Tuesday 2 December 2008

Four stories per week.


I’m still writing up a storm this week! I’m trying to treat my writing as a ‘proper job’. My aim is to send out four stories per week, either to competitions or women’s magazines. I have to give myself a deadline otherwise I’ve had it!

Last week I entered four competitions: Debut Magazine Comp; Lichfield and District Writers; ‘On the Edge’ Competition and Writersdock Short Story Competition. Wish me luck! There are two I want to enter closing in December and I really must research a few more. I do prefer writing more literary stories for the competitions when there are no taboos regarding theme and language!

I’m finding the women’s magazine stories harder to write. I feel more restricted and can’t write as freely. However, I was editing two stories I’d earmarked for literary competitions when it occurred to me that they’d also sit quite comfortably in Woman’s Weekly. Again, word length is a problem. I just found out today that Take A Break feature stories of 1,100 words and I’ve just shaved off 100 words to fit what I thought was a 1,000 word limit. Damn!

As for The Yellow Room Short Story Competition judging…..I’ve almost finished. I’m trying to decide on first, second and third. Unusually, there isn’t a clear winner for me this time. Nothing stands out and grabs me as an out-and-out winner. Perhaps it’s just me.

Finally, I’ve had very little feedback on The Yellow Room Magazine. The feedback I’ve had has been very general and only three people have voted on the stories, which makes it hard to justify paying the winning author £20! So come on, if you’ve read the magazine, get voting!

3 comments:

Sally Zigmond said...

Blimey, Jo! That's a lot of stories. I'm struggling to get one out per week. Good luck.

Jo said...

I'm struggling this week, Sally. I've sent one story off and have three more 'sort of' ready. They don't quite work, though and I need to play around with them. I'm not sure I can do that in time to send them off tomorrow. Bother and blow!

Quillers said...

Well done on the writing, Jo! That's half the battle. Good luck with the competitions too.

BTW, Take A Break only take 1000 word stories for the weekly mag, but they'll take anything up to about 3000 words for the Fiction Feast issue, and the fiction editor, Norah McGrath will consider stories for both publications.