Author: Peter

I'm a retired civil servant in Surrey, UK. and long-time blogger at Conscious Entities. These days I'm spending more time writing stories and doing other creative stuff

April ’23 Competitions

March 18, 2023

Here is a look at writing competitions I might enter during the coming month (so no poetry or competitions that are not open to UK writers, for example).

  • The Grindstone Novel Competition looks for the first 5,000 words of your novel, plus a synopsis. Entry is £16, and you could win £1,000 plus introductions to some people who might be helpful. The deadline is 1 April.
  • Nimrod is running the Katherine Ann Porter competition. Up to 7,500 words, $20 to enter, and a top prize of $2,000. Again, the deadline is 1 April.
  • The Missouri Review’s Perkoff Prize will take up to a sprawling 8,500 words on the theme of health or medicine. Entry is $15, first prize £1,000, and the deadline is 2 April.
  • The Masters Review is back, seeking manuscripts of up to 7,000 words for another anthology: entry is $20 and you can win $500 plus publication. Enter by 2 April.
  • The Brick Lane Bookshop has a word limit of 1,000 to 5,000 words. Entry is £10, first prize £1,000, and you have until 3 April.
  • The Evening Standard is running a free competition – and you only have to produce 1,000 words, on the theme of ‘belonging’. The downside is that there’s no money prize, but you get mentoring, publication in the Standard and participation in various events. The deadline is 12 April.
  • For the John Gardner Memorial Prize you need up to 4,500 words. Entry is $19 and the top prize is $500. The deadline is 15 April.
  • Desperate Literature is back, looking for up to 2,000 words. Entry is €20 and you can win €1,500 plus a week’s literary residence in a splendid Italian castle. The deadline is 16 April.
  • The First Pages competition requires the first 1,250 words of your book: it’s $20 to enter, with a prize of $2000, and you must get your entry in by 24 April.
  • The Australian Book Review’s Elizabeth Jolley Prize requires up to 5,000 words. Entry is A$30, the top prize is A$6,000, and the deadline is 24 April.
  • With the same deadline, we have the Bath Short Story Award with entry fee of £9 (I’d round it up if it were me). The word count must be under 2,200 and the prize is £1,200.
  • The we have the Bristol Short Story Prize, which accepts up to 4,000 words. The entry fee is… £9 (is this a thing?), and the top prize £1,000. The deadline is 26 April.
  • The Ghost Story’s Supernatural Fiction Award is not restricted to actual ghost stories. The word count can be as high as 10,000, it costs $20 to enter, and you can win $1,500 plus of course publication. The deadline is 30 April.
  • With the same deadline, the Letter Review Short Story competition accepts stories up to 3,000 words. Again it’s $20 to enter and the prize is $600.
  • Mirk Fantasy magazine is new and wants stories up to 2,500 words on the theme ‘Outsiders’. It’s £5 to enter and the prize is £100. Any kind of fantasy is acceptable, but their favourite is apparently epic or high fantasy. Deadline 30 April.
  • Finally, you can get the ‘early bird’ entry fee of €12 if your entry for the Anthology short story prize is in by 30 April. If you’re prepared to pay €18, you can have until the end of August. Maximum 1,500 words and the top prize is €1,000 plus publication and a year’s subscription.

If you enter any of these and win (or get anywhere), do let me know!

Mirror

March 17, 2023

When we had fitted wardrobes done, we got a square sample of the wood used. It seemed a shame to throw it away, so I’ve added a mirror. The ‘floral’ swags on the corners are cut out of old cans and painted – they sort of pick up a motif from the curtains (or anyway that was the intention). I wasn’t sure acrylic paint would stick, but it seems fine.

Hockney at Lightroom

February 27, 2023

There has been a bit of a fashion lately for shows where an artist’s works are projected at huge size on the walls and floors. The Hockney one at Lightroom (‘Bigger and Closer, not smaller and further away’) is the first I know of where the artist is alive and actively involved in the show. Hockney, of course, has always been up for using technology, whether cameras or more recently iPads.

