However, I think it’s safe to say that if astory is a thousand words or less (very approximately two sides of A4 in anormal-sized font), there aren’t too many people who would object to youcalling that flash fiction. Every Day Fiction and FlashFictionOnline are twoonline publications that work to this definition. Other places are a bit morestringent – the annual Biscuit Publishing Flash Fiction competition specifiesstories no longer than 750 words, and Flash500, as the name suggests, wants 500words or less. There’s no real consensus. So, it’s probably better to forget aspecific size and just think ‘short’.

However many words there are in your flash fiction, the mainthing to bear in mind is that it should still be a story. That means it has a beginning, a middle, and an end –although they don’t necessarily have to be in that order, and they don’t alwaysneed to be explicitly spelled out in the text itself (sometimes there isn’troom for this anyway, and you have to rely on subtle hints that allow thereader to fill in the missing pieces).

Another way of thinking of the different parts of a story isthat it needs: (i) A Challenge, (ii) A Response/Reaction, and (iii) A Result.Essentially, something should happen that changes the circumstances of at leastone character in the story. I suppose I’m a traditionalist at heart, and I’mnot ashamed to say I prefer stories where there’s a definite change from onestate of affairs to another. Often I read pieces where the ‘story’ isessentially just a set-up for a (sometimes) clever twist ending, or those wherethe whole thing is basically an overly literary character sketch, full of thoughtful,quirky detail but lacking in narrative drive. Make sure something happens andyou’ll keep your reader (well, this one at least) happy!

This is just a very brief overview, and I’ll be coming backto look at those story elements in more detail later. For now, I hope that thishas shed a little light on the subject for those new to the concept, whilst ifyou already write flash and think I’m way off the ball with these suggestionsthen I’d love to hear from you.

Happy flashing!

Two More Stories Online

2011-04-02T22:57:00.000+01:00

A bumper week for me, with two stories going live online. The first is another success at the Brighton Community of Writers - my story, "A Night In with Zil" came joint third in their Short Story Competition. (Be advised, this piece contains strong language).

The second is a story that's made it into the spring 2011 issue of The Waterhouse Review. This piece is an older story that I've heavily re-worked a couple of times - I blogged about the process a while ago, here. The result is something I'm pleased with and I'm glad to see it find a home. I haven't had a chance to read the other stories, but the Winter issue was thoroughly stuffed with some first-class fiction, so I'm sure I'm in good company.

Cow News, Seven Things, and Seven Other Things

2011-03-13T11:13:00.000Z

My flash story, The Deconstructed Woman, has gone live on The Brighton COW website. My fellow winners and the highly commended stories provide an broad range of styles and approaches. It's always interesting having a look at other entrant's stories and putting yourself in the judges' position, trying to work out why they put the stories in the order they did. Ultimately, more often than not, you just end up shrugging and thinking, "Oh well, each to their own." Because it all comes down to personal taste, in the end.

Bridport Prize queen Teresa Stenson very generously passed a Stylish Blogger Award my way. Thanks, Teresa! Everybody seems to interpret it in a slightly different way, but the general idea is that it's a treat for list fans, as you reveal a number of things about yourself, and give people a few links to other places (usually other blogs). I don't read a great number of blogs, and pretty much all the ones that I do regularly look at are listed down the right-hand side of this page. If you haven't already, please do check them out - there's something there for everyone, I think. So, instead, here are seven things about me, and seven links to online places that I like. They may or may not be writing-related. I don't know yet; I'm winging this.

Seven Things:

If my bookcase caught fire, and I could only save one book, I'd go for my (UK) first edition of A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick. Indispensable.
My earliest experience of my writing being unleashed on the 'public' was a poem I wrote about snow in my third year of primary school. My teacher declared it 'lovely' and posted a copy of it up for everyone to see. It began, "Snow is soft, snow is nice / Underneath it there is ice". Ahem. In my defence, I was very young...
Most of the time I write directly onto my laptop, but when I take a break from that, my writing implement of choice is the Bic four-colour biro (pictured below). It's not an expensive, fancy pen, but it's dependable, chunky and comfortable to hang on to. Four colours are useful, too - Blue for notes, black for first drafts, red for editing. I save the green for writing abusive letters to prominent public figures.
After many years of writing nothing creative at all, instead getting some A levels and an Engineering degree, I got back into it via an attempt to put something together for a Radio 4 travel writing competition. I never actually managed to edit down the piece I wrote enough to fit the competition word count, but it was academic by that point, as I'd realised how much I enjoyed writing and haven't stopped since.
I don't have any particular writing rituals, although I find it very hard to concentrate without background music. It has to be something I know well or it ends up being too distracting. Although if it's something I've heard too often that's just plain annoying. It's a delicate balancing act.
My approach to the early stages of my work varies enormously. If I'm writing on the computer, I tend to be very organised and meticulously save each version of the draft all the way to the final one. If I'm hand-writing it, I regard it as entirely disposable and, once it's typed up or rewritten, I get a weird sense of satisfaction from feeding it into the shredder. It might just be that hand-written drafts always look pretty shoddy, with bits crossed out and arrows scrawled all over it, as I've moved chunks around. Or perhaps I'm just odd.
I get the feeling this is fairly common, but I have a kind of mental block when it comes to writing in a new notebook. This probably has a lot to do with Number 6 above. Like a lot of writers I have a love of stationery, and have a number of entirely blank, pristine notebooks all awaiting that first stroke of the pen. Because when it comes down to it I seem to end up writing on scraps of paper or junk mail or the inside of old cereal boxes, anything that can be thrown away easily. I think the problem is that I see the first draft, or the notes that go into a story, as being so transient that I don't like to set them down in too permanent a way, in case I get too attached to them and can't bring myself to 'murder my darlings' as they say.

Fig. 1 - A precision-engineered writing machine

Seven Other Things

Green Metropolis is a great website for readers, where you can buy and sell secondhand books. You won't get rich (a typical book sale nets you £3, from which you need to pay the postage), but it's a hassle-free way of selling your spare books and every sale raises money for the Woodland Trust.
Every Click is a search engine that raises money for charity. You can set up an account (really simple to do), and specify which charity you want to contribute to. It's not as all-singing, all-dancing as Google, but if you're prepared to be a little more specific when you search, it's a way of raising money for good causes with the minimum of effort.
Chapter Seventy-Nine - the writing forum I'm a member of. There are a lot of writers' sites out there, but this one is well-run and friendly and caters for all levels of ability and confidence.
Duotrope is about the best listing site for writers find markets. It's straightforward to use, although there's so much on there it can be a little overwhelming if you just plunge into it. Focus, and be specific, and it should direct you to useful, interesting places.
Defenestration - one of my favorite websites. They published something of mine, I love the Ben & Winslow cartoons, there's always something worth reading on there.
Guernsey Literary Festival. Surely this doesn't need any explanation?
And finally, some music... I've been entranced by James Mudriczki's voice since the Puressence track "Standing in Your Shadow" appeared on the soundtrack of British crime flick "Face". Puressence make elegant, articulate indie-rock, of a similar ilk to Elbow. Despite being generally well-received critically, the band haven't managed to break through into commercial success, which is a shame. Anyway, have a listen to Don't Know Any Better and see what you think.

A Flash of Success, and Motivation: The Missing Ingredient

2011-03-05T17:55:00.000Z

Yesterday, after a week of loitering nervously around the Brighton C.o.W. website, I discovered that my story, The Deconstructed Woman, was one of the winning entries of their Winter 2010 Flash Fiction Competition. I'm very pleased about this - mainly because it's so short (a word count limit in this case of 250), which is something I'm concentrating on at the moment, and because they had "a great many entries", so I must have got something right for my story to stand out.

I don't know if they plan to publish the stories on the website - if not, I'll probably put it on here. What might be interesting is to post the first draft as well, which I workshopped over at Chapter 79. What's great about online peer-review sites is that they're a great way to gauge reaction to your work (plus, I strongly believe that you learn just as much critiquing somebody else's work as you do from getting your own stuff reviewed). The first draft of The Deconstructed Woman, which at that point was entitled somewhat inelegantly as The Unreconstructed Woman, was generally well-received. People liked the concept, and they thought the style worked. Two or three readers commented they thought it lacked something, which confirmed my own concerns that the piece wasn't complete.

