A Successful Week!
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions, Successes on September 26, 2011
After a dearth of acceptances over the summer months I’ve had four bits of good news in three days:
- Writers’ Forum have accepted an article that I first pitched to them back in July.
- I have a short story in this week’s Weekly News (dated 24th September). Thanks to Julia for letting me know it had been published and to Helen Yendall, my writing buddy, for giving the story the once-over before I sent it.
- I have won the Friends of Morley Literature Festival short story competition. This was a free to enter competition (which we like!) with a £50 first prize. There is also a prize-giving in Morley, near Leeds – I’m still working on the logistics of attending that. The 2012 short story competition is now open and entry forms are available via email from the organisers. Details are here.
- I have been asked to write for the Work Your Way magazine website. I mentioned this magazine on my blog a couple of weeks ago. It’s a new publication aimed at entrepreneurial/self-employed mums.
So at the moment my head’s buzzing and I feel great! But now I need to get some more work out there in the hope of getting this ‘high’ feeling again in the future. So I’m trying to learn from these acceptances.
Writers’ Forum taught me not to be afraid to chase an editor if he doesn’t reply to a pitch within a reasonable time – the summer holidays meant time was short and things were overlooked.
The Weekly News story was written from a male point of view and involved sport. This may have increased its chances of success in a publication read by both sexes.
My competition win shows that there’s nothing to lose and everything to be gained by sending off an entry to a free competition. For more free competitions check out Patsy Collins’ blog.
The offer from Work Your Way came about because once I’d had one article accepted by the magazine, I went back to the editor with another idea before she had time to forget who I was! Now I have to get my thinking cap on and come up with several more ideas – it feels quite scary to be put on the spot!
Writing Competitions – the way to win
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Books, Competitions, Resources on September 19, 2011
In my quest for success I’ve started reading ‘Writing Competitions – the way to win’ by Iain Pattison and Alison
Chisholm. It covers short story, poetry and article writing contests.
Chapter 2 deals with targeting the right sort of competitions to increase your chances of success. Iain and Alison advise a few ways of doing this:
- Forget the big internationals and concentrate on small competitions that will attract fewer entrants. Not many of us are likely to get anywhere in something like the Bridport but we might stand a chance of being placed in a local writing competition. I would much rather win a book token in a small competition than see my entry disappear into the black hole of well-publicised literary contest.
- Choose a competition with a difficult theme – this will put many entrants off because it’s too much of a challenge and a previously written story can’t be recycled to fit the subject. Competitions with an open theme attract the most entrants.
- Try competitions where entry is limited by the rules – for example competitions restricted to unpublished writers or to writers of a certain age or to those living in a specified area
Iain and Alison also advise targeting contests where the entry fee is high compared to the prize fund. This is because we are all naturally mean and therefore the number of entrants will be low. I’m afraid my own natural meanness won’t let me endorse this advice but I can see that there is logic in this method of choosing where to send your work. So if you’re not as tight with money as me, you might want to try it.
And speaking of relatively small competitions (& I don’t mean that in a derogatory way), Bev Morley is running a short story competition on the theme of ‘Christmas’ via her blog. First, second and third prizes are £50, £25 and £10 respectively plus publication in a Kindle anthology, up to 12 further stories will also be included in the anthology. The word limit is 3,000 and closing date 30th September. Entry by email only and the fee is £3. Full details are here.
‘Writing Competitions – the way to win’ is worth a read if you want to increase your chances of success in competitions.
Work Your Way Magazine
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Markets, Resources on September 12, 2011
The launch issue of Work Your Way Magazine dropped through my letter box recently. It’s a quarterly magazine aimed
at freelance, self-employed and entrepreneurial mums – categories that lots of us writers fall into.
In her first ‘Letter from the Editor’, Mary Cummings describes the magazine as a ‘celebration of all you fabulous mums who have split the nine to five office scene and are now working from home’.
