Kindle Talk
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Authors, Books, Computers & Technical on February 6, 2012
I’ve finally got round to buying a cover for the Kindle I received at Christmas. It’s a bright pink neoprene zip-up sleeve.
I wanted to use the Kindle for a while before deciding whether to go for the book-like cover or the sleeve – but I couldn’t start on the e-books until I’d finished the ‘proper’ book I was already part way through (Harvesting the Heart by Jodi Picoult – not as good as some of her others, I thought).
Before I started using the Kindle I was a bit worried that it wouldn’t feel like a book and I wouldn’t be able to get engrossed in the story. But it was no problem, the page turning becomes automatic and the fact that it’s an electronic device doesn’t reduce the enjoyment. A colleague at work said he was so involved in what he was reading that he totally forgot it wasn’t a book and reached his hand over to turn the page manually.
The only thing I find frustrating is the choice of font sizes. I was hoping to find one that would let me read without wearing my glasses but my ideal size seems to fall in the middle of two choices – so I still put the specs on.
So far I’ve worked my way electronically through A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton, How to Make £10 in 10 Minutes by Linda Lewis and I’ve just started Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (am I the only person never to have seen the film or read the book?).
Now, I’m wondering about downloading Write a Great Synopsis by Nicola Morgan. I think I’m going to need it to stand any chance of getting an entry ready for the Good Housekeeping Novel Writing Competition – it’s not going too well at the moment! Is anybody else struggling?
Persistance Pays
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Markets, Successes on February 2, 2012
Most of us have ‘favourite’ stories, poems or articles that for some reason have never made it into print. For some
Image via Wikipedia
reason we particularly like these pieces but it seems no-one else does! Recently I resurrected a couple of stories which had unsuccessfully done the rounds but which I thought had a strong idea behind them.
The first was a ‘twist in the tail’ about a fortune-teller and was based on an anecdote that a work colleague told me. It was rejected by both Take a Break Fiction Feast and The Weekly News. I managed to distill the essence of the story down into just 60 words and emailed it off to Real People, which publishes a 60 word story each week and pays £25. And finally my fortune-teller tale found a home! It was published a couple of weeks ago and now I feel that I can stop fretting over that ‘favourite’ and move on.
Similarly, another story, set partly in the early 1980s and partly in the present day, had flopped in a couple of competitions and had been rejected by Woman’s Weekly. It then also got turned down by My Weekly – but this time with a few words about why it wasn’t quite right. I took notice of the comments, reworked the story and sent it off yet again – this time to People’s Friend. This week I had an email from one of the People’s Friend fiction team saying that they liked the story, but also listing a number of changes that would be necessary before it could be considered for the magazine. So now I’m editing the story yet again and crossing my fingers that when I re-submit it, People’s Friend will say ‘Yes’ and finally give my story a home.
So if you’ve written something you really love but can’t seem to get it accepted anywhere – keep trying. Persistance can pay!
CheerReader Humourous Short Story Competition 2012
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions on January 30, 2012
Here’s a nice contrast to the competition I mentioned last week about death and dying.
Brian David from the CheerReader website has asked me to give their quarterly short story competitions a mention – and they want stories that will make the reader laugh.
The theme for each competition is – anything, as long as it’s funny. 100 Euros is the prize on offer for the winner in each of the 4 competitions. The winner plus commended stories will be published on the website.
The maximum word count is 1500 and the entry fee is 5 Euros (payable via PayPal). The closing dates are March 15th 2012, June 15th 2012, September 15 th 2012 and December 15th 2012. Winners will be announced 2 weeks after each closing date.
There are plenty of stories on the website to give you an idea of what goes down well with the organisers. Have a look here.
The full competition details are here.
How to make £10 in Ten Minutes
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Books on January 26, 2012
Cover via Amazon
I was one of the many who received a Kindle for Christmas and one of the first books I downloaded was Linda Lewis’ new book How To Make £10 in Ten Minutes. Linda is a prolific Womag writer, competition judge, columnist etc.
Her book is short and to the point. It gives useful advice on how to find the material that the weekly women’s magazines (and to a lesser extent other publications) thrive on. For instance, lots of magazines pay for Tips that either save money or make life easier – but how do you find tips to submit? Linda explains.
I was tempted by the book because you can download the first chapter for free, which I did. After reading it, I decided it was worth paying 89p to read the rest. Now all I need is one successful submission following Linda’s advice and I’ll be quids in!
By the way, did anyone else see the bit in the news that said around 20% of those who received a Kindle for Christmas haven’t used it? In contrast, only 9% of iPads have remained unused – probably because you don’t buy someone an iPad ‘on spec’. If I was spending all that money I’d want to be sure that it was something the recipient actually wanted!
Can you guess what the most unused present was? Smellies and toiletries.
Read the full story here.
5 Word Challenge – The Answer
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions, Writing on January 18, 2012
The 5 word sentence, where each of the 5 words is identical is:
Image via Wikipedia
Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
The meaning is:
Buffalo buffalo (i.e. buffalo that live in Buffalo) buffalo (i.e a verb meaning to intimidate or fight) Buffalo buffalo (i.e. buffalo that live in Buffalo).
This is also explained here and a longer more complicated version is here. One day this knowledge might make you the winner of a pub quiz!
Whilst we’re on the subject of short pieces of writing, here are a couple of flash fiction competitions:
- Early Works Press are offering £75 first prize plus two runners-up prizes of £10 for a 100-word story. Entry is £3.50 and the closing date is 31/8/2012. Full details here.