After about a week, I came back to it with a more detached view. Most writers will agree it's almost impossible to do this when you've just finished a piece. If you're anything like me, from the instant you hit that last full stop, you're convinced it's the finest writing the world has ever seen. Until you re-read it, that is, and cringe at the discovery that you've written such dismal and appalling guff. The process of re-writing is trying to reconcile these opposing viewpoints, and one of the most important skills is to dismantle the story and look at it in terms of its component parts.

I looked at what was there: a plot, a protagonist, an antagonist, a turning point, a satisfying conclusion. Yep, all those were present and correct. Then it hit me - the central character wasn't sufficiently motivated for her actions to make sense. This is something of a schoolboy error, and I think I'd let myself get carried away with some of the other story elements to notice at first. Essentially, mine was one of those novice-writer mistakes where a character suddenly gets fed up with the way their life is going and makes a drastic change. In real life, people sometimes do just reach breaking point and 'snap', but in fiction you're probably best off having a trigger event - no matter how small - a straw, if you like, to break that camel's back. Particularly in flash fiction, where you don't have the luxury of showing the stresses/demands/problems piling up for your hapless character.

So I went back to my story and thought, Why would this character react so strongly to her circumstances, when the day before she was prepared to put up with them? What might have changed? What, in this case, had she discovered about her marriage, about the things her husband expected of her?

Once I'd started thinking along those lines, I knew exactly what the story needed. My character's motivation slotted neatly into the story - and, almost as a side-effect, so did that of her husband, the villain of the piece. In fact, her motivation relied on his - her reaction to what he was trying to do made her actions understandable and appropriate. After I'd re-jigged the story (that 250 word limit called for some judicious word-pruning), it immediately seemed fully complete, the internal logic worked, it made sense. And, it seems, the judges agreed.

So, character motivation - ignore it at your peril!

The Guernsey Literary Festival

2011-02-19T19:29:00.004Z

This is something that cropped up a while ago, and I mentioned in passing in this post at the end of last year. I've held off writing a post about it, though, because to be honest it's seemed a long way off. However, as years tend to do, this one's cracking on past at an alarming rate and now there's only three months left to go. So, here's what's happening...

This year, the delightful island of Guernsey is holding its inaugural literary festival. They may be starting on a relatively small scale, but they have some big names lined up - topping the bill is Annie Barrows, half of the writing partnership behind the internationally successful novel, "The Literary and Potato Pie Society". Further down the list is yours truly. My contribution will be a flash fiction workshop, held in the Guille-Allès Library on the afternoon of Sunday 15th May.

I'm excited about this, as it's the first time I've been asked to take a workshop of any kind. At first I was unsure I really had enough publishing success behind me to be of benefit to a class full of people looking to discover the 'secrets' of writing short stories. However, the best thing about this is that it's forced me to take a look back at what I have achieved, and that's been surprisingly positive. Okay, so I've not got an anthology of my own I can plug when I go over to Guernsey, but I've had a respectable number of stories accepted, which have made it onto the web, into a couple of books, and a magazine or two. My competition wins and placings have netted me a decent amount of cash over the last couple of years, and in getting to this position I have interacted with a fair few editors and other people in the industry. So, maybe I do have more insight and useful experience than I initially gave myself credit for.

So, I'm starting to plan exactly what the workshop is going to involve. I have a few ideas, and have sketched out an approximate structure that I'm happy with. The next bit is refining this initial plan, and working out various examples and exercises to use. It's an interesting process, and I'm enjoying it and looking forward to taking the workshop and hopefully meeting a bunch of enthusiastic writers keen to have a crack at writing short fiction - whether attempting it for the first time or developing existing skills.

However, nothing's set in stone yet, and if anybody is thinking of signing up for the workshop, perhaps arriving here from the link on the GLF website, and wants to know anything or has any suggestions on what might make the workshop particularly useful and interesting, please let me know. Just leave a comment and I'll get right on it.

Oh, and if you don't live in Guernsey and were wondering about visiting, here are some photos of the place to whet your appetite...

A Thing in Print, Another Thing Pretending to Be

2011-02-12T12:34:00.001Z

I'm very pleased to announce that my story, Changeover Day, has been selected to go into Every Day Fiction's 'Best of EDF: Volume 3', a printed anthology that will be coming out sometime around May. It's good news as far as I'm concerned - it's a story I'm very fond of, and it's the first one of mine that will have been available in electronic, print, and audio versions.

I've also been playing at being a desktop publisher, and have reformatted Featherweight so that it now looks a bit more like it's a story in a magazine. It's available here in PDF format, so if you've been meaning to read it but were waiting for a version in a more print-friendly form, now's your chance. It might even work on one of those new-fangled e-readers or something. I have absolutely no idea.

Inspiration vs. Plagiarism

2011-02-05T19:05:00.000Z

So, I didn't get anywhere in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly short story competition. Click here for the judge's report.

A habit (which may be good or bad, I haven't quite decided) I've got into is that of looking into the background of writers who win competitions that I entered. I'm not sure what the motive is. Maybe I'm looking to learn from them, perhaps I just want to reassure myself they actually exist and I haven't been the victim of an elaborate scam. Part of me is always pleased when I track down the blog of somebody whose story caught the judge's eye, and find that they're excited and giddy and fired up about the win. There's something very disappointing about somebody mentioning such a thing in passing: "Oh, and I won another competition, can't remember which. Am thinking about buying a new pen." Boo! Hiss!

This habit of checking out the competition has led to me following the blogs of people like Jonathan Pinnock, James Bloomer, and Valerie O'Riordan, and very interesting and pleasant people they seem, too.

Anyway, a chap called Douglas Bruton won the SLQ prize. I'd heard of him a couple of times before this result - I think he's done well at Biscuit Publishing, and a few other places. I decided to try to find out a bit more, and the first thing I stumbled into was a rather drawn-out and increasingly nasty row about plagiarism.

Now, it's not really my place to comment on what's happened in this particular case (or cases), but the whole hoo-hah got me thinking about where my own ideas tend to come from. Inspiration is fickle, and once I started thinking about this subject, I realised that one of the tricks of avoiding "writer's block" must be to keep yourself open and receptive to ideas at all times. My story, "One Street Corner Too Soon", owes a huge debt to The Killers' song "Read My Mind". I don't think I lifted anything directly from it, other than the general mood and the idea of standing on a street corner. Also the bit about reading minds crops up. Hmm...

Lots of my stories have their roots in songs. I listen to music as I write, and I suppose it's inevitable that I'll soak up some of that as I go. I've tried to write things using a photo or painting as a jump-off point, but I find that a bit of a struggle - there's something 'complete' about a visual image that doesn't break down into text easily. Well, not for me, at least. Last year I tried my first story inspired by a poem. I'm quite pleased with how that turned out, so it might well be something I have another crack at.

So, songs, pictures, poems, things I've seen or overheard on the street... these all seem pretty 'safe', considering what set me down this route was thoughts of plagiarism. What, then, about stories inspired by other stories? Two of mine were written very shortly after I had read similar works - I wrote a story about superheroes within a couple of weeks of reading Andrew Kaufman's "All My Friends Are Superheroes", and once I'd read Joe R. Lansdale's "Godzilla's 12-Step Program" (from his Best Of), I had a different interpretation of the key elements of the story stuck in my head. I couldn't shift it, so I wrote it down.

Perhaps tellingly, I haven't managed to place either of these stories yet (the Godzilla one, although scheduled for publication, was pulled from The Battered Suitcase due to concerns over the use of trademarked characters). In my defence, they are relatively new stories and haven't really done the rounds yet. But, nevertheless, there is something at the back of my mind that feels slightly uneasy about these pieces. Are they a good example of my writing skills, or are they like a dodgy remix of a successful song?

The problem is, I really like both pieces, and believe they do stand up to scrutiny on their own merit. I haven't rehashed any parts of the original stories, or stolen any characters (well, not that weren't already stolen anyway) or scenes, or done any of the usual stuff that prompts accusations of plagiarism. I don't think I've taken any more from these two stories than I have done from the songs, but somehow it seems worse that the source material is another piece of fiction. But, let's face it, Andrew Kaufman didn't invent superheroes, and Joe R Lansdale didn't invent Godzilla. Maybe they had similar doubts about their work?

I think the only way to find out for sure is to try to get my stories into print and then see what people think. I'm too close to both sets of writing to be objective about it, I think.

2011 - The Story So Far...

2011-01-15T19:46:00.000Z

Okay, so the bright shiny New Year is well and truly out of its box and already looking a bit worn around the edges, so I guess it's time to pack away all the bubble-wrap and maybe spend a while hunting fruitlessly for the warranty card. Oh, it's only 12 months, what could possibly go wrong?

