Found Stories I’m always a bit surprised when writers tell me they can’t think of anything to write about. My problem is that there just aren’t enough hours in the day! Yesterday, for example, standing in the post office queue with my little pile of sample chapters to send to agents (cross your fingers please, […]

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Submission call This one has me fascinated – I’ve never been published by Gray Friar Press, so I’m not promoting my chums or anything here, but this is a book I would be keen to read, let alone appear in. PAGING MR HITCHCOCK – an anthology of dark stories inspired by the cinema Whatever differences […]

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Dealing with Acceptance Groucho Marx famously said ‘I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.’ It’s amazing how often writers share this prejudice. You’d think dealing with rejection would be bad enough, but many writers make heavy weather of getting a story accepted too. ‘Perhaps I should wait […]

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Creative non-fiction This relatively new hybrid of fiction and reportage is becoming increasingly popular. What is it exactly? I would say that it dramatises factual events by using techniques formerly reserved for fiction. It conveys not just fact, but tries to bring to fact the immediacy and emotional power of fiction to illuminate experience. I […]

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Pimp your Prose Pimping your ride means doing up your car so it looks better (or at least, more eye-catching) and pimping your prose is the same process. Most of us would need help to get beyond go-faster stripes and back-to-black for our bumpers, and we’d appeal to a specialist pimper for whitewall tyres, decals, […]

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Columns – the fun of writing regularly Yeah, yeah, I love my column at Moondance! It’s a great opportunity to explore themes that I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen for myself, to look at other people’s responses to the same theme, and to generally kick back and share my wisdom (such as it is) with the […]

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Submit – or suffer! It’s the season of the year when most journals and magazines stop reading – for those of us who live or die by the SAEs that drop through our letterboxes, this is a drought time, a period when our self-belief is eroded and our neuroses rise up to mob us. If […]

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Language and how to use it I’m reading a bunch of American stories at the moment and two of them have used the same phrase ‘he could care less’ to mean ‘he couldn’t care less’. Now I’ve heard this said myself, in Texas, and while I have no objections to it in dialogue (or even […]

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Tales of the DeCongested Anthology Launch and Exhibition Opening 29th June 2006, 7pm 2nd Floor Gallery Space, Foyles Bookshop Come celebrate the launch of a new independent publishing company, Apis Books, together with its first publication, Tales of the DeCongested, Volume One. There will be plenty of wine, plus readings, book signings, and the Tales […]

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If you want to be a writer – read! I’m always surprised (and saddened) when I lead a workshop only to discover that though I have anything from six to thirty writers in the room, only two or three will be subscribers to literary magazines. Yet those writers will want – and maybe even expect […]

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