Remember just before Christmas I was longlisted for the Comedy Women in Print short story prize? I’m on the shortlist! Which means my story You Can’t Get There From Here will be in the anthology from Farrago books which is coming out in September. As well as the twelve shortlisted stories I think there will be a couple of stories from comedy writers you might have heard of, but as yet I don’t know who. Rest assured I will keep you posted.
Of course a shortlist implies there will be a winner, and indeed there is an awards do next month in London. Anyone who’s been around here a while (or knows me in the real world, offline) will realise the terror that simple phrase caused. I have spent my life avoiding London whenever possible, which is to say on all but half a dozen days of the last forty-odd years. It is a long train journey away and holds more people than should be possible. As far as I know, there are no sheep. Add to this an actual party – I watched clips of the last one, the amount of people and sequins was astonishing – and suddenly I had plans to become writer in residence on a remote Scottish island with immediate effect.
I bumped into a former member of Ilkley Writers yesterday – technically we are all former members now as it folded three years ago, but she was already a former member by then. I shared the excitement and then, because she knows me and therefore knows how unnaturally an event like this sits in my life, she gave me some advice: wear comfortable shoes and a memorable top. As she put it, ‘they’ve already clocked your work, now they need to clock you’. Which one of my three check/plaid shirts is the most memorable? Or will I need to take her up on the offer to help me trawl the charity shops of Ilkley to find an alternative? Stay tuned to find out…
If you want to fortify me in the meantime you can always buy me a cuppa.
My entry to the inaugural Comedy Women in Print short story prize has made the longlist! There are no links to anyone’s websites or social media (yet) so we can’t all check out their work but I do recognise a couple of names on there and I’m happy to be in such company.
Author photo of a comedy woman in print
Sadly you don’t get to read my highly amusing longlisted story, You Can’t Get There From Here, but here are a few other things I’ve written in the last couple of years that are intended to make you laugh:
Episode 1 of my one-woman (+1 cat) sitcom Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays is available wherever you get your podcasts (listen-in-browser or find the appropriate links here)
I Could Murder a Custard Cream, a short film by Slackline Productions starring Susannah May and directed by Callie Nestleroth is availablehere
Or if you prefer something to read, Silver-Topped Cane is a short story at Funny Pearls
If you enjoy any of them, you can always buy me a cuppa. Excuse me while I go off and dance…
I have an 87% rejection rate this year so far. Wow.
Inspired by Katie Hale’s recent post I thought I’d summarise my 2020 experience as a writer through submission and rejection stats, in case it’s comforting to fellow writers or interesting to readers. It should be noted that my 28-hour-a-week day-job ended at the end of March, after which I threw myself into writing as a distraction from the news and it all got a bit feverish for a while. I calmed down as the year went on.
As I write this in mid-December I’ve made 140 submissions. That includes 32 short stories/flash, 7 pieces of creative non-fiction, 5 novels, and 13 scripts. I’ve pitched articles and applied for commissions (unsuccessfully so far), sent pieces to journals and anthologies, entered competitions, sent partial or whole novels to agents and publishers, sent scripts to BBC opportunities or open calls, and probably more besides. I’ve heard back from 125 of those (or the ‘if you haven’t heard by…’ date has passed) and 109 of them, that’s 87%, were out and out rejections or silence. For context, in 2019 I made 39 submissions and had a 90% rejection rate, so this is an improvement of sorts. Still, that’s a lot of rejection for one year, particularly when it’s already pretty shabby. Until April I was still getting 2019 rejections trickling in too.
On the plus side – and I really do want to focus on plus sides this year – that’s sixteen times in 2020 when I got an acceptance in a magazine, or won a competition, or someone asked to read the rest of my novel after they’d read the first 3 chapters. I’d never had a full manuscript read before but by the end of this year I’d had three small publishers express interest in reading from chapter four onwards, two for one novel, one for another. One of them has since said no, but the other two are technically still potential acceptances [Late edit: a second no, but with helpful feedback]. I have seen two actors take on my monologue scripts and bring them to life wonderfully, and this month I found out a short radio drama of mine will be recorded next year as one of the winners in the Script Yorkshire competition.