2011's off to a decent enough start for me. I have my first acceptance of the year, from the very lovely Waterhouse Review. The story is quite an old one, and I've been hoping to find a home for it for a while. It's one of those stories that I've never been entirely sure what to do with and people seem to either love it or hate it. As a result I've swung back and forth from having loads of confidence about it to being convinced it's the biggest pile of crap ever. Deep down, though, I'm convinced it's a story I want to tell, and that's helped keep my enthusiasm for it at a reasonably high level. I've tinkered with it a lot - it's had at least three titles and has been edited into at least three different tense-and-viewpoint combinations. A few weeks ago, after leaving it "resting" for several months, I went back to it and thought it seemed a bit over-worked, so I stripped it back to basics and pulled it through a deep edit (in the process putting it into yet another format - this time third-person present tense). I felt that did the trick, so I sent it off and - lo! - it was accepted.

It's interesting - I think this is probably the longest time I've experienced between me writing a story and finding somewhere to publish it. Effectively it's a collaboration, between me as a writer about four years ago and the writer I currently am. Personally I feel it's worked pretty well, although there are parts that maybe aren't quite as smooth as I'd like. I hope that's a sign that I have improved in the intervening time and have a better grasp of structure, character development, pacing, etc. However, because it's a story I've lived with for so long I'm not convinced I can be even slightly objective about it, so I'll be very interested to hear what people think of it when Issue 3 of The Waterhouse Review goes live in April.

In terms of new writing, there's not a great deal to report. I seem to be dealing with a lot of Real Life™ at the moment and that's getting in the way of cranking out much in the way of fiction. I have started work on something I hope will be a potential competition entry, although it's early in the process and could very easily amount to nothing. Still, I'm going about it in a way that's unusual, for me at least, in that I'm just keeping a very loose idea of the framework in mind and filling pages (well, two pages so far) of a notebook with ideas of things that I may want to include, not worrying too much about how they'll all fit together or indeed whether they'll actually got into the story at all. Usually I approach stories in a very linear fashion. I let them stew and develop in my head and once I've got a fair grasp of the plot I take that as a prompt to sit down and type out the first draft. Subsequent edits may introduce drastic changes, but more often than not the basic structure remains relatively fixed. I know other people work in the kind of way that I'm attempting here, so I'm looking forward to seeing how this one turns out.

So, in terms of writing, 2011 so far has meant slow progress into unfamiliar territory. But I'm hopeful that it will form a sound basis for a successful year, propelling me forward to my goal of someday being some sort of actual writer.

Oh, and just as a parting remark, I can thoroughly recommend A.L. Kennedy's What Becomes, which I'm just coming to the end of. It's a collection of twelve short stories and they are superb. Not the cheeriest of themes, it has to be said, but Kennedy has a dark, dry sense of humour and there have been several moments when I've literally laughed out loud (something I do very rarely when reading). Often with a collection there's at least one that I reach the end of and think, "Yes? And?" - but these are all diamonds. Highly recommended.

Looking backwards, looking forwards, trying not to get dizzy...

2010-12-31T00:03:00.001Z

So that, pretty much, was 2010. A mixed bag, as with every other year I've experienced.

Hmm... I'm not sure I can sustain that level of insight. Okay, let's think in terms of landmarks. It's been a good year in many ways. Near the beginning, I won a big prize with a short story that I think is one of the best things I've ever written. I got another story into a national writing magazine. Other stories picked up shortlistings and second and third placings in various competitions. I made a reasonable amount of progress on my novel. This blog has been quite successful, in terms of the modest aims I had regarding it, and I've enjoyed writing it.

On the downside, I still haven't received all the cash from that big competition. Many stories in which I had a lot of faith sank without trace in competitions, or got knocked back from magazines that I dared to think were dead certs. Some of my successes have cast doubt on exactly what type of writer I am - for instance, I still haven't had a single science fiction story accepted, despite starting the year pretty much thinking of myself as a SF writer.

On the whole, though, the positives outweigh the negatives, which is good. Next year is already looking promising - I have a couple of stories coming out in printed magazines/anthologies, I'm running a short-story workshop as part of the first-ever Guernsey Literature Festival (I was planning to do a full post on this news, but I didn't get the opportunity), and there are a few interesting-looking competitions on their way. For me, the 2011 Bridport Prize is unmissable, as A L Kennedy is judging it and she's one of my favourite writers. Plus the Bristol Prize seems to be going from strength to strength - the prize money is doubled compared to last year, and from the sounds of things it's a very slick operation that deserves to do well. So, yes, onwards and upwards. Hopefully.

Considering the general competition-y focus of this blog, I'd like to announce the inaugural Lies, Ink Awards. This is a way for me to publicly applaud and recommend competitions of which I have personal experience and that have proved to be well run. I make no excuse for the fact that these are biased - after all, I'm not qualified to advise on how prizes are handled in competitions where I haven't actually won anything.

Gold Awards go to TxtLit and Catherine Howard. Linda Lewis (the writer behind the Catherine Howard competitions) gets the winners' cheques in the post within a couple of days and when I asked her to revise the synopsis of my ghost story that came third in her recent competition, she took care of it straight away. TxtLit cheques turn up within a month of the story going live on their website and when I queried a problem with the submission process the admin people there couldn't have been more helpful. Keep up the good work, folks!

Silver Awards go to Writers' Forum and The H.E. Bates competition. Writers' Forum is a great place to get published and the prize money is very good, but they just miss out on top honours because once I found out my story was shortlisted it fell into an odd two-month vacuum during which I had no idea whether or not it was likely to go any further. I didn't know which issue it was being considered for, or when they were going to make the decision. Although I didn't win anything in the H.E. Bates competition, the people running it were very helpful and I like the fact that despite it being a fairly 'small' competition they still have an awards ceremony.

Sadly, there's a Wooden Spoon to hand out as well. But I'll leave that for another time.

In the meantime, Happy New Year, everyone. See you in 2011!

Mulled whine...

2010-12-22T17:25:00.000Z

December's been an awkward month for writing. I haven't had anywhere near as much time to write as I'd hoped, and when I have actually managed to sit down at the computer with something close enough to enthusiasm to be confident of producing something, I've then found myself incapable of deciding exactly what it is I should be aiming my efforts towards.

Still, I've worked on a couple of new stories, one of which is pretty much finished and an edit or two away from being sent somewhere. I thought I'd missed the Sentinel deadline but looking at the website just now I see they've extended it and I've got until the 7th January (my birthday!) to enter. It's a sign! Hopefully a more accurate one than the previous 'sign'...

I was very pleased to find I've come joint third in the second Catherine Howard competition. My story 'Evergreen', was - surprisingly, I thought, given the time of year - the only Christmas-themed story entered. Having chalked up second place in her previous competition with 'Featherweight', and getting a second win at TxtLit recently, I suppose I am officially becoming one of those annoying people who keeps cropping up on the shortlist of the same competitions. It's a trend I'm happy to allow to develop, I must say.

Trying to Avoid Blogging About Not Blogging

2010-12-07T22:45:00.000Z

I've been spending a disproportionate amount of time thinking about what my next blog post should be. I was treading dangerously close to the dreaded scenario of writing about how difficult it is to come up with something to put in your blog. But I'm resisting that, so far.

There are a few developments going on, kind of behind the scenes at the moment. I'm working on a couple of stories. One of them turned out quite well - it was one that I workshopped at the writing weekend I mentioned a while back. Just waiting to gather up some feedback, hopefully in time to send it off somewhere. Maybe here.

The other story is causing me concerns. I've worked out what happens, who the characters are, the main plot arc, a sort of subplot to fling in there as well. The problem is I can't 'get' the structure. I think it's going to work best if it's just linear, nothing fancy or complicated - and yet I still can't work through it in my head. This isn't something I've run into before, and it's proving very difficult to put it to one side and just get on with writing the damn thing, work out the details at the editing stage. It probably doesn't help that at the moment I'm only getting to write in short bursts, which isn't my preferred approach.

Ah, well. There are positive things on the horizon - I found out recently that the story that was accepted by The Battered Suitcase will appear in the Spring edition of the magazine. So, I'm guessing it'll be out around March/April. Also, the story that got shortlisted for the H.E. Bates is going to be in an anthology published by the Northampton Writers Group. It's reassuring to be heading into the new year (Yikes - that suddenly seems very close...) with a couple of pieces on their way to being in print already.

