Tag: micro fiction

Finalist for author of the year

After being Spillwords Author of the Month in October, I’m now a nominee for their Author of the Year award! 😊

There’s something about the possibility of being Author of the Year that sounds vastly more impressive than Author of the Month, like I’ve not just stumbled upon a good story but that I might actually be a consistently good writer 😮

If you enjoy my writing and you’re part of the Spillwords community, please do take the time to vote. Fiction writing can be a bit of a thankless hobby, with rejections appearing in your inbox far more frequently than anyone would like, so I’m sure that every single author nominated for Spillwords’s awards will be thankful for you taking the time to consider their work.

In addition to this, back in January, I was Author of the Month on Fifty Word Stories and they’re also about to announce their Author of the Year for 2023. There’s no option to vote because the decision rests with the editor, but if you would like to read the best of their microfiction in 2023, or if you missed my story the first time round, they’ve posted links to all the shortlisted stories in their news feed: 2023 Finalists Do give my story a wee like on the page if you enjoy it!

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The woodsman and the witch

I’ve fallen a bit behind on my updates so this is a couple of days out of date!

Spillwords have published a micro fiction piece of mine called The Woodsman and the Witch – a dark little story to get people in the mood for Halloween 🎃

I also published my latest blog post earlier this evening: Using simile and metaphor to write effective stories

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One year anniversary

Three weeks back at work and totally knackered 😴 I thought about posting something about the experience, and even had a few paragraphs drafted, but writing a blog about being an NHS psychologist is a very different track from the one I had planned when I started this. Suffice it to say, there are too many patients, not enough staff and not enough time. I spend my days trying to prioritise as well as I can and always leave with a list of more things to do the next day, that would ideally have been done already 🤷‍♀️

In terms of writing, I’m working on a story about grief that was originally for a particular magazine but ended up longer than their word limit, so now will need to find a new home. My productivity won’t be what it was last year, but I have plans for a magazine in June; a contest in July and then another contest in September. Wish me luck keeping to those plans!

I also had some good news in that one of my flash fiction stories, called ‘The Unicorn in the Garden’, was accepted for Flash Flood 2023. The Flash Flood Journal will be posting a new flash fiction piece every 5-10 minutes for twenty-four hours on the 24th June in celebration of National Flash Fiction Day. My story will appear at 6.40am BST 🙂 This story was written for a contest where it didn’t even reach the longlist so it’s nice to know that someone out there liked it – hopefully readers will appreciate it too!

I also plan to start a blog called “Storytelling”, stylised with a psi symbol for the ‘i’, just to be all fancy like.

I have drafts for the first 3 posts and I plan to post on a monthly basis, a couple of weeks after each chapter of George Square. I’m not really one for blogging but my hope is that the more I say the more readers might find my work. The blog will be an attempt to combine my two interests of psychology and writing in various ways – hopefully I don’t run out of ideas too quickly! I’m still working out how to make it look all nice on the website but hopefully I’ll get that figured out in the next couple of weeks 🙂

Check out my published fiction here.

A break from your regularly scheduled programming

I said in my last blog post that I probably wouldn’t update George Square this month and sadly I was correct that I wouldn’t have enough time for it. Completing the two science fiction stories for Globe Soup took far more of my headspace than I had hoped that it would. It was also a quite difficult month for me on a personal level. My beloved Siamese cat, Loki, fell unwell and we had to make the heart-breaking decision to put him to sleep. He and his sister have been part of my family for nearly 11 years, adopted as kittens and always there to greet me through my day. I miss his cute fluffy face and his demanding cries. So having stories that I was busy trying to complete was a bit of a blessing, since it gave me something else to concentrate on. Now that the deadline has passed, I feel that I have two quite good (or I think they are anyway!) sci-fi stories that I can submit to magazines once the results of the contest are announced, so it has hopefully been worth all time and effort.

In terms of writing, my main other achievement this month has been a further publication – Spillwords.com have published a piece of flash fiction that I wrote called ‘Chosen for greatness but by whom?‘. Originally written for a micro contest on the theme of ‘Luck’, I found myself considering how it might feel to grow up as a destined hero, with all the heavy expectations that come with it and whether your faith in that destiny might ever waver.

My plan for the next month is to get back into writing George Square so that I keep up with my self imposed schedule.

If you’re new to George Square, the first chapters are available to read here

You can also find my published short fiction here