Authors Electric

I recently started writing short stories for the Reedsy Prompts weekly contest . This is a fantastic competition for kickstarting your writing if/when you feel blocked. The prompts are always thought-provoking with great scope for exploration. The best part is that you get to read the other stories submitted to the contest once the winners are announced. Exploring hundreds of different ways to interpret the same prompt is a wonderful testament to human creativity, as well as reassurance that AI is not going to steal all of our jobs just yet.  In all my years of entering writing competitions, I’ve never won a single thing. I don’t take it to heart. It’s a writer-eat-writer world out there (I’m kidding—I love learning from other writers. I’m also a vegetarian and not a cannibal). But in all seriousness, I enter these contests not with a hope of victory, but with the knowledge that it’s a great way to improve my craft.  Well, dear reader, guess what? The very first story I entere...

"I wish, I wish ...." Peter Duck 2014 If I had One Wish and wasn't allowed to use for anything altruistic (eradicating poverty & inequality, enforcing world peace etc) I think I would wish to learn how to write short stories. I've never wanted this before. I'm a very quick and gulpy reader, too impatient (in the past) to savour the subtle pleasures of a good short story. These are the stories that force you to close the book, turn off the e-reader and let them linger in your mind. I've always been over-eager to race on, read more.  Occasionally binge-reading works even for short stories. As a child I read obsessively   MauriceGriffiths 's Ten Small Yachts, his 1933 follow-up to his masterpiece, The Magic of the Swatchways (1932) I read that book too but without the same compulsion. Ten Small Yachts  told me story after story (they were true) of MG's relationships with his successive boats. I would end one story satisfied, momentarily, th...

Margery Allingham Albert Campion Margery Allingham (1904 – 1966) was one of the Golden Age “Queens of Crime” along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh. Her series detective, Albert Campion, sometimes merges in people's minds with Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey – those languid, upper-class, vaguely Woosterian / Sir Percy Blakeney-ish types.  As far as I'm concerned this perception does Campion and his creator a disservice. I was lucky enough to write Allingham's biography ( The Adventures of Margery Allingham ) and remain constantly impressed by the way she used her detective to dramatise her personal preoccupations and record her observations of social change over four decades.  Bibliography of MA's short stories Allingham was always a developing and experimental writer. She stayed within the 'box' of the crime novel but never wrote the same book twice. Campion appears in nineteen full-length novels from The Crime at Blac...

          The market for short stories is even more limited these days than it was in the past, to say nothing of the market for poetry. Gone are the heady days of the daily story in the Evening News . That was my first taste of paid publication, and it was a terrific outlet. The only requirement was that it had to be between 1050 and 1100 words, and not be offensive. So I did science fiction, historical, contemporary…  Capital Radio had a slot where you could do weird surreal stories there, of a similar length. The short story competition has filled some of these lamentable gaps, and poetry competitions are invaluable for undiscovered bards who are notching up rejection slips in three figures from magazines.             The first competition I ever entered was Bridport, in 1987, and I came third. These days they publish anthologies, which gives you an idea of the sort of thing th...