Vote For Fifteen Minutes!

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Brighton Waterstones, Janet Swinney, Lulu allison, Mathew Clayton, Pierre Hollins, Reviews, Storgy, The Dry, The Saboteur Awards, The Short Story, Threshold's Short Story Forum, Tracy Fells

I’m having a great week! After many months of plugging away at promoting Fifteen Minutes things are finally starting to happen. It’s quite difficult to promote a short story collection, generally bloggers don’t want to know and short story journals want finished reviews. This week I found out I had been shortlisted for a Saboteur Award, a big deal in short story circles. I am beyond thrilled that people took the time to vote for my book, thank you to anyone who did so. I now have another favour to ask – the shortlist is open to the public to decide the winner so even if you voted to nominate me you have to vote again. It’s really easy though, just click on the link below, you don’t need to vote in every category but you every vote counts.

https://www.saboteurawards.org/

Awards like this ensure that short story collections get a much needed publicity boost.

I got back from a lovely holiday in Lyme Regis to find that I’d been longlisted for The Thresholds Feature Writing Competition. I try to enter this every year but failed to do so for the last couple because I’ve been so busy with Fifteen Minutes. This year I specifically set aside some time. I do think that if you practice any craft you should examine the way the masters work. If you were studying art you’d look at Picasso’s methods or DaVinci or Monet as a short story practitioner I find it extremely helpful to look at great writers in depth and try to work out how they do it. I really enjoyed researching and writing my feature for Thresholds and it certainly paid off – the shortlist is published on April 23rd so fingers crossed, I’m in very good company on the longlist.

Last night I was part of a panel event at Brighton Waterstones on crowdfunding with Unbound. Editor In Chief Mathew Clayton chaired and also on the panel were fellow Unbounders Lulu Allison and Pierre Hollins. It was a lovely evening, not least because it was about the books rather than funding or promoting them, Mathew got us all to talk about how and why we’d written them, the audience asked questions and bought books and there was a little wine. Brighton Waterstones are brilliant at events, they host loads of different authors so keep an eye out for what’s on next. A big thank you to Richard and the team there even if we don’t agree on The Dry!

Also this week three excellent reviews for Fifteen Minutes. It’s so nice when people like your work but it’s even more rewarding when the reviews show that they know exactly what you are aiming for and fully appreciate it. Please have a look at them here.

http://thresholds.chi.ac.uk/when-will-i-be-famous/

https://www.theshortstory.co.uk/the-short-story-review-fifteen-minutes-by-erinna-mettler/

https://storgy.com/2018/04/07/book-review-fifteen-minutes-by-erinna-mettler/

Don’t forget to vote!

 

 

Publications Are Like Buses

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David Garnett, editing, Exeter University, Lady Into Fox, litereature, Michael Rosen, motherhood, Mrs. Fox, rejections, Riptide Journal, Sarah Hall, short stories, submissions, suburbs, Threshold's Short Story Forum, University of Chichester

Just checking in to say that I have had two things published this week This goes some way to making up for all the rejection in my ‘year of submitting to everything.’ My short story Grimaldi has been included in the fabulous Riptide Vol 10 – Imagining The Suburbs. It’s a nasty little tale about mental illness or actual demonic dragons (take your pick). In the foreword Michael Rosen says, ‘these fascinating stories and poems show a diversity that resists’ the picture of the suburbs as “one culture, one class, one type of house’. I am very proud to be part of a collection that resists monoculture!

I am also thrilled that Threshold’s Short Story Forum has printed my essay on Sarah Hall’s  BBCNSSA winner Mrs. Fox. I absolutely loved Hall’s story and wanted to find out about the controversy around it’s similarity to the novella Lady Into Fox. Both journals were an absolute pleasure to work with and it was a brilliant experience to see my work properly edited. I feel like a real grown up writer.

Field of Dreams – Setting Up A Short Story Competition

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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.

 

All I Want For Christmas…

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Alice Cuninghame, BHT, Brighton, Brighton Housing Trust, chartity, Christmas, First Base, Homeless, Homelessness, Richardson's Yard, Shelter, shipping container homes, Stories For Homes, Threshold's Short Story Forum

I’m not going to write a Christmas post here this year. The lovely people at Threshold’s Short Story Forum have printed a piece I wrote about Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story  so that can serve for my thoughts on Christmas. Instead I’m posting about something very important and very close to my heart. I have been running a book group set up by City Reads at The First Base Centre in Brighton for the past eighteen months. I have really enjoyed working there but I feel it is time to move on so I recently hosted my last session (someone else is taking it over) however, I do want to highlight the work being done there.

