Last Chance To Enter The Brighton Prize!

Tags

Alison Macleod, competitions, Erinna Mettler, flash fiction, Golden Hare Books, Haleh Agar, Sarah Manning, short stories, Sussex, writing

As a director of The Brighton Prize I have the good fortune to act as one of the judges every year. The prize is open for international entries of short stories (between 1,000 and 2,000 words) and flash fiction (up to 350 words). It’s always exciting to see what stories arrive through the inbox and there are always some truly world class entries. We like to see stories that are a little bit out of the ordinary, that look at the world in a different way, through different eyes. We also love a laugh and rarely get sent anything funny so if you have something that will make us guffaw it might be worth sending it – comedy is a difficult write though.

This year my fellow judges are author Alison MacLeod (previously long-listed for the Man Booker and currently shortlisted for The Edge Hill Prize) and literary agent Sarah Manning

On what she looks for as a judge Alison says: ‘In a great story, I love to see a writer’s understanding that seemingly small dramas can reveal the profound stuff of life; that ordinary events can reveal the extraordinary.  Melodrama swamps a short story of course. If a story is about the extraordinary or the fantastical, I want to be shown the ordinary human truth within those events. I love a confident prose style. whether the language of the story is gritty and stark, or lucid and clear, or rich and rhythmic. I want the voice of a story to draw me in with its quiet force or alternatively, to grab me and say, ‘Listen… This story matters.’

Sarah says: ‘I am excited to be a judge for the Brighton Prize and am looking forward to discovering new voices. If the main character jumps off the page and has a clear goal which keeps me reading, then I am hooked no matter the genre!’.

And me? ‘I want to see stories that linger long after reading. There has to be something new and original, an authentic voice, a subject no-one has thought of before. Be as ‘out there’ as possible but keep it simple. The story should be suitable for a public reading and should therefore be easy to follow. I love cinematic writing; I want to be immersed in new worlds. Writers need to show that they have paid attention to detail too. I don’t want to see any silly mistakes as I’ve got to edit the stories for publication!’

The winners and short-listees of last year’s prize were all offered publication. There was a prize-giving in Brighton in November, a launch at Golden Hare Books in Edinburgh, an event at Brighton Fringe Festival and our Flash Fiction winner Haleh Agar was published in Viva Brighton a local magazine with a circulation of 26,000.

All this AND big cash prizes!

You’d be silly not to enter. www.brightonprize.com

 

Unbound Diary Part 11 – Almost There!

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competitions, crowdfunding, literature, mentoring, publishers, Riptide Journal, short stories, short story appraisals, starlings, submissions, The Bristol Short Story Prize, The Fish Short Story Prize, The Manchester Review, Unbound, workshops, writers, writing, writing workshops

A lot has happened since I last blogged here. I was stuck around the 45% mark for what seemed like an eternity, thinking that I was never going to get this thing funded. Last week I had a conversation with a Twitter friend, the fab short story writer Safia Moore, who not only pledged to the book but suggested that the pledge options I should be pushing were the ones for large sums, the short story appraisals and mentoring packages. She pointed out that I am the director of a short story prize, have been short-listed in a few myself, and am a tutor! She is of course right on all counts. It’s funny how when you are in the middle of something you can’t see it for what it is. I started pushing these options on social media and so far someone has pledged for £400 of mentoring and four people have pledged for short story appraisals. I suddenly find myself 81 % funded, so thank you Safia for reminding me of what I have to offer!

If you keep getting nowhere when sending out short story submissions, or entering competitions, perhaps you could do with a little help from the director of a prize, who has been published in Riptide and The Manchester Review and short-listed for The Bristol and Fish prizes. I am an experienced tutor, mentor and editor with an MA (dist) in Creative Writing and an acclaimed novel.

On offer as part of crowdfunding for In The Future Everyone Will Be Famous For Fifteen Minutes are:

Short Story Appraisal up to 5,000 words with full edit and notes – £100

Mentoring,  4 face to face sessions (skype, email or phone for those too far away) up to 20,000 words with full edit and notes. This can be part one manuscript or several short stories. £400

2 hour Short Story Workshop for 5 people (South East and possibly Yorkshire) £200

These packages are offered at a much lower price than my usual rate and at a much lower price than most literary consultancies. Not only will they greatly benefit your writing but you will facilitate the publication of a book of short stories that would not otherwise be published.

You could of course just prove all the people who think short stories aren’t worth publishing wrong and pledge £10 in support of the book. You will be a patron of the arts and I am so very grateful that so many of you have already done so.

