One more to go

This morning (taking my writer friend Bill's advice to make the most of Dave's absence) I finished the second to last story for my crime anthology. This one's about a schoolgirl and a kettle, loosely based on a recent headline in the news. With fourteen stories ready and waiting I could send the collection in now, but I'd rather have fifteen stories - it's a nice 'round' number and probably represents better value for the readers, assuming I get the thing published.

Which means there's only one more story to go. I have two in mind as possibles, one about an amnesiac which is further along but proving difficult, and one about a mad axe man with a difference which is great fun but still in the early stages. Hmm. Decisions, decisions. I guess in the end it just boils down to working on whichever one I get inspired by most. Whichever it is, I'm now very hopeful that I could have a working product to submit to publishers by the middle of March.

All on my ownsome

Dave has gone off to an astronomy weekend in Preston and left me on my tod. Before we met I quite often spent weekends alone but once you're married you get out of the habit and when it does happen it feels a little strange.

I'm keeping busy, though. Yesterday I got on with some decorating in the living room; we inherited a pleasant but very neutral colour scheme (cream carpet, cream curtains, off-cream walls) and I'm zinging it up a bit using a spare pot of yellow paint we brought from Brum.

Today one of the neighbours is popping in for a coffee and to pick up armfuls of 'stuff' for a jumble sale in aid of Cancer Research. She's on the local committee and helps to organise fund-raising events and we're downsizing and desperate for a good home for some of our unwanted stuff, so it makes sense to get together. This time I'll be handing over a couple of unused sleeping bags, an attache case, and a whole bin liner full of 'bits and bobs'. It's amazing what you can find stuffed in the back of cupboards when you really start to look.

Tomorrow if the weather's half decent I might pop out for a local walk - the waterfalls should be impressive after all the rain we've had. And after that, suddenly Dave will be back and I won't have done half the things I wanted to get done while he was out of the way. I spoke to him briefly on the phone last night and he was already having fun so I'm looking forward to hearing all about it when he gets back.

Fun day out

It's half term and our friends and their son are staying no more than fifteen miles away from us. Yesterday we arranged to spend the day together and because it was cold and wet we suggested the Lakeland Motor Museum which is under cover, dry, warm, and fascinating to boot.

The five of us spent a good couple of hours crawling all over the cars, fire engines, motorbikes, pedal cars etc and had a whale of a time. Unlike many museums this one constantly updates its exhibits and this time there were new features on the Womens' Land Army, and on a 1930s car showroom complete with 'contemporary' write-ups on the 'brand new' cars and a on-the-road price - of about £200!

As well as all the vehicles and associated stuff (driving fashions through the ages; car themed crockery; motoring posters etc), the museum houses a small but separate section on the making of ultramarine 'blue' for the laundry industry. My Mum still had a little 'bag blue' hidden away under the sink and I suspect many people remember their parents or grandparents using them in the wash. The museum is housed in an old building that used to be a 'blue' factory - in both senses of the phrase since the powder got everywhere, inside and out, and dyed the walls bright blue. You can still see this in places inside as they've left one or two walls untouched to show how it would have looked.

All in all it's a fascinating place to poke round and our friends thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Just as well since the previous day they'd done the Bond Car museum at Keswick which they said was utterly disappointing.

Perfect Alibi crime writing contest

If anyone saw this advertised on the Alibi channel last night but can't track it down, don't worry - you're not alone. The url they quoted (theperfectalibi.co.uk) was wrong and only leads to a rather alarming '403 Forbidden' message, which made me wonder whether they wanted to advertise the contest at all.

However, it really does sound good. The channel and their associates HarperCollins are seeking the crime-writers of the future; the prizes include tickets to a crime writing festival in Harrogate; and the overall winner gets a holiday in Sweden, a Kindle and a library of books. And I guess there's always the possibility that if you are placed, you'll be accelerated to the top of the HarperCollins slush pile. ;)

So, if you want to enter and can't find out where, don't despair. Muggins here trawled the Alibi website earlier and can reveal that the real page for the contest, complete with instructions, terms and conditions, and closing date, is here.

Happy scribbling and good luck.

Ooops...

Isn't it amazing the howlers you can find in your own writing, even after you've been through it two or three times? Yesterday I was editing a story for the crime anthology and came across the following:

'And he'd found the barn, cycling down to the river in search of fish.'

Hmm. Must have been an abnormally large bicycle, then.

::headdesk::

Spring-cleaning

Yesterday for various reasons I could NOT concentrate on writing. The sun was half shining, birds were singing, there were squirrels bouncing around in the trees, and Dave was making an ungodly racket in the study next door. In order to look and feel as though I was still doing something, I began to check some of the vast store of available markets in my 'favourites' folder.