This show amounts to a guide or commentary to all the different periods of his career, narrated by the man himself. I thought a few things worked particularly well – watching the construction of some paintings, joining in his ‘Wagner Ride’ and animations of his set designs (he has apparently suggested the Lightroom set up could be used to stage a short opera).

It’s lucky that Hockney is good at explaining his views on perspective, say, or the representation of time. He tells us how much he liked it being always warm and sunny in L.A., but he also says there is no bad weather. (‘If it’s raining, I’ll paint the rain: if it’s snowing, I’ll paint the snow. All of the world is beautiful, really, but people don’t look at it.)

Dead Puppets

February 22, 2023

I’ve fallen a bit behind with my reviews, but I have to say a belated word about ‘Famous Puppet Death Scenes’ by the Old Trout Puppet Workshop from Canada. It is indeed essentially a puppet show with a series of death scenes showing off a range of jokes and ingenious stunts. You could call the style Gothic Absurd, perhaps: supposedly the sponsor, a puppet himself, has put together for our edification these celebrated death scenes, culminating in his own. The series is loosely bound together by some repeated motifs, especially a number of extracts from that seminal work The Feverish Heart by Nordo Frot.
The pieces are funny and ingenious (sometimes you may suspect a bit has found its way into the show because it’s such an amusing idea, rather than because it fits the theme brilliantly, but hey, what’s wrong with that?) and actually have some genuine shock value. You won’t expect deep philosophy, but things are rounded out with a little moral reflection, delivered as snappily as the rest. If this show or this group ever come your way, give it a try.

Ann Pattison Memorial Prize

February 21, 2023

Sutton Writers has renamed its annual competition after Ann Pattison, a stalwart of the group who passed away recently. This year there had to be a link with St Mary’s church in Beddington, and they introduced separate categories for poetry and prose. I won the poetry (but not the overall trophy)! Maybe I should give poetry more of a try…

March ’23 Competitions

February 20, 2023

Here is a look at writing competitions I might enter which have deadlines in the coming month (so no poetry or flash, for example).

  • Not to be missed, the Alpine Fellowship seeks stories of up to 2,500 words on the theme of ‘Flourishing’. They interpret this word in a particular way, so I recommend reading what they say about it. It’s free to enter: first prize is £3,000, down from the massive £10,000 of previous years, but still generous, and it comes with  an invitation to their August symposium in Fjällnäs, Sweden. The deadline is 1 March.
  • Not actually a competition, but with the same deadline, Guts Publishing is open for submissions of works at least 30,000 words long.
  • Is March 1 Guts Day? Because with the same deadline again we have the Gutsy Great Novelist competition, looking for Chapter One of your novel. This one costs $20 to enter, with a prize of $1,000.
  • The Fowey Festival competition has a deadline of 5 March, and seeks up to 1,500 words. It’s £10 to enter, with a £250 prize and the melancholy theme is ‘I’ll Never Be Young Again’.
  • Entries to the Tennessee Williams Short Story contest should have some link to the great author and be between 1,500 and 4,000 words. $10 to enter, a prize of $200, and the deadline is 11 March.
  • The BBC National Short Story Award is a big one, with a prize of £15,000 and your work published and broadcast. Entrants need a record of prior publication and self-publishing does not count. It’s free, however, and there’s a generous word count limit of 8,000. The deadline is 13 March.
  • The Perkoff Prize, from the Missouri Review, wants up to 8,500 words on health or medicine. It costs $15, the prize is $1,000, and the deadline is 15 March.
  • With the same deadline, Lorian Hemingway (granddaughter of Ernest and a notable writer herself) looks for up to 3,500 words. Entry is $15 if you’re quick or $20 later, and the prize is $1,500.
  • Also with a deadline of 15 March, Phoebe wants up to 5,000 words. Entry is $7 and top prize $500. The link goes to the Submittable page, scroll down for the relevant details.

All the rest have a deadline of 31 March.

