Category: My writing updates

Couple of Items out/sold.

Lucky Break magazine is a useful venue as well as being an excellent magazine to read. Frankly I despise most of the celebrity magazines in which all you read about is people who are famous for being famous, and who behave stupidly, criminally or disgustingly. With LB (and That’s Life, a similar Australian magazine) you …

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Don’t You Hate Rejections?

I didn’t spend my Christmas/New Year break doing nothing. I planned to begin a new book on January 14th and wanted a stack of short work submissions out before that, the more so as over late December I’d written a number of new stories and several new articles which needed to find homes. And I …

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Re an anthology and why you should Keep your authors informed.

Timeline. Early February 2012 – I submit an original story to what sounds like an interesting anthology. Early November I thought I’d catch up on how the Rollicking Tales anthology was going, to find that it seemed to have vanished. I discovered a possible email address and queried. To be told by email from the …

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Articles Published

The Dannevirke News is probably the smallest daily newspaper still in existance, it’s been in print too for over 120 years and now and again when something attracts my attention as a subject, I write an article for them. Often these are based on how to save money in some way, shape, or form, or …

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New Sale for January

Yes, a recent email to say that the true-life tale I offered the Oh Sandy anthology in the USA has been accepted. I did an item on the major quake we had on Mother’s Day in 1990. It was humorous – no real damage anywhere local, and the editors liked it. And the author copy …

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THE GREAT DETECTIVE:His Further Adventures. Edited Gary Lovisi, an anthology.

A nice new anthology arrived from America over New Year, containing two of my Sherlock Holmes tales, The Fury and The Button-Box. Several years ago inspired by an idea I sat down and wrote 14 new SH stories… and then couldn’t find a publisher who wanted a short story collection. I kept being told that …

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Taking a Blog Break

Currently I’m flat out. The raspberries have gone slightly mad so I’m out there picking first thing in the morning and again in late afternoon most days. Short story plots have been breeding like rabbits, and I’ve written three new stories in the past week with another three to go which I hope to clear …

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World Ends On December The 21st – not here it doesn’t.

There’s been a fair amount of natter recently about the world ending on December 21 according to The Mayan Prophecy. Reading some of the stuff about it I gather that it’s unlikely; that this wasn’t actually a prophecy, that it’s more likely they just did the long cycle and left it at that because to …

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Revising

Back in late October I sold a standalone Young Adult book entitled Flying Free. The publisher seems to have decided to bring it out very promptly because initial revision arrived only a couple of weeks back. I’ve done that, returned it and am now waiting for possible further edits. But if both sides continue at …

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Another Short Story Sale

and since Steve’s let the feline out of confinement I guess I should announce that I’ve sold another story to Whortleberry Press for their 2013 Valentine anthology. Slightly Potty was one of those stories that comes from something you do. I belonged for several years to a local group that did pottery-making (and produced the …

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