I've collected these over a number of years. Markets I've spotted whilte trawling the net, markets I've tried and failed; markets I intend to try... one day. They're divided into various categories - magazines, small press, print publishers, electronic publishers etc - and for no particular reason I started with the magazines.

It soon became apparent that I hadn't checked them for a while, as link after link turned up dead. Some had posted nice little messages on a cut-down webpage ("We're sorry but we've gone out of business"); most had simply vanished without trace. I deleted all the ones that no longer led to viable publications and my favourites list is a lot less daunting as a result.

One or two of the dead markets were ones I'd had stories published in and at least one of these (Bent Magazine) had still been available until fairly recently. But, like the parrot in the famous sketch, it is no more, so the next thing I had to do was go and root out all mention of that story on my website. While I was at it I took a brush and dustpan to the site, fixed a few other broken links and did some general tidying up. Which means, hopefully, that it's also a lot less daunting as a result.

Some of the mags that had disappeared were small, amateur webzines that tend to be fly-by-night and have the life expectancy of a gadfly. One or two, though, such as The Reader and Pen Pusher, were well established print magazines and it's sad to see those go.

Christmas paragraph

For those of you who missed my offering at Paragraph Planet on New Years' Day, it's now available to read on the site archive.

You can find 'Home for Christmas' by clicking the link below and then selecting Jan 1st from the drop-down box just above the featured paragraph.

It's only a daft little thing but hopefully will give you a giggle on a damp and somewhat depressing February day.

http://www.paragraphplanet.com/archive.htm

Those Porlock moments

So there I was yesterday morning, wrestling with not one but two versions of the same story and desperately trying to marry the best bits of both into one homogenised whole. Then the doorbell rang. Oh bugger it, I thought, and then - no, it might be important. I legged it down three flights of stairs (my study's in the attic) and unlocked the front door. A fat bloke was standing on the step grinning at me out of a moon-like face.

"Morning luv," he said. "D'you want any 'orse manure for your garden?"

Oh dear.

For some reason it was terribly hard to concentrate on lyrical prose and serious writing after that....

I know Coleridge was cursed with the man from Porlock (hence the title of this post) but do other writers find the same thing?

The great title hunt

This morning I finished that story inspired by the snippet of insider police information. The anthology is coming together nicely and I'm starting to think about something other than just finishing stories: the order of the contents and a title.

The other day I realised that all the stories involved revenge in some form or another so I wanted a title that would reflect that. Straight away I thought of 'Best Served Cold', and headed off to search the Amazon catalogues. Not that titles are covered by copyright, of course, but it's nice to know that if I do get my book published it won't be one of dozens with the same name. That way if a reader searches on the title rather than my name, they won't be faced with a heap of books and choose the wrong one.

Sadly for me, 'Best Served Cold' was a popular idea. There were at least seven or eight books with that title, ranging from mainstream crime novels to self-published e-books. Not wanting to be number nine on the list, I had to come up with something else.

A frequent port of call for titles is quotations so I started searching online for quotes that involved revenge. I was struggling rather; too many of them are Biblical and involve God's vengeance - possibly not the most suitable thing for a book about crime. But then Dave came to the rescue with a Confucius quotation which was ideal. So now I have a working title, a contents page, and another story to slot in. If I can keep up the momentum I might actually finish this thing.

Belated Christmas

A week before Christmas we were supposed to go out for our annual friends' Chrismtas meal/bash. There's usually eight of us and each year we pick a local restaurant or pub and have a good, old-fashioned fun evening. This year we were due at Los Iguanas, a South American restaurant in the Arcadian centre in Birmingham city centre. We'd been the previous year and had such a great time (fantastic food, good 'buzz', friendly service) that we booked again. And then it snowed. Rather a lot, actually, and several hours before the meal we were forced to cancel.

Luckily the restaurant understood. The city centre was gridlocked, their customers were dropping like flies (apparently only 25 turned up out of 250 bookings), and they very kindly held the booking open for us until the new year.

On Saturday we tried again, and this time the weather was kind to us. Six of the original party of eight made it, and we had another fantastic evening. Same wonderful food, same great vibe; in fact the only thing that was missing was the Christmas trimmings - and you don't really need crackers or a tree to have a good time.

While we were there one of our friends, who's a police officer, let slip a little nugget of information that immediately set off story alarms in my brain. I'm not going to say what it was, because that would give the plot away, but first thing Monday I settled down with the idea and have been scribbling ever since. The result is another crime story for the anthology and if I finish it I'll be sending a note of thanks to my friend. I just hope he realised the inspiration he sparked!