Mary has used a variety of freelance contributors (I know because I am one!) to source the wide range of features in the magazine. The areas covered include:
- Family – features on Raising Confident Kids, Parenting a Child with Special Needs and A Day in the Life of a Freelance Mum
- Work – features on Coaching To Help You Move Forward, Good Customer Care and an interview with Carol Savage of mydish.co.uk, who secured a £100,000 investment from Deborah Meaden on Dragon’s Den
- Top Tips – features on How Much Should I Charge?, Blog for Business (that’s me!) and Cash in Your Bookcase
- Health and Well-being – features on A Good Night’s Sleep, What to Avoid When Working from Home and Yoga
The magazine also has a flourishing website which is currently asking for online contributions. Click here for details.
Work Your Way features in Writing Magazine this month (October 2011 issue) as a case study for Elaine Everest’s article How to Set Up a Start-up. In it Mary describes how she got the magazine off the ground.
If you fancy getting your hands on a copy of Work Your Way and picking up some useful information about the freelance life, visit the website for details of how to subscribe.
San Francisco and Writer’s Digest
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions, Non-writing, Resources on September 5, 2011
I’m back!
I had my bike ride – it was across the Golden Gate Bridge & I had my icecream – in the heart of San Francisco. (Apologies for the white lie about my holiday but I’m currently wrangling with my car insurance over the theft of my car a few weeks ago and it made me feel vulnerable about announcing to the world that the house would be empty.)
Amongst many other things we visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It contains a video installation that explores the art of story telling ‘without a beginning or an end and with no character or plot development’. I’m sure if we tried this as writers our work would be swiftly rejected. Maybe it’s different in the art world…
I also bought a copy of the US writing magazine ‘Writer’s Digest’. It seemed quite thin compared to our own Writing Magazine and Writers’ Forum but there are a few things of interest on its website:
- A series of writing prompts – responses of up to 500 words can be posted on the site or you could just use them to kick-start your own writing
- Various competitions such as one here for a 1500 word story.
- Writing Tips
- Writing articles cargorised by genre such as Romance, Horror, Memoir etc.
So, if you fancy an insight into the US writing scene, take a look at the site.
Summer Break
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Books on August 25, 2011
Image by Jo Peattie via Flickr
Apologies to those of you who were looking out for my regular Monday lunchtime post this week. I’ve decided that since so many people are on holiday at the moment, I’m going to take a short break from blogging. Normal service will be resumed in September.
Over the next couple of weeks, amongst other things, I’ll be reading and reviewing The Barbarian Nurseries by Hector Tobar for the Waterstones website. If you fancy reviewing books for Waterstones (no payment but you get to keep the book) grab yourself a Waterstone’s loyalty card and click here to see the current book prize draws, each has around 25 copies of a forthcoming title up for grabs in return for providing a review.
I also hope to find time to read Sally Quilford’s My Weekly pocket novel ‘Sunlit Secrets’. I recently won a signed copy via Sally’s blog and am hoping that it will point me in the right direction with my own pocket novel. I have a 50,000 word first draft sitting in a corner waiting to be edited…
If you would like to be notified when I start posting again, please put your email address in the box on the right and you’ll receive my next (and subsequent) posts via email. It’s free and you can unsubscribe at any time.
By the way, the beach photo is just wishful thinking – although I do hope to manage a cycle ride in the local park plus an icream (everyone deserves a treat!).
See you soon!
Emerald Writing Workshops Competitions 2012
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Competitions on August 18, 2011
Emerald Writing Workshops 2012 Competition Calendar is out now!
These competitions are entering their third year with an increased prize pot of £100 per competition – First £65, second £20, third £15 plus three runners-up each receive a book of short stories. Entry is only £1.80 (overseas entrants can pay via PayPal) and I think that’s really good value!