 

 

Full Of Things That Have Never Been

Tags

Araminta Hall, Bridget Whelan, Brighton, Catherine Quinn, competitions, Cornerstones Literary Agency New Writing South, David Headley, Emlyn Rees, Jo Rees, Kate Harrision, Laura Wilkinson, literature, Lizzie Enfield, Myriad Editions Julia Crouch, publishers, Rattle Tales, Rilke, Sharon Bowers, short stories, Simon Toyne, Simon Trewin, Small Batch, spoken word, starlings, Sue Teddern, The Angel House, The Beach Hut Writing Academy, The Short review, William Shaw, Write by the Beach, writing

And now we welcome the New Year. Full of things that have never been.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Isn’t that a glorious quote for the new year? January is a difficult month, everyone is full of lethargy and Christmas excess. This year it seems like all our heroes are dying. The weather is awful. The nights are long and dark. It’s hard to get motivated. For a writer it can be the most depressing time of year. I have often found it hard to get started. If I haven’t written for a couple of weeks, getting back into stride can feel like climbing a mountain. It’s all a matter of perspective of course, as Rilke’s quote illustrates. This year I am determined to see the new year not in terms of the past but in terms of what’s to come.

Rilke was himself was a wanderer, a traveller of no fixed location, he sought lovers and patronage and never truly settled. He moved from one possibilty to another, across Europe into the Middle East and Russia, back to Paris and then, fatefully,Switzerland where he died at 51 of leukemia. A short and packed life of longing and regret that produced breathtaking poetry. Read some.

This year my resolution isn’t to lose weight or drink less! I probably will, but under no pressure to do so, 2016 will instead be a year of action. I have plans. I have words to write and opportunities to exploit. I have a fully finished short story collection and a half finished novel. This year I will find an agent and a publisher and move things on and if I don’t find either I will move things on anyway. There is always a way. There are always things that have never been.

The first Rattle Tales show of 2016 takes place on Feb 16th at The Brunswick in Hove. We had an amazing response to our call for submissions and we are reading through them all now to come up with a programme as varied, entertaining and thought provoking as all our shows. Do come along and see what we are all about.

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I am involved in two very exciting projects this year. Firstly, The Brighton Prize (of which I am a co-director) enters its third year and we are in a position to expand. The competition will go international for the first time and we are adding categories for flash fiction and local writers. I will have more information on this very soon but we recently asked for volunteers to help us develop the prize, and Rattle Tales in general, and were literally overwhelmed by the response. I’m really looking forward to the group taking this project forward and to working with new, talented and enthusiastic people.

I am also involved in The Beach Hut Writing Academy, a new writing school established by professional writers in Brighton. I did my first course for them last year, co-teaching on short story practice with Bridget Whelan, and it was a very enjoyable success. The new courses begin on Jan 21st with a Fiction Writing course run by best-selling author Aramanita Hall and then a TV and Radio course taught by Sue Teddern and Hannah Vincent. Our most ambitious plan for early 2016 is a writers conference in Brighton on March 12th. Write by the Sea will feature, best-selling authors, publishers and agents taking part in panel discussions, workshops and one to one pitches, all at the beautiful sea front venue The Angel House. We have agents Simon Trewin, David Headley and Sharon Bowers, Cornerstones Literary Agency, local publishers Myriad Editions, The Writer’s Guild of Great Britain, authors Simon Toyne, Julia Crouch, Lizzie Enfield, Laura Wilkinson, Araminta Hall, Catherine Quinn, Kate Harrison, Sarah Rayner, Sue Teddern, Bridget Whelan, Jo and Emlyn Rees, William Shaw and me. There will also be one to ones where you can pitch or discuss your current project. The full programme is available on our website and the early bird rate is in place until Jan 24th.

Before I had a publisher for Starlings I attended a similar event at The Jubilee Library run by New Writing South. I met other writers, agents and publishers and came away with a wealth of advice and contacts that really helped me get my book published. Rattle Tales is sponsoring a session on Writing A Prize-winning Short Story and so two worlds collide. You’d be crazy to miss it.