Website update

Following on from my news about QueeredFiction's recent facelift, I should mention that I've updated various links, information etc on my own website to make it easier to read about (and order!) 'Queer Dimensions'. I've added a snippet of a very nice review from Rainbow Reviews, and a whole plethora of links to point of sale for both the electronic and print versions of the book.

You can find the result here.

In other writing news I'm feeling rather pleased with myself today since I've finished off not one but two new stories for the crime anthology. One is a ghoulish tale about a crack in a girl's bedroom wall; the other starts with a man jumping naked out of a birthday cake. I've been struggling with the latter because neither the plot nor the language seemed to match up to the first line, but at long last I've scribbled something I'm happy with. It's much darker and more vicious than I first intended, but better for it in many ways.

The anthology is filling up nicely. I have two, possibly three more stories to finish (depending on how long they turn out to be), and major rewrites on a couple of others. After that, I might actually be ready to start sending it out. Of course, it would help if I could finish two stories a day, every day...

Contest to avoid

This particular news has been spreading round the internet like a bout of flu, but it's such an all-round Bad Deal for writers I felt I had to pass the information on, just in case any of you were tempted to enter this contest.

First One Digital Publishing (no link provided for reasons which will become apparent) are a start-up e-publisher. As part of their launch they have organised a writing competition where at least part of the prize is publication with their company. The contest is open to novels and they are charging a hefty entry fee for the privelege, of $149.

This immediately rings alarm bells, because if you pay that much money and the prize is publication, then you are effectively paying the company to publish your work. That fee is monstrously high; a typical fee for a private, high-quality contest with proper, independent prizes, is only around a tenth of that amount. And because the press is a new start-up, they have no track-record of publication so there's no way of checking what your sales would be like, assuming you won.

But it gets worse. Because tucked away in the small print at the very end of their contest guidelines is the following:

"By submitting an entry, all entrants grant Sponsor the absolute and unconditional right and authority to copy, edit, publish, promote, broadcast, or otherwise use, in whole or in part, their entries, in perpetuity, in any manner without further permission, notice or compensation..."

That's without compensation. Effectively, they are taking all rights to your work, in perpetuity, and not paying you a penny in advances or royalties or flat fees or anything else.

So. You pay them to enter the contest. Whether or not you win, they take your novel, publish it themselves, and take every last penny of profit it makes.

And you get nothing.

Less than nothing, because they've taken the rights for ever, so you can never submit your work to another publisher.

Can I respectfully suggest giving this contest, and its owners, a very wide berth? At the very least it's naive; at worst, it's a colossal scam. I kind of wish it was illegal so I could report it to someone. As it is, all I can really do is pass the word along and warn as many writers as possible to stay away.

QueeredFiction facelift

I've been meaning to post since before Christmas about QueeredFiction's jazzy new website. Their old site was rather dark and more than a little hard to navigate but the new version is much more straightforward, not least because all the books on their catalogue are now visible at a glance and each book has its own page with blurb, reviews and ordering details. The new design is also more eye-catching than the old (if a little... pink *grin*) and they even have their own stylish new logo.

You can find details of Queer Dimensions, the anthology which includes my short story The Visitor, here. The page includes full details of the contents and authors, as well as links to point of sale for both the e-book and print versions.

Printer rage

Am I the only person who beats my fists on the desk in sheer frustration when I'm trying to write and vital bits of equipment or software won't work?

I spent a large portion of Friday afternoon crawling round on my hands and knees underneath my desk, trying to get my cheap-useless-piece-of-crap printer to actually PRINT. First of all it wouldn't talk to the laptop even though everything was plugged in and switched on. Then it took about 20 sheets through the feeder at once. Then I took everything out except one sheet and that wouldn't go through. Then I got a couple of sheets to go through and they went in skewed and jammed. Now the bloody thing won't work at all.

Aaargh. *hits head repeatedly on keyboard*

I'm coming to the conclusion that cheap printers aren't worth it. This one only cost about £30, but has lasted less than a year...

Inspiration from daytime tv

I don't know about anyone else but I very rarely watch daytime tv - I don't have the time, plus it's usually crap. Just occasionally, though, you catch something that just screams 'story' because of the human element/emotions involved.

This morning I saw 'Wanted Down Under' which is a property programme for Brits wanting to move to Australia. Apparently loads of them just pack up and go out there on a whim; this programme does at least take them out there for a week, show them the sort of property they could afford, jobs that are available, living costs etc etc. A bit of a reality check, in other words, while making good telly.

