Short Édition

November 20, 2020
Short edition vending machineMy story Castrapitheca has been bought by Short Édition to publish in their unique vending machines! (A big hat-tip to Susan O’Neal for tipping me off about this company.) These innovative machines are sited on stations, in libraries and elsewhere; at the touch of a button you can print off a story or poem of a selected length. Though new sites are arriving, there are currently only three of them in the UK (Canary Wharf is the closest to me), but there are lots in the USA and in the company’s original home, France. The stories are also accessible online and mine will also feature in their online quarterly review Short Circuit.

December 2020 Competitions

November 15, 2020
Here’s my look at competitions I might enter with deadlines in December (three are right at the start of the month).
  • ‘Language Evolves’ is the theme for a science fiction story competition with a word limit of 2,500 and a deadline of 1 December. It’s free to enter and the top prize is £400 plus publication in the New Welsh Review. The competition is linked with a workshop back in August, but you don’t have to have attended.
  • The Breakwater Review at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, offers $1,000 dollars and publication for a story of between 1,000 and 4,000 words. The deadline is again 1 December and the entry fee is $10.
  • A rare novella competition is being run by Lucent Dreaming with word count limits of 15,000 to 40,000 words, an unusual opportunity if you’ve got something in that bracket. The deadline is 4 December, top prize is £100, publication and some other goodies. Unusually, simultaneous submission is not allowed, though since there aren’t many novella competitions that probably isn’t an issue. Entry fee £4.
  • SF again; the Roswell Award is for stories up to 1,500 words; the top prize is $500, and your story may be read by a celebrity at the presentation. Entry is free and the deadline is 15 December. No fanfic, which won’t trouble me.
  • Janus Literary has a competition for stories of 750 to 1,000 words on the theme ‘wild dark sea’. Top prize is $400 and online publication, entry fee is $4 and the deadline is 16 December.
  • Staying with the general theme, Wild Words (an organisation that runs retreats, mentoring sessions and so on) invites pieces of up to 1,000 words inspired by one of three uplifting quotes (they actually say four quotes, but I only see three). The winner gets online publication and a one-hour mentoring session with the founder Bridget Holding. Judge for yourself whether that justifies a £7 entry fee. The deadline is 21 December.
  • Go west for the Devon and Cornwall International Novel Prize, which calls for your first 5,000 words with a 500 word synopsis. The deadline is 31 December and the top prize is £2000, a trophy and an online publishing contract. The entry fee is £15.
  • Finally, Swoop Books, the independent publisher, is running a competition for stories of 1,500 to 3,000 words on the theme ‘Ordinary People’. First prize is £100 and twenty stories will be published in an anthology (a proper paper one, I believe – that’s what I like to see); entry is £5.
Merry Christmas competing!

Upcycling Corks II

November 8, 2020

So I made place mats out of my collection of wine bottle corks; but what about the cork stoppers from bottles of spirits?

They would have made nice little cork feet to attach to the bottom of some amplifier or game console, but I didn’t have any that needed feet like that; anyway, there were too many. But the slight variation in sizes suggested another possibility; a chess set! And here it is.

A more skilful person would have carved the cork into a likeness of each piece, but I thought it was more within my range to produce symbols to add to the top of each cork. A couple of bases had to be painted to make up the correct tally of black and white.

The main problem with this is that I am rubbish at chess, and no one in my family really plays, so the set is unlikely to get much use. But the great thing is, I didn’t throw the corks away…

Exeter Longlist

November 5, 2020

I had recorded the Exeter Story Prize in my spreadsheet (yes, I have a spreadsheet) as a fail, but it turns out the judging process was just slow, and in fact I have been longlisted, which is gratifying! I’m not allowed to say which story yet, though.

(Update: it was ‘The Dimitropol Chinese Restaurant’, but alas it didn’t progress any further. )

Billboard TV

October 26, 2020

The Hammond House prize announces its results on a local (Lincolnshire) arts channel which they call ‘Billboard. This year they did a little montage of entrants, including me, introducing themselves. You can see it here, me at 8:50.

Last year I placed third, one of my best ever results, so it would probably be greedy to hope for anything this year.

Good Title

October 23, 2020

I was reviewing the rules for the Southport writing competition and I see they include the advice ‘Titles should be both appropriate and interesting.’ Who’d a thunk it, eh? No wonder my strategy of using titles that are both irrelevant and boring isn’t paying off.

Then I tried to come up with the most tedious title I could think of, and it is strangely difficult. A List of my Socks – no, somehow you start wondering about these items of footwear. Are they alphabetised or sorted by colour? The old Beachcomber column used to publish extracts from the List of Huntingdonshire Cabmen. In a televised version they got, I think Ralph Richardson to read them, and they were gripping.

What about Some Dream I had once – no, I’m interested already, even though other people’s dreams are notoriously tedious and dreams are a terrible plot deflator. Or Common Houseware Problems – the trouble is that with a title like that, you automatically suspect the author of slyly concealing a very uncommon narrative. The truly boring title has to sound sincere but be utterly colourless. In the end the best I could come up with was A Tale, which seems blandly uninviting. On reflection I thought I could go one better with A Further Tale, which adds the dispiriting hint that you’ve probably already missed any good bits. But I can still imagine glancing at it. So somehow I’m just not getting the real nadir of off-putting boredom.