Even some of the full-on rejections have had silver linings. I have received ‘encouraging’ rejections more times this year than ever before, including those form rejections that ask the writer to submit again sometime. Before this year I dismissed those as mere politeness that costs the editor nothing, but I’m coming to understand that in general they do mean it and when I get a rejection like that I feel pretty good about it now. I’ve also received some more concrete near-misses – thank you to all the editors who took the time to give me even one line of feedback. It’s still frustrating to know a piece didn’t get accepted because someone else had already sent a similar topic, or they were put off by that one line I wasn’t sure about and should have taken out (ask me to change it – I’d probably be happy to! I know, I know, you don’t have time for the extra emails and not everyone would take kindly to the suggestion, but a girl can dream).
I made 35 quid from writing this year, one payment on publication for a story accepted last year, one payment on acceptance for a creative nonfiction piece due out in 2021. Unfortunately I’d already spent 26 quid on competition entries and submission fees. The monetary gain wasn’t much but I’m finishing the year with twelve stories, sixteen scripts and two novels, either written from scratch or finally finished or substantially reworked in 2020. I’ve started another couple that have potential but aren’t quite there yet, too. The astute among you will notice that I wrote more scripts than I sent out (partly confidence issues, partly not finding a suitable place to send it) and sent out more stories than I wrote. I have stories I absolutely believe in that I wrote years ago, and while some people might say it’s time to put them away, I’d point to the story I had published this year that I wrote in 2013, and the novel I got my first full manuscript request for, which hit the end of its first draft in 2011.
So what can we take away from this? Persistence and self-delusion are useful traits in a writer? Maybe. I’ve written stuff I’m really proud of this year, and I hope some of it’s made people think, and some of it’s given them a laugh in this bleak year. I’ve had my confidence boosted in some areas (scripts and novels) and it makes sense to concentrate on them next year. I’m also intent on applying for grants for the projects I want to do, instead of letting all the bureaucracy put me off as I have this year. Let’s hope 2021 is better than 2020, and may you read as many good books as you need.
Here’s a quick run-down of what you can read or watch from me this year:
Starting in April there was I Could Murder a Custard Cream, a dark comedy monologue produced by Slackline Productions, directed by Callie Nestleroth and starring the fab Susannah May. Watch it on Youtube (and catch up on the whole Slackline Cyberstories series while you’re at it, there are some under-rated gems in there) and you can read a bit about it here.
In May there was a short comedy monologue as part of the Rapid Reel challenge. I wrote about taking part, and you can watch A Ferret Too Far, admirably portrayed by Alan Cammish on Twitter here.
In June I had a splurge of fiction: light-hearted gay romance Evidently Lovestruck at Truffle magazine and angry pandemic-inspired Twelve Weeks’ Rest in the first issue of Untitled:Voices. You can read a bit about them both here. I also had prose poetry at FEED, Eyes Front.
In October Secret Attic shared my 1980s flash Stolen Warmth, about being a kid & thinking your parents are just being mean when they won’t put the heating on, and Ellipsis Zine printed my flash memoir Dream On in their eighth anthology, You, Me, and Emmylou which you can buy here.
Issue 14 of Confingo came out last month, which you can buy if you’d like to read a dark story of mine called 24 Years, 361 Days (they’re the ones who paid me – thanks Confingo!). And if you enjoyed any or all of that, you can always buy me a cuppa at https://ko-fi.com/jysaville
Wow, I’ve got a story in the National Flash Fiction Day anthology! Although I’ve had a few pieces of flash fiction released in their Flash Flood on the day itself over the years, the previous couple of times I’ve submitted to the anthology I haven’t been successful. Much rejoicing at this news this week then, particularly since so many fellow-flashers from Twitter are also in the list, including Ilkley Writers’ own Emily Devane. The anthology is due out in June (NFF Day is the 16th) so I’m looking forward to seeing that sitting on my shelf.
Contributor copies
Meanwhile, in the last week or so I’ve had a couple of other publications in the post, as pictured above. Confingo 9 is a lovely magazine with colour artwork inside and a story of mine called Last Post. The Crossing the Tees anthology (which I think is only available from libraries in Teesside) houses my Time Team inspired story, Ghost Bridge, and is a pleasing paperback that I’m looking forward to reading.
As if that isn’t enough strain on my bookshelf, I went on a tour of the local charity shops yesterday with OneMonkey and my parents. Between us we got a big enough haul of books that OneMonkey had to drop some of them off at my parents’ car before we could continue (“That should keep us going for a couple of days,” said my dad). It’s dangerous letting me near a buy one get one free offer involving second-hand books, but at least I can safely say I’m unlikely to run out of reading material any time soon.
