And we're off!

We delayed the start of our trip as long as we could, in the hopes of getting the office sorted before we left home. Unfortunately that wasn't possible, so it will have to wait until we get back. That's not ideal, but it is good to be off on our adventures.

Our first couple of stops were to gardens. I took a great many photos, which I've hardly even looked at yet, so the pictures will be trailing behind us. (If you'd like to see even more pictures from our trip, have a look at the blog on my website.)

Free entry writing competitions

Here's a monthly short story competition. The prize is $100 plus 50% of the subscription revenue from your story. Reprints are accepted – provided of course that you've not given up the rights.

A reminder about the Creative Futures competition. The theme is 'material', the competition is for under represented authors, entries of fiction, poetry and creative non fiction accepted. The prize is publication and '£25,000 worth of cash and professional development prizes'.

Womag news

Thanks to Suzan Lindsay for the details of the People's Friend poetry competition. They want - "a poem on the theme of 'reconciliation'. The poem has to have three verses of four lines. The competition closes at noon on 9th May. Email your poem with your name and address to pfeditor@dcthomson.co.uk with 'Poetry Competition' in the subject line. First prize is £150 with three runner-up prizes of £50 plus publication in the magazine."

If you've had a big batch of rejections from TAB, don't panic! Lots of people have (mine are in double figures and some go back to stories I submitted EIGHT years ago!). 

From Vivienne Moles

How do you find what publications you might have been in when they have the rights to place them elsewhere? (Something it's useful to know for various reasons, including claiming ALCS.)

I trawled through a few month's worth of Woman's Weeklys, just to see if any of my BOWW had appeared, as happened with Alyson this month. (I did it the long way 😩 and went through individual ones looking at the 'text preview). Then I had an idea: Haha! If you type your name in Pressreader (My library no longer subscribes, so this is as a non-user), preferably in inverted commas because it narrows the field, snippets of your work pop up and you can see where they've come from, and dates. 🙂

I suspect that might be useful for the Woman's Weekly family? Like Australia, NZ, Woman etc...,? You'd have to have someone with more of a repertoire than me to check that out. I work pretty much exclusively on a laptop and think this might not be so easy with an app (Hate apps! 😠 ) on a tablet. It will NOT find publications that are not in Pressreader. I found a variety of bits, including shortlisted from WM, a letter in the TV times from 2019, Best win and letters to WM.

Vivienne adds that at one time Yours didn't attribute stories, so although some show up, they don't all.

Thanks for this, Vivienne. My library also stopped subscribing to Pressreader and I hadn't realised it was still possible to still search for works, so this is potentially very useful.