Fiction Writer
I have come to the end of my year as the The Bridge/Moniack Mhor Emerging Writer. It has been amazing. I really feel that winning this prize has propelled my writing forward. First there was the happy of shock of finding that I had been chosen, that my work had been chosen, that it was … Continue reading The Bridge Awards Emerging Writer Prize
I let people think I’d just arrived. And once I’d done that, I had to stick with that story until Sunday.
The idea is to write 50,000 words in November. That averages out at about 1,600 words per day. Of course, commercial novels are actually 80,000 to 100,000 words long and a first draft is not a finished novel, but it's still a really good challenge to set yourself, very satisfying to complete, and can be a useful way to kickstart your writing, or to build up a good chunk of first draft to start working on.
Only days after winning the Bridge Emerging Writer award, I got another encouraging email regarding the Northern Writers' Awards.
When I returned her call she told me, unbelievably, that I was the overall winner of the Emerging Writer award! I gasped and I gabbled and I tried to absorb what she was saying, but overall I was just overwhelmed with happiness and rendered largely incapable.
I’ve heard a lot about sugar being addictive, so I thought that the first week would be the hardest, and that denying myself would get gradually easier as I broke bad habits and got the sugar out of my system. What happened, though, was the exact opposite.
My short story, Curly Fries, is included in this month's The Honest Ulsterman, which is a magazine for which I have a lot of fondness.
The Winter 2016/17 Issue of The Broken City Magazine is now out. It's called Life of the Party and its theme is parties and celebrations. It includes my short story, She Did Go To The Ball.
I am actually kind of looking forward to Christmas this year. Every year I hate it less and less. For a long time it meant only stress and exhaustion. Disney, I feel, are largely responsible for setting the bar of small children's yule expectations so high. It means that only a prolonged period of parental … Continue reading Learning To Love Like Christmas
Towards the end of this otherwise pretty horrible year, some nice things happened, so I decided to write a blog post.