Tomorrow, after eighteen months of having as much time as I want to write, read and mess about (I mean, network) on Twitter, I start my new day job. Four days a week for the next couple of years I’ll be commuting again, which at least means guaranteed regular reading time on the train. I guess I’ll be reading more, writing less, maybe submitting fewer stories, and definitely spending less time on Twitter. Seems like a good time to look back over the last 18 months and see if I achieved anything.
One, from Ellipsis Zine – I’ve got a story in here
I set out with the intention of editing Sunrise Over Centrified City in a proper focused way. Eventually I did (it’s called Lachlane’s Centrified City now) and so far I’ve had it rejected by one indie publisher and entered it for a competition. Along the way, I won a 3-chapter critique from Claire Dyer in a Mslexia Max subscribers’ monologue competition, so having already had a good go myself I sent Claire the first 12,000 words or so of my dystopian detective novel and got loads of helpful advice back, which put me on the right path for another round of editing.
The novel I started writing on that first day of unemployment is now at around 35,000 words. I’m so determined to get it right that I’ve trashed whole sections of it and had days when my wordcount spreadsheet has a negative total for the day. An extract of it got me selected for the Penguin Random House WriteNow initiative though so clearly someone saw potential, and I got useful feedback from Mikaela Pedlow at the insight day in Newcastle so I hope I’ve strengthened the novel since then, even if I haven’t lengthened it as much as I’d have liked.
Souvenir of WriteNow
I have written tens of thousands of words of fiction (and a few thousand of non-fiction, not including the blog) but as it’s not all in one project it’s not easy to see how much there is. If you glance down my publications lists, almost everything published between November 2016 and April 2018 was written or heavily redrafted during my – shall we call it a sabbatical? That’s included Twitter fiction (I even won a couple of competitions), flash fiction and short stories which have been published online, in magazines and anthologies, and I recently had my first flash CNF (creative non-fiction) published at Ellipsis Zine.
It hasn’t been a continuous year and a half of excitement and success. There have been projects that fell through due to funding scarcity, places I never quite felt ready to submit to, people I never quite plucked up the courage to contact, articles I didn’t pitch, stories I didn’t write (or finish redrafting). I had about 150 rejections plus a couple of magazines went silent after I sent them something (next issue failed to appear, tweets dried up – Ligature Works, for instance). As I write this during the week of the 9th April, I’m waiting to hear about more than fifteen submissions.
As I look back over what I’ve done since I quit my last day job, some of it seems so long ago. Real life intervened occasionally: domestic crises, family illness, my dodgy back and related muscular problems (relics of a slipped disc about 4 years ago) but on the whole I did a fair few things I wouldn’t have done if I’d been at work. More to the point, at least I tried it instead of maybe regretting not trying it, later on. Immense thanks to OneMonkey who agreed to a scarily large slump in household income for six months (yes, the timescale grew once I got going) and made me hundreds of cups of tea when he was working from home and I was utterly focused and paying no attention to my surroundings. I wanted the new day job to be less than full-time so I could carry on a bit of this writing life I’ve grown accustomed to, and I’m not saying I definitely won’t take another sabbatical when my two-year contract’s up, but for now I’m reining back.
If you have a passion for writing (or anything else that might benefit from some dedicated time) and you think you can possibly economise, compromise or otherwise rearrange your finances so you can take some time out to focus on it, I can recommend at least having the conversation (with your spouse, your boss, or someone whose advice you trust). If I hadn’t mentioned it to OneMonkey, my sabbatical would never have morphed from an idle dream to eighteen months of reality. And after the tight budget of the last year and a half, the prospect of a second regular income in the house is making us feel filthy rich.
I wrote about writing with a partner, for the New Writing North blog, so if you’re not sick to the back teeth of me banging on about Lavender Ink (the radio drama Roz and I wrote for this year’s Writing On Air), you can read about how we went about writing it, here.
Marvel at our logical approach, learn from our mistakes, celebrate our continued friendship, then listen to Lavender Ink itself (there’s a link at New Writing North or you can go straight to Chapel FM). Feedback, as ever, gratefully received.
Oh, and for those who read last week’s post which mentioned the renewed search for a day job, I’ve found one, so come next month I won’t have to worry about the Earl Grey supply drying up for a while.
