I was recently asked to be a judge for a short story competition. Despite my full-blown imposter syndrome, I accepted the invitation as part of my ‘doing something differently in 2024’ mantra. Having entered several competitions over the years, I was keen to see the other side.   Let me start by saying that there are some great writers out there. Even the stories that weren’t in the running for the top 5 were still entertaining and swept me up in their storylines. It’s terrib

I don’t like being afraid of things. I’m that idiot who goes outside to investigate the weird noise in the middle of the night, or looks inside the ancient, mysterious box even when the scary music is playing. So, I opened the work-in-progress to see if it was as bad as I remembered...   It kind of was. I had point of view slips and inconsistent characterisation. Really rookie stuff. It also felt like a bunch of 500-word attempts mashed together, which, in fairness, it was. M

I haven’t worked on my short story for just over two months. It is sitting at 2,222 words exactly. The numbers-weirdo in me likes that figure, perhaps that’s why I left it there? Or perhaps I know I’m butchering the story and I don’t want to keep inflicting more damage?   I can’t even bring myself to open it and read it. I can watch the movie of the story in my brain at will, and it is great in the fully immersive experience of my imagination. But the written version is like

It has never taken me so long to write a short story as the one I’m writing now. I know the storyline, and so far it is doing everything my imagined-on-the-bus version did. In the old days these were the stories that would trap me at my computer for five hours and I’d write 8,000+ words in a day to get it finished.   I’m trying to work out what has changed. This story is meant to be an allegory for something pretty ugly. This makes the writing process a tough slog, because wh

There’s a great trick for blocked writers; if new words don’t come, edit some old ones. I took that advice recently and dusted off an old story which I wanted to set free. I’d sent it off in the past, always awkwardly tweaking it to meet the criteria for one anthology or another, but it never quite fit. So, I edited out all the stilted rubbish and left it standing on its own feet, exactly as I had imagined it.   Fate then pointed me in the direction of an anthology which seem