I’ve got an exhibition of photos up at the local airport, so life’s a bit strange at the moment. We start the day with a mad rush to get my son to school, then I go straight to the airport and open the exhibition. For most of the morning there are just enough people coming through that I can’t settle to anything else, so I get thoroughly bored. Once or…
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…