Losing Control – TEDx and The Brighton Prize

Tags

Book Slam, Charleston, Cheryl Powell, competitions, control, Grit Lit, literature, Lonny Pop, Lucy Flannery, Peter James, Rattle Tales, reading aloud, short stories, spoken word, TEDx, The Brighton Prize

Last night I did something I’ve never done before. It was the awards show for the 2015 Brighton Prize and I am lucky enough to be one of the Directors. We wanted as many of our ten shortlistees to read as possible, fortunately our winner Lucy Flannery was there to read her prize-winning story, Calm Down Dear, but our two runners up, Tamsin Cottis and Cheryl Palmer couldn’t make it.  I offered to read Cheryl’s story Mermaid for her. I loved this story from the first round of reading, it was very striking and original and had a poetic rhythm to it fitting to the title. When I was practising in the afternoon I realised that I hadn’t ever read somebody else’s work to an audience.

I made my stage debut five years ago, when I read at Brighton’s Grit Lit event in December 2010. I was absolutely petrified and on last! Somehow I managed to get through without anyone guessing how nervous I was. I thought that my right leg was shaking so much that people must have seen it but nobody mentioned it. What people did do was come up and congratulate me on my reading. Since then, I have read my own work many times, usually in dingy cabaret bars but also in festival tents and university conferences. I am always nervous but it does depend on what I’m reading. If a story is very personal to me I will be terrified, if I have any doubts about what I’m reading my hands will tremble and my mouth will dry. Sometimes, when I know it’s good, when people I trust have told me it’s my best, I will be more in control. 

On Friday I went to the TEDx talks at The Brighton Dome. The theme this year was Losing Control. All the speeches addressed the relinquishing of control as a positive experience, the act of venturing out of our comfort zones making us better humans, more open, able to live up to our true potential. These talks made me think of my own experience reading my writing to an audience. At one point my nerves were so bad that I had a form of hypnosis to try and tackle the root cause. It worked, up to a point, but I always have a little bit of stage fright, I always stumble a bit over my words or suffer from shaky hand syndrome. Last night was the exception. I think because the words weren’t mine I could read without fear. I didn’t feel nervous at all. It was probably my best reading. Now comes the tricky bit. It’s okay to be a bit nervous but I would like not to be. I would like to be able to read my own stories the way I read Cheryl’s. To be in control. Then again, perhaps losing control makes me a more emotional reader and helps get the message across with more impact. Whichever it is, I know that if I want to be a writer I have to keep on doing public readings, it’s part of the game, and if you want to be a writer you will need to do them too. So, deep breath, let yourself go.

The winner of the Brighton Prize 2015, Lucy Flannery, with our host Lonny Pop. The shortlist and details of the prize are on our website www.brightonprize.com

Rejection Revisited

Tags

competitions, Jaqueline Paizis, Keats, short stories, starlings, Stephen King, The Manchester Review, The Short review

A few months ago I wrote a post about rejection. It was my most sucessful post since I ranted about old punks wittering on about The Jubilee. Lots of people left insightful and encouraging comments and I was left with the sense that rejection is something we all have to cope with and writers take comfort from all being in it together.

In the six months since 2015 began I have submitted stories and poems to fifty journals and competitions. I didn’t intend it to be so many, in fact, in my last post I said that I wasn’t going to submit to competitions at all. The thing is I have a completed short story collection on the look out for a publisher and I know that a major competition win would help, I have been shortlisted for a few so I know this is not beyond the realms of reason. Of those fifty submissions ten are still out, I was asked to rewrite one (the piece that got me a distinction in my MA) by an American publisher, because it wasn’t satisfying enough, thirty-eight have been rejected out right and then a couple of weeks ago I got my first acceptance of the year.

Let me just say that on that morning I got two rejection emails and was ready to give up on submitting indefinitely. Constant rejection can accumulate into a heavy burden, weighing on your shoulders so much it restricts the movement of your hands over the keyboard. In short, self-doubt prevents creativity. It was either stop the rejection or stop writing. Fellow writer Jacqueline Paizis wrote a heartfelt blog about failing to list in a prestigious short story competition. I failed to list too so I recognised the words of the rejection email.

‘All short stories are about change and transformation’ and ‘need to kick into life immediately with a strong, vivid and involving first paragraph.’

Jacqueline wonders if this is the case for writing to be considered good or if it’s just a proviso of the competition. She also goes on to wonder about the historical writer’s relationship to rejection.

I know stamina is a vital ingredient of any writer’s recipe but I wonder if  Dickens felt he could add nothing to the world because it had all been said before? Did George Elliot doubt she was writing something revolutionary about her sex? Answers anyone?

The thing is they probably did. Even established writers are only as good as their last book. Think of Keats toiling in obscurity, relying on his friends to pay the rent as the critics hold his masterpieces up for ridicule. More recently, think of Stephen King teaching high school and drowning out the volume of failure with buckets of bourbon. They didn’t compromise what they wrote for an easy route to publication.