So, good news, mostly. I'm sure the story that's giving me grief will straighten itself out before long and I can build up enough momentum to get to the end of it. Then I can get on with the job of working out whether it's actually any good or not.

An Incy Wincy Story

2010-11-23T13:41:00.000Z

Just a quick note to brag about my most recent success - a second win over at TXTLIT. If you don't already know about TxtLit and you're a writer with a mobile phone, it's well worth having a look. The tiny word count (actually it's a character count, and you've got to fit all those spaces and commas, dashes and semi-colons into your limit of 154 characters) forces you to really scrutinise each and every word.

They've quoted me on the site saying how powerful a single word can be, and that's something that applies to fiction (or writing in general, actually) of any length, although it's amplified when you're trying to squeeze a whole story into 30 words or less - mine tips the scales at 28. For instance, the word "ripcord" in my story is not only a key element of the plot, but it saves me dozens of words of description - I don't need to mention parachutes, aeroplanes, gravity, etc: it's all implied by those 7 characters.

This is a way of thinking I'm trying to apply to my other writing. I know I have a tendency to over-write, and I think it's something that separates aspiring writers like me from the people who've already made it - that confidence in what they're writing that lets them just sit back and think, "Yeah, that's enough. The readers will work it out." It can be difficult to resist hammering the point home, just to make sure everyone knows exactly what you're saying. I'm starting to realise that's an impossible goal. Some people will never get it, others won't want to. The readers who are on your wavelength will tune in naturally, and they'll respect you for not spoon-feeding them.

It would be easy to be a bit sniffy about TxtLit, and question the literary merits of it and other formats that consist of so few words. But I'll defend my story as just that - a proper story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has a point of realisation after which nothing will ever be the same. It has backstory. Whether or not it is written with flair is not really for me to comment, but I'm pleased with the way it turned out. I'm not going to claim it as one of the masterworks of modern fiction, but any writer who takes on a challenge like this has to spend time thinking carefully about words, about sentence structure, and about how readers interpret their work. That, I'm convinced, can only be a good thing.

Not a Trouser Press in Sight...

2010-11-21T01:31:00.001Z

Knowing me Dan Purdue, knowing you Blog Readers. Ah-ha!

Er, yes. In my defence I've been feeling quite a lot like Alan Partridge recently, living in hotels and rented accommodation for a couple of weeks. The tedium of living out of a suitcase and eating on my own in restaurants has made me feel a lot like Alan in the third (and in my opinion, the best) series of his show, although so far I've managed to resist begging the staff to make adult films appear on the TV, or dismantling the trouser press. The latter may only be because I haven't stayed anywhere that actually provides a trouser press yet.

The reason for this is that as of last week and for the next few months, I'll be working part of each week in Leeds and staying in a hotel/B&B while I'm there. Initially I thought that this would mean I'd have a lot of time on my hands in the evenings and could get a lot of writing done, but it hasn't worked out that way. I've found that by the time I've got back from work, changed into casual (i.e. scruffy) clothes, walked or driven into town, found somewhere to eat, eaten, paid, and walked back again, there's actually not that much of the evening left. I wrote a page of a short story and a few notes for other stuff, but not the huge chunks of progress I was anticipating. I think instead I'll try to do some editing while I'm away - that seems more realistic. I tend to edit longhand using a printed copy and a biro, which are a lot more portable than a laptop.

In the middle of my first two weeks in my new role was a writing weekend, of the extremely enjoyable variety. Some friends and I hired a cottage in the Yorkshire Dales and holed up for three days doing various writerly things. For me, the most interesting and useful was a tightly structured review circle, the type where you read a piece out and then sit anxiously chewing your fingernails while the group members make notes and then, one-by-one, tell you what they thought of it. The key thing is that you don't get the chance to respond to the comments until the end. This is quite hard (I resorted to literally biting my tongue at times), but it's worth it. If one person picks up on something that doesn't work, it's easy to get all defensive/indignant and assume they weren't paying attention. When the comment gets echoed by two or three others, it's somehow easier to take the criticism. Not that it's diluted, it's just that it becomes obvious that the bit they're talking about simply doesn't work. From that point on, you're not dealing with opinion but a matter of fact, and (for me, at least) that feels like something concrete, something that can be worked on and improved. We also wrote new things, ate and drank a lot and stayed up late talking nonsense. Good times.

But after all that it's good to be home again. Today I've painted what used to be the garage but will soon be my office / writing room / guest bedroom, listened to the five stories shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award (very good, all of them - hear them on Listen Again or get the podcasts, here), and admired my signed copy of Not So Perfect - which, I was pleased to see, Nik Perring had signed using his "dried blood" ink as per his interview on Teresa Stenson's "Tell Me How You Write" spot on her blog.

Oh, and having been shortlisted for the H.E. Bates Short Story Competition (one of the news items I hinted at in my last post), I found out I'd got no further than that, which is a shame. Still, nice to have made the shortlist.

Updated Comps Page and Hints of Other News

2010-11-12T10:21:00.000Z

I've updated my competition page, clearing out the ones that have passed their closing dates and adding a few more that I've found. There's a good mix there, something for everyone, I hope.

I haven't had a lot of time to attend to this blog since the end of October, and I'm just about to rush off into the Yorkshire Dales for a weekend of writing and, potentially, wine and Twiglets too. However, I will say that I've been lucky enough to win a signed copy of Nik Perring's "Not So Perfect" - which will go nicely with the not-so-signed copy I bought a couple of weeks ago (I wish I'd remembered I'd entered that competition before I ordered it!). Many thanks to the lovely people at The Lancashire Writing Hub for organising the prize draw.

The Hints of Other News I mention in the title of this post relate to a couple of things that for the moment I'm going to have to be a bit vague about. The first is because I don't want to jinx it, and the second is more certain but still needs to have several things confirmed before I start blabbing about it on here. You'll have to bear with me, and I'll let you know what's happening as soon as I can.

Godzilla Finds Home in Battered Suitcase

2010-10-31T10:15:00.000Z

Don't worry, this blog hasn't been hijacked by a headline writer from the Sunday Sport. My story, A Night In with Zil, has been accepted by The Battered Suitcase, a magazine published by Vagabondage Press. They haven't given me a publishing date yet, but I'm very pleased to have placed this story as it's one I'm very fond of.

So I've been filling out the paperwork (contract, author profile, etc) to make it all official. I'm still at the stage where all this kind of stuff is quite exciting. I'm sure eventually it'll become a tedious chore, but for the moment I'm happy to enjoy it. The thing I like best is that they invite their contributors to answer a few questions about their writing - so I'm regarding it as my first writing-based interview. I've no idea if they'll use what I've sent them. I'm already a bit concerned that the things I've said will make me seem like a complete idiot with no idea what I'm doing. Ah, well...

Oh, and I didn't get anywhere in the Biscuit Publishing Flash Fiction Competition (results out today). Maybe next year.

Status Update

2010-10-27T17:26:00.000+01:00

Having mentioned progress on my novel in my previous post, and finishing Chapter Ten today, it seemed like a good time to take stock. I've copy-&-pasted everything into one file (I tend to work with each chapter in a separate file, to try to make sure if any get corrupted it's merely annoying, rather than the end of the world).

Anyway, the rewrite currently weighs in at a respectable 23,000 words, spread over 82 double-spaced pages. I'm not sure if 2,500ish words per chapter is a bit on the short side. Originally the chapters were coming out at around 6,000 words - which seemed far too long. I'm hoping the shorter style suits the fact it's more of a thriller than a ponderous, philosophical musing on the human condition.

23K seems like a good chunk - it's enough to feel like the rewrite is actually happening now, it's not just something I'm tinkering about with. Having said that, it's early days yet. There's still another 60,000 words to go before I catch up with where I was before I decided to go back and switch it all to first-person. And then I can press on and write the end, which I'm starting to panic about already. There are going to be a lot of loose ends to tidy up.

The aim is to write somewhere between 90-100K in the first draft, and then trim it down by at least 10%. 85,000 words seems to be an industry-standard acceptable length for a first novel. It would be good to have the first draft finished before the end of the year. In fact, seeing as I've just written it, that is officially my goal. You're all witnesses, so now I have to do it. Thank you. I think.

Recent Acquisitions, Routine, Rejection...

2010-10-17T20:49:00.001+01:00

I haven't blogged in a while. Don't think that I have reached a rather feeble milestone and settled back to rest on my laurels. Oh no.

