Posted by on Jan 30, 2007 in acceptance, market, short story | 2 Comments

Swimming with Kangaroos No, not a threat from the Australian Mafia (if there is such a thing) but an acceptance. Swimming Kangaroo Books, an Australian publisher, puts out a monthly newsletter, and has selected one of the stories from the ‘Green Thought’ project to feature in their short story slot in July. Visit them at […]

Posted by on Jan 24, 2007 in editors, erotica | 6 Comments

And sometimes the editor is just plain wrongAnd a writer has to nail their colours to the mast. Below is a series of emails between me and an erotica editor whose details I have removed to save unpleasantness. This is a publisher that asks for a sample story – a process I’m always dubious about, […]

If you want to get published – DON’T read on … Sigh. It’s slush time. Yet another reader has reneged on her promise and a pile of short stories have just arrived on my desk instead of hers. For an absolutely miniscule fee, I have eight days to sort them into four piles: Forget it […]

Posted by on Jan 18, 2007 in Big Brother, prejudice, racism | No Comments

I am ashamed My friend John, from Kerala, emailed me. ‘What are you telling me now, about sending my son to England for his university education?’ he asks. What indeed? Big Brother is the worst form of reality TV, and it has revealed the worst form of reality – racist bullying. Shilpa Shetty is a […]

If you want to be a writer … Sometimes you have to take it on the chin. Today I got my complimentary copy of an anthology I’ve got a story in. My name is spelt wrongly in the contents list. It could be worse, it could be wrong in the story footer and the biographical […]

Resolutions Did you make any? Were they literary? My favourite psychologist (yes, I do have a favourite) the excellently offbeat Professor Richard Wiseman, has been talking about resolutions and how little we know about the process of making (and breaking) them. He points out that the advice given in every agony column and on every […]

So much to say The problem with only blogging twice a week is I have to save things up! 1 – Take this from Publisher’s Weekly back in September – Last week’s announcement of the Sobol Awards—in which online submissions from unpublished fiction writers compete (for an $85 fee) for thousands of dollars in prizes […]

Posted by on Jan 4, 2007 in how to articles, queries, short articles | No Comments

Quickies Yesterday afternoon I had an idea for an article – just a tiny one, around 700 words, about breaking into a certain magazine market. The reason it occured to me was that I was filing all my last year’s queries, and spotted a pattern to the acceptances that I hadn’t recognised before. Hmm, I […]

How was 2006 for you? In the spirit of transparency, here’s how it was for me – as a fiction writer, rather than as a fully rounded human being. Lots of wonderful, terrible, and mundane things happened to the human being, but this is simply the writer’s year: Submissions – 181 (112 still outstanding) Print […]

Posted by on Jan 1, 2007 in blog posting, column, moondance, publication | One Comment

Happy New Year! A great way to start is to have the invaluable (for writers) service of Google Alert tell you that something has been published, in this case, my latest Moondance column … http://beta.moondance.org/2006/winter2006/columns/sexton.html And I have a 2007 resolution to share with you – I’m reducing posting on this blog to twice a […]