My story, Miley Cyrus Fault, has no punctuation. I wrote it like this on purpose. It is about a suicidal Big Brother contestant and the form reflects the narrator’s state of mind. It was always going to be a hard sell. I didn’t expect it to win any competitions. People would either understand or they’d hate it and probably not even finish it. I know I polarize opinion with my writing. The first two reviews for Starlings were equally damning and gushing. One said the prose was turgid and over-ambitious; the other compared it to A Visit From The Goon Squad and The Wire. I have kept those two reviews  because both, in their own way, confirm I am on the right track. I refuse to temper my writing to win a competition or get a good review. I am writing for me.

The rejections came in for Miley Cyrus Fault within a week. As a judge for The Brighton Prize and a co-director of Rattle Tales I regularly send out rejection emails. I was sending some out on the morning I got mine fom the competition Jaqueline and I had entered. It’s not personal, but quite often it does comes down to personal preference.

On Friday afternoon an email came in from The Manchester Review telling me they wanted to publish Miley Cyrus Fault. I almost filed it unread because I really wasn’t expecting anyone to publish it. I wrote back explaining my gratitude as I was about ready to give up. The editor, Valerie O’Riordan, wrote back, Keep subbing – it’s a numbers game, really. Persist! I think what she means is simply that the more you submit the more likely it is for something to get published. I would add to that, don’t compromise. If it’s good someone somewhere will like it.

The Brighton Prize – How We Decided

Tags

awards, Brighton, Brighton Prize, competitions, prizes, Rattle Tales Anthology, short stories

There will be a very exciting announcement about this year’s Brighton Prize soon. It is an event that I am extremely proud to be involved in. With a longer submission period and a later awards show we are hoping to read even more excellent submissions this year. Last year’s prize-winners, and many of the stories featured at Rattle Tales shows from 2014, are about to be published in the third Rattle Tales anthology. We are delighted to have so many wonderful stories and flash fictions gathered together in one place.

As an afterword for the anthology, I wrote a short piece about how we choose The Brighton Prize shortlist and winners, aided by our excellent judges Bethan Roberts and Laura H. Lockington. I have republished the article below, in case you were thinking of entering The Brighton Prize this year and wondered what we were looking for. Remember to follow us on Facebook and Twitter @BrightonPrize @RattleTales and sign up to our mailing list for information about our prizes and events.

The Brighton Prize – How We Decided by Erinna Mettler

The inaugural Brighton Prize was presented on Wednesday May 14^th at a sell-out show at Brighton Fringe.  Our winner was Linda McVeigh with her story Ordinary Man In Suit and our two runners up were Allie Rogers and Melanie Whipman.

When the show was over, a few members of the audience asked us about the judging process and how we managed to narrow it down to the short list of ten, and ultimately, the three winners. This was the first time we had run a short story prize. We opened submissions in February and closed them a just six weeks later so we would have enough reading time to present the winners at our Brighton Fringe show. In that time we received 350 entries, nearly all of which fitted the entry criteria (here’s a tip though, if it says ‘Short Story Competition’ don’t send an extract from your novel or a narrative poem.) There are ten key Rattle Tales members and, from that pool of experienced readers, one had to ensure that the entries were anonymised and a couple of the others couldn’t commit to extensive reading. We had seven readers, each being randomly allocated fifty stories. Each story had to be given our full attention. We decided on a selection criteria based on technical ability, structure, language, characterisation, dialogue, originality and suitability for performance. Rattle Tales is very much concerned with the performance; to win the story would have to work live.

The first thing we learned was that it would be easier to have a shared spreadsheet to organise the voting. Each reader’s first fifty were allocated yes/no/maybe votes. All the yes and maybe votes were put through to the next round. It may seem harsh to reject a story on the opinion of one person but we are all experienced writers who have taken part in the selection process for our regular shows and anthologies. We know what works live and what constitutes good story-telling.  The stories going through had to tick the majority of the boxes on our list of criteria. If a reader didn’t like a story because the subject didn’t appeal to them personally but they could see it was well-written and original, the story would be forwarded for a second opinion. The commitment of our readers is without question, all gave up their time to ensure the competition was run fairly.

Eight of us read in the second round. We divided the stories into two groups and each story was read by four people, who then voted yes or no. In the end it was simply a matter of counting the votes, and the stories with three, or more, made it into our top ten. The top ten was originally a top eleven but we considered one of the stories potentially libellous and, as an organisation low on funding, we really couldn’t risk it. (Tip number two, if you are using real people as characters at least change their names!) These ten were checked for legal issues, plagiarism and previous competition wins/publication history. They were then forwarded to our judges, Bethan Roberts and Laura H. Lockington.