Today's 'subject' was a 40-ish bloke from Sheffield who had a lifetime dream of moving to Oz. He had a 16 year old son from a previous marriage and was remarried to a nice lass; they had two small children. The lass clearly thought the world of him, but he came across (whether in reality or by skillful editing) as a selfish bastard. The lass didn't want to move at all; she had loads of friends and family in the UK and didn't want to leave them behind. He was quite happy to leave everyone behind - including his 16 year old son.

The week went from one disaster to another. Their UK house was valued at a good £50k less than they thought it was worth, so they'd struggle to afford a similar property in Oz, let alone the 4 bed with swimming pool he wanted. He'd have had to take a lower responsibility job with a pay cut; and to afford the lifestyle she'd have had to work too. That was fine with him, even though she didn't want to because of the kids.

By the end of the show it was obvious that emigrating was pretty much the worst thing they could do. The couple were interviewed separately and she said that much as she hated the idea, she would do it for him because 'at the end of the day he was the most important thing in her life'. When they interviewed HIM, he said that if he chose Oz and she chose England, they would talk it over a lot and then he would get his own way, 'simple as that'. But if worst came to worst, they would split up.... Whether she ever saw those comments, and what happened if she did, wasn't made clear.

When I'm writing my crime/noir stories I sometimes wonder if they're a bit unrealistic, but watching this you realise that there are little tragedies going on behind closed doors all over the country and writing about dark, selfish people is actually a lot more realistic than you might think.

Back to the grindstone

After a long break courtesy of bank holidays, bad weather and general not-wanting-to-workness, I finally settled down to writing again today. It wasn't much - a short, thousand word story about killer crossword puzzles for my crime anthology - but it's the first time I've put fingernail to keyboard in nearly a month.

I say 'grindstone' in the title of this post but actually it feels great to be back at work again. Like many writers I get fidgety if I have too long away from the craft; sometimes 'fidgety' is the least of it and 'irritable' or even 'exasperated' might describe my mood better. I saw a quote recently about writers never having a holiday because even when they're not physically writing, they're still working on ideas, and it rang very true. Sometimes all those ideas build up and build up until you just have to get them down on paper, or explode. Luckily for the walls and carpet I managed without the explosion but this particular story has been fizzing around my brain since before Christmas and it's still a relief to get it finished.

Happy New Year - and new story

Now it's time to wish everyone a very happy, prosperous, healthy and successful 2011.

To kick things off, I'm delighted to report that Paragraph Planet will be featuring my latest 75 word story, Home for Christmas, tomorrow (1st January 2011) for one day only. Do go and check it out if you get time between nursing your hangover and washing your shirt for work. ;)

Merry Christmas

Just a quick line to say 'Merry Christmas' to all my family, friends, readers and assorted associates. ;) Hope it's a good one, hope you have a good relaxing break - and hope you don't get snowed in. *rolls eyes*

I'll 'see' you all in the new year, if not a bit sooner.

Drip... drip... drip

That's the sound of a very, very, painfully, very slow thaw, which is currently going on beyond our windows. Last Saturday we had around 6 inches of snow and it's been so cold since that it's still been lying virtually untouched. But today the temperature rose to *gasp* one degree celsius and the snow has gradually been retreating. It's still so cold, though, that it's creating massive icicles on all the gutters, of our house and just about all the others. Some of them are incredible - about 3 feet long and hanging, Sword-of-Damocles-like, over peoples' front doors. I don't want to be underneath them when they finally break off and fall.

It's also the sound of the thawed water coming through our utility room roof. Our newly replastered utility room roof... Dave shot out with a broom handle and knocked as much snow away from the gutter above that section of roof as possible and we're hoping that will limit the damage, but for now we have an ominously spreading stain on the ceiling and I'm standing by with buckets. Still, if that's the only damage we suffer after more than 2 weeks of terrible weather, we'll have been lucky.

In writing news I've finished yet another crime story and also scribbled a daft little Christmas-themed flash. I submitted the latter to Paragraph Planet but if they decide not to use it I'll post it here as a way of saying 'seasons greetings' to everyone. Watch this space.

Notfrog update

Earlier in the week I finally sat down to write to Hotfrog and ask for my profile (missing, presumed lost in action) to be removed.

After a day or so I had a perfectly pleasant response... which told me that without a company name they... wait for it... could not find my profile.

Only problem is, they didn't give me a company name. I wrote back to explain this and haven't heard since.

My profile is now missing presumed dead, and if even the site administrators can't find it, what hope have I got?

It doesn't inspire much confidence in their search parameters...