All the competitions are for a 500 word piece of flash fiction and the 2012 themes are as follows:
- Story set on a train – closes 28/02/12
- Story including the words ‘Nobody will ever know’ – closes 31/5/12
- Story about anything you like – closes 31/8/12
- Story on the theme ‘Trapped’ – closes 30/11/12
Plus, if you enter any of the above (or have entered any of the 2010/2011 comps) then you can submit a Four Sentence Story. This is free to enter and 5 winners will each receive £20.
Entries are by post only but entries from different people or for more than one competition can all go in the same envelope.
Full details of how to enter are here along with winning entries from previous competitions.
Good Luck!
Character or caricature?
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Authors, Books, Writing on August 15, 2011
Cover of Filthy Rich
Many thousands of words have been written on how to create believable characters that will attract the reader’s empathy. Well-honed characters make the reader turn the page and ultimately they linger in the mind long after the book has been finished.
But sometimes authors appear to break the ‘rules’. I’m reading Filthy Rich by Wendy Holden and several of the characters within this novel are more caricatures than characters with whom that the reader can identify. There is:
- Alexandra – the stereo-typical footballer’s girlfriend. She’s all shiny bling and would-be celebrity.
- Beth – an American desperate to mingle with the English aristocracy
- Morag – the local eco-warrior who insists on an earth closet at the allotments to provide free fertiliser
Initially, I felt these cartoon-like people gave the book a shallow feel and I was tempted to give up on it. However, there are some ‘real’ people in the book – the headmistress who’s falling in love with the widowed solicitor, Mary who’s struggling to save the local stately home plus 8-year-old Sam who’s being fostered. As I got drawn in to the story of the believable characters in their fictional Derbyshire village, I realised that the ‘caricature’ people served a purpose:
- They add humour
- They unite the other characters in their battle against them (or against the earth closet in particular!)
- They provide plot lines as their over-the-top activities impact the village
So maybe it’s not necessary to make every one of your characters totally authentic. If you want to lighten the mood, advance the plot or bring other characters together then it could be alright to go OTT once in a while.
Plus it could be fun to let your imagination run riot and create a really way-out caricature!
48 Minutes to a Magazine Article
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Resources, Writing Exercises on August 11, 2011
This post is being brought to you in association with Sally Quilford’s 48th Birthday Celebrations on August 11th 2011.
Many of us whinge that we don’t have enough time to write. Home and work commitments are always getting in the way -I use this as an excuse for my lack of writing as much as anyone. So, here is a 7 day plan that involves writing for just 48 minutes per day and by the end of it you should have a short article all ready to go.
- Day 1 – visit a large newsagent and spend 48 minutes finding your market. Look for a magazine that covers something you know at least little about (i.e. write what you know so that the research isn’t too onerous). Check out the list of staff in the front of the magazine and compare to the ‘by’ lines on each article in order to check how much is written in-house and much is freelance provided. Buy the magazine you think you could write something for. (N.B. In a perfect world you would buy 2 or 3 issues of the magazine over a number of weeks/months in order to get a feel for which articles are regular columns and which are the one-off freelance features that we are aiming at) .
- Day 2 – make yourself a cup of coffee and sit down with a large sheet of paper. Set a timer for 48 minutes and then brainstorm! Dream up as many article ideas as possible for your chosen publication. For example, if you’ve chosen a dog magazine then your list could include ‘How to Choose a Dog Walker’, ’10 Tips for Taking Your Dog on Holiday’ or ‘Famous People and their Dogs’.
- Day 3 – choose which of the articles shows the most promise and spend 48 minutes writing an outline. Include an introduction (not too long – get straight to the point of the article), each point that you want to make and a conclusion.
- Day 4 – pitch the idea, via email, to the editor of the magazine. If you want some help on how to put together the perfect pitch have a look at Simon Whaley’s article here.
- Day 5 – start writing the article. If you don’t want to stop after 48 minutes that’s fine – keep going whilst the enthusiasm is high! Hopefully by now you’ll have stopped looking for displacement activities like cleaning out the kitchen cupboards.
