Write Exposure & Words Magazine Competitions
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions on November 14, 2011
Write Exposure has launched its first monthly competition. There are 3 categories – short fiction (up to 1200 words), flash fiction (up to 250 words) and poetry. Entry into each category is £4 or you can enter all 3 for £9.
The winner will be showcased on the website for a month along with 3 other ‘honourable mentions’.
Prize money depends on the number of entrants. I couldn’t find it on the website so I contacted Cheslyn Baker, who is running the competition, to find out the ‘formula’ that would be used to calculate the prize. She told me that it would be 25% of the total entry fee received in each category.
The theme for the competitions will change each month. For November it is “I know your face” and the closing date is 30th November.
Please read the full details here before you enter.
In most competitions we never know what percentage of the entry fees was paid out in prizes so this competition is being transparent in that respect. It is also being open about its judging. It will be using a panel of 3, one of whom is a ‘citizen’ judge and any of us can apply to sit in that third seat. See the website for details.
What does anybody think about prize money being 25% of the pot? Is it fair? Can we (the entrants) actually reach a fair conclusion on this question when so many other competitions only advertise a fixed prize rather than a percentage?
There is a lot of work in running a writing competition – including a large amount of administration as well as the actual reading and judging of entries. 100 entries would be required to win £100 – and I’m sure that a lot of competitions offering a prize of £100 receive more than 100 entries so maybe 25% is realistic.
By coincidence I came across another competition recently where the prize money is dependent on the number of entrants. Words Magazine is running a ‘winner takes all’ competition for short stories of up to 2000 words. Entry fee is £3 – so if 100 people enter the prize will be £300 (Closing date is December 31st).
Best of luck if you decide to enter either of these!
Tragedy
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Events, Writing on November 7, 2011
My daughter’s school was offering a ‘community’ lecture on Tragedy by Professor David Robert of the English
department at Birmingham City University. I haven’t studied English Literature since my O’ level in 1979 (Julius Caesar, Lord of the Flies & Keats’ poetry – you never forget those books do you!) so I thought it was about time to broaden my horizons.
Wikipedia tells us that tragedy is ‘a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure’. This definition seems to make anyone that has ever enjoyed Hamlet or Macbeth heartless and cruel! But David explained that watching a tragedy is a catharsis because we see someone in a worse situation than ourselves. The hero who suffers a tragic end can be seen as scapegoat. His demise makes us feel good because we didn’t suffer such a terrible end – he does the suffering for the rest of us.
David took us on a whistle-stop tour of famous tragedies through the ages from ‘Oedipus Rex’ to ‘Death of a Salesman’. Then he gave a mention to the current popularity of disaster movies such as ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, which can also be seen as tragedies.
Tragedies are mostly written by men and this could be because there is a more certain self-destruct pessimism about the world within the male psyche (and they call us the moody ones!).
So where is all this taking us in the context of our writing? Well, I’m not sure really unless you’re a playwright since tragedies seem to be generally written for performance rather than as a narrative. I had hoped that learning about the greats of English Literature might inform my own writing but I can’t see People’s Friend or My Weekly falling over themselves to buy a tragedy!
But it wasn’t a waste of time because it broadened my horizons and I got a certificate of attendance!
By the way if there are any English scholars out there do correct me if I’ve got anything wrong here.
The Magic of Secondhand Books
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Books on November 7, 2011
Image by Arun.R via Flickr
What is the allure of secondhand books? Why do so many of us enjoy sorting through other people’s discarded reading material?
If you’re anything like me then you’ll find it impossible to come away from a secondhand bookstall empty-handed. And we’re not alone – more and more charities are opening shops that sell only books. Oxfam also sell them online.
So do these shops attract us because we like a bargain? I think there’s more to it than that – after all I don’t enjoy rooting through the donated blouses and shoes in a charity shop.
Is it because, unlike a slightly used skirt, a secondhand book can give us the same experience as the new version? Possibly, although new books (like a new car or a new carpet) have that unbeatable ‘new’ smell and that’s part of their attraction. Some older pre-read books can have a slightly less attractive odour.
I think the excitement of ferreting through a secondhand book shop is the journey into the unknown that it offers. The books might be jumbled up or loosely grouped – but you never know what you might find! It could be a favourite classic from your childhood, a recipe book used by your grandmother or the latest best-seller. The secondhand book shop experience is totally different to the well organised High Street book chain where everything is in its place and the staff can consult the computer and tell you instantly whether something is in stock.
