Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2024 i Writing Magazine

Why think small when everything is up for grabs in the world of words? One of the greatest and most glorious things about writing is that the only limits to what we can do with it are in our imaginations. With words, you can come close to creating magic, because in writing literally anything is possible. In this issue of Writing Magazine we’re exploring some of the many ways in which writing offers unbounded possibilities and how we can expand our creative practice. For starters, Tim Brookes, the founder of the Lost Alphabets project, has contributed a brilliant, thought-provoking piece about what writing actually consists of, and what the act of doing it means (p9). Our star interview, multi-faceted literary author Will Eaves, offers fascinating insights into opening yourself up…

When I was starting my third book about my work on the Endangered Alphabets Project – work that involves finding, researching, promoting and carving the world’s 300+ minority scripts – I found myself asking a question I had never asked myself, despite having spent my entire adult life as a writer and teacher of writing. To wit: what is writing? For example: from where I’m sitting in my dining-room-cum-kitchen I can see ‘writing’ on a wall calendar, a mug, a box that contained a water filter for hikers, a clock, an air purifier, half-a-dozen magazines, a can of paint, a pill bottle, three books, a brown cardboard delivery box, an electric kettle, several bottles containing condiments and spices, a bottle containing electrolyte supplement, a stack of Endangered Alphabets postcards, a…

‘There’s always one,’ Jane Wenham-Jones once told me. We were discussing giving talks. She had discovered that wherever she went to speak there was always one person who would sit, arms folded, lips tightly pressed together, staring at her as if to say, ‘Go on. Make me laugh.’ She took this as a personal challenge. After that chat I began looking out for ‘the one’. The first I noticed was sitting right in the middle of the middle row of a WI meeting. I tried hard to keep my eyes averted from her but kept looking to see if there was any change. Had Ms Grim’s expression managed to morph into a slight hint of a smile? No. Thankfully, the rest of the group were all laughing out loud. My…

STAR LETTER STORIES TO BE SHARED I always enjoy learning new things from your magazine as ever since I was little I’d dreamed of becoming an author. Family suggested I get a ‘proper job’ so I did care work for many years until my disabilities stopped me working four years ago. It gave me the determination to share my lifelong rollercoaster of epilepsy, eating disorder, challenging relationship and challenges working with others, especially with teenagers. A kind charity helped me publish my book Jo’s Hidden Secret, which raises money for a domestic violence charity and post-natal depression charity who helped me at my darkest times. After the first few months struggling to share my book with media, my book was nominated for the West Country Women’s Awards. I was invited…

Adam Gauntlett is an agent in the Books Division of Peters Fraser and Dunlop (PFD) Fraser and Dunlop (PFD) Literary Agents, one of the longest-established agencies in London. He joined the company in 2010, having completed his Masters in English Literature at Kings College, London. His clients include Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, broadcaster Marina Gibson, and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Bloomsbury published his debut novel, The Stranger at the Wedding, in March 2024, and he is represented by Ariella Feiner at the United Agents agency. What do you enjoy most about being a literary agent? Every day brings something new. I could be meeting with a scholar on Ancient Rome in the morning, and then seeing a crime scene investigator in the afternoon – all whilst fielding offers from publishers for the latest book…

The 2024 Exeter Novel Prize Win a £1,000 first prize in the prize for unpublished novels by unrepresented authors. The Exeter Novel Prize is an annual competition from Creative Writing Matters and supported by Exeter Writers. It is for the first 10,000 words of an unpublished novel manuscript by an author who is not currently represented by a literary agent. There is a first prize of £1,000 and five runners up will each receive £100. The final judge will be literary agent Hellie Ogden. To enter, send the opening of the novel and a synopsis not longer than 500 words. The total word count must be no longer than 10,000 words. Novel manuscripts may be in any genre, including children’s and YA. All entries must be original and unpublished. The…

The Bath Flash Fiction Award October 2024 The Bath Flash Fiction Award, which runs three times a year, is given for original, unpublished short fiction up to 300 words. The winner will receive £1,000, and there are second and third prizes of £300 and £100. Two commendations each get £30. 50 longlisted entrants will be offered digital anthology publication. The Flash Award judge is Matt Kendrick. The entry fee at full rate is £9 per flash fiction/£15 for two/£18 for three. The closing date is 6 October.  Website: www.bathflashfictionaward.com/ The Dinesh Allirajah Prize for Short Fiction 2025 This year’s competition is for short stories inspired by the theme of ‘The Unspoken’. Comma Press is inviting entries for its annual contest in memory of its much-loved director and founding board member,…

