A piece of flash fiction of mine appears in UK literary journal Spelk today. ‘The Owl House’ is a pretty dark tale by my usual standards, and is based on a real person. Helen Martins was a South African artist who turned her home into a sort of living art gallery. I don’t want to… Read More ‘The Owl House’ in Spelk
Today I have a flash called ‘Pattern’ published online as part of National Flash Fiction Day. NFFD is an annual (funnily enough international) celebration of the micro form, with flashes published every 5-10 minutes over a 24-hour period. An anthology of work is also published (separate from the online flashes), plus you can get prompts… Read More ‘Pattern’ for National Flash Fiction Day
[Updated 20/6/19] Writing is a funny old game that you can easily spend more money on than you earn from it. To make progress, you need to get your work out into the world and hopefully build a reputation as a writer. But regularly entering competitions is costly, and you can run up quite a… Read More Free-to-enter writing competitions
Well, my day has been considerably brightened up with a blog post by UK writer Matt Kendrick. In the latest of a series of articles, Matt discusses economical scene-setting in short fiction, and includes a teeny flash of mine (‘Socks for Samuel’, published in The Drabble back in December) as an example. He talks about… Read More Words of encouragement
I haven’t been entering competitions lately (not enough finished material), so I was really chuffed to see my name pop up on the shortlist for The Bangor Literary Journal 40-word Flash Fiction Competition. Also on it is my very funny writing group pal Eileen O’Sullivan – a double celebration for our little gang. The shortlist… Read More The Bangor Literary Journal flash fiction competition
Did you know that every time a bell rings, a new literary magazine launches somewhere in the world? No? Well, ok, maybe that isn’t strictly speaking true, but it does seem as if they’re mushrooming up everywhere you look. Hurray for that, as it gives us writers more avenues to get our work out into… Read More New journals to submit to
[Update: date change, see below] If you’re a writer in the Cork area, you might be interested to know about a one-day creative writing workshop taking place in the atmospheric setting of Glenville Park, about 12 miles from Cork city. It’s being facilitated by my writing group pal Laura McKenna who, hand on heart, is… Read More Writing workshop in Glenville Park