I now have a bookcase groaning with books. Those that I’ve really enjoyed I pass onto friends, the others find their way back into the perpetual charity secondhand book cycle. I have sold the odd one on Ebay but found that it wasn’t worth all the hassle for the amount of money generated. But if you have a real mountain of books and would like to try and make some cash out of them (maybe to buy a Kindle?!) have a look here for some tips on how to set up a bookselling business.
Print Express Poetry Competition
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions, Poetry on November 3, 2011
Alex Black contacted me last week and asked if I’d give a mention to the poetry competition that his company, PrintExpress.co.uk, is running. So here goes:
- Entry is free!
- First prize is £150
- Poems can be on any theme and up to 45 lines long
- Entry is via email
- Closing date is November 30th 2011
Full details can be found here
So with nothing to lose in entry fees or postage, even a non-poet like me might enter!
World Book Night 2012 – Be a Giver
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Books, Events, Promotion on October 31, 2011
Do you fancy enticing people who don’t read for pleasure to open a novel and give it a try?
Applications are now open for those who would like to be a ‘giver’ on World Book Night 2012.
This entails distributing 24 copies of your chosen book (selected from a list of 25) to people who read very little. 20,000 givers are needed on April 23rd 2012. Givers must be over 16 and able to collect the 24 books from their local library/bookshop. The closing date for applications is December 31st 2011.
To apply click here. You must state where, to whom and why you want to give the books away.
A wide range of books are available to give, including Pride and Prejudice, The Book Thief and The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic. The full list is here.
I would choose to give The Book Thief but I’m still thinking about where I would hand them out. I’d want to be sure of finding people who don’t currently read much but who would appreciate the book and at least give it a proper try.
Encouraging more people to read books has to be a good thing for the publishing industry and thus, in turn, a good thing for all us writers who would like to see our work in print.
FBFT Sports Writing Competition 2012
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions on October 27, 2011
Don’t panic – this is not a competition for a kick by kick account of a football match or an in-depth account of an athletics
Image via Wikipedia
meeting. FreeBetsFreeTips, the organisers, are happy to accept prose or poetry, fiction or non-fiction. And it’s free entry – so no excuse not to have a go.
The prizes are £50, £30 and £20 plus publication on the Free Bets Free Tips website. Word count is 1500. You can write about any subject as long as it relates to sport. The organisers are looking for something exciting, original or even abstract.
Closing date is 13th May 2012 and last year’s winning entries can be read here.
By the way, if you Google ‘Sally Jenkins’ you will discover the Wikipedia entry for an American sports writer. Amongst many other things she wrote cyclist, Lance Armstrong‘s story – ‘It’s not About the Bike‘.
Maybe I should enter this competition and see if I can emulate my namesake’s success in this field…
Novel Writing Booster Kit with Martin Davies
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Authors, Events, Writing, Writing Exercises on October 24, 2011
The other Saturday I attended a novel-writing ‘booster’ workshop with the author, Martin Davies at Mackworth library.
The aim was to build on what we had learnt earlier in the year at his ‘starter’ workshop .
Martin set lots of exercises to get the pen moving over the page and thus prove to ourselves that ‘writing’ isn’t some wonderful magical gift that you must have in bucket loads in order to succeed – instead tenacity is one of the qualities most useful to a writer.
Once again Martin was very generous with his advice and I came away with the following tips jotted down:
- If a minor character is feeling 2-dimensional, give him an unusual hobby to flesh him out
- Before you begin your novel, write a 2 sentence or ‘elevator’ pitch – and repeat this exercise at regular intervals to make sure you’re not going off at a tangent
- The odd observed detail will bring your settings and characters to life – not swathes of description
- When setting a scene, mention one big thing e.g. the mountain that dominated the landscape, and one small thing e.g. the cigarette burn on the table-cloth.
- Finish the first draft without looking back over your work AT ALL
- In preparation for the second draft print out the manuscript and read it through, marking any corrections/changes as you go – don’t change anything yet because you’ll lose the momentum of how the story flows. When you’ve read & marked to the end you can begin changing the text. Repeat this as many times as necessary.
- Read aloud to check the flow of the story.
- Write what you feel excited and moved by.