  • The Deborah Rogers Foundation offers a big prize of £10,000 for a promising work in progress. Send 15 to 20,000 words of your manuscript so far. It’s free: the intention is to help give someone who is struggling the support they need to get their writing project delivered. You must reside in Britain, the Commonwealth, or Eire. As a comfortably retired person with plenty of opportunity to write, I probably won’t enter, but I hope they find a worthy winner.
  • The Clay Reynolds Prize from the Texas Review is a relatively rare opportunity for works in the novella form (20 to 50,000 words). Entry is $20, and you could win $500 plus publication.
  • The Crazy Cats are back with an Easter competition in which you must include swearing and/or insults: however, you are to use the names of pastries or chocolate as the offensive terms, you bunch of glazed croissants. Up to 2,500 words, £7.50 to enter and a prize of £70 (not huge but it would buy you a few pains au choc).
  • The focus is on experiences for the Long Covid anthology, which is free to enter. There will be no single winner, but selected accounts of the continued impact of the disease (up to 1,500 words) will be published and the authors will receive an honorarium.
  • That old warhorse the Henshaw prize is still plugging away, with the latest competition offering the usual £200 prize for stories up to 2,000 words: it’s £6 to enter and for a modest extra fee you can get feedback.
  • Finally, Pinch Literary Awards, from Memphis, wants up to 5,000 words. Entry is $20 and the prize is a nice $2,000.

Good luck if you enter any of these; if you get anywhere, please do let me know.

Spanish Treasures

February 14, 2023

‘Spain and the Hispanic World’ at the Royal Academy is a mixed bag which doesn’t really aim for a coherent view but presents a large selection from the American Hispanic Society’s collection (I believe their building is being refurbished at the moment). There are works by El Greco, Velasquez and Goya as well as other items whose interest is more historical or even ethnographic. There are fascinating maps and they also have a fine set of knockers on display (thank you, I’m here all week).

Goya’s large painting of the Duchess of Alba (‘The Black Duchess’ – he also did a white one), used on posters for the exhibition, is interesting. You notice she is pointing down, and at first I thought she was drawing attention to the remarkable shoes she is wearing, which are silver and sharply pointed. In fact, there is a message written in the sand at her feet: ‘Only Goya’ it says. Goya treasured this picture and kept it for himself. Hmm.

We also have a remarkable bust of Saint Acisclus, life size and unsettlingly realistic. The saint’s expression, which seems to change slightly when viewed from different angles, expresses a curiously anaemic distress at his head being cut off (here indicated only by a delicate red line).

Also memorable is the set of little pieces depicting the Four Fates of Man (death, hell, purgatory and heaven). Death doesn’t quite fit here: it seems to suggest that total extinction is another option hereafter, which surely isn’t the orthodox view.

El Greco’s work is always fascinating and here we’ve got good old St Jerome, recognisable by the invariable presence of a cardinal’s hat (though he never seems to wear it). His usual friend the lion is not shown, though. You couldn’t mistake El Greco for anyone else. Did those distortions, that otherworldly sense in his paintings, really come in part from poor eyesight? People have said something similar about Turner.

Mother Goose

February 4, 2023

It’s a lot of fun.

Mother Goose, starring Ian McKellen with John Bishop, is essentially a traditional pantomime, complete with absurd storyline, corny jokes, audience participation and of course, a dame.

In a pretty negative review, the Guardian said that if you were just going to see McKellen do his dame, you wouldn’t be disappointed, but that the rest of the show is underpowered. It is true that McKellen is really what the show is about: he is brilliant and it’s astonishing that at his age, he can take on a run of this length (touring till April). I think the Guardian is also right that when he briefly does a bit of Shakespeare straight, you kind of wish he would forget the panto and carry on. It is at least a welcome acknowledgement that he has played other parts besides Gandalf, a rôle we are reminded of perhaps a little too often here.

Yes, it’s true the jokes are not very sharp, especially the handful of political ones, but then this is panto, not satire. Granted, there is a sort of uneasiness about a pantomime with no children in the audience (a point they make a joke of). And I really wish they hadn’t decided to wrap things up with a rousing singalong of Sweet Caroline.

But… it’s a lot of fun.