Yesterday morning I found out that I’d made it through to the final of “Tweet Me a Story” for the second year running. Many thanks to all of you out there who voted for me, as I ended up as being the “Audience Award” winner for my group (again for the second year running). There […]
Last week I was asked by Joe Melia (otherwise known as “Mr Bristol Short Story Prize”) if I’d like to contribute a piece to the BSSP site about how Mrs Darcy came into being. Before I go on, I must say that one of the things I really love about the BSSP is the way […]
Sometimes you don’t need to go looking for stories. All you need to do is rely on your brain to make a few connections. A couple of evenings ago Mrs P was away for the night and I nearly blew the house up (or at least I thought I nearly did, except that Ed who […]
I think I mentioned last week that I was taking part in NYC Midnight‘s “Tweet Me a Story” competition again. So I duly stayed up until past midnight last Thursday and awaited the arrival of my prompt word, which turned out to be “perfect”. I thought about this for a while, consulted Wikipedia, and came […]
What is the point of a publisher? After all, anyone these days can, without much effort, put together a reasonably presentable manuscript in PDF form and upload it to the likes of Lulu or CreateSpace and – bingo! – they’ve published a book. Not only have they ensure that their cut of royalties is a […]
In my last post I said I wasn’t going to be submitting much this year, preferring to concentrate on writing full length stuff. So how come I’ve sent off no less than three pieces in the last couple of days? I don’t think it was to demonstrate the power of an unreliable narrator … One […]
I’m going to change the nature of this blog very slightly this year, as there probably won’t be so many of the breathless “Look at me I won something” and “Look at me I’ve had something published” posts. This is mainly because I’m intending to focus a bit more on writing longer stuff – but do […]
I found out the other day that my story “Hidden Shallows” is going to be in the next Every Day Fiction anthology. I should at this point very quickly say to any other EDF authors reading this that I believe decisions are still being made about other stories. I was told about this one early […]
I like being asked to do things. It’s so much more civilised than submitting stuff and then waiting on tenterhooks to find out if anyone likes it. So when Jo Mortimer e-mailed me to see if I fancied taking part in the last night of SPARKS in its present form, I had to say yes. […]
And here’s another anthology that’s fresh off the press. This one came out at the start of 2011 and collects together the best bits from the first year of the splendid Eclectic Flash. In case you haven’t already seen it, their “editors” page is well worth a look – scary bunch, eh? (Nice to see […]