Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2025 i Writing Magazine

This month, with the seasons turning, autumn nights draw in and darkness eats the daylight as winter approaches. It’s only natural that we’ll be spending more time cocooned at home, and for writers, this is an ideal time to hole up and dedicate hours to a new project. Anyway, for most of us, writing is our home. It’s where we find our true selves, express ourselves and make sense of the world. In this issue of Writing Magazine, with Halloween on the horizon we’ve taken a close look at what home means in the context of spooky stories. Take a look at the invaluable insights on writing 21st century haunted houses from Zoe Apostolides (p4) and gothic mansions from historical bonechiller star Laura Purcell (p14). Even if you don’t write…

WHERE DID YOUR JOURNEY AS AN AUTHOR BEGIN? I think my journey as an author began from early school days. English Language, particularly essay writing, was my favourite subject – and I’ve been scribbling stories ever since. However, a pivotal moment occurred as a young staff nurse on night duty. I picked up a contemporary romance novel – abandoned by a colleague – during my break and thought, ‘I could write like this.’ It was many years before I did, though! WHAT IS (OR HAS BEEN) YOUR PROUDEST MOMENT AS A WRITER? My proudest moment as a writer has to be seeing my first ever, traditionally published novel in print (several years ago now) – and it was a real thrill to have it featured as Book of the Month…

Matthew Plampin is the author of several highly acclaimed historical novels. He has a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art and has worked as a lecturer, tour guide and children’s author. His writing day tends to be fairly structured. ‘I like to write in two to three-hour stretches, usually in the morning, afternoon and evening.’ he says. ‘If I have other things to do I might choose one or two of these slots; in the perfect writing day I’ll get all three. ‘My best time to write depends on what else is happening, but I usually find the morning to be the most productive part of the day in terms of simply getting the words down. That said, if I’ve been writing all day, the really interesting and unexpected…

If you have a query for Lisa, send it by email to lisacuttsenquiries@gmail.com Q My main police character arrests a young Romanian man for murder. How much research and checks would she carry out to find any background information on him? He has previously been arrested in Austria, but not his own country. How easy would it be for her to miss vital information or not be informed of his past? Emily Ashbury via email A The police would carry out specialist intelligence checks on any foreign national coming into a murder enquiry, or, indeed, for any criminal matter. Checks would be requested from foreign law enforcement agencies relating to any high harm foreign person. This would fit your scenario. Any request for such information must be justified and authorised…

Era of Witches Snake Bite Books want stories for their anthology, Era of Witches, writes PDR Lindsay-Salmon. The editorial team seek ‘ten twisted tales of witchcraft; each taking place in a different time setting.’ Currently the time settings are 1340s and 1960s for the First and Second Era section of the anthology. Check the website guidelines regularly as the team ‘will run several submission windows for this collection’, because each submission period will ask for two time eras. The team will select one winning story from each era for the anthology. Researched thoroughly and make the time setting important to the story. Witches may be good, evil, or somewhere in the middle. They can be the main character(s), or be ‘spookily in the background’ but they must be essential to…

The 2025 Bath Novella-in-Flash Award The Bath Novella-in-Flash Award, which comes under the umbrella of the Bath Flash Fiction Award, is given for novellas between 6,000 and 18,000 words that are comprised of flash fictions or very short stories. Each flash should be no longer than around 1,000 words. The winner will receive £300. There are two runners-up prizes of £100, and each winning novella will be individually published by Ad Hoc Fiction. The Novella Award judge is Jude Higgins. The closing date is 31 October. Website: https://www.bathflashfictionaward.com/ Flash 500 Novel Opening & Synopsis 2025 Submit the first 3,000 words of an unpublished novel manuscript in any genre, plus a synopsis no longer than 750 words. Novelists entering the competition may by unpublished, published or self published, but the manuscript…

Hugo winners The winners of the latest Hugo Awards, arguably the most prestigious awards in the field of speculative fiction, were announced at the Seattle Worldcon 2025, the 83rd World Science Fiction Convention, writes Gary Dalkin. The winners were: Best Novel, The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett; Best Novella, The Tusks of Extinction, Ray Nayler; Best Novelette, ‘The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea’, Naomi Kritzer; Best Short Story, ‘Stitched to Skin Like Family Is’, Nghi Vo; Best Series, Between Earth and Sky, Rebecca Roanhorse; Best Related Work, Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, Jordan S. Carroll; Best Editor, Short Form, Neil Clarke; Best Editor, Long Form, Diana M. Pho; Best Semiprozine, Uncanny, publishers and editors-in-chief Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas; Best Poem, ‘A War of Words’, Marie…

