Sep

18

Woo Tiddley Hoo!

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Here’s a tip that I offer for free. If you’re getting twitchy about rejections, competition failures and the like, write a maudlin blog post about all the bad things that have happened lately and how no-one likes your stuff any more. Within 24 hours you will receive an e-mail telling you that you’ve won one of the prizes in a competition. It’s not guaranteed of course, but it’s certainly worth a try.

After all, it just worked for me. More in due course …

Jul

21

Bournemouth Short Story Competition

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Over the last few weeks I’ve been nervously checking the website for the inaugural Bournemouth Short Story Competition (not to be confused with the Bournemouth Literary Festival competition, where I once had some success with erotica, God help me), watching for the results. Then last week the following rather disturbing notice appeared:

Due to the fantastic number of entries received, reading the short stories has taken longer than expected.  Winners will be announced at the end of July.

So that’s me out, I thought. But I was wrong, because this morning I received an e-mail to tell me that my piece “The Problem with Pork” had picked up one of the runner-up prizes of £25, plus publication in the associated anthology. Woo hoo!

This is actually round about the second or third story that I ever wrote, back in the early 90’s, and (under its original name of “Meat”) it gave me my first-ever brush with success when it was highly commended in the 1993 Ian St James Awards (remember them?). At the time, I thought that anything short of a prize was a complete failure, so I didn’t take the message of encouragement from this that I really should have done, and not long afterwards I pretty much gave up writing short stories.

When I started writing fiction again, it was once more one of my earliest successes, getting longlisted in the 2007 Fish competition, and it’s really nice to see it finally winning something and getting published into the bargain. Especially as it’s not to everyone’s taste: I once submitted it to Whittaker judge Geoff Nelder’s magazine, Escape Velocity, and he absolutely hated it. But, then again, the piece does centre around eating meat, and he is a vegan (what was I thinking of?). And, despite this, he did very kindly offer some helpful advice on the writing aspects which I used in the final edit before entering it for this particular competition.

Jul

14

The Whittaker Prize 2009

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… and in fact I came second in the fiction and fourth in the poetry. As far as the fiction is concerned, the excellent Cathy Edmunds grabbed the lead back in Round 3 and clearly wasn’t going to let go of it, so it was always going to be a race for second place in the end. And as for the poetry, well let’s just say that I think I eventually got found out. But I’m still quite chuffed that I managed to fool them for the first five rounds …

So what next? Well, I’ve got rather a lot of stories that could do with a good edit, and there’s also that full-length project that really needs a bit of attention. So it’s not as if I’m going to be idle :)

[EDITED TO ADD: Ooh, and I've just noticed that I get a free copy of the anthology for coming second. Yay!]

Jun

30

Calderdale 2009, The Brontës and The Dhol Foundation

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A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail telling me that I’d won one of the top three prizes in this year’s Calderdale Short Story Competition, out of 420 entries. So last Thursday we headed off to Halifax (the one in Yorkshire, not the one in Nova Scotia) for the prize-giving. Despite turning up a quarter of an hour late (and walking in during Sarah Holman’s reading of her story – sorry, Sarah!) we had a great time. I was more than a little apprehensive about reading my piece, “Possible Side Effects”, because it contains a fair smattering of strong language, and it’s a bit peculiar to walk into a roomful of strangers and start swearing like a trooper. Fortunately, it seemed to go down reasonably well, and it even got a few laughs – although some of them sounded ever so slightly nervous.

In the event, I came third, behind two excellent stories from Sarah Holman and Sylvia Anne Jones, but the very slight disappointment was tempered by the fact that apparently mine was the only piece that was on both judges’ final shortlist of six. And it was good to meet the two judges, Ra Page and Jane Rogers, as well as several members of the audience.

Halifax is a fascinating and slightly scary place on a Thursday night, mainly populated by young girls with orange fake tans wearing dresses that look smaller than the average T shirt. Amidst the febrile atmosphere, Mrs P and I eventually found an excellent Turkish restaurant, whose only drawback was the lack of an alcohol licence. So I was sent back out into the night to track a bottle down. I eventually succeeded, although I think that paying £9.50 for a bottle of Echo Falls red counts as some kind of benchmark in desperation. Although, curiously, after the thrill of the chase, it didn’t actually taste at all bad.

We thought we’d make a short break of it, so we stayed a couple of nights in nearby Hebden Bridge – a lovely place, mainly populated by ageing hippies. On the Friday we left the car behind and took the bus over to Haworth, into Brontë country, where we went on an eleven mile circular walk up to Wuthering heights and back. Wonderful, and I didn’t break out into a Kate Bush impression once.

The icing on the cake came later on, when we were taking a stroll around Hebden Bridge after supper and we heard music coming from the cinema. It turned out that The Dhol Foundation were playing a gig there to kick off the local arts festival. Woo hoo! Ever since we saw tham at WOMAD a couple of years back, we’ve both been big fans of the Dhols, and as there was only an hour to go, we managed to get in for a fiver each. Oh, and they were ace as ever.