I ended 2017 with a stack of books (review copies and competition prizes), a cloth bag from the University of Edinburgh, a lifetime subscription to SciArt magazine, a print copy of an anthology with my work in, and the promise of royalties to come. All very nice but it doesn’t put Earl Grey in the caddy (except the royalties, later). It doesn’t even cover the expenses.
Despite avoiding most of the paid-for competitions (I’ve written about the barrier of fees before) I managed to spend almost £50 on eight flash fiction and short story competitions I didn’t so much as get longlisted for. All the competition successes I had in 2017 came from the ones I didn’t have to pay to enter, and I can’t decide whether or not there’s a lesson in there.
Twice, I forgot about the early-bird prices for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, meaning I missed out on saving £3. I had little runs of entering Ad Hoc Fiction hoping to win a free entry, but then I’d forget about it again after a few weeks, and I haven’t won one yet. There are some competitions that now offer a limited number of free places for low income writers, which is a great initiative. I haven’t taken any of them up because I’m in this position voluntarily, quitting a day job I was frustrated with and dragging our household income well below the UK median again (thanks to the ever-supportive OneMonkey, this has mostly been working out OK). However, anyone unburdened by feelings that it’s meant for people worse off than them can avail themselves of the opportunity.
The Penguin WriteNow insight day in Newcastle was great, and such a confidence-booster, but the train fare wasn’t cheap so I took the edge off it by using some Tesco clubcard vouchers to get credit at Red Spotted Hanky (I felt like such a pleb, like when we celebrated in Wetherspoons the day I got the WriteNow invite). When I got home I covered an old part-used notebook in sections cut out of the paper bag they kindly gave us a pile of books in, so I have a unique souvenir of the day.
More recently, I’ve been shortlisted for a competition and invited to a prize-giving that would cost almost as much as the third prize for me to attend (and it’s a six-hour round trip). Sadly, I’ve declined (see also my previous post about the cost of winning).
As I said, I quit the day job of my own accord for my own reasons, so I can’t complain about being hard-up (and truthfully I’ve been in way more precarious and penny-pinching situations than this). I should concentrate harder on the paying markets for fiction, and learn to pitch articles to magazines, but a lot of that requires confidence I’m only slowly building up. What I can do is stop allowing other people to make money off the back of my work when I get nothing. A webzine I like is free to read and they’re not paying me – fine, they’re unpaid too. A competition gives cash prizes, I’m not a winner but I’m in the anthology which they’re selling – fine, the money’s probably ploughing back into the prize fund. A commercial organisation is selling (at a standard market rate) a magazine or anthology with my work in it and all I (and all the other contributors) get is a free copy – why haven’t I realised how unfair this is, before now? I’ll try and stop being complicit in my own exploitation, and in the meantime the search is on for a new day job.
Flash, I love you! is the fabulously titled new flash fiction anthology from Paper Swans Press and the table of contents reads like a Who’s Who of flash fiction at the moment. Gratifyingly, it includes one of mine called Life’s Struggles. You can buy a copy at the Paper Swans Press website, it is a lovely item (as well as having great contents) but I admit I was shocked at the price. Don’t blame me, none of it’s coming my way.
If you haven’t yet got the previous anthology with a story of mine in, you can still buy Ellipsis Zine One. It’s cheaper (admittedly the print version is stapled not perfect-bound) and has more stories in, features similarly good writers (some, like me, have stories in both), and it pays royalties to those writers (hurrah for Steve at Ellipsis).
I’ve put some tinsel up, I’ve eaten five mince pies, I’ve tutted frequently at overdone lighting displays in the neighbourhood: it must be nearly Christmas. We even have a tiny sprinkling of snow.
I’ve been quiet for a couple of weeks, mainly because I couldn’t write (or think) about anything much except library funding cuts for a while. A project I’ve been passionate about for some time, which we (three of Ilkley Writers) were about to announce, suddenly has no funding. In a mild panic, I rang the Arts Council for advice about obtaining funding for the project ourselves. Their guidance documents are not the easiest things to plough through and understand, but we haven’t even got that far yet. To register for their online system you need to give them the details of the current account they’d need to pay any grant into. It can be an organisational account, or an individual’s account, but what it can’t be is a couple’s joint account. Guess what we all have? Not that surprising given that a) we’re middle-aged and in long-term relationships, and b) none of us have steady full-time jobs. “Just open a new account,” says the young man on the phone, as if he’s never had the trial of proving identity and income to a bank that doesn’t want his custom.
