As is the modern way, many writers these days connect through Twitter. UK writer Adam Lock is one such person whose excellent short fiction I’ve come to know from a variety of online journals that use Twitter as their main promotional tool. I was interested to see recently that he was also on the brink… Read More Dinosaur author Q&A
[Updated 10/7/19] The last time I did a short story round-up, the year was just beginning and the days were short – though the month was looong. Now here we are, already halfway through 2019, and some of us are in the middle of unprecedented heatwaves. Good times. Here’s a brand new list of opportunities… Read More Short story competitions July-December 2019
I’m really thrilled to have a short story included in this year’s edition of The Ogham Stone, the annual literary print journal published by the University of Limerick’s Creative Writing department. And what a sumptuous publication it’s turned out to be. ‘It’s the Little Things’ was shortlisted for the first Colm Tóibín International Short Story… Read More ‘It’s the Little Things’ in The Ogham Stone
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 5/7/19] 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
