Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2025 i Writing Magazine

As any good gardener knows, it’s important not just to nourish the seeds you’ve planted, but firstly to ensure the ground is in the best possible state for them to grow. It’s exactly the same with writing! In this issue we’re putting the spotlight on wellbeing for writers, taking a look at some of the ways you can prepare the ground, so to speak, for ideas to flourish, creativity to be encouraged, and your mental health protected as you send your writing confidently out into the world to find its readers. Check out the pieces on journaling (p4), the parallels between writing and gardening (p6), surviving and thriving as a writer (p10) and the passionate piece on writing what you love on p14. Here at WM we practise what we…

Many memoirs are written from a desire to help and inspire. Last month we looked at memoirs in which authors share their wisdom, things they have learnt from life – ‘I went through this difficult experience, I survived, and this is what I learnt.’ The desire to help, guide or teach may also drive memoirs in which the author shares information, knowledge and practical skills they have learnt through their hobbies, interests and careers rather than issues they have dealt with in their personal life. A great example of this is Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, in which he blends his personal story as a writer with advice on the writing process. He divides the text into different sections, where the emphasis shifts between story and advice.…

PEVERELL’S PROGRESS I am pleased to announce the publication of my cosy crime novel A Hearse for a Joker as a Kindle ebook on Amazon, writes subscriber Alan Orchard. This is the second in the series featuring private detective, Peverell Wood, who was first introduced in the novel Beware of the Trains. It’s 1967, and Peverell Wood is something of an anachronism. Whilst the youth of the day were becoming enthralled with flower power and the permissive society, 23-year-old Peverell feelsmore at home with his suit and tie, his battered old Wolseley 6/90, and his passion for the works of Agatha Christie. The latter have inspired him to set up business as a private detective in Durham. Thankfully, he has a private income, as the residents of the county seem…

Jessica Woollard has been a literary agent for over thirty years, working at Toby Eady Associates and The Marsh Agency before moving to David Higham Associates in 2016. She was the agent for Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk, and her clients include Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris, and Merlin Sheldrake. How has the role of literary agent changed during your career? Things used to be slower. We’d submit printed manuscripts by post. My mentor, Toby Eady, famously used to deliver his submissions by hand, walking the manuscripts round New York. Editors had offices, and they were filled with piles of paper. We send a lot of material around the world quickly now and readers have a lot of reading matter pushed at them in many different ways – but it…

Society for Ritual Arts The Society for Ritual Arts is an interfaith organization creating work ‘at the crossroads of art, science and spirituality.’ Twice a year they publish Coreopsis: Journal of Myth & Theatre, and host events related to ritual arts. Submit papers, 3,000 to 10,000 words, for peer review from many disciplines and welcome of all faiths and philosophies. Twice a year they publish Roses and Wildflowers: The Magazine of Mythopoeic Fiction, Poetry & Art, a home for mythopoeic (i.e.poetic and mythical) fiction under 7,000 words, poetry and art dealing with the fields of spirituality, consciousness, healing, performance, and visual media. The autumn issue needs submissions and is dedicated to hope, with a theme of mytho-anarchism. Payment: short stories US$20 and poetry, US$15 per poem. Website: https://societyforritualarts.com The Glass…

Wells Festival of Literature 2025 International Competitions The Wells Festival of Literature is inviting entries for its creative writing competitions. There are four categories: • Open Poetry. The first prize is £1,000, with second and third prizes of £500 and £250 and £100 for the best poem by a local poet. The judge is Camille Ralphs. Enter original, unpublished poems up to 35 lines. The entry fee is £6. • Short Story. The prizes are £750, £300 and £200, and a local prize of £100. The judge is Judith Heneghan. Enter original, unpublished short stories between 1,000 and 2,000 words. The entry fee is £6. • Book for Children. The prizes are £750, £300 and £200, and a local prize of £100. The judge is Fleur Hitchcock. Enter the first…

First Novel Prize 2025 The competition for unpublished and independently published novelists is now in its tenth year. The annual competition from The Literary Studio invites submissions of work-in-progress and completed novel manuscripts by unpublished and self published writers. Manuscripts should be at least 50,000 words long, and in any genre aimed at adult readers. The first prize is £1,000, and there is a shortlist prize of £500. To enter, submit an opening extract and a synopsis, up to 5,000 words in total. The entry fee is £25 per manuscript. The closing date is 31 May. Website: https://www.firstnovel.co.uk/ Goldfinch Novel Award 2025 Goldfinch Books is running its contest for unpublished novelists for the second time. The competition is for original, unpublished novel manuscripts by authors who have never published a…

