Yesterday I emailed the tourist office in Orkney to say that I was writing a short story with a heroine who was working at an archaeological site on Orkney, and please could they tell me what sort of soil she’d be digging through. I’d like to be a fly on the wall when they read that one! If nothing else, it should give them a good laugh on a Monday…
New writers agonise about rejections. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that I average about one sale per ten submissions, so I try not to get too hopeful about any one story. I send them out, and they get rejected I tell myself that’s 10% of a sale and I send them out again somewhere else. I keep doing that until either they sell or I run out…
The first draft of the novel “Frankenstein” was written by Mary Shelley during a holiday in Switzerland, as a dare. Consequently my email group of writing friends (the Critter Litter) ocassionally have what we call a Shelley – a date to produce a story on a certain theme by a tight deadline. It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be done. The point is that the worst…
Last week I asked a collegue if she was looking forward to the Easter Holidays. She said, “It’s not a holiday. It’s just a change of activity.” How right she was. We only get Holy Week off school, and it zipped past somewhat faster than a headless chicken. But I got 5 submissions sent off, set up a web site for my friend Norma and cleared up some of the…