Cafe Writers Open Poetry Competition 2025 Win up to £1,000 in Cafe Writers’ annual poetry competition. Entries can be on any topic, by poets anywhere in the world, but must be no longer than 40 lines. The judge is poet Jessica Mookherjee. Prizes are £1,000, £300 and £200. There are also prizes of £50 for six further commended poems, and £100 for the best entry from a Norfolk poet not winning another prize. The entry fee is £5 per poem or £13 for three and £4 per poem thereafter. The closing date is 23 November. Website: https://www.cafewriters.co.uk/home/poetry-competition/ The Happiful Poetry Prize 2026 Happiful magazine is published to challenge the stigma around mental health and to promote a healthier, happier and more sustainable socciety. Its annual poetry contest is inviting entries of…

The Celestial Glossary The Celestial Glossary is the literary magazine from Estrella House Publishing, writes PDR Lindsay-Salmon. It publishes twice yearly. There are no genre restrictions, and authors are encouraged to submit whatever is nearest to their hearts. Open to most fiction and non-fiction genres except S.F. or mystery. Poetry is also welcomed. Submit prose, up to 7,000 words, comic strips: up to 10 pages, visual art up to 2 per submission and poetry no more than 5 poems per submission. Payment: a revenue share system where authors get a portion of ad revenue generated from views to their work and a portion of submission fees. Website: https://estrellahp.com The Ex-Puritan The Ex-Puritan is a Canadian literary magazine which is open to submissions all year round, from anywhere in the world,…

Self-publishing a book is a major accomplishment – but getting it into readers’ hands is where the real challenge begins. Without a traditional publisher’s distribution network, indie authors must navigate the complex world of online platforms, bookshops and libraries themselves. Following last month’s look at ISBNS, metadata and print book distribution, the next of our four key tips can help ensure your book reaches its full potential. 3. Think beyond Amazon for ebooks While Amazon KDP dominates the ebook market, relying solely on it can limit your reach. • KDP Select offers perks like Kindle Unlimited inclusion and promotional tools but requires exclusivity to Amazon. This can work for certain genres with strong KU readerships (e.g., romance, thrillers, sci-fi). • Going wide with platforms like Apple Books, Kobo and Google…

We used to think of memoir and biography as non-fiction, that is completely factual, but nowadays we have a more nuanced understanding of truth. Real life is messy and amorphous, but stories are small, elegant structures, and must inevitably involve a lot of shaping and selecting. Therefore a story can never be actual, factual, objective truth. It can only ever represent a subjective truth, based on objective facts, seen through the eyes of the author. Memoirs often play with the narrative timeline rather than telling the story chronologically but thinking of memoir and biography as creative non-fiction opens the door to an even more inventive approach and gives us opportunities to experiment with different ways of telling our stories. If you have read my free-range writing books you will know…

Social media dominates the writing world. We’re encouraged to have writer profiles that promote our work, publicise our writing projects, and help us engage with readers. In the BSM days (Before Social Media), one of the best ways to promote a new book was to issue a press release. In some ways, press releases had a lot in common with social media posts. We never knew who might see them, who might stop what they were doing to read them, or if anyone would even notice them at all. But sometimes, just like a social media post, one would resonate with the world and go viral. So, do press releases still have a place in today’s world? Can they still benefit our writing business? And if so, how do we…

The role of AI in creating book material remains a hot topic. As a book industry insider, my viewpoint might be somewhat biased but part of any publishing role is to protect authors and their creative output. There are huge concerns about AI-generated content but the human element remains crucial in terms of crafting a unique voice that will resonate most strongly with readers. Then there are the AI-generated ‘rip-off’ books that are marketed to readers of a similar genre. Both authors and readers complain that these are poor quality in comparison and obviously not written by a human. Whether this changes in the future, time will tell. In terms of protecting original material, we enter another minefield and a current UK legal action accuses an AI company of downloading…

Guideposts Guideposts is a series of US Christian anthologies of multi-author devotionals and true story collections, writes Gary Dalkin. Current series in progress are: Angels in Our Lives. The editorial team are looking for stories that clearly show how God intervenes in human lives through others, events, visions, objects, and animals. While the moment can be wrapped in an everyday or commonplace experience, the result should be the realization that whatever happened did so only because God sent a helper. Stories can be based on, but not limited to; help from a mysterious stranger, a voice out of nowhere, direct divine intervention, dramatic or ordinary rescues, angelic visions, angel-related objects, guardian angels, animal angels, and messages received through nature. Each story should be a true, first-person account of between 750…