First Base is part of Brighton Housing Trust. It is a drop in centre for those people around the city who find themselves without proper housing. First Base staff work tirelessly with their clients offering them practical help finding accommodation, health care, applying for benefits and training, anything to get people off the streets and into safety. Part of what they do is to provide cultural activities to help with the sheer boredom of being homeless, hence the book group. There are also classes in creative writing, photography, art and crafts and cookery. It is an amazing organisation and during my time there several members of the group were housed and well on the way to getting control of their lives back.

Let’s get something clear right away, homelessness is not a choice. Forget what certain people try to tell you, no-one lives on the street or in a hostel because it’s easier, it isn’t. No-one is there because they are too lazy to work or because they think the world owes them a living. Being on the street is generally about circumstance. Maybe it is the only option against a life of abuse. Maybe they lost their job, couldn’t afford the rent and didn’t have a loving family to catch them when they fell. Maybe they are an ex-con who can’t get a job, have psychological or physical problems, were shifted around a series of children’s homes until they were of age; there are as many reasons as there are individuals, every single one has their own unique story.

Okay, so sometimes it’s down to addiction, drugs or alcohol, and often they don’t seem that interested in giving up but seriously, it’s cold and dangerous out there – wouldn’t you want to block it out? Haven’t many of us had a drink as a way of coping with the stresses of life? What would happen if you kept on drinking, if that coping mechanism became the problem itself? And what if you didn’t have anyone to tell you to stop? Then what?

I also think that if the country carries on as it is doing there will be many more people on the street. People just can’t cope with the discrepancy between income and outgoings: the bedroom tax, fuel inflation, it’s all too much. Circumstance can change in a matter of weeks, never more so than now with the gap between rich and poor ever-widening. To use the National Lottery slogan, ‘it could be you,’ only in this case it’s not about winning a fortune.

This post isn’t about creative writing but in my experience most stories begin with the author asking, ‘what if?’ Give it a try, invent a chain of events that ends with you having no choice but to sleep rough and then think about how you would get back on track. First Base is one of the organisations that can help. Every day in the run up to Christmas Brighton Housing Trust is circulating the story of one of their clients, to let people know how much homelessness is about circumstance. To read these stories go to the BHT website, Facebook page or Twitter feed.

On occasion, when I have mentioned volunteering at First Base, people grimaced; I have even been told that the homeless are scum. There is certainly a lot of fear when they cross our paths. I’ll admit it, I was scared too, going into First Base for the first time and not knowing what to expect. It’s lively that’s for sure, we had a few disagreements in the group, sometimes the reading was punctuated with loud snores, or barking dogs or shouting from elsewhere in the building but in the main the people I met at First Base were intelligent, ordinary people who were down on their luck and just wanted to be treated like human beings. One of my group gave me a thank you card when I left and one of the things she thanked me for was the weekly conversations and the laughs. It’s not too much to ask is it?

If solutions for homelessness interest you (and I think they must if you have read this far) check out the new housing initiative in Brighton’s Richardson’s Yard designed by QED Property Solutions. It looks amazing, but remember there are at present only 36 units planned and the last city council count estimated that there could be up to 100 people sleeping in doorways and hundreds of others in transient emergency accommodation such as hostels and shelters.

First Base has a wish list with Amazon featuring essential items for the coming winter: hats, coats, socks, thermals, if you are buying something on site please add something from their list, items cost as little as 79p. If you live in Brighton you can donate items directly.  And if you don’t want anything to do with Amazon there are hundreds of homeless charities out there who could do with a little help.  My good friend Alice Cuninghame has a short story in the anthology Stories For Homes the proceeds of which go to Shelter, I think it makes a great Christmas present and not just for the person who unwraps it. If the weather forecast is right we’re in for a worst winter in decades and it’s going to get dangerously cold out there very soon.

I leave you with this short film, which went viral on social media recently, because it perfectly illustrates how easily we are shaped by circumstance.  Merry Christmas x