Passionfruit Poetry Prize 2024 The Passionfruit Review’s competition is for poems on the theme of ‘love’. The competition, which launched last year, invites original, unpublished poems up to 40 lines that interpret the ‘love’ theme in any way. There is a first prize of £400, a second prize of £75 and a third prize of £25. The judge is Aaron Poochigian, who will also select up to 15 commended entries to be published in a special edition of The Passionfruit Review. The entry fee is £4 per poem. The closing date is 30 September. Website:https://passionfruitreview.com/passionfruit-poetry-prize-2024/ Finding the Words – Freedom from Torture Poetry Competition 2024 Freedom from Torture is inviting entries for its biennial poetry competitition, which is part of its literary festival. Winners will be invited to read their…

Mirage Mirage is a niche travel writing podcast looking for the kind of writing not found in the usual travel guides: something ‘deeper than the frivolity of writing done by tourists,’ writes PDR Lindsay-Salmon. Make it individual, and honest, perhaps not even travel writing, it could be anti-travel writing or simply writing about place. Writers should listen to the podcasts to understand the tone and mood they want. Submit by email a high-quality recording of a minimum of twenty minutes or a piece of writing of at least 3,000 words. Payment is US$50 for writing of a minimum of 3,000 words or US$100 for an audio of at least 20 minutes (well-recorded and edited). Website: www.miragetravelpodcast.com…

2024 Blue Pencil Agency Pitch Prize The 2024 Blue Pencil Agency Pitch Prize is open to unrepresented authors for a novel in any adult fiction genre. If offers the opportunity for up to 10 winners to pitch their novel and receive feedback from the agent judge, Katie Greenstreet from Paper Literary Agency. The Readers’ Choice Award will be awarded to one winner. At least 10,000 words of the novel should have been written. Send your opening 500 words, synopsis and cover letter including your pitch. The entry fee is £12 per submission. There is a minimum of 20 free entries for disadvantaged writers. The closing date is 25 October. See website for submission details and eligibility: https://bluepencilagency.com/bpa-pitch-prize-2024/…

So you’re an advanced writer. You’ve learned the basics and started to master the kinds of tricks that professionals typically use to engage readers. Being an advanced writer means not only being able to write, but also knowing how to structure, to edit, to present ideas and to persuade. Your first choice may be publication. After all, you have the skills not only to write a publishable novel but also to create a compelling cover letter, synopsis and even blurb to help sell your book. This is the dream. However, we all know that publication usually doesn’t bring immediate riches. Nor will a good book necessarily be published. Genuinely excellent writing tends to sell less well than workmanlike storytelling. Advanced writers can use their skills in different ways. By all…

The love shone through in the many submissions we received in this month’s postbox. We’d invited you to send writing rooted in something that really mattered to you, and with submissions on topics including video games, tea, beach-combing, Shakespeare, meadows, music and much more, we’ve been thrilled at the wide range of topics, and treatments, on subjects close to our subscribers’ hearts. Some have been moving, some have made us laugh out loud, some have planted unforgetttable images in our minds and all of them have filled us with pride and delight at the quality of the writing used to convey what means most to you. As ever, selecting the pieces to publish required a lot of considered reading and reflection, but we kept coming back to the two that…

Hello, my name is Jodi Taylor and I’ve written twenty-five books and a number of short stories – mostly about a bunch of time-travelling historians and their misadventures as they jump around the timeline, observing major historical events in contemporary time, and leaving chaos in their wake. I didn’t set out to write a book for publication – far less a series – and I’m still a little bemused as to how it all happened. I have absolutely no scientific or technical knowledge whatsoever. In fact, if anyone should ask me what was the major factor in my success I would have to reply, ‘Complete ignorance.’ I always think of myself as not so much a good example but more of a horrible warning. Those of you out there with…

Hugo Awards 2024 The Hugo Awards, the most prestigious awards in the field of speculative fiction, were given at the 82nd World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) at Glasgow 2024 in August, writes Gary Dalkin. The winners were, Best Novel, Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh; Best Novella, Thornhedge, T. Kingfisher; Lodestar Award for Best YA Book, To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose; Best Novelette, ‘The Year Without Sunshine’, by Naomi Kritzer (Uncanny Magazine, November-December 2023); Best Short Story, ‘Better Living Through Algorithms’ by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld May 2023); Best Series, Imperial Radch, Ann Leckie; Best Graphic Story or Comic, Saga, Vol. 11, written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples; Best Related Work, A City on Mars, Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith); Best Editor Short Form, Neil Clarke; Best…