- Multi-Story want 600 words and offer prizes of £300, £100 and £50 for an entry fee of £5 (or £8 for 2 stories). It’s an open theme and the closing date is 29th February 2012. Full details are here.
5 Word Challenge
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Writing on January 16, 2012
Here’s a challenge that my sister-in-law set me at Christmas – I failed miserably but I’m sure you can do better.
Can you create a 5-word sentence where each of the 5 words is exactly the same?
Here’s a clue – the word has 3 different meanings within the sentence, it is used as a verb, a noun and a proper noun. The word is spelt the same each time it is used.
I’ll post the answer on Wednesday (if you use the box on the right to subscribe to this blog via email, the answer will automatically arrive in your inbox as soon as it’s posted – it’s free and you can unsubscribe at any time).
In the meantime if you’re running out of inspiration for your writing, take a look at Sally Quilford’s blog. She’s currently running a challenge to write 100,000 words in 100 days – not for the faint-hearted and definitely not for me! But to help those who are up to the challenge she is posting a selection of writing prompts each day. Many of them are quite inspiring and could easily trigger a short story or a poem. Why not nip over there, choose a prompt and get writing!
Cloud Backup or External Hard Drive?
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Computers & Technical on January 11, 2012
Over the last couple of weeks the computer gremlins have invaded our household, throwing up the ‘blue screen of death‘
Image by Bill Strong via Flickr
on the desktop PC and various funnies/frozen screens on my daughters’ laptops. This made me nervous and I decided we needed to have a proper back up copy of everything. I’ve mentioned the importance of regular backups before on this blog (see here) but I’ve still been bumbling along with a memory stick for documents and the occasional backup of photos to CD when we remember to do it.
So off we went to buy an external hard drive. But the nice man in the shop talked us out of it and into buying a Cloud back up instead. This would mean we could access our data from any PC, it would be equivalent to an ‘off-site’ backup and my elder daughter wouldn’t have to cart yet another bit of kit off to university with her. It seemed a great idea so we bought it and set it to save everything that was on my elder daughter’s laptop – music, photos, university work etc.
It took hours and hours and hours and sent us way over our internet usage allowance (I suppose if I’d thought about it I would have realised this would be the case). Then we had trouble trying to determine whether the scheduled hourly scan & save for changed documents was actually happening. I tried phoning the Cloud support line but a machine told me all queries must be logged via the website.
We concluded the Cloud was a bad idea and went back to the original, external drive idea for the other PCs. It was so much easier! A few ‘copy and pastes’ and everything was saved and we could easily see it was there.
I’ve previously used the limited free cloud storage provided by Dropbox (and recommended by Simon Whaley) for some of my documents and will carry on using it. But it seems to me that if you have large amounts of pictures or music then an external hard drive is the better choice (especially since they don’t tend to change very often and it’s easy to remember to back them up each time you download a new bunch of photos or an album).
Does anyone else have experience of Cloud backup – am I the only one that struggled with it?
Valentine’s Day Short Story Competition
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions on January 5, 2012
Gail Lawler has asked me to give a mention to the Valentine’s Day short story competition that she is running through the website www.5minutefiction.co.uk. Entries should be on the subject of ‘Love’ and must be between 100 and 1,500 words in length.
The entry fee is £1 per story and the prizes are Amazon vouchers to the value of £30, £20 and £10 for 1st, 2nd and 3rd prizes respectively. These 3 winners, plus up to 20 additional entries, will be considered for publication in an e-book anthology and will receive a share of the royalties. The rules also state that ‘all entries will receive feedback’.
Entry is via email and the entry fee is payable via PayPal. Closing date is 5th February 2012 and the winning stories will be published on the website on 14th February 2012.
I’m sure that most of us have written a story at sometime on the theme of love, so with such a reasonable entry fee, now is the time to dig it out, polish it up and send it on its way!
But first check out the full terms and conditions here.
New Year’s Resolutions…or maybe not
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions, Writing on December 28, 2011
I don’t like New Year’s resolutions for two reasons – both related to the fact that they have to be made public. Firstly, when you say aloud something that you really want to do, it can sound impossible to achieve or just stupid – and that is a bad way to start. Secondly, once everyone knows that you’re training for a marathon or writing a novel, they will keep asking how you are doing. This is fine when things are going well but it’s awful to have to own up if you’re struggling. So I am going to keep my own aspirations to myself this year and instead I’ll just share a few mini-goals that I’ve put on my ‘Writing To Do List’ fot the first part of 2012:
- Enter all 4 of Eddie Walsh’s Emerald Writing Workshops 500 word story competitions plus the 4 sentence story. I intend to send them all together in one envelope (saving money on stamps!) before the first closing date of 28th February 2012. I’ve already drafted most of them – I just need an idea for the story set on a train…
- Enter Della Galton’s competition for a 250 word story about a New Year’s resolution that went wrong. The prize is a copy of her new book ‘Moving On’. Closes 10am Jan 4th.
- Enter The Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook 2012 competition. Stories on the theme of ‘Identity’ of up to 2,000 words. Closes 14th February 2012. I really fancy the prize – £500 plus an Arvon course.
- Enter the Swanwick 2012 competition for a story or article on the theme ‘A Sense of Duty’. First prize is a week at the Swanwick summer school. Closes 30th April 2012. I fancy there will be fewer entrants in the article section but at the moment I’m struggling to come up with an idea.
Finally, (following yet another rejection from Take a Break’s Fiction Feast) I am going to stop banging my head against a brick wall on markets that my writing is obviously not suited for.
Happy New Year to you all – and thanks for sticking with me through 2011!
Sally Jenkins 