Wildfire Audio Book Competition 2025 The latest contest from Wildfire Words is for audio book texts, which may be either stories or poetry. Each entry should consist of at least six items of text (up to 300 words or 60 lines), at least one of which should be presented as an audio file. There are prizes of £150, £75 and £35. Winners will be published online by wildfire words as audio books containing up to 20 poems/stories as text with the author’s voice. The judges are Katherine Parsons, Marilyn Timms and Howard Timms. The entry fee is £7 up to 20 October, and then £9. The closing date is 30 November. Website: https://wildfire-words.com/wildfire-abc/…

Dahlia Publishing Dahlia Publishing is a small independent press based in Leicester, writes Gary Dalkin. Established in 2010, the company publishes a small number of single author short story collections annually, always work that they ‘really, really love’. Recent titles include Cold Toast, by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris, and Monstrous Longing, by Abi Hynes. Editor Farhana Shaikh is currently open to proposals for short story collections from UK-based writers. She is particularly keen on publishing diverse voices and actively encourages submissions from firsttime writers. Your proposal should include a cover letter in the body of your email addressed personally to Farhana Shaikh which introduces your manuscript and explains something about why you write. Include an outline of your whole book, and the first three stories from your completed manuscript or the first…

Dead Sky Publishing Dead Sky Publishing, along with its Death’s Head Press imprint, publishes work that is inherently dark, across a spectrum of genres and formats, writes PDR Lindsay-Salmon. From non-fiction to memoirs, from comic books to novels, from art books and photography books to short story collections the press looks for ‘book-ish misfits’ in the form of dark fiction, non-fiction, and graphic novels in the genres of horror, crime, thriller, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy. Currently the press seeks full-length manuscripts for standalone works, series, and short story collections all 40,000 words to 90,000 words in length. Agented and non-agented submissions should include the first three chapters or a 50-page excerpt. Rights and royalties discussed with the contract. Website: https://deadskypublishing.com Driftwood Press Driftwood Press is an independent publisher of…

The Booby Prize October 2025 The Booby Prize is a new quarterly creative writing contest with conservation in mind. Simply, write a 500-word flash fiction story in just 48 hours using three prompts from a provided list. A shortlist will then be drawn up by a judging panel of writing people from around the world and then an industry-acclaimed author will whittle that shortlist down to the winner(s). The first prize is £500 (GBP). If there are enough entrants the prizes will be extended to second place and hopefully more. If you include a Blue-Footed Booby in your story, it will automatically be inducted into the Booby Hall of Fame and have a chance to win a booby soft toy! The entry fee is £10. £1 from every entry goes…

One of the unexpected outcomes of being a literary agent is that it means I am in the privileged position of knowing exactly how tough it is to forge a career with your pen. As a result, it is always something of a mystery to me why so many people want to become writers. Of course there is another part of me – the part that wants to be (and is) a writer too – that absolutely gets it. Who wouldn’t want their ideas, their imaginary worlds, to be inhabited and shared by readers? Part of the reason why I love the world of books so much is because it has always seemed to me the most democratic of art forms. Just about everyone who has ever lived tells stories.…

My first sale was a letter to a women’s magazine. My second an article about family life. When it was accepted I wrote another piece for the same market. Then a friend told me I shouldn’t wait. ‘Try to get five things out there,’ she said, ‘and once you have five things, aim for ten, and when you have ten, aim for fifteen.’ Get it? The most I ever had was forty-five but that caused another problem. How to keep track of these stories and articles. What were they? Who had they been sent to? How long ago did I send each piece? I found a lovely notebook and began listing my work. I’d put the title at the top of a page, together with the word count. Under that…

STARLETTE A GOOD GRUMBLE I feel I must write to raise a most serious you are giving me far too many ideas. Every time I open an issue of the magazine, I myself I’ll just take a quick look. But then I find an article about setting and atmosphere that sparks one novel, a feature on flash fiction that suggests a short story, and a competition that suddenly demands a completely different project. By the end of the I’ve got a list of plots, characters, and ‘must-write’ ideas that could keep me busy for the next ten years. The real problem, of course, is that your magazine far too good. I sit down to write one project, and then I catch myself wondering if perhaps I should try that ghost…