The thing is, I haven't really had much to blog about. I've been plodding along with the novel re-write, adding about 800 words a day on average to the word count. Reasonable, steady progress I guess, but unremarkable. It feels good to have a routine of sorts, although in actual fact my daily output still varies from a couple of hundred words to a couple of thousand. I've just come out of a fairly heavy-going portion, which I've struggled with, and into a more exciting section that's got a lot more going on, some snappier dialogue and more movement. I definitely find this kind of thing easier to write. So, that's good.

I've had a couple of pieces turned down, most recently by Vestal Review. This is a nice-looking market that I'd like to get a story into, but their rejection (although very polite and encouraging) confirms some of the doubts I have about my ability to write flash fiction - a form I still haven't entirely separated in my head from 'regular' short stories. A lot seem frustratingly incomplete, some have characters so slight I'm left wondering why anybody cares what happens to them. Some are excellent, and have stayed with me as indelibly as my favourite novels. I'll keep trying to write decent flashes, and keep reading them, in an effort to understand more about the form.

And I've bought some books this weekend:

'All My Friends are Superheroes' by Andrew Kaufman - I bought this because I found it in a secondhand book shop near to where I live and thought the title rang a bell, although I can't remember where I'd heard about it. I've read it (it's very short) and it's one of the quirkiest, most charming stories I've read in a long time. It's basically a love story - Tom is a regular guy in a city where just about everybody else is a superhero. His new wife, The Perfectionist, has been hypnotised by her jealous ex, Hypno, into thinking that he is invisible. When he touches her, she flinches or hiccups, but she can't hear anything he says. Tom has the time it takes to fly to Vancouver to find a way of convincing her he is right next to her, as she is convinced he's left her. It's a clever idea and it's very well executed.

'The City & The City' by China Mieville - I've been meaning to read Mieville's work for a long time, and I decided that this would be a good place to start, seeing as it won this year's Arthur C Clarke award. That suggests it's a science fiction story, although I tracked it down in the Crime section of Waterstones. I get the impression it's the kind of story that's hard to classify, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

'The Space Merchants' by Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth - I don't know a lot about this, only that a friend of mine was talking about it one night (I'd never heard of it before), and the very next day I found it in a secondhand bookshop - not just on the shelf, but actually perched on top of a row of books as though it had been left out specifically for me to see. I can't resist coincidences like that, so I bought it.

'Not So Perfect' by Nik Perring - This ties in nicely with my aim of getting a better grasp on flash fiction, as Nik's stories are regarded as fine examples of the form. Plus, he seems like a very nice bloke, and it's always good to support an up-and-coming authors whenever you can.

So, that's it for now. Back to the reading and writing...

A Bicentenary, of Sorts...

2010-10-07T17:29:00.001+01:00

I've reached a milestone today. Hoorah! Well done, Lies, Ink, you're well on your way to being a proper blog or something. Perhaps.

Admittedly, it's all a bit arbitrary because it was more than a week after I'd set up the blog that I added the counter, and it was a good few days after that before I found out how to block my own IP address so I didn't artificially boost the viewing figures. But, still, I've always believed in celebrating the small things in life, and even a quasi-accurate blog counter hitting 200 views deserves an acknowledgement.

By the law of averages, at least half a dozen or so of those 200 visits are from real human beings rather than web-trawling robots, and there's a sliver of a chance that some of those are people I haven't actually met. If you're one of those, Welcome, it's great to have you aboard. I hope you're finding the blog to be interesting / helpful / a handy cure for insomnia.

***As you can probably tell, I've been at work all day and have nothing writing-related to comment upon. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.***

Exciting New Content!

2010-10-04T15:10:00.000+01:00

As you can see by my shiny new tab bar across the top of this blog page, I have added a section of the blog that I hope will be of interest to my fellow writers - a listing of short story competitions.

I've put this together after trying to get more organised about entering competitions and finding it difficult to navigate my way around other competition listing sites, which - understandably enough - don't tend to focus on short story competitions of the kind I like to enter. So, it's partly here for my own reference, but with a bit of luck it will also be helpful to other writers with a competitive streak.

Putting this list together has shown me a few things:

There are a lot of competitions out there. I found 45 closing before June 2011 in my first couple of searches. There were others that I missed out, for instance because they aren't yet accepting entries.
Competition organisers really need to make their webpages as straightforward as possible - on several occasions I had to navigate my way over three or more pages just to get all the information required to send an entry that complies with all their rules.
Blogger does really odd things with paragraph breaks once you start putting tables into a blog post.

Anyway, I hope it's of use / interest. Good luck!

The Honeymoon Comes to an End...

2010-09-29T11:37:00.000+01:00

Okay, I've pretty much got my feet back on the ground again after my story "Hotel Subterraneana" was printed in the November issue (available now from newsagents and online, here). The euphoria has worn off, mostly, although I do sometimes catch myself wondering what the people who aren't family and friends of mine (i.e. the ones who buy the magazine of their own free will rather than having me thrust it under their noses) think of it.

In the writing class I go to, last night, the tutor talked about editing and proof-reading and how it is, for some reason, virtually impossible to spot all the errors in a piece of your own writing. I guess the story is so familiar to you that your brain fills in any gaps, or skips over parts of it without actually taking full notice of what is physically there.

I employed all the tricks I know to try to make sure my story was as close to flawless as possible when I submitted it. I read it through on-screen, I printed out several copies, changed the font so it looked different to how it looked in Word, I read it out loud, I got other people to read it. I was pretty confident (if a little bored of the story) by the time I sent it in.

As Jonathan Pinnock described in his recent blog post about hearing one of his stories read out on Radio 4, there's nothing like a professional version of your work to make the flaws shine just as brightly as the good bits. Most of my story is fine, but when I read the final printed version, several niggles leap out at me. The first paragraph doesn't end the way I thought it did - the last line seems tacked-on, and I was sure there was a better bridge between the ideas in the last couple of sentences. The sentence, "He will be the library," is missing its "in". And I've got the word "straightened" at the start, which isn't a problem, but it then crops up again, twice in the same sentence later on. Jeez... how the hell did I miss that?

My first reaction was horror and shame, and wondering why the magazine editors hadn't asked me to sort it out, but I think I've reached a healthier point of view since then. I have to bear in mind that I'm still a developing writer, I'm not claiming to be anywhere near perfect. A judge or an editor can still decide a story is worth telling even if it does put an occasional foot wrong. Most importantly of all, readers are possibly more forgiving than your typical obsessive, over-critical writer.

Let's face it, if you waited for a story to be utterly perfect, with not a single word that couldn't be improved, or a comma that couldn't be left out / put in for better effect, you'd never submit anything.

My "Writers' Forum" debut...

2010-09-24T17:11:00.001+01:00

I've had a bizarrely invigorating day today. I got up feeling pretty switched-on, wrote 1000 words of my novel and went swimming (for the first time in well over a year) before lunch. I came home to find (a) a sparrow hawk murdering a wood-pigeon on the driveway - not particularly nice, but kind of majestic nonetheless, and (b) my contributor's copy of Writers' Forum pushed through my letter-box. Oh, and the cheque, which is worth mentioning - a couple of friends had stuff published in WF a couple of years ago, and they had a lot of trouble getting hold of their prize money. It seems like the new organisation over there is really on the ball, though, so I have no hesitation in recommending their monthly competition. Go on, give it a go...

Anyway, my first-ever magazine publication:

It's been quite a while since I've seen any of my stories in print, and this is the first time anything I've written has made it into something so widely available. It feels fantastic! Although I always get a bit of a rush when I see something of mine in a format other than bog-standard Word, there's something extra-special about seeing it on glossy paper, all laid out in twin columns, with a leader written by somebody from the magazine introducing the story (and saying very nice things about it, too).

As I mentioned earlier, the three winning stories get critiqued by the competition judge, Sue Moorcroft. This bit turned out to be the icing on the cake - Sue says some very encouraging things about the story, mentioning "lively writing", "admirable descriptive passages", and describing parts of the story as "a masterclass on how to make description leap from [my] imagination to that of the reader". I'm strutting like a peacock after all that.

It just goes to show, if you think you've got a decent story, it's worth sticking with it, even if it takes several attempts to get it right - the Writer's Forum competition wasn't my first attempt at getting this story published, but every time it came back I took another look at it, identified which bits worked and which didn't, cut some parts, expanded others, basically honed it little by little until it had developed into a publishable story. Sometimes the distance that a rejection puts between you and a story is exactly what you need to come back to it with a more critical, more discerning eye. Take knock-backs as a positive thing - they're a second chance to reach that little bit higher with your writing.

