Revolutions!

Well, finally made some progress on this old writing malarkey:

We are delighted to let you know that your story has made it through the selection process for the REVOLUTIONS anthology and that we would love to publish it.
Please find attached our standard publishing agreement. If you could sign this and return it to us as soon as possible, that would be awesome. We are in the process of finishing the galley proofs. Once we have them, we will send you a copy.
Your author name on the manuscript is SK Harrison. If you would like us to publish your work under a different name, please let us know at this time.
Also, if possible, please supply us with a short biography. Just a paragraph about yourself with any links to websites, blogs etc.
Again, thanks for such a great story!
Kind regards,
Craig, Graeme and Eric
The Editors

Very happy with this because I've had fuck all published in a while. Mostly due to churning out utter shite and not looking at things objectively. 

So, hopefully with this boost I can pull my finger out and raise the bar on other writing projects. Stop settling for what I think is okay and really rip apart everything I type, trying to make something that I would be proud for anyone to read. 


Neversettle. Ironically the name of the WiFi network I'm currently connected to... 

Shortlisted

I am officially on the shortlist for an anthology of Manchester-linked short stories, being edited by The Manchester Speculative Fiction Group, entitled Revolutions! with my story 'Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want' - yes, a Smiths lyric. How clever.

I've bounced off a longer short story to a magazine I greatly enjoy, but the chances are never great as I think my style is not their style. As evidence, so far they have rejected me 5 times. But, still, I try. So very few short story magazines out there.

Another entry for the end of this month ready to be emailed off, once some little Sharpie drawings have been scanned, Photoshopped, and put together nicely.

A big short story competition the same time every year rolls around. Bugger that if I'm entering again. It's very...high-brow. In other words, I don't understand any of the damn stories that win. Are they meant to be so obtuse, to have no undercurrent of tension, no discernible resolution? Is that a publishable short story? Am I muppet for not understanding them? In that case, I'm fucked so I'll save myself £17 and not enter.

I am 50+ words into a novel. Again. I write quickly, but this does not make for good writing. It makes for great fun, great brain-scratching, but more time must be loaded into thought, editing, slowly walking around it and studying it from many angles.

This sudden huge word count has been accomplished simply by scrapping the load of utter, utter crap from the beginning of the year (what was I thinking, seriously?), realising what was just padding, and how the same scenes, the same middle of each 'novel' is always the same, whatever plot I employ. This is a story I feel I have to write, and write correctly, so that I can stop circling around it and write something NEW! Imagine: the same damn story in your head for years that you can't purge. Like a reoccurring boil that you finally realise needs a surgical excision. 

It is frightening how very, very wrong you can be about a novel's potential, about its readibility, even its credibility. Rose-tinted glasses perched on a nose shoved against the page. You don't see anything except one damn word at a time.