It has been a busy week!
Guest Blog Spot on Jennifer C Wilson’s Author Website
I first met Jennifer at Swanwick Writers’ Summer School in 2016 and we quickly became friends. In 2017 we had the great joy of racing to the Swanwick Book Room to get our books in there!
The Lakeside Block at The Hayes Conference Centre where Swanwick is based. Image by me.
The beautiful main building at The Hayes. Image by me.
This is one of the huge joys of going to events like this. Yes, you learn from the courses. You may well make connections that will help you with your writing career but the most important thing is to make friends. Nobody but a fellow writer will quite understand what drives you to write. Nobody but a fellow writer will sympathise with total understanding when what seems like the millionth rejection has come into your inbox.
Jennifer writes paranormal historical fiction (I like to think of them as ghost stories with a twist!). Her latest books are The Last Plantagenet, a novella available in e-book, and the second in her Kindred Spirits series called Royal Mile. Her first book in this series, Tower of London, was about a hero we both love – Richard III!
So when Jennifer invited me to have a guest spot on her website, I was only too pleased to accept. I talk about how I “fell” into flash fiction and share two new stories, which I hope will make it into my next collection. Hope you enjoy the post and I am only too happy to recommend the Kindred Spirit series. I am currently reading The Last Plantagenet – and loving what I’ve read so far!
A truly beautiful library but do the books in it meet my criteria for what makes a good story? I would like my book in there (obviously) and Jennifer’s Kindred Spirit series amongst many, many others! Image via Pixabay.
Facebook – Southampton Writers’ Circle
I would like to say a big thanks to Geoff Parkes for sharing a wonderful picture from Wednesday night when I had the great joy of being back at the Southampton Writers’ Circle.
I was judging their Scroll Award competition for the best work produced that year and the winner was Angela Curtis for her non-fiction piece, My Pocket Rocket.
It was great to meet up with everyone again and the quality of work was high. I hope all who entered go on to submit their pieces. It would be lovely to hear later if some (ideally all!) end up being published – good luck, everyone.
This was an interesting contest as it meant non-fiction was being judged alongside fiction. As with this kind of competition, you can’t compare like with like (because they’re not!), I judged each piece based on how close they were to publication standard. I also named suitable markets. What was nice was that every piece has very good potential to be published and I would love to hear later that they do achieve that.
I present Angela Curtis with her trophy and scroll. Many thanks to Geoff Parkes of the Southampton Writers’ Circle for the photo. Great image! (Note to self: I need to laugh like this more often!).
Facebook – Goodreads Author Programme
I have posted my second blog on here now and today I talked about what you read. Many thanks to Paul Trembling for getting a short debate going on this. More comments welcome. I will be trying to post to this site once a week. Do also send in questions to the Ask the Author spot as I love author Q&As and would be only too pleased to talk about books, writing, being published, flash fiction and so on.
Association of Christian Writers – Writers’ Day
Firstly I’ll share the link to my most recent post for the More than Writers blog page where I talk about the changing seasons and my take on autumn/fall.
Secondly, ACW had their annual London Writers’ Day on 7th October. Our speakers were Glen and Emma Scrivener and the topics were God’s Story and Your Story. Our venue was almost full, there was a real buzz from the Day and everyone was inspired by our speakers. My FB post is below.
Had a wonderful time at the Association of Christian Writers’ Day in London today. Good venue, great speakers and there was a fantastic buzz too. (Always a good sign that!).
Really finding my smartphone so useful. Managed to do some reading and evaluating on the way home, which was great. I use Evernote to draft stories, remind myself of writing tasks and so on and am finding this incredibly useful. I’ve also used its camera function and then saved the file to Drive, Photos etc. (Ii am a great believer in the multiple back-up. I’ve been caught out in the past here – so help me, never again!).
Writing can be very therapeutic at times, if only because you are so busy working out what your characters are doing/going to do etc, you can’t really think too much about anything else. Am finding that useful too.
Well, what IS your story? Image via Pixabay.
Allison Symes: Collected Works 