Jun

19

Earlyworks Press Web Poetry Competition

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Well, it’s been over a week since I last blogged, and I was thinking that I really ought to write something profound on some deeply important, albeit possibly boring, aspect of writing to keep the place ticking over. But instead I’m going to crow about something I heard about just now, ‘cos I’ve received an e-mail telling me that my poem “Feral” is one of the ten shortlisted for the Earlyworks Press Web Poetry competition, earning me the grand sum of £5 – which is, incidentally, the first prize I have ever won for a poem. Nor much more to say, except that I have now exceeded my target of getting shortlisted for a poetry competition in 2009 by a factor of three. I think I like Earlyworks Press.

Jun

9

Nature’s Banquet

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My first-ever first-prize-winning piece (God, that sounds horrible – call youself a writer, Pinnock?) is now up at Earlyworks Press. Amusingly gothic, if you like that sort of thing. Of course you do.

May

18

Old Magic in a New Age

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Funny thing. Last night as I was blogging about Every Day Poets, I was wondering what had happened to all the short stories that I’d submitted to competitions recently. (Actually, I know full well what happened to the ones that I entered for the Fish and for Bristol. Bugger all is what happened.) But then out of the blue, a mail pops into my inbox this evening to tell me that my story “Nature’s Banquet” has just won first prize in the Earlyworks Press “Old Magic in a New Age” competition. I am mightily pleased about this for two reasons:

1. It’s the first time that I’ve won first prize in an external competition (which was, curiously enough, one of my writing ambitions for this year)

2. It’s the piece that absolutely tanked in Round 3 of the Whittaker Prize, with a score of 58/100. I love it when that happens. I hasten to add that it’s no reflection on the judge of either competition. This piece was always a risky proposition, given that it’s written in the second person. But I’m rather glad I took the risk now.

The moral? Stick to your guns. If you believe something works, you might just be right.

Jan

25

Leaf Poetry Competition

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I’ve just heard that my poem entitled (deep breath) “Pants Outside Trousers, Big Letter H On T Shirt, Here To Save The World” has been commended in the 2008 Leaf Poetry Competition. I am massively chuffed about this, because (a) I’ve always wanted to get into one of Leaf’s anthologies (having previously failed on more than one attempt) and (b) getting onto a poetry shortlist was one of my writing goals for 2009.

“Pants Outside Trousers etc.” (which is what Leaf call it in their e-mail to me) was previously a completely unexpected winner of the SlingInk monthly poetry challenge back in October of last year. The title was added at the last minute, and was originally “Pants Outside Trousers, Big Letter H On T Shirt”, and it was only when I had submitted it that I realised that it was an unconscious partial haiku. So I added a further five syllables when I did the edits. Oh, and there’s a reason why the title needs to be a haiku. But you’ll have to buy the anthology to find out :)

So 2009 is going to be all about poetry, then? Well, maybe. I still find it all a bit baffling. But anyway, I have signed up for The Write Idea’s STIRRED POeT six-week rolling poetry competition, starting in February, and I will be fascinated to see what comes out of that.

Jan

5

Longlisted at Cadenza Again

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So … for the second time running, I’ve been longlisted at Cadenza, this time with my story “Piss and Patchouli”. Whoo hoo! And for the second time running, I’ve failed to make the shortlist. Boo hoo! Clearly I’m doing something right, but not quite right enough. Still, I guess that’s my first hit of 2009. Now where else can I send it?

Dec

6

Milton Keynes Speakeasy Competition 2008

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Just heard that I came second in this one, with my piece “Fishermen’s Tales” (or, as they refer to it in their e-mail, “Fisherman’s Tale”, which is probably better). This one has had an unbelievably tortuous life. It sort of started out as my first-ever entry for the (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) Café Doom weekly flash challenge, all 349 words of it with the title “Bait”, back at the start of November 2007.

It then mutated into the first piece I wrote on the practice night for last year’s Children in Need, 356 words long, with the title “I Caught an Amazing Fish” (I hadn’t realised that you were supposed to use the prompts as inspiration, not as titles – duh). Following this, I inserted a whole load of backstory at the start, taking the word count up to 1133, with the title changed to “Catch of the Day”. This was, much to my surprise, Highly Commended in this year’s JBWB Summer competition.

Meanwhile, I’d posted it on the VWC virtual manuscript evening, where it was (quite justifiably) torn apart. I took the tattered shreds, stitched them together, renamed the piece “On the Hook”, and put it into the September session of the Café Doom crit group. There it was torn apart a bit more, following which I produced the final version, now renamed “Fishermen’s Tales” (or “Fisherman’s Tale”, if you prefer), with the word count bumped up to 1305, and the voice changed from first person to third. And the rest is history.

The moral of the story? Easy. If you’ve got an idea that you know works, keep plugging away at it. But never be afraid to subject it to criticism. And always, ALWAYS act on that criticism.

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