Cast of Wonders Cast of Wonders is a US YA speculative short fiction podcast which produces audio versions of stories up to 6,000 words long, writes Gary Dalkin. It is a companion to the very successful Escape Pod (SF), Podcastle (fantasy) and Pseudopod (horror) podcasts for adults. The editorial team led by Katherine Inskip are looking for stories that evoke a sense of wonder, have deep emotional resonance, and have something unreal about them. There are several reading periods each year, with the next – 14-30 May, 11pm UTC – being for Banned Books Week. For the team want to see stories of irrepressible joy, sparks that can’t be extinguished, humanity in all its splendour, hope in dark times, stories that are unapologetic and inspiring. Then between 1-14 July they…

The Astley Prize The new contest from Nairn Book and Arts Festival is in memory of writer Veyatie Astley. In its inaugural year, The Astley Prize is inviting international short story submissions on the theme of ‘Coast’. Stories may be any length, up to 5,000 words. The first prize is £500, and there are second and third prizes of £100 and £50. Winning authors will be invited to read at the Nairn Book and Arts Festival New Writers Event on 3 September. The entry fee is £10. The closing date is 30 June. Website: https://www.nairnfestival.co.uk/about/the-astley-prize Cranked Anvil Short Story Competition 2025 The new prize from Cranked Anvil Press is for short stories between 1,000 and 2,500 words. Enter stories in any genre to win prizes of £300, £150 and £100.…

I ’ve kept a journal for as long as I can remember. Journaling went from a favourite pastime to a lifeline when I was diagnosed with leukemia at age twenty-two. I approached treatment with youthful naïveté. I expected a short stay in the kingdom of the sick: a few weeks of chemo in hospital, followed by a bone marrow transplant, then back to life as I knew it. But I spent the better part of a year in and out of the hospital. My immune system was nonexistent, and whenever I stepped out the door, I had to wear gloves and a mask. Being confined to a hospital bed, unable to do anything unassisted – even things as basic as taking a shower – sent me into a deep depression.…

STAR LETTER HUMAN EXPRESSION I must thank Douglas McPherson for his bracing article, How to Write Better than AI (WM Mar), which I’m sure has done a lot to calm our fears and put more zip into our prose. In EFL I am always impressing on my students the need to use English collocations to produce authentic English language, a process they steadily resist. As Michael Lewis pointed out in the early days of discovering collocations, we don’t say, ‘I have a strong cold’ (as translated from Spanish) but ‘I’ve got a heavy cold’ as mispronounced by the sufferer when calling in sick. You can’t, I tell them, get away with word-for-word translation. Don’t even try. Famously, a Spanish politician’s wife, in an interview, was talking about ‘coffee with milk’…

I watch Mother, fingers dripping blood as she washes chicken livers in a bowl that squawks as it shifts in the stone sink. I’m leaving her with the last few hens and daddy’s bones in the meadow. I stand at the back door my bag held tight, but her eyes are not on the familiar carpet bag with my ticket and a few punt, they’re on the buttons, bold and brassy on my old school coat. Mother hunts for buttons in the soil, chops them off old clothes and stores them in a toffee jar; shaking it, watching the buttons settle into new patterns. Her kaleidoscope, but I dare not suggest it. I suppose they are her gems, a reminder of the life she once had. Am I repeating Mother’s…

In The UK government’s official website GOV. UK (www.gov.uk) is a great source for government information and services. It contains a huge amount of information and the topics include anything and everything pertaining to living in the UK. While it’s certainly a valuable resource, it’s not the only option available for accessing government-related information. Here are some additional sites to consider: UK PARLIAMENT AND THE DEVOLVED ADMINISTRATIONS The UK Parliament website (www.parliament.uk) provides information on all functions of Parliament, including details about its business, MPs, Lords and offices. For instance, you can explore the House of Commons and the House of Lords, read Hansard (the official record of proceedings in both Houses), news, inquiries, parliamentary select committee reports and other publications. You can also track the progress of Bills (draft…

