The Exeter Novel Prize - be the first to win this brand new competition!

It's often been said that everyone has a novel inside them.

Some cynics love to add that inside them is precisely where it should stay.

Cathie Hartigan, Sophie Duffy and I have decided to test this hypothesis. We have set up a brand new fiction award, The Exeter Novel Prize, which in its inaugural year will be sponsored by Exeter Writers and will offer a cash prize of £500, with five prizes of £50 for runners-up.

You can find the details on this link:

http://www.creativewritingmatters.co.uk/.

Entry will be open to anyone, published or yet-to-be-published, who does not already have a literary agent and is not currently under contract to a publisher. You can choose to write in any genre except for children. YA is likely to be acceptable, but we haven't finalised this aspect of the competition yet. Your novel can be set anywhere and at any time - past, present or future.

Please return to the Creative Writing Matters website for updates, and in the meantime perhaps start writing or polishing up that unpublished novel, ready for entry?

We'll be having a launch event in Exeter in June 2013 to which everyone will be welcome.

Ebook arriving!

My new novel The Wedding Diary is up on Amazon Kindle and other ebook platforms from today.

I'm looking forward to finding out what readers think of my first rom com.  Most people know me as a historical novelist, and this is something a bit (no, make that a lot) different.

Where's a fairy godmother when you need one?

I need mine today!

You can click on the image to the right of this post to take you to Amazon's UK website, or click the link below. The cover art is gorgeous!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Wedding-Diary-Choc-ebook/dp/B00C6BFEUC/ref=sr_1_10?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1365072602&sr=1-10&keywords=the+wedding+diary

Rejection - boo hiss...

Rejection - it's a way of life for writers.

I get lots of emails from readers of Writing Magazine who have been bruised and battered by rejection letters.  Or sometimes they get rejection emails sent out on Christmas Day or on Easter Sunday, or sometimes rejection compliment (ha ha ha - oh, the irony) slips with NO scribbled across them, or sometimes there's just a REJECTED rubber stamp on the typescript itself.

OMG these things hurt.

So today, on Easter Monday, I'm drawing everyone's attention to a wonderfully cheering website which should buck up every writer!

http://www.literaryrejections.com/best-sellers-initially-rejected/

Do have a look and be encouraged.

You haven't failed until you have given up and stopped trying.

Story, story, story...

Merry April and equally merry Easter Monday, everyone!

Now it's spring (or so we are led to believe), what better time could there be for starting to write that novel or short story you've been thinking about for ages?  Cathie Hartigan and I are here to help with Chapter 3 of our free on-line guide, The Creative Writing Student's Handbook.

Click on the link or the image to the right of this post to take you to Chapter 3, in which we suggest how to make a story.  If you're writing fiction and you don't have a story, you don't have a house - you have just a pile of bricks.

http://www.creativewritingmatters.co.uk/the-creative-writing-students-handbook.html

Competition time...

It's almost spring, although if you're in the UK today you wouldn't think so, because an Arctic wind is roiling round my house and I have the central heating on full blast. All the same - March means competition time, especially for writers of short stories.

Exeter Writers is a long-established group which has been running an increasingly successful short story competition for several years now.  This year, the prize for the winner is £500, with further cash prizes for the runners-up.  The entry fee is a fiver, which is quite cheap these days.

The closing date is 31 March 2013 and we'll be getting cracking on the judging in April.  If you have an unpublished short story in any genre, why not enter it?  Let Exeter Writers pay for your summer holiday!

That's if we get a summer.  Let's live in hope.

Here's the link you'll need: http://www.exeterwriters.org.uk/p/competition.html.

Good luck!

The Creative Writing Student's Handbook - Chapter 2

Chapter 2 of the interactive guide to creative writing by Cathie Hartigan and me is free on www.creativewritingmatters.co.uk today and for the rest of March. 

To read, please click on the link in this post, or click the book cover to the right of the post. 

We would love to know what you think, so any comments would be much appreciated. You can leave them here or on the Creative Writing Matters website.

RoNAs 2013

The RoNAs - forget the Booker and the Costa, the RoNAs are awards for novels which hundreds of thousands of people actually read, rather than buy and intend to read one day.

The RoNAs are given by the Romantic Novelists' Association at an annual awards ceremony in late winter or early spring (in 2013, it was yesterday, to be exact), and in May the Romantic Novelist of the Year will be chosen from among the six authors below.

Good luck, ladies - and in the meantime, thank you for writing and sharing some wonderful novels.