Scrooge and Marley, my self-published prequel to A Christmas Carol is out today!
This is the exciting tale of how the two young men (Marley the lively ideas man and Scrooge the human calculator) cut a swathe across the Victorian City of London in a series of takeovers that lead to a confrontation with corpse-like Sir James Owtright.
Meanwhile Scrooge loses his beloved sister, and his objections to her charitable work begin to drive a wedge between him and his fiancée.
Anthologies are sometimes a bit cheap and cheerful, but I must say Dust and Divinity, the recent one from WHE is unusually nice quality, hardback with some great artwork.
My story The Judgement of the Livelli, was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Mainstream/Literary Short Story category of the 95th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition! There were over 3,300 entries, so it’s not bad going.
I’ve been waiting patiently for the official announcement of my poetry win at Writer’s Digest, but it turns out I missed it and it has been up for over a month… it’s here.
November is coming, but there will be no NaNoWriMo…
You may know that this was the annual exercise in which people attempted to write an entire novel (well, 50,000 words, a bit skimpy actually) in a single month. You could register your progress, meet up with fellow writers and so on.
There was always something a little strange about this. It seemed designed for people who didn’t really enjoy writing, but wanted to get it off their bucket list once and for all. Arguably it encouraged bad writing because quality was not important, just quantity. And while it was meant to be encouraging, most people always failed.
Apparently there had been several problems. There were claims that its forums were misused, though the organisers were quick to act. It weirdly decided to allow the use of AI, which most people thought rendered the exercise pointless (it even claimed that denying AI to participants was ableist). Somehow it ran out of money.
My feelings are ambivalent, but they include a big element of regret. I entered (and succeeded) in 2008 with a story about, what else, someone entering NaNoWriMo. I polished the result up afterwards, but it’s still medium bad with a few good lines. Probably my biggest mistake was to make my hero, the narrator, pretentious and verbose. Humorously, but still.
Nevertheless, in a spirit of commemoration and for what it’s worth, here it is.
Hurrah! My poem Plaints of the Old Git has won first place in the ‘rhyming poetry’ category of the annual Writers’ Digest competition! The prize is $1,000 plus various other goodies.
I’m not quite sure whether I’m allowed to share the poem here, but if so I will. It consists of three sonnets, with two lines filleted out of the second so as to come within the 40 line limit.