It’s not all been doom and gloom, however. I’ve got a new story up at Visual Verse, One Thing At A Time, written from a photo prompt. I had a 25-word novel included in the latest issue of Mslexia, and in further Twitter fiction news this morning I won a competition for a Christmas story:
"Christmas?" he says. "Pah! Waste of money." His Scrooge act is as much a family tradition as turkey and tinsel. I hide the bills and sneak an extra bauble in. But when he thinks no-one's looking he liberates a mince pie and retires to his shed, humming carols under his breath.
There’s an anthology coming out this week from Paper Swans Press that has one of my flash fiction pieces in, too (you can pre-order Flash, I Love You!here) so things are on the up, there are more mince pies in the cupboard, and it’s not even Christmas yet. I wonder if Santa does arts funding?
I’ve been inadvertently quiet for a couple of weeks. So busy editing the SF noir novel and reading books that I forgot to blog. To those of you who missed me: sorry. To those of you enjoying the respite: tough, I’m back.
I’ve got a couple of book reviews out there that you might not have seen, and they’re all great novels. First was Wychwood by George Mann, he of the Newbury and Hobbes series of occult Victorian steampunk mysteries. This novel is the start of a new series of contemporary police procedurals, also with an occult twist. You can read my review at The Bookbag.
Then I read We Are The End, the debut novel by Chilean writer Gonzalo C Garcia. Really it’s about being young, feckless and in love, but it has a flavour of computer games and rock music so maybe if you enjoyed the film Scott Pilgrim vs The World you might particularly appreciate it. Anyway you can read my review at Disclaimer magazine.
Yesterday I finished Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft, a big-publisher reissue (out in January 2018) of a fantasy novel he self-published a few years ago. It’s the first in a series, located in the fabulous setting of the Tower of Babel where a small-town headmaster has become accidentally separated from his wife on their honeymoon, and I’m itching to read book two and find out what happens next. You can read my review of it at The Bookbag.
As if that wasn’t enough, I’ve got flash fiction in an actual print anthology from Ellipsis Zine, which you can buy here if you feel like it (I get royalties…). The book is full of work by the serially-shortlisted of the flash world, the names that crop up again and again, and I can’t wait to get my hands on my free copy. I’m in seriously good company.
This week I’ve also been plotting and planning with Andrea and Roz, my friends from Ilkley Writers who you’ll have heard on the radio programme we did about libraries in April. An audacious idea for a library-based writing festival grew out of that programme, and yesterday we agreed on a final form for said festival, with our lovely contact at a local library. When we know whether the library’s funding bid has been successful (sometime before Christmas, we hope) we’ll know what scale our festival will be on, and I’ll tell you more about it. Until then I’m fizzing with excitement at the thought of getting people writing, getting people into libraries, and adding further evidence to Why Libraries Are A Good Thing.
I read a few pieces of flash fiction in the pub last night and they seemed to go down well. I don’t mean I had one too many shandies and jumped on a table with a sheaf of paper in my hand, this was an event I’d jointly organised on behalf of Ilkley Writers, with the Wharfedale Poets. Between us we’ve got a clutch of published writers (of novels, short stories, poetry and non-fiction), and the talent on show reflected that. A reasonable audience turned out on a Sunday night for us, and I think everyone enjoyed themselves. We had poetry from Tony Barringer, Jenny Dixon, Yvette Huddleston, Colin Speakman, Mike Farren, Dave Hesmondhalgh and Fiona Williams, with prose from Mandy Sutter (a Wharfedale Poet with a short story collection out soon), Emily Devane, Fleur Speakman, Rachel Hagan, Andrea Hardaker, and me. I re-used the fab performance book I made a couple of years ago, which is ok as long as I don’t turn over two pages and start reading a story from some previous event.
Afterwards, I ended up talking to a couple of the poets about the blurred boundary between flash fiction and less structured poetry. I’m not keen on labels, as a rule – I just write stuff and see what happens. Admittedly I have trouble finding where to submit some of it…
I have, however, submitted a story inspired by John Mayall’s Blues Breakers album with Eric Clapton to The RS500, where they’re slowly releasing writing inspired by each of Rolling Stone’s top 500 albums, and it’s due out this week. I’ll put the link here when it’s available.
