Finally the writing resumes!

Since having a baby just over a month ago my writing has very much taken a back seat, but this week - finally! - I've managed to get a short story completed. It may get submitted or it may just sit on my computer as a reminder that I can write and be a mother!

Who likes short shorts? We like short shorts!

Short Stories
Do you write them? Do you hate them? Do you think they're lovely but there's no market for them? For those who wish to be published, many people will tell you that short story publications get your foot in the door. And while that is definitely true, I'm not sure how many people really focus on the short stories. So tell me about your own views on them. Have any been published? Are you looking to publish some?

I love reading and writing short stories - I would say 75% of the stories I write are shorts or flash. I like the challenge of creating a well fleshed out character and making a fully fledged story in a limited amount of words, and there's so much that you learn from short stories that you can then transfer into novels to make them better.

I haven't had any shorts published yet but I'm looking to do so. I've got a little pile of shorts at various stages of editing that are waiting for me to get back to them ready to submit somewhere.


Bonus: What is your favorite magazine/anthology of short stories? Send us a picture of the cover! (Especially if you have a favorite issue.)

I suppose my favourite magazine would have to be the People's Friend. My grandma used to get it regularly and I would look at the children's pages, and now my mum gets them occasionally and leaves them in the bathroom for reading when you're, ahem, 'sitting down'... I like that the stories are inoffensive and generally feel-good, and that you get all sorts of stories in one issue.

I like anthology story books as well, and the best one I read recently was Other Worlds, a collection of 10 YA sci-fi/fantasy stories by Rick Riordan, Shaun Tan, Tom Angleberger, Ray Bradbury and others.

Happy National Flash Fiction Day!

May 16 is apparently National (and International?!) Flash Fiction Day, so happy flash fiction day!
To find out more click here.

Inspiration from the obituaries

I was reading the obituaries of the local paper and came across this fascinating entry:

Service at Shrewsbury
Crematorium, on Friday,
October 7, 2011, at 12 noon.
Dress code is fancy dress
(Funereal theme).

So many ideas came from this straight away - who was this man and why would his family want a funereal fancy dress cremation? What sort of conversations would the people have at the funeral? What would people say when they saw people dressing up to go to the funeral? Would someone go as the Grim Reaper? The moral of the story is sometimes the most interesting parts of a newspaper can be the classifieds - births, marriages, deaths, wanted adverts and for sale columns. If you're short of an idea try looking for something unusual in the back pages.

After all, the same newspaper that yielded this obituary also turned up

Wanted - one tonne of oats - cash sale

A Good Six Months

Well the first six months of 2011 have been pretty good on the writing front, what with being included in Write for Japan, having Jazz Night accepted by Every Day Poets, and with the creative writing course going well.

In a non-fiction vein I've got into podcasting as well, and written two podcasts for 365 Days of Astronomy - End of an Endeavour (broadcast May 31) and The Universe in your Phone (broadcast May 28).

My goals for the second half of 2011 are:

• Edit, edit, edit...
• Start submitting the short stories I've been writing to magazines.
• Finish the OU creative writing course and sign up for the advanced course.
• Do NaNoWriMo with the story I almost started for my last assignment (provisionally entitled Flux).
  

Write for Japan now on sale!

The Write For Japan book has gone on sale this week to raise money for the Red Cross's relief work in Japan. The book has 34 short stories by 34 different authors from all over the world, including my sci-fi story Generation Three.

I'm really glad the book has gone on sale and that I could contribute to it. The disaster in Japan is one of those things you feel helpless about - you want to help and you don't know how. Without wishing to sound clichéd, it was a privilege to be able to join in with the project and do something that will hopefully raise a decent amount of money which can be used to help the people who have been caught up in the devastation in Japan.

If you like short stories and you would like to help support the relief work in Japan, please buy the book:
• Lulu - £6.99
• Smashwords - $3.99
• Kindle - £2.86
• Createspace - coming soon...

Write for Japan - Generation Three

Here's a short preview of the story, Generation Three, that I've written for the Write for Japan anthology.

Zen is a teenager living on a generation ship which is travelling to a new star system where humans will create a new home.

Zen looked at the picture of herself and her family. Her dad looked out of place, his blond hair and blue eyes standing out among the Japanese features of the women in his life. For the first time Zen caught herself wondering what her life would have been like if her grandparents hadn’t decided to be part of the generation ship mission.

She went over to her bunk as the deceleration warning sounded. As she strapped herself in she noticed something white sticking out between the bunk above hers and the wall. She reached up and tugged at it, then frowned as she looked at the object in her hands. It was about the size of a small display unit, but it was made of thin pieces of... Zen hesitated for a moment, trying to remember the word from her history lessons. Of course, it was paper, and the item was a book.

Carefully, she opened the front page. It was covered in writing; some in English and some in Japanese kanji characters.

‘Oh!’ the exclamation was entirely involuntary as she recognised the name at the bottom of the page. The book was a diary, and it had belonged to her grandmother.

Writing to a time limit

Writing is so much easier when you have a deadline to write towards. Take naNoWriMo, for example. I've managed to complete the challenge - 50,000 words in 30 days - for the last four years, but trying to keep up that amount of writing at other times seems to be pretty much impossible for me.

