Yes, sort of – and No, sort of

I submitted a few short pieces recently, and I’ve had a verdict back on three of them. Nothing to crack a bottle of fizz over, and nothing to send me weeping to a lonely spot to reflect on how baaad my life is.

First up was an entry to the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation’s ‘Inspired by Jane’ competition. I made the shortlist of twelve for my take on Miss Gardiner, who became the Mrs Bennet of Pride and Prejudice, but not the final three. I had just over a week to write it, so it was still rough at the edges – another week of editing would have knocked it into decent shape.

I made the decision to submit one of my favourite stories to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction this month. That’s like a novice romance writer asking Danielle Steele to take a look at their romantic novel draft – it was a scary step. It takes up to three months for F&SF to make a decision, and they ask you not to pester them in the meantime. Or three days, if they love the title enough to read the story straight away and then don’t love the story enough to take it. It was a kind rejection, and reading between the lines it seems that the story needs more substance. It’s not on the scrapheap, I love the idea too much – but it is on the ‘needs repair’ heap for now.

The final verdict I had was from Globe Soup, the amazing writing group who run free and paid-entry competitions on the internet and offer a huge amount of encouragement to their writing people. I sent an entry in to the memoir competition that they ran, based on ‘A place that changed me’. I was worried that they would take offence, as I based it on East London of the 1960’s. Anyone who’s watched Alf Garnett in ‘Till Death Do Us Part’ should understand what I’m worried about. Warren Mitchell performed an Alf Garnett set at the Theatre Royal Stratford in the 1970’s as a one-man stand up comedy routine, and was greeted with applause and cheering. The audience didn’t realise he was joking. These were the people of the streets where I grew up.

But my memoir was longlisted. Globe Soup encouraged anyone who made the longlist to submit the piece elsewhere, and I might yet do that.

Next on the cards is some reading I promised to do for friends for opinion and haven’t yet got around to, and a new project for Globe Soup. I love writing for them. They put a lot of effort into encouraging good writing – posting articles on matters such as first lines, showing vs telling and character description. Their competitions cost from £12.50 down to free and they publish the winning entry so that anyone can compare it to their own effort. In any competition, the judges’ opinions really matter. In case that sounds like a dead-end way to write, it’s what every writer does – tailors their work to entice the readers they want to draw in. I wouldn’t write a gory horror for People’s Friend unless I wanted to see what their rejection letters are like; I wouldn’t write a piece on a subject really dear to my heart in the kind of plodding rhyme scheme that needs a Spoon for every June and a Weasel for every Teazle.

Globe Soup’s next challenge is historical fiction; buy a ticket in one of five colours for £12.50 (on early-bird offer for £2.50 when I jumped in, and may still be so) and then open the ticket to discover which historical era your story needs to be based around. The eras are; Ancient Egypt, Vikings, American Civil War, the Roaring Twenties and World War II. Like their regular challenges, the fun is in being handed a lucky dip for something, so I’m not going to spoil your party by telling you which colour ticket will net you your favourite time. Plus, Globe Soup are easy about which other genre you stick in with the historicals – time travellers gatecrashing the American Civil War, a murder mystery in the time of Tutenkhamun or the evil spirit that haunts the Viking longboat. It’s been done before – Blythe Spirit, a supernatural comedy set in the Roaring Twenties? Stargate the (rotten turkey) film version where the ancient Egyptian gods were revealed to have been aliens? Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter? Dive in, get a ticket and mix it up.

That’s me busy until Christmas.