November Competitions

October 20, 2020
Here’s my look at writing contests I’m thinking of entering next month.
  • The Caledonia Novel Award offers a top prize of £1,500, and for the best entrant from the UK and Ireland, a week-long course at the Moniack Mhor Creative Writing Centre. The judge is literary agent Laura Williams, who I believe is keen to find new talent; entrants cannot already have representation. They want the first 200 pages plus a 200 word synopsis (rather tight); the deadline is 1 November so you need to get moving quickly.
  • Also with a 1 November deadline is the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. This is judged in regions (1. Africa, 2. Asia, 3. Canada and Europe, 4. Caribbean and 5. Pacific.); regional winners get £2,500, with the overall winner getting £5,000. Entries in certain languages other than English are permitted (no idea how they judge across languages, and not all Commonwealth languages are covered – not even Hindi, it seems, though you can write in Bengali). If a winning entry is a translation, the translator gets a small extra prize, which is nice. They are looking for 2-5,000 words, one entry per writer.
  • Sutton Writers, that excellent group, invites Christmas ghost stories of up to 1,500 words, deadline Friday 13 November… In addition to online publication there will be a cash prize made up of the entry fees (£5 per story), so the more people enter, the bigger the prize!
  • Tripfiction promotes books with a strong sense of location, offering members a database where they can find recommended books about any particular place. Their competition encourages you to write some more of that kind of thing. They’re looking for 750 to 3,000 words with a strong ‘sense of place’; they provide more detailed tips, but only after you’ve registered (free) and signed up to enter. Top prize is £300, the deadline is 15 November.
  • Hope Mill Theatre is looking for plays of at least an hour’s length; top prize is £5,000 and a full performance. Finalists also get a scene performed and one-to-one mentoring sessions.  You need to submit the script, a short biog, synopsis and character list (thought a character list was a standard part of a script anyway?) all by 27 November.
  • Fiction Factory offers a top prize of £300 for stories up to 3,000 words, with a deadline of 30 November. Top stories will be published in an anthology. The judge is Tim Symonds, who writes stories about Sherlock Holmes, which might be a clue to what’s likely to go down well.
  • Last but certainly not least we have the prestigious Fish Prize for stories of up to 5,000 words. Top prize is €3,000 plus a 5 day Short Story Workshop at the West Cork Literary Festival. Second place brings a week at Anam Cara Writers’ Retreat and €300.  Even the honourable mentions get €200, and the top ten stories will be published in an anthology. The deadline is 30 November.
I have to admit I’m still working on October competitions…

Literary Taxidermy

October 19, 2020

I got an honourable mention for my story ‘New Troy’ in the Literary Taxidermy competition! This is an unusual competition where you have to take the first and last sentences of a novel (Brave New World in this case) and fill in the gap with a new story.

Piranesi

October 13, 2020

A building that fills a whole world; an endless sequence of halls, all filled with statues. Here and there the sea has broken in and flooded or destroyed some of the great marble figures and massive stairways. And here lives one resourceful man who has contrived to live off fish, befriending the albatross and other birds who also live here. He is not quite alone. He regularly meets the Other, a man in smart suits, and together they try to obtain powerful magic. The Other jokingly calls him ‘Piranesi’; he knows this not his real name but does not mind. Piranesi believes there are probably only fifteen people in the world; the rest are all skeletons that he cares for respectfully.

This is the new novel from Susanna Clarke that we fans of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell have been waiting for so eagerly. We had The Ladies of Grace Adieu to keep us going, but nothing more substantial. Are we satisfied?

Well, the new novel is not a sequel, and as we eventually discover, it is set in the twenty-first century. There are no delightful footnotes, and it is relatively short. However, it clearly comes from the same imagination as Strange and Norrell. There are no fairies, but the underlying conception of magic as a dialogue with the powers of Nature is still here. The fascination with (the real) Piranesi’s bizarre architectural fantasies is obviously here, too. Even if our hero were not given the tell-tale nickname we should recognise that these halls owe something to the dream-like images of the Italian architect and artist, though for many readers they will call up faint echoes of Borges’ total library, too.  These visions presumably shaped the King’s Roads in Strange and Norrell and explicitly provide the design for the tremendous Thoresby Bridge in Grace Adieu. There are some other signs of kinship with Strange and Norrell. We might say (slight spoiler) that both books feature a resourceful black man with a false friend who inadvertently inherits an enchanted realm.
One of Clarke’s great achievements in Strange and Norrell was to provide a really satisfying conception of magic which chimed well with folklore yet got everything to make sense. Here we don’t quite get that. Piranesi’s world is explained, partly by a kind of guru who seems to be a cross between Julian Jaynes and Aleister Crowley; but there’s a certain amount of handwaving involved. In some ways I almost feel it would have been better to leave the modern world out of it and simply give Piranesi adventures in his own self-justifying world.

Overall, this isn’t the further volume of Strange and Norrell that many of us would have liked, but it’s a great book and very welcome. More please, more!