This week I had good motivation though - I had to complete and edit my submission for Write for Japan and send it in by Sunday 27th. Knowing that there was an end date, and that after that there would be publication (the writer's Holy Grail), and that it was all for a good cause did wonders for my motivation.

The sad thing is, now that the story is done I'm feeling unmotivated again. Must find another deadline to work towards...

Write for Japan & poetry

The Write for Japan project is well and truly off the ground now. To find out more visit www.writeforjapan.com, and please, please, please do consider donating.

All the authors are writing stories on the subject of destruction and/or hope. I don't know exactly what form the stories will take, but I'm looking forward to finding out. My story - Generation Three - is a sci-fi one set on board a generation ship, taking the human race to find another world after the Earth became uninhabitable.

And changing the subject completely, my poem Jazz Night has been accepted by Every Day Poets!

Weekend ahead

This time last week I was on the train with 200 members of the Royal Navy. This week I'm sitting at my desk trying to get motivated to write and thinking about the 101 things I should do when I get home - starting with getting the washing out of the washing machine, and doing the washing up.

Somewhere this weekend I want to try to finish the first draft of a short story I've been working on as well, but whenever I sit down to write fiction at the moment I seem to come up with ideas for things that are entirely unrelated to the story I'm trying to write. I need to try to find the balance between getting the ideas down somewhere to work on another time, and making sure I don't get too sidetracked.

Maybe I should just start with an outline for the bits of short story I don't have, and fill in from there. Girl gets chased, girl gets caught, girl is dead, boy finds girl, boy's dad explains about the monsters, boy goes hunting monsters, and so on... I'll give it a try and let you know how it went on Monday.

Writing on the train

I've just been away on holiday for a week in sunny Plymouth and had to get the train there from Birmingham - about 4 hours either way. Fortunately I had a good book and my laptop with me, so I was able to occupy myself pretty well.

I actually found the journey was a good source of inspiration - I found myself on the same train as 200 members of the Navy who were all heading off for furlough. Listening to them chatting (nothing about what they'd been doing in service, just normal chatter) gave me a few ideas for scenes, and the reactions of some of the other passengers sparked a few character ideas as well. And then there was the guy who managed to get locked in the toilet...!

I only managed to write one short story during the journey, but that's better than none, and I finished my book as well as having the experience of meeting some great guys.

The book, which I highly recommend, was part of the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik. If you like dragons, swordplay or historic novels, read and enjoy!

Writers block & dreams

Some days the writing just flows and other days ... it doesn't.

For the last week or so writing has been a real struggle. My imagination isn't coming up with anything especially interesting, and my vocabulary seems to have shrunk whenever I try to get anything down on paper.

I've been trying to do some more refining of Dark Magic as well this week, and I don't know if it's because I've been looking at it too much, but although I know where I should be changing things, I haven't been able to find the right way to do it. For example, I know I want to turn one of the early scenes into a flashback scene rather than a memory, but I can't seem to find the right way to transition.

The only thing I seem to have written that was good - and which surprised me because the subject matter wasn't something I usually write about - was a very vivid dream I had. The following night I woke up at 3am and couldn't get back to sleep so I went to the computer and wrote down the dream - 600 words of blood, strange powers and healing.

Maybe I'll post it later, but I don't know... It was a dream about some of the characters from Heroes, and I don't want to do a Mary Sue (although helping Claire Bennet to heal Peter Petrelli was a nice dream to be in the middle of...!).

The six word competition

I decided at the start of the year that I wanted to enter more writing competitions to give myself targets. The Arvon Foundation's six word story competition caught my attention today. Here are my attempts:

Competition entered, judges awed, prize given.

Rope knotted, chair kicked away. Goodbye.

I've also entered the Txtlit competition - write a story within the length of a text message. I seem to be veering towards microfic/flashfic at the moment...

Goals for the next few months

Submission deadlines and themes I'd like to meet:

• Two 500 word flash fictions on the theme of sci-fi and fantasy
• Up to 5,000 words on the theme 'End of the Rainbow'
• 2,500-5,000 words about werewolves
  
• 3,500-6,000 words on the theme 'Zero Gravity: Adventures in Deep Space'
• 1,500-15,000 words on the theme 'Whodunnit Halloween'
• Up to 7,000 words about the exploration and colonisation of outer space and the solar system
• At least 3,000 words of sci-fi set off-Earth

Don't know how I'll get on with this, but it's good to have something to work towards.

Writing with no idea where it's heading

I've started several new stories this week but have no idea where they're heading or what they'll turn into - if anything.

Well, that's not strictly true. One of them is going to be a short story about a teenage werewolf and her (yes, I said her) boyfriend, and I've got that pretty much mapped out. Now I just have to sit down and write it. If it turns out well then I might submit it for an anthology - I know Wyvern Publications is going to be doing a Fangtales anthology next year about creatures of the night, vampires and so on.

The other ideas aren't anything like as developed.

Oh well, on with Alive, where Dak is about to find signs of sabotage and Macintyre's tracking an odd smell...