Major excitement (and writing vaildation) this week as I found out I’ve been lucky enough to get a place on the Penguin Random House WriteNow insight day in Newcastle. This means, among other things, I get to talk to an editor about an extract of the semi-rural fantasy novel which they’ll have read in advance. I’m sure you can imagine the walking on air/dancing on lino that’s been going on here. Penguin books had a similar status to the BBC when I was growing up so even without making the trip north, meeting anyone or getting any further along the route to mentoring, I feel like I’ve won the pools and been anointed with the sacred oil of authorhood, extracted from the typewriter keys of earnest 1950s writers in suits.
Back in June I rather cheekily asked if from a London perspective their criterion of being ‘socio-economically marginalised’ meant that simply being northern was enough (and since then there continues to be evidence of the north-south divide, such as in premature death rates) but to their credit they gave me a considered answer:
3/4 We think that Northern working class voices are under-represented in books & would love submissions from writers from this background
They also said they’d consider applicants as eligible “If you define yourself as working class/ from a working class background”. We can argue about class till the cows come home, whether going to university catapults you into middle class territory regardless of accent, outlook, or what your sister does for a living, but there’s no denying my background, my roots, and the words I write with a loud northern working class voice (just look at the class tag here on the blog, for a start).
As Mark the artist pointed out while congratulating me, this surely highlights the importance of being true to yourself. On the face of it a combination of politics and urban (semi-rural) fantasy set in northern England in the wake of Brexit doesn’t sound like it would have mass appeal and I’ve worried a few times that I’ve sunk so much time and energy into a novel that no-one will be interested in. Yet that’s the novel I sent them an extract from and a synopsis of, and that someone has presumably seen potential in. The lesson to take away from this is: write with passion and originality, and you’ll get there (somewhere) eventually.
There’s a slice of my dystopian imaginings over at Visual Verse, less than 500 words so it won’t take you long and you can read it via this link. I recommend dipping in to the other responses to the prompt photo as well, it’s amazing the variety that one image can spark off.
I don’t have anything else new for you to read yet, but I did have an editor express interest in the sound of the sci-fi noir novel (the one I’m reworking, if you recall) this week. A good sign, and simultaneously confidence-boosting and terrifying. Will the manuscript live up to its description? Only time will tell.
This month has brought a spate of near-miss rejections full of praise, urging me to submit again soon, but ultimately unable to find a home for my stories. The one that included the line This is the best flash fiction I’ve read this year almost made me cry – if I’m hitting the heights and still can’t make it, what chance is there? All is not doom and gloom, however. I have a cliche-ridden 150 word story available for your amusement (story number 16 on this list) as part of a project arising from a recent flash fiction festival which is intended to grow into a charity anthology. I’ve also got a story coming out at The Fiction Pool soon, I will of course give you the link once it exists.
It’s been a while since I had a new short story (as opposed to flash fiction) available, but Letters From the Past is now on HeadStuff in their Fortnightly Fiction slot. It’s primarily about a woman who’s been looking for her ‘real’ father, by which she means the one she shares genes with. It’s also about how genes don’t necessarily make a family, how time passes by quicker than you think, how it’s easy to put things off till it’s too late, and how you can spend all your time searching for something that you had all along. I urge you to go read it. And you can always leave a comment to let me know what you think of it (politely…).
When the story was accepted, they asked me for a square photo. I thought it would be nice to use something a bit more up to date than my familiar Twitter picture, which is from summer 2015 as I recall. I trawled through our photos and realised the ones of me basically fall into two camps: leaning my head on someone (usually OneMonkey but occasionally a sister or friend) or wearing a paper hat at Christmas (possibly also whilst leaning my head on someone). There were two on northern beaches with my hair clearly showing which way the wind was gusting, and one of me surveying the damage when the moor had been on fire (which I wrote about here). I decided to use that, it’s out of date too but it’s nearly a year more recent than the Twitter one.
I don’t mean over-analysed in the English Literature sense, where sixteen pages of hidden meaning can apparently be wrung from one paragraph of a novel. I mean, loosely, in the sense of data analysis. I read an interesting article in the Guardian this week (and believe me, I don’t say that very often these days) which looked at graphs of writing progress for one author on his way to a finished novel, courtesy of an app he’d used to log these things. Cheering to most of us, I expect, was the up and down nature of the thing, the long pauses where life intervened and writing was something that happened to other people, or the stumbling recovery made up of several days of adding a sentence, a paragraph, nowhere near target.