- Don’t tell other people what your novel is about – it will make it feel stale to you.
So now I’m trying to pluck up the courage to go back to the Pocket Novel that I completed in the summer. I need to turn that rough first draft into something comprehensible – or maybe I’ll decide that it’s rubbish and bin it! But, as Martin said, no writing is wasted – it’s all practice for better writing.
100 Not Out!
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions on October 20, 2011
Yes, this is my 100th post!
When I started out around 12 months ago I wasn’t sure whether I’d have enough material to sustain a blog for more than a few weeks never mind a whole year – but I’m still here!
Blogging becomes addictive (watching those stats go up and down and wondering if you’ve offended somebody when there are no comments on a post) and it generates a feeling of power (I can write what I like without wondering if it will get rejected by some picky editor).
I’ve found some lovely people online (but I’ve never met you – so maybe you’re really all mad-axe murderers waiting for the right moment to strike!) as we cross-pollinate each others’ blogs.
So to celebrate, here are a few competitions mentioning 100 in their requirements or winnings:
- The Angels and Devils Poetry Competition is offering a first prize of £100 and has a closing date of 31 December 2011
- Each quarter Cheerreader are offering a 100 Euro prize for a humourous short story. The next two closing dates are 15 December 2011 and 15 March 2012.
- Helen Yendall is offering a £15 Amazon e-gift voucher for a 100 word story based on the photo displayed on her blog. Closing date is 31 October 2011.
- And a reminder that Readers Digest are running another 100 Word Story Competition with £1000 first prize. Closing date is 31 January 2012.
Thanks to those of you who’ve been with me since the beginning and a warm welcome to all those who’ve joined along the way. Here’s to the next 100 posts!
Article Writing
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Markets on October 17, 2011
The other week I ran an article writing workshop for my writers’ group. I’m not one for speaking in front of a group and so was a bit concerned about how it might go. However, once I got going and the participants started asking questions, I began to relax and enjoy it.
We started off by analysing the pile of magazines that we’d brought with us:
- Comparing staff names on the masthead to the by-lines on the articles to see which were written ‘in-house’
- Looking at the adverts to get a feel for the readership of the magazine
This raised the problem of the expense of buying magazines to search for markets in this way – especially since it’s necessary to read around 3 consecutive (and up-to-date) issues in order to spot the regular columnists and get a proper feel for the content. Unless you live near a large, well-stocked library there’s no easy answer to this – other than begging, borrowing or stealing from your friends. What do other people do?
Once each of us had established a potential market, we brainstormed a list of ideas that we felt might make an article for that magazine – trying to stay away from the obvious well-worn themes. This was the part of the evening that I found really interesting. There was a wonderfully wide range of feature ideas – displaying sides of my fellow writers that I never knew existed. Without giving too much away (because I hope they’re all going to write-up their articles) these included:
- Batman
- Activities for winter evenings
- Dog-related issues
- The significance of one lady’s mother’s choice of wedding date
- Railway memories
- Multiple Sclerosis
We went on to draft a short email pitch to the editor before the chairman rang his bell and our time was up.
There are a couple of useful blogs that include generous advice on article writing and are well worth a visit:
Remember there are many, many more markets for articles than fiction or poetry – so why not give it a go?
P.S. Many thanks and welcome to those of you that requested email updates to this blog over the past fortnight – a donation is now winging its way to the RNIB.
Birmingham Book Festival Short Story Competition 2012
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions on October 13, 2011
The annual Birmingham Book Festival is currently under way and it includes a short story competition.
The theme is ‘Clocks’ and the story must be between 1000 and 2000 words. The winner will receive £100 plus a writing workshop of their choice (from a program yet to be announced for next spring) and the second prize winner will receive £50. Two runners-up will receive tickets to an event of their choice in the Birmingham Book Festival 2012 ‘Spring Thing’. Each prize winner will also get to read their story at a special celebratory event.
Entry fee is £5 and closing date is 31 January 2012. Full details are here.
Remember – stories with a theme, like this one, attract fewer entrants than ‘open’ competitions – so have a brainstorm and try to come up with something unusual on the theme of ‘clocks’.
Also – until midnight tomorrow (14th October 2011) I am donating £1 to the RNIB for each new subscriber to this blog. Simply enter your email address in the box on the right – it’s free and you can unsubscribe at any time. More information is here.
Sally Jenkins 