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…
Been there, done that
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…
Slugs
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…
Where did the last week go?
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…
Carnival!
We’ve just finished Carnival here. Both my son’s school and the school where I work shut for the week, and we’ve had friends visiting from the UK. I had hoped to do loads of stuff around the house, but instead I’ve had fun and submitted some stories. I actually submitted seven stories in February, which is almost back to normal. The ideas are flowing again. Now I just need to…
HeroicStories
I have a new writing job. I’ve become the Comments Editor at HeroicStories. People email in comments on the stories, and it’s my job to chose which comments to run (which is most of them) and edit them until they say what the author would have said if they’d known how to write well. The trick is to make the English clear and correct, maintain house style (American spelling, give…