Writers' Forum is available in most large newsagents, or can be ordered online. Their website is here.

A Documentary About Sharks

2010-09-16T11:41:00.006+01:00

I hadn't intended to make this a review blog, but having just finished reading this, and with Nik Perring's call-to-arms ringing in my ears, I decided that I'd make an exception. Just this once, mind. At least until next time...

A Documentary About Sharks

by Gavin Broom

I’ve been enthusiastically following Gavin Broom’s online output for several years, and this collection is a round-up of his stories (and a few poems) that were accepted for publication during 2009. The fact that all the works included here have already been given the green light by editors who know what they’re doing (many from well-established magazines like Jersey Devil Press and Menda City Review) should calm the nerves of anybody imagining this to be an indulgent vanity project.

A Documentary About Sharks, then, is a polished collection of works that serves as a demonstration of Broom’s impressive range. Fifteen stories and three poems fill 90-odd pages, covering such diverse themes as love, loss, and rampaging reanimated corpses. I don’t really feel qualified to comment on the poems, so I’ll just say I enjoyed them, and thought they were worth including. Approximately one-third of the stories were new to me, and re-reading the ones I already knew was like getting a visit from an old friend.

There is common ground in many of the stories – Broom’s characters often inhabit a world tilted beyond their control by events or circumstances. They are isolated, disconnected, struggling to fit the role life has carved out for them. Although this sounds like a recipe for a tediously introspective gloomfest, Broom’s touch is light – he strikes a careful balance between hope and despair, often adding a rich vein of dark humour, so although the stories have their share of poignant moments, they’re never depressing.

I hadn’t read the title story before, in which two disaffected teenagers walk through a shopping mall, planning a Columbine-style massacre. This is a typical example of Broom’s skill – initially seeming like nothing more than two drop-outs hanging around, comparing people in the mall to different kinds of shark, the focus tightens to reveal their sinister motives, before pulling away again on a curiously redemptive note. The effect is unsettling, and it leaves you with plenty to think about.

One reason the writing is so effective is the characterisation. From the jaded commuter in The Boy Who Threw Rocks at Trains (a new one for me, and particularly good), to the unnamed and unnoticed high school girl quietly setting an emotional depth charge for a fellow student in On Your Birthday, Broom has created living, breathing people to populate his stories. The end of a good short story is always a beginning, of sorts, and the reader is left in no doubt that these characters will carry on well beyond the final full stop.

Although the majority of the stories are constructed in a straightforward and traditional way, Broom plays with structure with some of the shorter pieces. The stream-of-consciousness of Between the Lines results in one of the weaker stories, in my opinion, but the style suits the content perfectly. More effective is Everything Binary, a story of a tourist witnessing a murder on the Paris Metro. It’s told in fourteen bite-size ‘chapters’ of fifty words each. The choppy, edgy mood this introduces again complements the story itself brilliantly, and adds an extra level of authenticity that would be hard to achieve with a more conventional narrative.

The standout story, for me, is The Spirit of Shackleton, a master class in short-story writing that makes me jealous every time I read it. Other gems include the gloriously unhinged Poe-infused The Reading of Mr Edgar’s Will, and the book’s closer, a short sting of a piece called Emma’s Verruca.

Whether you buy this collection or simply make the effort to track down a few of Broom’s stories online, your reward will be fiction of a consistently high standard, in the form of unpredictable and intelligent stories that offer insights into the various tangles, pits, and peaks that life can throw at us. Highly recommended.

I'm not superstitious, but...

2010-09-13T20:21:00.000+01:00

This afternoon I walked down into town to buy some cereal and to get some exercise after being stuck in the house all day. It was raining, a bit. I noticed an A4 poster pinned to a telegraph pole - it was one of those 'Lost Cat' posters, with a photo of a black and white cat on it.

Artist's impression of Lost Cat poster

The Bridport Prize results are announced soon - at least the winners and shortlisted authors should be informed in the next couple of weeks. It is, of course, just about every writer's dream to get onto that shortlist. My entry is a story about a bloke who goes out in the rain to pin lost cat posters (for a black and white cat) to telegraph poles. So, the fact that I saw such a poster at this point in time can only mean one thing...

It's a sign!

...and I must have won the Bridport Prize. That's the only logical conclusion, which is exciting. Of course, I will be seriously disappointed if it turns out to be a false sign and I haven't actually won the Bridport Prize after all. Even more disappointed than usual.

P.S. I hope whoever put up the poster finds their cat soon. I also hope it's not quite as creepy a cat as the one I've used for my reconstruction above. That cat knows far too much; you can tell by the look on its face.

"Drat!" and "Whoo-hoo!"

2010-09-08T13:36:00.001+01:00

As the heading suggests, the last few days have brought both good and bad news.

To deal with the bad news first, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens rejected the story I sent them. This was one of the quickest rejections I've ever had, and came in the form of a polite but firm No Thanks. It would have been good to get a bit more feedback, but I guess they're busy people. The sting of rejection always smarts, but in this case I'm more upset (too strong a word, but you know what I mean) about the fact that I misjudged the market. It's much easier to deal with a rejection if you sent your story in on a wing and a prayer, with no real insight into whether it might be what they're looking for. In fact, I'd say this is one of the big pluses of competitions - you just give it your best shot and hope it works out. When you (as I had, in this case) carefully research a number of different magazines and pick the one that seems like a really good fit, it's a real slap in the face when it comes straight back at you. Still, nothing ventured, and all that.

Okay, moving on to the good news... Writers' Forum have awarded my story, Hotel Subterraneana, second place in their monthly competition. This is very exciting news for me, as my work's never been published in a magazine before (well, when I was a kid I entered a competition to design a monster for a computer game. The magazine printed a photo of the hundreds of entries strewn across a desk, and you could just about make out my monster's legs in the top left corner). The fact that it's a writers' mag, too, is encouraging - sort of like having the teacher read out your work in class. I'm looking forward to seeing what the editor has to say about the story; one of the best aspects of WF's recent format change is the critique of the three stories chosen for that issue.

It'll be in the November issue of the magazine, which should be in the shops in about three weeks - just in time for, er, October.

Interesting places to fling your thing

2010-09-03T14:41:00.001+01:00

I've been scouring the web looking for unusual markets, having found that September is a bit of a sparse month for writing competitions. Two places caught my eye in particular:

Firstly, Do Not Look At The Sun - Not just sensible advice, this is also a quirky Paris-based magazine with an interesting approach - they print up their mag and then wander around Paris leaving copies in various cafés, bars, and bookshops for people to discover and take home, for free. It's also available through more conventional means, and you can view most (if not all) of the content of past issues on their website. What with giving their magazine away like happy little literary pixies, they don't have the cash to pay contributors, but they will send you a couple of copies of the issue your piece appears in. Very Bohemian, well worth checking out.

Secondly, the quite spectacularly named Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens - This one's an American print and online magazine with a strong taste for the bizarre and surreal. It's a gorgeous site and the magazine seems put together with a great deal of care (quite a few of the back issues are available for perusal on the site, for free). They pay ten dollars and send a contributor's copy.

I thought I'd give Bust Down the Door... a try, and I've sent them a story that I hope they'll think is bizarre and surreal enough to warrant a place in their next issue. Despite a rummage through my folders I couldn't find anything ready to send to Do Not Look At the Sun, but I'll definitely bear them in mind if I write something quirky and unplaceable in the future.

Shortlist announced for Seán Ó Faoláín Prize

2010-09-01T15:08:00.000+01:00

Well, the results are in, and it looks like the story I submitted failed to catch the judge's eye. 'Tis a pity, as the SOF is quite an expensive competition to enter, and for some reason I felt the story I was putting forward was a good fit for the competition. I should learn to be more wary of these gut feelings.

The Seán Ó Faoláín Prize was judged this year entirely by one person, Tania Hershman, with no readers or sifters helping to filter the entries. This was a pretty mammoth undertaking, with almost 850 entries. She posted an interesting piece on the judging process a while back.

Having recently done well in one competition judged solely by one person, and disappeared without trace in another, I can't help wondering whether single-judge competitions really do find the 'best' writing out there, as opposed to ones that either go through some sort of filtering system or have more than one judge. Is a story that one person loves actually 'better' than one that two people both like? Which of these is closer to the definition of good writing?

As a writer, would you rather have a handful of people rave about your work, or a large group who enjoy it, but don't get terribly enthusiastic about it? I'm not sure which I'd prefer. Fortunately, at the moment, I'm not in any danger of having to choose...

