The very day I pretty much decided to abandon my novel as a ‘useful first experiment’, I got an email telling me I’ve been long-listed in the UK Novel Writing Competition! Out of 3,112, mine has been selected along with 249 others to go forwards to the next stage of the competition. So, yay! I’ll […]
Author: Annie
Less is More
I’ve been thinking about my writing goals for the year, in conjunction with my renewed pledge to write 150,000 words for Get Your Words Out in 2017. And, interestingly, my main goals for this year are actually about writing less, rather than more. 1) Put the novel in a drawer and forget about it […]
Gratifying Competition Result
This month’s issue of Writing Magazine arrived in the post today, and I was shortlisted in the Tight Situation Short Story Competition! I’m particularly pleased with this result, because the story I entered went through a development process I’m planning to cultivate more often in my writing this year. I worked on it in several stages, […]
Falling Sand
My story, Falling Sand, has been posted on the fiction site, eternalremedy.com. You can read it here.
The Delights of Scribophile
One of the other writers on the course I attended recently at Moniack Mhor told me about an online critiquing website called Scribophile, so I decided to check it out. I found signing up and navigating around very easy. They have a checklist of all the various things you can do on the site, which […]
Life Plus 2M
My story, The Sentencing, is part of an anthology that’s been put together by David Zetland for the Life Plus 2M project. The project has entries from storytellers, imagining what effect an increase in global water levels would have, and also thought pieces from scientists and environmentalists, predicting the same thing. You can order the […]
The Little Folk
My story The Little Folk is part of One Hundred Voices Volume Two, published by Centum Press. The anthology contains one hundred short stories by one hundred different authors, so plenty of varied material. You can order a copy here.
Learning About Revision
I spent the whole of last week on a writing course at Moniack Mhor, near Inverness. It was aimed at science-fiction and fantasy writers, with workshops in the mornings, led by the two tutors, Juliet McKenna and Pippa Goldschmidt, and the afternoons left free for individual writing time. I always find these kind of events […]
The House
In its heyday, the house stood in substantial grounds, and its nearest neighbour was at least half a mile away. The family that owned the house could trace their history back generations and were extremely proud of their heritage. The house hosted many a lavish party and saw hundreds of guests enter through its magnificent […]
Measuring Success
This blog post marks a major achievement in my writing. At the beginning of the year, I joined the Get Your Words Out online community of writers. In order to sign up, you have to pledge to write a certain number of words over the course of the year. They also have to be certain […]