Well, it's that time again, doesn't seem like five minutes since the last Anthology!
Writers Abroad, my online writing community, is a group of talented and supportive writers. We are all ex pat in one sense or another and crave for the company of other like minded writers looking to develop our 'voice' in a variety of ways. Because of where we live, the traditional writing groups are not available, so we set up a virtual one! We are eighteen months young and I for one have learnt so much in such a short time about a subject I adore. And I'm still learning and probably always will! We have members from all around the world, but we are small in number and that's for a good reason. We are a very active group, have regular weekly prompts, monthly challenges and much, much more... and of course we publish an annual anthology. Well. last year was the first time and we liked it so much, we're doing it again! We've just had an article about our experiences published in the April edition of Writers News, so we're getting our name about too!
Anyway onto the Anthology - details can be found on the site, but in a nutshell:
Theme - Food, drink and cooking around the World
Genre - Short Fiction (including flash) up to 1700 words and non-fiction up to 1000 words
Deadline - 9th September 2011 (plenty of time)
Submissions - Ex pat writers and those who have been at some time or another
Fee/Prize - no fee and no prize but proceeds from publication will be donated to The Book Bus
Oh, and forgot to mention, Rhodesian born writer and author of the No 1 Detective Agency, Alexander McCall Smith, will be writing our foreword!
Visit the site for more details and I'll keep you posted here as well...
Until Later.
As part of an incentive to increase my submissions of short stories and therefore increase my chances of publication, I signed up to a blog called Write1Sub1 which I blogged about a few weeks ago.
Well, in February I met the challenge and having subbed four stories I received a February Fahrenheit Award! The award is named after a book written by the revered Mr Bradbury on whose approach this idea of writing and submitting stories is based on. As part of this all award winners were asked to visit a least two other writers who had made it, and congratulate them on their success.
Imagine my surprise when yesterday I discover I've been presented with another award 'a lovely blogger' award from one of the writers I congratulated. So that's two awards in as many weeks, which although is not quite reaching the dizzy heights of publication, it is some sort of progress after all. All I have to do now is nominate fifteen blogs to receive the award and share the love. Someone said that these awards were just like a glorified chain mail letter - I always delete those - but it sure feels good! So thanks to Deborah Walker.
And, if that isn't enough to keep my inspiration flowing and motivation firing, a story of mine was long-listed in the Brighton Cow Flash Fiction competition. Apparently they'd had a huge number of submissions and increased the winners and prizes in response.
Now the standard has been set, can I continue to meet it? I have so far submitted one short story to My Weekly, have two short stories almost ready for submission and a piece of very short flash fiction simmering away... lets see what turns up next week.
Until Later
