Bristol is a really great city for things writing-related. First, you have SEVEN hours to get your entry in for this year's Bristol Short Story prize - deadline midnight tonight, UK time (British Summer Time, we just turned the clocks forward). Stories 3000 words maximum or much shorter (wow us in 1000 words, or even 300). Anonymously judged, of course. Open to any writer anywhere in the world!

To entice you, the prizes are....

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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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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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This blog post has an international flavour, beginning with the wonderful-looking lit mag I received from Zagreb this morning. Called Autsajderski fragmenti, this is apparently its "Book of Love" issue, to which I was invited to submit any of my flash stories which related in some way to love. I was delighted, I had such a great email from the editor, and now here are 5 of my stories in Croatian. All I can tell is... one of them is Plaits, but not sure about the others! My name is there, and a link to my website, so we'll see if I get some Croatian hits. This is lovely, the first time I've been asked for stories to translate into another language, and they say they'd like more. I must find someone who speaks Croatian...

And now to the main part of this post, the latest in my series of Writing&Place guest blogs, this time from Sylvia Petter.On her website, Sylvia introduces herself as "an Australian in Austria and I write fiction, essays and poems," so already there is a sense of ex-pat-ness about her! Sylvia, who blogs at Merc's world, had these answers to my questions:
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This is the blog post where I take back everything I said a few weeks ago! No, actually, that's a complete lie, I don't take any of it back. I have been trying out the routine I described here on Jan 1st for the past few weeks, but the writing at night element of it just isn't working. I loved coming into my study at 10pm and writing until 2am, but then I was so hyped up I wasn't getting to sleep til 3am... and was waking J up in the process. I was feeling jet-lagged, and both us were sleeping badly, which really ruins everything. It just wasn't working.

But - I am the kind of person that often needs to make a RADICAL change in order to knock me out of my rut, and this was that radical change. I have learned an enormous amount from what I have been doing,....

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Why am I doing this, you may ask? Well, I wanted to know, partly for my own selfish reasons. I had heard mutterings about the lack of lit mags in this area compared to the US, but then I started hearing about new lit mags and more new lit mags.... and then I started doing a bit of research. And since I am living in the UK now, I want to know about everything that's going on. I want to know if it's true that the "short fiction scene" is dozing. Well, I think you'll see from what I gathered below that that is far from true.

I should qualify: when I say "lit mags", my definition is a magazine that publishes fiction, or fiction and poetry. There are a wealth of poetry-only magazines, see The Poetry Library for listings of poetry mags. I am not including them here because I wanted to keep this list to those which publish short stories. I also included the few live lit events I know about - since these are also "publication" opportunities for short story writers. Where possible, I have lifted the description from Duotrope, the essential writer's resource, and done my best to say if the magazine pays contributors - although "paying" could mean a monetary reward that is very very small!......................

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Decade revisited



In the spirit of it all, having only just realised that this is a new decade as well as a new year (bit slow, me), I thought about 1999. That was the year I wrote the first short story that was ever published, during my first visit to the sublime Anam Cara writing retreat which I have since revisited several times and where magic always always happens. Anyhow, I may really regret this, but that first story, Doing it in Eden, is still available online, in The Beat's second issue. Ok, yes, you can read it. Hmmm. Perhaps you shouldn't comment. No. Don't!

So, a momentous ten years, one that saw me starting to take writing seriously, attending two Arvon Courses, at the first of which I met J, my partner, and at the second was instructed by my writing idol Ali Smith to drop everything and write full time. An MA in creative writing, several workshops in the US, various publications and some lovely prizes, and then... my first book was born. What a decade!


After all that, it is fairly embarassing to admit this. But in the spirit of honesty I shall do it: only this week have I felt that I am really living The Writing Life....

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So, I had all sorts of things I wanted to blog about - why so many of my favourite short story writers are Scottish, for example - and then the nicest email last night and all my priorities shifted. The Scots will have to wait. The Binnacle, the delightful people who awarded me the Grand Prize in their Sixth Annual Ultra Short Comp last year, wrote to let me know that the publication of the Ultra-Short issue has been a little delayed... but then took my mind off this entirely by telling me that they have become my Favourite Lit Mag Ever by nominating my winning story, My Mother Was an Upright Piano, for a Pushcart Prize!..........

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A wonderful time last night at the special launch event for Short Circuit hosted by Ride the World XX at Cafe Yumchaa! Here I am in full flow, reading three flash stories (photos courtesy of Elizabeth B):

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Nice news to wake up to: Cinnamon Press has accepted my flash story, Straight Up, for their microfiction anthology. This same story was the European winner of the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association's short story comp last year (you can listen to it here), and was just commended in Aesthetica magazine's's Creative Works comp.


It's always funny/weird to win something, to in some way "beat" other writers - a horrible attitude, I don't think that way - ....

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