- Day 6 – finish writing the article. Then find someone to read it aloud to – this will help you spot clumsy sentences, missing words, bad grammar etc. (this bit can be in addition to the 48 minutes since it can involve the rest of the family and therefore isn’t strictly ‘writing time’).
- Day 7 – spend the last 48 minutes having a final read through the article and then, submit !
For the purposes of simplicity I have assumed that the above activities will take place on 7 consecutive days. In reality there will probably be a gap between days 4 and 5 whilst you wait for a response to your pitch (fill this gap by starting work on a second idea). It might also be wise to leave a gap between days 6 and 7 so that you can re-read the article with fresh eyes before sending it off.
That just leaves me to wish Sally a ‘Happy 48th Birthday’ and thank her for the challenge to write a blog post based on ’48’.
Opportunities in Yours magazine
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Markets on August 8, 2011
Yours is a fortnightly lifestyle magazine targeting women aged 55+ and offers several slots for getting into print:
- Your Memories – send in ‘an amazing story’ (no more than 1000 words) from your past plus photos for a chance to earn £100.
- Travel – send a 300 word review of your holiday plus a picture with you in it. Each story printed receives £50.
- Grandkids Gallery – send in a photo of your grandchild or something funny that they’ve said. All those printed receive a £10 High Street voucher
- Meeting Place – this is described as ‘the heart of the magazine’ and welcomes funny stories, rants and photos. Every contribution featured gets a £10 High Street voucher and the Star letter gets £25.
- I followed my dream – £25 for 200 words
- Amazing at 80+ – £25 for 200 words plus a photo
- Fashion we wore – send in your picture of fashion from the past plus 60 words describing it for a £10 High Street voucher.
- Short story – the magazine uses one short story per issue. The guidelines are on the magazine’s website here.
- Nostalgia features – up to 1000 words. The guidelines are on the magazine’s website here.
Remember to study a few issues of the magazine in order to get a feel for the style before sending anything in and don’t expect a fast turnaround for anything you submit – Yours receives around 1500 letters and emails every fortnight and asks fiction and feature writers to allow 6 months before chasing their submissions.
Yours also publishes a hardback annual in the run up to Christmas and a short story which I submitted to the magazine a few years ago was eventually selected for publication in the annual instead, so there appears to be some crossover between the two publications.
Good Luck!
The Best Man to Die
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Authors, Books, Competitions on August 4, 2011
I’ve just finished reading The Best Man to Die by Ruth Rendell. I picked the book up in a charity shop because I’ve
enjoyed Ruth’s psychological thrillers. But this novel turned out to be an Inspector Wexford story (serve me right for not reading the blurb properly!).
After a few pages I had to check the title page to see when it was published – 1969. The book was plunging me into a world where fridges were the height of luxury (does anyone remember life without a fridge?) and wages were £20 a week. The book was full of prices (a top of the range set of false teeth cost £200 and played an important part in the book) and things that just don’t happen anymore – such as using phone boxes!
In the end I enjoyed the book as a social history of its era – a time I don’t really remember even though I was 6 when the book was written.
It also threw up two points that we should consider as writers:
- It’s very easy to make your stories sound ‘dated’ by including prices, wages, specific music etc. This can be an advantage if it’s important to the story that we know it is set in a specific year but a disadvantage if you’re resurrecting an old story for a new competition – your entry may seem a little tired if it’s referring to things that were current 5 years ago.
- Whenever we write we are creating evidence for the historians of the future. Whether our work is published or not someone may stumble upon it in the years to come and marvel at how primitive our lives were at the start of the 21st century!
And whilst I’m on the subject of Ruth Rendell, the Ruth Rendell Short Story competition is open for entries until the end of October. The winner will receive £1000 and will be commissioned to write 4 more stories. Full details are here.
Sally Jenkins 