SERENDIPITOUS SUCCESSES Serendipity is responsible for every stage of my writing journey, writes subscriber James Marshall. In 2019, I visited a local coffee shop and saw a flyer for a writing group. I joined the group, liked it and wrote a 1,500-word short story every fortnight. Then the COVID pandemic stopped that. Luckily, I had picked up a copy of Pen to Print’s Write On journal in my local library before they were closed and saw that Pen to Print ran an online writing group (led by WM columnist Ian Ayris). I joined that group. A year later, my short story, ‘Tales from the shop floor,’ won their annual competition. As my craft improved, I entered the Pen to Print book of the year competition and was one of a…

CLASS ACTION WINS AGAINST AI PIRATES There has been a significant victory for writers as a result of a class action lawsuit brought by the authors Andrea Bartz (We Were Never Here), Charles Graeber (The Good Nurse), and Kirk Wallace Johnson (The Feather Thief) against AI company Anthropic, who make the Claude AI chatbot, writes Gary Dalkin. In June Judge William Alsup ruled in the suit brought by the writers that using books to train AI was not in itself a breach of US copyright law, as the end product was ‘exceedingly transformative’. However, he then ordered Anthropic to stand trial this December for the way the company had acquired the books it used to train the Claude system, not by purchasing copies of them, but by downloading pirated ebooks…

Owlet Press Owlet Press is a small publisher of children’s picture books and graphic novels located in Leamington Spa, writes Gary Dalkin. The picture book list is currently full, but the press is ‘really keen’ to see submissions of graphic novels and chapter books from a variety of diverse creators. The company was nominated in the 2022 British Book Awards for Regional Small Press of the Year: Midlands. Email your submissions to info@owletpress.com with ‘submission - title - author name’ in the subject line. Attach your manuscript (if it is accepted Owlet will commission the illustrations) and include in your email 50 words about your book and another 100 about yourself as an author. If you are an author-illustrators of picture books or graphic novels send your submission as a…

Menagerie Menagerie publishes poems, fictions, and hybrid works. For poetry submit three to five poems in a single submission. Keep stories and essays under 5,000 words. Payment is US$50. Website: https://menageriemagazine.com Full Bleed Full Bleed is an annual print and online journal published by the team at the Maryland Institute College of Art ‘devoted to the intersection of the visual and literary arts.’ Submit criticism, belle-lettres, visual art, illustration, fiction, poetry, and graphic essays on the theme of inheritance, maximum length 4,000 words or one to three poems. Deadline: 1 November. Payment: US$25 per poem or flash fiction; US$50 for longer prose pieces and art portfolios Website:https://www.full-bleed.org Eleventh Hour Literary Eleventh Hour Literary welcomes literary prose (fiction, creative nonfiction or essays) and poetry. Submit short stories, flash fiction, creative nonfiction,…

County Highway County Highway is a newspaper, a chatty old fashioned paper born, so its editors say, during the Covid lockdowns. Inside are reports, regular columns about agriculture, animals, herbal medicine, and living uncommon lives. There are ‘columns like Bouquets and Brick-bats,’ humour, anger, and ‘an entire section devoted to music and musicians.’ Editors David Samuels and Walter Kirn welcome emailed pitches, full submissions, and advertising inquiries. PDRLS Website: https://www.countyhighway.com…

A recent book purchase got me thinking. I am a science enthusiast and bought a new book titled Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics. If this is not your thing, stay with me – I am not getting technical! The book was described as giving ‘unparalleled insights into the latest research’ in ‘everyday language with wit and charm’. However, the description was totally misleading, and the content was a history of scientists over the years and how understanding gradually developed. Not at all what I expected or wanted. Hardbacks are expensive these days and I felt I had wasted my money. Fearing that others would be misled I contacted the publisher, who initially dismissed my (constructive) criticism out of hand, then recontacted me saying they had made what I saw as…

Once (in another life) I had to recruit an office manager for an office – the company I worked for had opened in Brussels. The job and circumstances dictated someone who spoke English, French and Dutch. I will always remember one candidate – the successful one – when asked how many languages she spoke, told me, ‘seven’. She listed them, explaining how she spoke each and ended by listing English, saying ‘Well, everyone speaks English, don’t they?’ Few of us have that sort of language skill, never mind taking it as the most natural thing in the world, but of course those native to many of the places travel writers focus on do speak a language other than English. So, if you are visiting, it may be useful to at…