My NaNoWriMo progress during November 2016
Now, if you’ve been around here a while you will have guessed that I’ve been measuring things like wordcount totals on spreadsheets for years. It was probably during one of my attempts at NaNoWriMo that I realised the motivational power of a graph with a line showing where the wordcount should be, and columns representing my actual total. Certainly it was through use of a daily wordcount tally that I realised how quickly a couple of hundred words in the library in my lunchbreak became a short story, a novella, a few chapters of a novel. There is a flip-side, of course.
I imagine that even for those writers working to a publisher’s deadline, life will intervene sometimes. A family emergency, illness, even the temptation of a sunny day after a fortnight of rain. Wordcount targets will not be met. It’s clear, therefore, that for everyone writing alongside a day job and family (I don’t just mean children, you do need to spend time with your spouse or your sister occasionally if you don’t want them to forget who you are) this will happen a lot. If you’re writing with hope but no fixed publication deadline, anything you’ve written that wasn’t there last month is a bonus. Look at that sharp red target line floating way above your little blue column, though, and it’s easy to get discouraged. What was I thinking? I can’t write a novel, it’ll take years. I’ve missed my target twelve days in a row. It may be your targets are over-ambitious, but that’s another matter.
In the semi-rural fantasy novel I’m writing at the moment (I don’t think that’s a real genre, I started calling it that as a nod to urban fantasy but a lot of it is set in northern villages and moors) I’ve had days when I’ve written nearly 3,000 words and wondered how I managed it, I’ve had whole weeks where I’ve written nothing. I will have written something else because I don’t have a regular day-job now, but not the novel. I’m a great fan of conditional formatting, so on a day when I’ve written at least 500 words of the novel the cell goes green when I type my wordcount in and I smile a contented smile. Simple pleasures. Crucially, I don’t have any targets. I don’t count non-green-cell days as failures. I try not to have too many consecutive blank days, but how many is too many?
Try an app, try a spreadsheet, try writing your target and actual wordcounts on the calendar in the kitchen for a month. One or more of these may give you a boost and keep you going. But if you find yourself being frozen by fear of failure, or beating yourself up over missed targets, ditch them and focus on the writing.
Where to start this week? I’ve got Twitter fiction in Mslexia, I’ve had a bestselling author send my blog traffic through the roof, and my mum told me off for not making the link to my guest post on the Women Writers School obvious enough.
We’ll start there first in case you, like my mum, were desperate to read that guest post and just couldn’t get to it. It’s called Northerners! Know Your Place, and is at http://womenwritersschool.com/northerners-know-your-place/ (and like most of my other stuff, is accessible via my About page). As you may expect, it’s an article about why I set so much of my writing in the north of England. I may come across as slightly deranged and/or obsessive, but it doesn’t seem to have done me too much harm so far. Honestly, it hasn’t. Ahem.
Many of Kit de Waal‘s Twitter followers visited over the weekend to read a blog post I wrote a few months ago, about class/wealth being a barrier to writing (beyond the hobby level), so if you haven’t already read that you might find it interesting, and if you have already read it you might have missed the follow-up post I wrote this week.
Staying with Twitter, after winning a Twitter fiction competition recently I’ve now got another mini-story in Mslexia magazine, which is quite exciting (and a bit of a surprise – I’d tweeted it to them as part of a challenge, but I don’t actually subscribe so the first I heard was when a friend had spotted it in print). Here’s the story – writers, don’t take it too much to heart:
I wrote a post a few months ago about cost being a barrier to pursuing writing beyond a hobby, and since Kit de Waal* tweeted a link to it (let’s just pause for a moment together to let that sink in) there’s been a surge of interest in it this weekend. It seemed like a superb moment to talk about two writing competitions I nearly didn’t enter this week because of the cost of the prize.
Any excuse for a photo of a steam train and/or Cumbria
When I say the cost of the prize, I really mean the cost of train travel and accommodation. I’m not naming names because I don’t want to make them feel bad, it is after all my decision to enter and for everyone who lives closer to the area in question it isn’t a problem. However, both the competitions had definite kudos value, it would be quite a thing even to be longlisted, but both had some or all of the main prizes involving going somewhere to do a thing (course fees paid, or free festival tickets).
One was free to enter but shortlisted entrants are expected to ‘make every effort to attend’ the award ceremony, and while the first prize includes cash, second and third are writing courses/retreats which it would cost nearly as much to travel to as to pay for a similar course nearer to home. You will note that I haven’t just gone on a similar course nearer to home, because they cost a lot of money.
