The deadline for Short FICTION's New Writer competition has been extended until April 30th so I thought I'd invite Tom Vowler to come and chat a little about it here and let you know why you should submit. I'd like to say that Short FICTION is an excellent literary magazine, I am always incredibly impressed by the quality and the range of what it publishes. OK, take it away Tom!


1. Who are you and what's all this New Writer comp stuff got to do with you? (sounds a little rude,eh?!)

Tom Vowler: I'm the Assistant Editor of Short FICTION, an annual literary journal now in its fourth year, published in south-west England. Each issue we run a competition for writers who have not had a book of fiction published. Why?

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Warning: if you find offensive language offensive, please don’t read this post. Not even the title.

Hey, guys, I think I’ve found an aspect of writing that we haven’t already fished to extinction on Strictly Writing. That’s fucking difficult these days; we’ve trawled the whole of it, from dreaming up ideas to polishing your commas. In case it isn’t fucking obvious enough, I’m talking about swearing. Do you mouth it off in your fiction? Only in dialogue or in the narrative too?


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Sorry for the unauthorised absence, I’ll do my best not to let it happen again…

I’ve been thinking today about how we compartmentalise our lives so much, giving x number of hours in the day for work, so many for looking after the children, and x amount for writing (or whatever it is that feeds us). It feels like we are trying to squeeze key elements in our lives into neat ‘compartments’, which works, gives us control, but perhaps it’s too regimented and institutionalised, and

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Hell oh. I'm Gillian and bye now ewe will no me as won of the Strictly crew. Eye like to think eye am a good speller. Of coarse, we knead to bee good spellers, ewe sea. As authors wee set an eggs ample to others. Perhaps there are sum people who want to bee authors but our not that good at spelling. That's were the pea sea comes in handy.

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Thank you to everyone who sent kind wishes and congratulations on the Sense Award, including Pat Jourdan, an Irish writer whose stories I love and reviewed here. Even Pat's emails are wonderfully written: 'Dear Sarah - hooray! This is how life ought to be, writing doing something for other people AND the writer being celebrated. Congratulations. And Miriam Margolyes has such a gritty-with-honey voice too. These bright milestones (well, they do certainly gleam in the sunlight) make up for all the other times when we think we are mad to be going on writing.'

Kristie Lagone, editor of Literary Fever, Brian Lister at Biscuit Publishing, Ra Page at Comma Press and Roland Goity at LITnIMAGE all sent warm words, too. Not to mention friends and family. (My mother's so proud and I'm not too old to appreciate the pleasure of having made her feel that way.)


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Writer Olivia Ryan has been asking which her blog readers started writing first, short stories or novels, and the answers are interesting. I'm probably in what I'd guess is a largish minority, in that I started with novels, and until the second year of my Masters, ten years later, when I'd basically finished the novel that wasn't yet The Mathematics of Love, I didn't think of writing a story. But there was a workshop full of terrific writer-readers, and it was joy to discover that there was something I could write which took maybe a week or two, which I could spread out on the floor and contemplate whole, which friends would read and talk about, which magazines might publish, which someone might like enough to call Highly Commended, or even give a prize. Why not do that? For someone like me, who is not good at delayed gratification and who'd normally spend two years writing a novel which will only be read or real if a commercial enterprise thinks that it'll make money, it was a revelation. I had some success, too, chiefly at Bridport.

And yet, and yet... to this day, if a story of mine isn't working, it's usually because there's a novel inside it struggling to get out. And even now, too, if I'm suffering from a bout of feeling that it's all been done before, as I was talking about in Making the Skeleton Dance, I'm more likely to do that over a short-story plot, because it seems there's so little space in which to clothe the skeleton in more than a bikini, and get it to dance without dislocating its elbows. This is, of course, my deficiency, not the deficiency of the form: although sometimes an idea (for example the central idea of Maura's Arm) just is clearly a single-sitting story, fundamentally my story-telling mind works at novel-scale, and I'm not sure there's a lot I can do about it.

So I suppose it's hardly surprising that I do tend to jump into any talk which assumes that you can't write a novel until you've learnt to write short fiction, and if I hear of a card-carrying writing teacher saying that you mustn't try to write a novel till you have (and believe me, I have heard of such) then I begin to boil.

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For the past two and a half years, those three words have been banned not only in my house, but anywhere in my vicinity. That’s how long it took me to whinge about and complete my second novel – Cold Light. I started just as my agent started submitting A Kind of Intimacy to editors and at that time I was full of confidence – thinking that I’d done it once, of course I could do it again. This time it would be much easier, and quicker, and less frightening – because I knew what I was doing.

Insert the sound of hollow laughter here.

It wasn’t quicker, it wasn’t easier and in many ways, although I didn’t take the Donna Tartt route and leave a decade between my debut and follow-up, it was actually more difficult and time-consuming than the first time around. For months I deleted more than I wrote, dismantled the plot and screwed it together again threw the kind of hissy fits that I sneer at when I hear about them from other writers. It was a horrible couple of years.

Exactly like, in fact, writing my first novel.


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A body found in a wood in 1994; a murderer released from jail who disappeared in 1993; could they be connected?

That's what Chief Detective Inspector Van Veeteren and his team will have to look into. Unfortunately, the grumpy toothpick-chewer spends most of the book in hospital after an operation for stomach cancer. He's reduced to reading trial transcripts while half-dozen lack-lustre underlings take on the footwork and interviews.

The different reactions to this novel expressed at the crime reading group set me to thinking about how even crime novels need different reading speeds.


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When I'm thinking about submitting a short story to a competition, I always try and find something the judge of the competition has written, as if that will give me an idea whether she or he will choose my story for glory! However, now that I'm honoured to be on the other "side" as one of the final judges for the Brit Awards (now closed), the Bristol Short Story Prize (get your entry in before March 31st!), and the sole judge reading all the entries for the Sean O'Faolain prize (just opened), I realised something: what I love to read is often very different from the sorts of things I love to write. I thought this might be useful for those of you who are entering....

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The most exciting news from last week: I attended the SENSE Creative Awards at the Geffyre Museum in London on Thursday. SENSE is the UK's leading deafblind charity and the Awards celebrate writing by the deafblind as well as writing about the condition. I was privileged to hear some inspirational pieces written by the most amazing children and adults. Miriam Margolyes read various extracts - and the whole of my shortlisted story, A Shanty for Sawdust and Cotton.

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