This felt a bit like sending your child off to the first day of school. Would our favourites be their favourites?  We met with Laura and Bethan a week later to come up with the top three. It was interesting because Linda McVeigh’s story was the first one both of them mentioned. It was always the winning story with our judges and with most of the readers. The runners up were a little harder to come by; some of the stories were loved by one judge but not the other. We discussed each one and then narrowed it down to a top two. It was quite easy in the end. Any one of the ten could have got through and it is a shame that all of them couldn’t be read at the show, but at least you can read them all now in this fine publication. Which one will be your favourite?  The judge’s reports on each of the shortlisted stories are as follows.

Ordinary Man In Suit by Linda McVeigh

Linda’s story has a structural expertise that made it stand out. The story is simple, girl meets man, falls in love, finds out man is married but there are many layers in the telling of the tale. It has a Dorian Grey quality to it as the narrator’s talent develops through her relationship with the man and the portrait she paints of him at the end reflects the way she comes to see him, as an ordinary man in a suit. Subtle, beautiful, heart-breaking.

Not Coming In Again by Allie Rogers

Funny, poignant and more than a little creepy. Allie’s story has a sense of menace that could have easily descended into melodrama but is instead handled gently, creating sympathy for a pretty strange lead character.

The Real Thing by Melanie Whipman

A great teenage voice. This story took us into the world of young women in bars with authentic and funny dialogue. It has an uncomfortable undercurrent as the girls’ conversation presents different views of a possibly abusive parent.

The Short-list

Deep Dark and Dangerous is highly original with a great voice and folkloric atmosphere. White Light has an infectious energy and brilliant dialogue. A Long Walk is carefully plotted and full of fresh descriptions. The Fifty Fifty Room draws you in immediately with a strong and intriguing opening. The Strand At Lahinch is a refreshing take on the surfer love story with well-handled descriptions of youthful male beauty. Tracks is a deftly structured exploration of another world and political pre-conceptions. A Short Lie In The Long Grass shows atmospheric skill and mastery of suspense.

 

 

Field of Dreams – Setting Up A Short Story Competition

Tags

Bath Short Story Prize, Bethan Roberts, Brighton, competitions, Laura H. Lockington, Radio Reverb, Rattle Tales, short stories, spoken word, storytelling, The Bridport Prize, The Brighton Fringe, The Brighton Prize, The Bristol Prize, Threshold's Short Story Forum

If you have visited this blog before you will know that I am one of the founders of the spoken word group Rattle Tales. We are a group of writers who met on the MA at Sussex University and, when we left, continued to meet to workshop our writing. After a while, we decided to set up a regular literature night to showcase our own stories and give emerging authors the chance to read their work to an audience. Our nights have proved extremely popular. We ask the audience to get involved by discussing the stories they have just heard with the author.

The core Rattle Tales members are all practising authors. Just like you, we enter writing contests and send our work to journals and spoken word events. We like to read our writing aloud. Since we put on our first show we’ve run over ten events (including one at Green Man, one at Small Wonder, one in France and several at Brighton Fringe) and published two anthologies. The stories published are the ones read at our nights and for many authors it is the first time their work has been published.  We are a true co-operative; the eleven Rattle Tales members have equal say in everything. We share the work, we argue over the decisions and any modest profit we make goes straight back into venue and publishing costs. Many of our readers go on to success in competitions, or have their work published in journals or performed on the radio. Reading your writing aloud to an appreciative audience instils a confidence in you that you don’t get from having it appear in print. I speak from experience here; the first public outing for my writing was in print but nothing compares to taking a deep breath and reading your work to an audience who listen to your words, applaud and even congratulate you in person afterwards. It makes you feel invincible.  It makes you want to approach agents and editors and shout ‘publish me!’ from the rooftops. Rattle Tales wants to give every writer the chance to feel this way.

At one of our meetings we discussed the possibility of setting up a short story prize. We were surprised that there wasn’t a regular prize in Brighton, there are prizes in so many other cities and Brighton is stuffed full of writers. We were also aware that there isn’t a prize which is tailored to the spoken word. Rattle Tales stories have to work being read aloud to an audience and we wanted to celebrate this particular under-appreciated writing skill.