The other cost £2 to enter, not a high enough fee to discourage me in itself, but none of the prizes involve cash, first and second prizes are tickets to a festival which it would be great to go to, but train fare would cost a packet and then there’s the B&B as well. You do get plenty of warning though so at least you get a chance to book the cheapest train tickets. Shortlisted authors for this one are invited to a do, but it doesn’t sound like there’s any pressure to attend.
I ended up entering both, hoping for a place on the longlist (to point to with pride) but equally hoping that I didn’t win (or not the non-cash prizes, anyway), which seems ridiculous. It’s worth pointing out that I’m voluntarily in this position (having quit my job at the end of October after squirrelling away enough money in the preceding months to let us manage for a while on that and OneMonkey’s income) and not remotely what I’d call poor, but if I’m thinking twice about entering, how many talented writers are being put off altogether because they can’t afford to be shortlisted?
*Kit de Waal has spent time and money raising awareness and helping writers from disadvantaged backgrounds get a leg up. I had heard about the Birkbeck scholarship, but hadn’t read until yesterday this New Statesman article from last April. She also wrote for the Bridport Prize blog this week about the importance of entering writing competitions, acknowledging that it can get pretty expensive.
Just after last week’s update I won a Twitter fiction competition, and today my parcel of prizes arrived. There’s still something so exciting about getting things (particularly books) through the post.
Unfortunately (and indeed, shockingly) I wasn’t quite the comedic genius I assumed, last week, and Newsjack didn’t use either of my sketches or any of my one-liners. However, I haven’t let it put me off and I’ve sent in two more sketches today and am mulling over one-liners for tomorrow’s deadline. This week’s episode is the last in the series so it’s my last chance for a while. I am emboldened enough to consider entering the Sketch in the City competition for writers in the north though, so something good has come of this.
Speaking of the north (as I so often do), check back here in a few days for a link to an article I wrote about taking my inspiration from the northern landscape, history and people (which of course includes my home and family). I managed to get another chapter or so of the semi-rural fantasy novel written this week, which is set all across the north of England. I’m enjoying all the background reading I’m doing for that, The Marches by Rory Stewart being the most recent (sh, don’t tell anyone I’m reading books by Tory MPs). The Library of Mum and Dad furnished me this weekend with a local history book belonging to my 2xgreat-grandfather, however, and I’m looking forward to delving into that soon.
It’s only Tuesday, and I’ve already won first place in a writing competition this week.
The competition was part of the launch of a new creative writing magazine run by students at Edinburgh University and you can read the first issue (including all three winning tweets on the theme of ink and tattoos) at http://www.50gs.uk/mobile/magazine.html
If you feel like checking out some of my non-award-winning Twitter fiction, you can go right back to 2009 at PicFic with Destination Unknown, English Breakfast and Letting Go or come forward a few years to Nailpolish Stories which at a 25-word limit may sometimes stray beyond 140 characters. All of them and more are listed on my About page under ultra short and microfiction. Enjoy.
It’s been a good couple of weeks at Chateau Monkey. I’ll forgive you if you missed my story Breakfast in Bradford over at The Flash Fiction Press a couple of weeks ago (but perhaps not if you don’t pop across and read it now…). Since then I’ve submitted to a few more magazines and a couple of story competitions, had another piece of flash fiction accepted (for issue 8 of Firefly Magazine, due in September I believe) and shepherded Ilkley Writers through an evening of writing microfiction.
I’ve made progress with a sci fi story I’m quite pleased with (begun in March 2012 I think – I have to let things ferment at the back of my mind), and started on a ruthless edit of awkward length fiction (12,000 words. Short novella? Long short story?) that I finished in April. There’s a rewrite underway for another submission I made a few weeks ago, and if the rewrite is deemed suitable I’ll be immensely chuffed and will shout loudly about it on here.
Oh, and OneMonkey is hard at work on a comic, just the two of us this time (though there are other plans afoot with Mark, as usual). I’m hoping to be able to give you an update soon, but it’s looking good so far. And he gets to geek out over fonts.
I hope your projects are buoyant too, it’s a good feeling. Let me know in the comments below, or say hello on Twitter @JYSaville – sometimes it seems awfully quiet around here. I don’t bite, honest.
The tip-tap of monkey keyboards 