We’re on holiday. We just spent five days in Paris. Guess when we were supposed to be flying to London? When we left the hotel at 11am, the receptionist checked the web and said there was a problem at Heathrow, but it looked like London Luton wasn’t affected. So we took a taxi to the airport and checked in, they said we’d have a two hour delay because somebody had…
One way and another I haven’t written much lately, so I was relieved when my story “Slugs” went down well at the critters writing group. I edited, it, changed the title to “Dr. Slither”, and sent it off to Farthing magazine. Now I average one sale for every ten submissions, so I was stunned and delighted when they bought it after only 12 days. The only catch is that it…
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…