When we booked the theatre for our first spoken word event there was a feeling that it didn’t matter if no one turned up because between us it was only the cost of a good night out. It was a similar feeling with The Brighton Prize. But on a much bigger scale. We all sat down together and discussed how much we could afford to stump up for the prize-money if only a couple of people entered. We agreed to keep the entry cost down, both to ensure more entries and to make the prize more accessible. Between us we set the prize fund at £500, the maximum we could afford with only a few submissions.

We are lucky, there are a lot of us and we have people with different skills. Between us we can cover the writing of the contracts, the marketing, the admin, the website, the posters, editing, spreadsheets the list is endless. It takes up a lot of time but we all felt it was something we should do, something that you writers out there would want us to do.

We decided that the optimum time for the prize-giving would be at our sell-out Brighton Fringe show. This show is a real event with a great atmosphere and reading at it is a fantastic experience for any writer. Aiming for May though did mean we were a bit rushed, with a short 2 month submission period.

We needed judges and we were unbelievably lucky because the first local authors we asked said yes straight away. Bethan Roberts (author of Brighton City Reads book My Policeman and the upcoming, Mother Island) and Laura H. Lockington (author of The Cornish Affair, Stargazy Pie and literary journalist) were on board and suddenly we had a real competition.

The Brighton Prize has been a learning curve, we bit our nails waiting for the first entries to come in, we tweeted and posted, sent out newsletters and contacted the press, begged listings in writing magazines and airtime on local radio. And just like the baseball fans in the movie Field of Dreams the entries began to come in, a trickle at first, then a torrent and by midnight on the last day we had enough entry fees to cover the cost of the prize fund, our Fringe show and an anthology. That’s it though, we’re not going to get rich, and we’re not in it for the money. Your entry fee goes into giving more writers the opportunity to perform at and be published by Rattle Tales.

Right now we are reading like crazy to make the deadlines set for the long-list and the short-list and then to narrow those down to the ten stories we’ll send to Laura and Bethan. So far we have been struck by the quality and originality of the stories submitted. It’s going to be very hard to choose which ones make it through.

We have also struck by the generosity of the other short story competitions out there, particularly the B’s, Bath, Bristol and Bridport. We are the new kid on the block but everyone has been generous in their retweets and encouragement. The people who run these competitions really care about writers and it shows.

Thanks also to Threshold’s Short Story Forum, The Brighton Fringe and Radio Reverb but most of all thanks to anyone who entered our little competition. Good luck!

For more information about the Brighton Prize and Rattle Tales click here.

 

More Thoughts On Writing Submissions

Tags

competitions, magazines, publishers, rejections, short stories

      

I feel I may have been a bit negative in my last post. My rant on the lack of respect given to writers sending off their short stories to magazines and competitions was written in haste. On reflection this is funny because it was inspired by a rejection written in haste. Last week I received an email rejection for two shorts from an e-mag just 25 minutes after submitting. The email was polite and I wasn’t expecting it as the submission guidelines said if my work wasn’t accepted I wouldn’t receive a reply. The stories I submitted weren’t written especially for submission but had successfully been submitted and performed by a theatre group a couple of years ago. The submission came from me looking over old files and trying to get unpublished stories out there, so it’s not like I spent hours crafting stories especially for them, nevertheless something in the nature of the rejection rankled i.e. the speed of it!

I just wanted to add that it’s not all gloom and doom. My last post was the most popular since my anti-jubilee rant. Ranting works in blog posts I’ve noticed. After reading it someone pointed out how positive some writing organisations are when rejecting work and how a good rejection can spur the writer on to better writing. Some rejections offer encouragement and insight above and beyond. So, based on my own notes and conversations with other writers, a name check here to good rejecters of short stories, manuscripts and competition entries:

Canongate, Curtis Brown, Fox Mason, Grit Lit, Liar’s League, Lucy Luck, McSweeney’s, Myriad Editions, Radio Four, Revenge Ink, Rogers Coleridge & Wright, Swamp, Succour, The Book Trust prizes and, of course, Rattle Tales.

There are many more I am sure (I hope!). All of the above offer insight into why you are being rejected and don’t just say ‘No Thanks’ or nothing at all. There is a worrying trend in total silence. I still can’t believe that major writing competitions, who ask for money from authors who submit to them, can’t email the results out to all who entered. So, magazine editors, competition administrators, agents and publishers, if those listed above can take the time to write in detail about why they are rejecting someone, you have no excuse to ignore a submission. A standard reply is acceptable (it takes about three seconds to email one) no one is so busy they can’t manage this simple courtesy.