Monday: 20th October 2008

I admit it, I’ve been lazy, I haven’t written in my journal for a week or so. The reason being, not much has changed.

I reviewed The Taste of Honey last Tuesday and once again really enjoyed the experience. This time I had people looking out for me, introducing themselves and wotnot. I took a friend with me and even he was surprised (and a little jealous) by all the attention. I must reiterate. This is Amateur dramatics, I am NOT getting (I hate that word) carried away, but this whole thing is still alien to me and if it’s good I’m going to enjoy it. Anyway, the play was very good and I wrote a review for the Chronicle, this time without the supervision of Mimi Thebo and the, that Wednesday they were both published, which was great. It was about page 9854 of the local newspaper but there was still a great sense of pride, as I’ve said before it might be a tiny footstep, but it’s a tiny footstep through the industry door.

I’m doing another review on Wednesday evening, back at the Rondo, a play called A Tomb with a View, and hopefully, if my writing is up to standard I’ll continue to review for the Chronicle, but now that chapter of the module is over, I want to concentrate on other elements of being published, and that starts this week with Competitions.

Competitions

I’ve done a complete loop. At first I thought finding competitions to submit work would be difficult, then I found hundreds of writing competitions online and I thought it would be easy. Then I started researching the competitions, the submission criteria, the previous winners, the quality of some of the work, and I realised that my initial fears were true. This process will be difficult.

Having skimmed the surface and begun researching various competitions for travel writing, poetry and short stories, was time to bring out and dust down old stories and articles I’ve written sometime in the past and jazz them up. One feature, I wrote about spending five days in a Thai prison cell over Christmas has already been published in my old University newspaper a few years ago and I won second prize for it as best feature writer, (or second best). I primarily had this article in mind for a complete revamp.

However it was the fiction writing competitions that I was really interested in. One of the reasons I came to Bath Spa University to do the Creative Writing course was to really concentrate on producing large quantities of work. To an extent I feel I’ve achieved this, but one area in my work really lacking in quality and quantity is short stories. With this in mind I sat down and wrote a short story based on an idea I had months ago. I was incredibly happy with the result and have now sent off to various competitions online. To be honest, although it’s been difficult to find the right competitions, it’s also been a lot of fun and extremely broadening. I discovered all sorts of websites where you can post your work online and have it reviewed. Although some of these websites charge you money, there are plenty of others that are totally free. One of these is: http://www.writerscircle.biz.