Judge's Critique for Featherweight

2010-08-28T22:19:00.000+01:00

In the interests of making this blog as informative as possible, Linda Lewis has kindly agreed to let me publish the critique she gave me for my story Featherweight. I've appended it to the story here on my blog.

In some ways, the critique is less helpful because the story did well in the competition - I suppose it would be a bit strange if Linda had presented me with a long list of suggestions to improve it! However, hopefully publishing her response here will be useful to anybody who is entering Linda's next competition and is considering paying for a critique (always a tough decision when you don't have a clue what you're getting for your money).

I found Linda's take on my story to be very encouraging and perceptive. It's good to see that she's picked up on just about everything I was hoping to get across in the story. And it sounds like I only missed out on the top spot by a whisker, which is good (if a little frustrating!).

Incidentally, the winning story is now posted on the Catherine Howard website.

Hard to Swallow?

2010-08-18T21:57:00.000+01:00

My humorous story / restaurant review, "Xtcokpøt", has gone live today on Defenestration. They even let me cartoon myself for my biog pic:

I'm very pleased and proud that I've been able to place this piece. Firstly, although I try to make sure there's at least a sliver of humour in most of what I write, I don't tend to write a lot of stuff that's supposed to be out-and-out funny, so it's reassuring to know it's something I can 'do'. Secondly, humour is such a subjective thing that it's a real boost to have an editor take a look at something and say, "Yeah, that's funny." Hopefully their readers agree.

Thirdly, Defenestration is a great site. It doesn't pay, but when you look at it the site is obviously put together with a huge amount of care and attention. It's a good home for any piece of writing, and I'll certainly be sending them more stuff in the future. Plus, it's got great cartoons. I still think Sodabot is a work of genius, although in terms of titles alone, The Impending Ingestion of Mr. Snugglesbee takes some beating.

One thing that I found strange when I was looking for places to send Xtcokpot, was how little demand there seems to be for humorous prose. I mean, everyone likes a laugh, don't they? So why are there so few paying markets for chuckle-tastic writings? Very strange.

'Featherweight' Scoops Second Place in Catherine Howard Competition

2010-08-15T22:44:00.002+01:00

Just a quick note to say that my story, "Featherweight", was awarded second prize in the inaugural Catherine Howard Short Story Competition.

I'm very pleased about this - it's a story I'm particularly attached to, but one that has been difficult to find a home for. It's an awkward, between-genres kind of subject, and at approximately 4,000 words is a tricky length, being too long for many competitions but not long enough to be a serial in a magazine. I've had a lot of faith in it, though, so it's great to finally get some recognition (especially as it was up against 128 other entries).

Due to space restrictions, Linda (who runs the C.H. competition) won't be putting the story on her website, so instead I have set it up as a separate page here: Featherweight. I appreciate 4,000 words is a bit of a stretch to read on-screen, so if you want it as a printable PDF, please get in touch and I'll be happy to oblige. I hope you enjoy the story.

Linda plans to run another competition this autumn/winter - details are on her site.

Momentum and research, but not necessarily in that order

2010-08-08T20:00:00.000+01:00

I thought it was about time I actually wrote something about writing. This past week or so has been quite productive for me; I've finally swept aside the dust and cobwebs and got back to working on my novel. The reasons it has languished untouched for the last eight months are many, but as you can imagine going back to something after such a long time is not a task to be taken lightly. I was beginning to think that having taken more than half a year off, I would find it was no longer a story I was interested in telling, or that the characters were boring, or that I'd find so many inconsistencies in the style I'd get overwhelmed with it and just bin the whole thing.

Well, I did get a bit overwhelmed with it. It is, after all, 82,000 words I wrote between 2007 and 2009, in various bursts of activity and with various underlying aims and ideas regarding what the story was actually about. It is, in places, a tangled mess with more ideas than structure, and there are characters in key scenes early in the book who I replaced with other characters later on, and I'm not sure what to do about it. Plus it doesn't help that I didn't actually finish the first draft before I 'parked' it, so - having decided that the whole thing should have been written in first- rather than third-person perspective - as I start waaaaay back at the beginning, I don't even have the satisfaction of knowing I've already written "THE END".

But, despite having a small and temporary freak-out at the enormity of the task I'm inflicting upon myself, the important stuff (Do I still like the characters? Yes. Do I still "believe" in the story? Yes. Do I still feel a blast of excitement from imagining myself at the other end of the process, clutching a completed manuscript in my sweaty little paws and working my way through the Artist's & Writer's Handbook, sending it off to publishers? Hell, yes!) is all in place. So, it's good, and having had a couple of days where I've knocked out 2,000 words or so at a time - some new, some edited - it feels like I stand a decent chance of getting some momentum behind the project and, this time, getting all the way to the end.

One of the events that gave me a proverbial kick up the arse book-wise was a friend of mine inviting me on a tour of Birmingham airport. The relevance of this is that the opening scenes of my book take place in a teleport hub, which as far as my story is concerned is the futuristic equivalent of an airport. Looking around the place, without the stress and boredom involved of actually having to travel anywhere, helped me see elements that I had missed from my first draft - things that were not exactly crucial to the story but that help put meat on the bones of the idea. I hadn't considered at all, for instance, how a family with a young child would travel via this new technology. The result is that I have had to do a bit more thinking, and although the solution I came up with gets no more than a passing mention, I think it helps make the scene more authentic.

Authenticity is what good fiction is all about, I reckon - you have to convince your reader that all this stuff actually happened, no matter how strange and far-fetched it all gets. If you can throw in elements that make perfect sense but that the reader wouldn't necessarily have thought of, then that helps to prove that you know what you're talking about, and the reader is more willing to follow the trail of fictitious breadcrumbs you're leaving.

... And that's when you've got them right where you want them.

The start of something big...

2010-07-31T18:21:00.000+01:00

Okay. I've been wanting to blog about this for a while. And now it's turned out all not-quite-the-way-I-planned and I'm not entirely sure how to go about it. It's exciting and disappointing and scary and hugely inspiring all at the same time (for me at least).

Right, so, from the beginning: a while back (I think we're talking late April / early May) I got a phone call out of the blue telling me I had won the Chapter One International Short Story Competition. It took a long time for that to sink in. I still consider myself a relative newbie when it comes to writing at a 'competitive' level, so to have won something was pretty astonishing. What pushed it beyond pretty astonishing into the realms of downright unbelievable was that the Chapter One competition has a serious prize fund. I'm not going to specify the amount here but I have to be realistic and say I'm going to be incredibly fortunate if I ever again make that much money in one go from my writing.

I sent the contract back straight away and have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of that nice fat cheque ever since. Last night I got a call from Chapter One telling me that due to a technical glitch (actually it's more complex than that, but I can't go into detail about it), they will be paying me electronically, and in instalments. The first one of these arrived today.

So, it's good news - but the joy of the win is now somewhat diluted by the fact that it'll be a couple of months at least before the whole amount has transferred over to me. On the positive side, though, the little chunks arriving on a regular basis will be a great boost when I'm dealing with rejections from other markets or getting bogged down with the novel. Maybe it's a good thing - after all, it's best to eat a cake one slice at a time than to wolf down the whole thing in one and end up feeling nauseous. Ah, cake metaphors are my favourite.

The important thing that this development has reminded me about is how fantastic a feeling it is to be paid for something you've written. I know that sounds incredibly mercenary, but the truth is my ambition is to 'make it' (whatever 'it' is) as a writer. I don't claim to write for the sake of art. I'm definitely not the kind of writer who writes "for themselves" - I can tell myself stories in my head all day long; there'd be no need to write them down if I was the only audience I cared about. I write mainly to find some kind of connection to other people, and the best test of whether I've succeeded in that is finding somebody who will publish the story. Being paid for achieving that is the icing on the cake (hooray, more cake), and is the closest you can get to performing magic - you start with nothing, a blank page or screen, and pull ideas and words out of your head until you've made your best attempt at whatever it is you're trying to say. Then (once you've got that elusive acceptance) - hey presto! - all those words and grammar and stuff you got for free has magically become a pint of lager, or a CD, or a new printer, or a holiday or whatever level you've managed to place it at.

Somehow it makes the story more tangible, more solid. It's gone out into the world and become a thing - whether printed or published online or wherever - and that thing carries a weight and a value and you can hold it in your hand. And you can look at that thing and think I made this, with my mind. Nobody but me could have written that exact story. And you can be proud of yourself, and eat some cake.

Win a cottage in North Wales!