Bridport Memoir Award 2024 The Bridport Memoir Award is an international competition for unpublished memoir manuscripts. The first prize winner will receive £1,500 and a year’s mentoring from The Literary Consultancy. The winner will also be offered a consultation with A.M. Heath literary agency and with an editor from John Murray. The runner up will receive £750 and a full manuscript assessment from The Literary Consultancy, and three highly commendeds will each receive £150 and a 15,000-word manuscript assessment from TLC. All winners and runners up will also have the option of a consultation with the University of Exeter’s Creative Writing department. Memoirs do not need to be complete to be entered. To enter, send between 5,000 and 8,000 words plus a 300-word overview. Longlisted writers will be asked to…

Earlier in the year, in June, it was Independent Bookshop Week. Pleasingly, despite trends perhaps suggesting otherwise, independent bookshops seem to be thriving. A week designed to focus some attention on them is an opportunity for their owners to plan promotional activities of varying sorts. These may range from author signing sessions and talks to special displays or links with other local businesses. For writers there is an opportunity here to be one of those featured in such events. So, you need to know it is coming. Arrangements must be made ahead. A bookshop must find and brief a speaker with enough time to promote the event ahead of the due date. This means that to have a chance of being selected you must be in touch with ideas well…

The School Magazine The School Magazine is the umbrella name for several Australian print and digital titles published a self-funded business unit with the New South Wales Department of Education, writes Gary Dalkin. The magazines publish short stories, articles, plays, poems and activities that have literary and academic merit. Readers are mostly school children, and material should delight, intrigue, challenge and inspire them while reflecting the fact that they live in a multicultural, diverse society. The editorial team are looking for energetic and accessible writing that has suspense, with fast-paced action, twists, credible characters and, always keeps the child reader at its heart. At the moment they are particularly looking for very short stories, plays and nonfiction for readers of the titles Countdown and Blast Off. Stories can be realistic,…

I noticed a bizarre news item the other day. In Spain you can evidently now be fined more than £600 for urinating in the sea. This immediately poses not only the question why, but also how will anyone know? Will they check? I have visions of police frogmen patrolling beaches. Perhaps bizarre is an utterly insufficient word. But it prompts the question of breaching the law while visiting other countries. Both the attitudes to the law and the law itself can be different from our own, sometimes very different. Singapore is known as a ‘fine city’, in this case because there are fines for a very large number of breaches of law and order. For example, you can be fined for failing to flush a public lavatory (though to avoid…

Creative non-fiction – using techniques of fiction to write about real life in effective and compelling ways – can take many forms and this month we’re looking at the most creative end of the spectrum, where parts of the story are true, but not all. Autofiction, autobiographical novels, semiautobiographical novels, non-fiction novels… there are lots of variations but no fixed or precise definitions, which is perhaps appropriate for an area of writing that completely mixes fact and fiction. Generally, we understand, as readers, that this is a story based on the author’s experience, whether it’s told in the first or third person, because the author has told us so. It may read like a memoir or more like a novel. But to be considered creative non-fiction there must be a…

Writing is a bug, and I caught it very early on in life. Until recently I couldn’t put an exact ‘age’ on it but, when my parents cleared their loft out recently, they found a mountain of old school stuff of mine. It was from this that I can tell you exactly how old I was because, in amongst that pile of old exercise and text books, I found ‘The Poem / Story Book Special’ that I wrote when I was nine years old. Among the classics that it contained were ‘The Boy Who Cried Chocolate,’ ‘The Teacher,’ ‘The Boys Holiday,’ and ‘The Footballer,’ and reading them reminded me of just how special words had been to me at an early age. It’s a feeling that has endured, through my…

I don’t know about you, but I love a book set in a dark and gothic house. The kind of place that is filled with mystery and secrets, so full of atmosphere that it feels like a character in its own right. I’ve read my fair share of stories set in psychiatric hospitals and asylums, but with my latest novel, I wanted to write about a different kind of hospital. The House of Fever is a historical mystery set in a sanatorium. I began writing this novel in the year after the covid pandemic, and though the story itself is not really about illness, I wanted to reflect on my own experiences during that strange time. As a historical writer, it felt logical to look at a pandemic from a…

CASTING OFF WITH A NEW YARN As a change in direction, I have recently released a novel with knitting at its heart, and aimed at women aged 50+, writes subscriber Carol Waterkeyns. I wrote Casting Off, a story of 52-year-old Paula, as I felt that women of my age group often get overlooked when it comes to books and their female characters. In this novel, I wanted a protagonist who has a few wrinkles and has been through some tricky life experiences, but overcomes them, to build her dream life. Everything changes because Paula needs a ball of yarn to finish a cardigan; something any fellow knitters will probably identify with. It’s in pursuit of finding the right yarn that new opportunities, a mystery, and a surprising romantic interest come…

