30th January, 2025 - first of the year, and new meetings

I hadn't realised I'd not posted so far this year. With January coming to a close tomorrow I guess this is a good time to evaluate how the first month of a new year has gone.

All in, I'd say pretty well.

Yesterday I submitted a short story to the Parracombe Prize. Which makes the 3rd story I currently have out in the world that I'm awaiting a response on. That's the best position I've ever been in in terms of getting stuff finished and sent out. The story I submitted I ended up titling, When The Day Was Enough. It's a story about a pattern of generational violent behaviour, a sons concern as to whether he can escape that pattern of behaviour, and one day on a beach in Cornwall that offers an alternative way forward. I was as happy with it as I could be with the deadline looming. If it gets chosen for something, great. If not, I'll have more time to work on it, which is also great. Well, good if not great.

The other highlight of the month is that I finally got around to attending the local writers group. Words Out Loud are a Chichester based organisation and they run a fortnightly writers workshop/social just a 10 minute bike ride from our house. It was a very informal meeting but everyone seemed nice and it was good to talk shop with people who share the interest. I'll definitely be going along again.

So, a short story out into the world and a new writers social meet up in the calendar. I'd call that a good start to 2025.

28th November, 2024 - 2 up

I submitted a flash fiction story to a competition run by Fiction Factory yesterday. That makes my 2nd piece of fiction submitted this year. Given the fact we're almost in December I doubt I'll be adding any more to that total. 2 in a year does seem a bit pitiful. But it's 2 up on last year so there's that.

The story I submitted was a 1000 word story I ended up calling The Apron. A title taken in inspiration I think from Lydia Davies great story, The Sock. My story is about a girl who goes back to her childhood home because she is worried about her fathers ability to cook for himself since her mother who was an amazing cook passed away. There's a lot of personal influence in there from my partners Mum in terms of the food and links to the Netherlands so that was nice to write.

I should hear back in February whether I've had any success. Until then, onto the next thing.

12th October, 2024 - a check in

So now I'm fired up with envy...what have I been doing?

I've been trying to commit to a daily writing habit - and did pretty well with that for a while getting a few streaks in where I was writing solidly for weeks at a time. Out of that came a short story called 'Did you mean: Reiki' which I submitted to The London Magazine in July only to be rejected in September. I sent it out again to Litro magazine afterwards, though I didn't get any kind of acknowledgement from them which makes me slightly concerned. I don't even know how long I'm supposed to wait for a response...

Whilst waiting on a response from 'Reiki' I worked on another short story which is still being edited. I can't quite get it right but I feel it's nearly there. I've moved on to writing a flash piece with the hopes of submitting that somewhere by the end of November, then I'll return to the short story, the break having hopefully done some good.

Hopefully, this pattern of work will mean I end up with a catalogue of stories that can be sent out until someone stupid enough, drunk enough or genuinely interested enough decides to print something. The need, as always at this point, is just to do more. Some days, most days, I just do a minimum of 20 minutes of writing. Other days I push it to an hour or so but it still doesn't feel enough. I can find ways of bettering my enjoyment of the process but that doesn't necessarily feel like it advances work in progress - that part feels like work. And it is work I guess. I need the dedication of treating it like work, without getting bogged down in the mentality of seeing it that way to the point where I don't enjoy it. Tricky.

I did also do my 'craft study' for which I have a little notion board. I've only really "completed" one category: description. I gathered a load of resources on writing great descriptions (web pages and podcasts) read through and summarised them all, and turned my summaries into a kind of cheat sheet of information. I then did a close reading of the opening of Tessa Hadley's story 'Bad Dream' and wrote a little essay talking about how the section successfully uses the kind of descriptive techniques I'd been looking at. It was a very helpful exercise and I would like to repeat it with other topics like dialogue, structure, point of view etc. It's just time and dedication.

But that's what's been happening between my silence and my envy.