2010-07-21T17:24:00.001+01:00

Well, okay, not quite...

July seems to be a favourite month for competition organisers. Other than the Catherine Howard one, the Hay-on-Wye one, and the Seán Ó Faoláin one, several others are ending at the end of this month. The ever-generous Teresa Stenson has rounded up a few of them on her blog. I'm rapidly running out of viable stories and am wondering whether to hurriedly write some more, or take this as a sign that I have enough pieces "out there" and get on with my novel.

This is one that seems to have slipped beneath the radar of most of the competition websites that I look at - it's the Cinnamon Press 5th Birthday Competition. The prize is not a cottage in North Wales, but a place on a residential writing course that's held in one. There's not a huge amount of detail on the site, but I went on an Arvon course a few years ago, which was one of the most inspirational writing things I've ever done, and this sounds like it's in a very similar vein.

They're looking for stories of 2000 words or less, or a bunch of micro-fictions, or some poetry. The entry fee is £12 and the course usually costs £490. There are bundles of books for the runners-up.

A Disturbing Trend

2010-07-19T18:54:00.000+01:00

"Write what you know" is an oft-quoted maxim amongst fiction writers. If I'm writing what I know, it turns out I'm a fairly despicable chap. Although maybe that came across in my last post.

Greed takes centre stage in my entry for the Hay-on-Wye Short Story Competition, while the story I've sent to the Seán Ó Faoláin Competition revolves around deception and the wilful destruction of public property. In my defence, the theme for the Hay-on-Wye competition is "Avarice", so I didn't have a lot of choice in the matter.

Themed competitions are not something I tend to enter very often. Either I look at the theme and find it terribly uninspiring, or I come up with something that seems like a good idea, but won't fit the maximum word count. This time, the combination of an Avarice theme and a competition hosted by Britain's favourite book town both appealed and provided me with an idea for a story.

Both of these competitions close at the end of July, so if you've got a story lying around (and that just happens to be about greed if you fancy the Hay one), or have the muse flowing through your fingertips at the moment, there's still time to send it off.

Greed 1 - Selfishness 0

2010-07-15T13:59:00.005+01:00

Should you let people know about a writing competition you've entered?

After all, the more entries the organisers receive, the smaller your odds of winning*. On the flip side, the better-supported a competition is, the more likely it is to happen again next year (or next month, quarter, etc).

Some competitions further complicate things by linking the prizes to the number of entries. Hence the dilemma - if your story is good enough to claim the top prize, you want that to be as big as possible, so you want it to have tonnes of entries. But, uh-oh, here come those pesky self-doubt gremlins... Is your story really good enough to see off a hundred other stories? What about two hundred? A thousand? Yikes. Maybe you should just keep your mouth shut and hope for the best.

The Catherine Howard competition is one such competition. So, More cash or a better chance of winning? Greed or Selfishness?

Obviously, in this instance, Greed won. Catherine Howard is the pen name of Linda Lewis, who has a regular column in Writer's Forum magazine. This is (as far as I can tell) the first competition of this type she's run, and I think it deserves support. Not least for the fact that the winner's prize is at least £100, increasing if there are sufficient entries, with an additional £50 donated to a charity of the winner's choice. The charity angle is a nice touch.

Check it out, see if you have something suitable to send. It's postal entry only - get yours in by 31 July 2010.

Good luck!

* Well, sort of - more on that later.

"Counterfeit Confetti" goes live on Fiction at Work...

2010-07-09T19:20:00.001+01:00

My first piece on Fiction at Work went live today. Well, it actually went live a couple of days ago but there was a slight hitch with two versions of the final paragraph being published one after the other, which was a bit confusing, so I didn't link to it before now.

It was the first thing I've ever subbed to them, so I was very pleased they took it. It's also the first time I've been asked to alter anything - the original final paragraph introduced a much more cynical note to the story, and the editor at F@W asked if was okay if they left it off. That kind of left the end flapping in the breeze, so I rejigged the new final couple of sentences, and it was those that got repeated.

I wasn't sure about the changes at first, but I've grown to like the new ending. It makes it a bit more ethereal.

Oh, yeah - the story directly after mine has some strong language and sex 'n' drugs references. Exactly, in fact, the kind of thing that might fall foul of a typical work-based internet filter (which is odd, considering the website's name). Just thought I'd mention that before anyone accuses me of leading them into murky waters.

Get in!

2010-07-07T21:33:00.001+01:00

Some good news today - my spoof restaurant review "Xtcokpøt" has been accepted by Defenestration. I'm well pleased about this, as once I'd written the thing I had absolutely no idea where to send it and spent a lot of time searching through a lot of websites that claimed to be humorous but instead were, largely, pants.

Defenestration on the other hand, seems well put together, nice-looking, and most importantly, funny (with the caveat that humour is a very subjective thing, of course). I thought they were worth a shot, and - to my surprise - they liked the review.

I've spent some time browsing the site, and I particularly like the cartoons, which are drawn by the Editor-in-Chief, Andrew Kaye. Sodabot is genius.

No news on a publication date as yet, but stay tuned and I'll let you know when it's up and doing its thing.

Oh, yeah, right - about the name...

2010-07-04T17:05:00.000+01:00

Why "Lies, Ink"?

Most people seem to use their own name as a title for their blog, and there's a lot of sense in that.

What kept me from using my name is the thought that - one day - I plan to have a couple of writing careers in parallel. See, I'm an awkward swine and like the idea of writing both mainstream/literary fiction and genre stuff. Publishers, apparently, aren't keen on this and if writers insist on hopping out of their pigeonholes every once in a while, they are expected to use a different name so that bookshops can put the different styles of books in the appropriate sections and nobody has to venture into a part of the bookshop that is unfamiliar and scary to them. So, I might end up publishing stuff under two (or more, I suppose) different names. Unless I did an Iain Banks / Iain M. Banks. I like his no-nonsense approach to this dual-name thing, but can't help thinking he's missed an opportunity. Why not really let his hair down and call himself Iain Banks for one category, and Zoot Freeblander or Spanky Huckerdime for the other? Just a thought, Iain, if you happen to drop by.

Er, anyway. So I wanted a blog name that meant something to me but wasn't actually my name. So I picked "Lies, Ink". It's based on the Philip K. Dick novel, Lies, Inc. - but cunningly altered so that it references two aspects of writing fiction. Lies, because fiction is essentially the art of telling massive lies, and ink, because - well, it's obvious, innit?

http://www.philipkdick.com/works_novels_liesinc.html

Click on the link for more details of the book, and plenty of information about Philip K. Dick's other work. There'll be more references to PKD in the future, I'm sure - I'm a big fan of his.

An End to Procrastination?

2010-07-02T14:55:00.002+01:00

I've put off starting a blog for quite a while. It seemed like something I probably should do, but I didn't think it was 'my sort of thing'. Several of the people I know who write also have a blog and I wondered how they ever find time to write and blog and do all the other stuff they have to do to avoid starving to death or having their house repossessed.

So why the change of heart? Well, I've been taking my writing more seriously for the past year or so. I'm not particularly prolific, so I haven't written all that much, but I have at least been a bit more focused and have sent more stories out (either to competitions or printed or online markets). As I result, I've begun to have some success with what I formerly considered a pleasant but largely directionless hobby.

Achieving this moderate level of success made me take more notice of what other writers were doing. So I began to pay attention to those little potted author biographies that publishers tend to put at the end of people's stories. Nearly all of these seemed to end by telling us all that so-and-so blogs at so-and-so's-blog.com.

Ha! I thought, what self-indulgent fools. Who on earth is going to want to read the unedited mental outpourings of some over-opinionated amateur writer? What a waste of time. Admittedly, I did read a few of these blogs and they were pretty good. But still. It seemed more effort than it was worth.

Recently, I've clocked up a couple of what I humbly consider to be impressive results in a couple of competitions. Impressive enough for me to have got over one of those mental hurdles - the lack of confidence in what I do that used to make me want to keep the fact that I write a secret, as though it's some grubby habit you don't mention in polite society. And I started thinking about what it means to be a writer in today's web-centric world, and how best to present myself as a writer.

Suddenly, it clicked. I realised that the bloggers are not just spouting self-congratulatory garbage (well, not all of them) - they are tying together their stories, sharing tips and advice with other writers, spreading the word about competitions, building a readership.

So, here it is, my blog. It won't change the world. It won't show you how to be a better person. But it might help you track down my stories, and it'll give me something extra to put in my bio.

Thanks for stopping by.