Q Would a new, young PC recruit be able to access the closed CID file of someone found drowned three months previously? And would toxicology be able to determine if the deceased was intoxicated at the time of drowning if the body had been in the water for three weeks before its discovery? John Stewart via email A In theory, the PC would be able to access the file, even if it was closed. The file and its contents would be accessible by computer. Having said that, there may be databases and systems that the PC wouldn’t have access to, such as HOLMES. Major enquiries, murders for example, are run on the HOLMES system. Access and licences are granted if someone’s role requires it. Someone with only a short amount…

Genres often have a moment where every agent and publisher seems to be seeking that particular category, to feed demand from readers. We’ve lived through a fair few in recent times, with an exploding Young Adult market that caught fire in recent years, as well as – before that – historical fiction, celebrity memoir and chick lit. Genre definition is so important for a publisher as they’re able to identify direct appeal with a specific market, and also quantify roughly how many copies they might be likely to sell. Bookshops will want plenty of choice for the reader who comes in and gravitates towards a particular area of the bookshelves, so book commissioning can often become market-driven. In turn, if a book has broken a record sales figure, there’ll be…

The McNeese Review The McNeese Review is produced by the MFA programme at McNeese State University USA and showcases contemporary fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and essays, writes PDR Lindsay-Salmon. For fiction the editorial team prefer streamlined prose and restraint; stories which quietly question and deconstruct, and are emotionality indirectly. They like experiments and unconventionality. Genre elements are welcome, but character-driven stories are preferred over plot-focused ones. Submit stories no longer than 6,000 words, or one to three flash pieces, no more than 1,500 words each. Poetry submissions should be one to five pages of poems. Creative nonfiction submissions may consist of lyric essays, personal narratives, experimental pieces, and hybrids under 3,000 words, or one to three flash pieces 400 to 1,000 words each. The MFA program at McNeese State University…

Flame Tree Publishing UK press Flame Tree Publishing are accepting submissions for three new anthologies, writes Gary Dalkin. The first two will be additions to the series Myths, Gods & Immortals, which have already featured volumes about (and titled) Medus, Odin, Circe and Anansi, while the third anthology will explore mental illness. Morgana le Fay will tell new stories about a mysterious figure from Arthurian legend. She has deep roots in Celtic mythology, is known for her magical abilities, and is a complex character who oscillates between benevolent healer and malevolent sorceress. Her relationship with Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is marked by both familial loyalty and deep-seated enmity, making her one of the most enigmatic and multifaceted figures in the Arthurian mythos. Achilles will be all…

Horrorsmith Publishing Lyndsey Smith, editor at Horrorsmith Publishing, wants ‘quality work to take readers to some really dark places,’ writes PDR Lindsay-Salmon. The editorial team have been concentrating on through themed and professionally edited short stories. This year the press is expanding into novellas and novels of mainstream horror and ghost suspense fiction. The preferred tropes are ‘haunted houses, unique creatures, possession stories, gothic, urban legends, cursed items, and ghosts.’ Read all the submission guidelines carefully and present a well-edited manuscript. Submit the first three chapters, a query letter, and a full synopsis of the novella or novel, over 40,000 words in length, by email. Rights and royalties discussed with the contract. Website: www.horrorsmithpublishing.com Wakefield Press Wakefield Press is an Australian independent publishing company, writes PDR Lindsay-Salmon. Topics published include…

The Dodge The Dodge is a literary magazine based at the College of Wooster, USA that invites ‘eco-writing, works in translation, and writing about animals.’ Submit fiction up to 8,000 words including flash and micro fiction; nonfiction, creative nonfiction, 7,000 word limit; poetry one to five poems.  Website: www.thedodgemag.com/submissions Heroica Storytelling platform Heroica is dedicated to sharing stories about all aspects of gender oppression and wants ‘the stories of women and gender minorities which are the stories of generations.’ Submit first with a pitch online. Payment is a £10 flat fee. Website: /www.heroica.co/ Alphabet Box Alphabet Box is an international literary journal publishing original poetry, personal essays, flash fiction and short prose. Limit subs to ‘a total of 900 words’ for one to five poems, up to 900 words for…

www.writers-online.co.uk/writing-competitions Writing Competitions, Writing Magazine, Warners Group Publications Ltd, West Street, Bourne, Lincs PE109PH WIN! £775 IN CASH PRIZES & PUBLICATION OPEN DARK TALES Take your writing to the dark side as this month’s contest is inviting grisly stories between 1,500 and 1,700 words from crime to supernatural and anything in between. The winner will receive £200 and publication in the April issue of Writing Magazine, and the runner up will receive £50 and online publication. The entry fee is £7.50/£6 for subscribers, and the closing date is 15 November. Ref code: WRO/October24/darktales £250 TO BE POETRY FREE VERSE Your chance to enter your best unrhymed poem (up to 40 lines) and show us how you use the popular free-verse form to express your ideas on any subject. The winner…