WRITERS FIGHT BACK AGAINST AI ABUSE On 3 April, Gary Dalkin writes, members of the Society of Authors, including Kate Mosse, Tracy Chevalier and Daljit Nagra, protested outside Meta’s London headquarters following the revelation in The Atlantic that Meta – which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads and Messenger – had used the online pirate ‘library’, LibGen, of 7.5 million books and 81 million academic papers to ‘train’ its Llama 3 AI software. In March The Atlantic released an online tool which enables writers to see if their work has been misused in this way. Within minutes I found multiple books which I had edited included in the dataset, among them last year’s international bestseller The Thirteenth Child, by Mark deMeza. SoA chair Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin described what Meta has done…

Southword Creative Non-Fiction Award 2025 The Southword Creative Non-Fiction Award from Munster Literature Centre is inviting entries of original, unpublished personal essays and memoirs up to 4,000 words. The winner will receive €1,000 and eight runners up will each receive €400. All nine winning essays will be published in Southword. The contest will be judged by Southword poetry editor Patrick Cotter. The entry fee is €20. The closing date is 30 June. Website: https://munsterlit.ie/southword-creative-nonfiction/…

Awards round-up By Gary Dalkin Isabel Allende has been honoured as the recipient of the 2025 Bodley Medal, given annually by the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University to, ‘individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the worlds of books and literature, libraries, media and communications, science and philanthropy.’ Allende is best known for her novel The House of Spirits. Previous recipients include Sir David Attenborough, Claire Tomalin, Philip Pullman, Zadie Smith and Christopher Tolkien. British-American author Nichola Griffith has been honoured as 41st recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the US Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA). Griffith, who has won over a dozen genre awards and been shortlisted for around 25 more, from her debut novel Ammonite (1993 – which won the James Tiptree,…

Cupid’s Arrow Publishing Cupid’s Arrow Publishing publishes general fiction, plus historical fiction, or mystery, in their Paper Angel Press imprint, writes PDR Lindsay-Salmon. For speculative fiction, submit the manuscript to the Water Dragon Publishing imprint, and for horror submit to the Graveside Press imprint for consideration. Writers of romance are welcomed to submit to the new imprint, Dalliances, which accepts short fiction (5,000-12,000 words) for its Second Chances Anthology, the Good Sports Anthology, and the For the Uniform Anthology. Romance, not full-on erotica. HEAs are preferred. The editorial team plans to evolve the list to publish full length novels in the Dalliances imprint. Submit the complete, finished manuscripts in digital format. Payment for novels, see the contract, for Dalliance stories is US$0.02 per word plus 5 print and 10 digital…

I have no wish to enter into the very Marmite area of Harry and Megan – they will doubtless continue to prompt a wide range of opinion for years to come. However, seeing them in the news (again) recently reminded me of the launch of the book Spare and made me think. When the book went on sale in Spain ahead of the scheduled publication date, it resulted in massive press coverage over the best part of a week ahead of the due date, perhaps doubling the time the launch spent in the news. Word of mouth is always a good way of enhancing promotion. There was plenty of that to encourage buyers of all sorts: those who support the couple and those that do not and some people in…

A while ago I read an interesting article in the Sunday Times travel section written by Rachel Mills (it was on 8 March, if you want to check it out). This set out the details of, and her experience on, a new ferry service From U.K.to France. This takes the form of a 57-foot sailing catamaran, Echoe, which sails from Dover to Boulogne (a place without any kind of ferry service since 2010). You read that right – a sailing boat, though one with engines as well (saillink.co.uk). As the intention is to use sail for as much of the voyage as possible, it takes a while to make the crossing, which is in any case a slightly greater distance than Dover to Calais. Passengers can sit inside or out, but…

The sonnet is one of poetry’s best-known forms, and one of the trickiest to write effectively. It needs to have fascinating content that will hold the reader’s attention, and yet its entire message must fit into fourteen lines. When you find the perfect subject, it’s equally important to master the techniques of writing a sonnet. For while the longevity of the form is aided by the fact that for centuries poets have played with it, introducing their own variants and rhyme schemes, a knowledge of the basic form is vital for all who want to demonstrate their skills as sonneteers. Almost every entry in the sonnet competition had something interesting to say. There were plenty of original ideas, and also ideas that have been used many times before but were…

We are decorating our home room by room. My writing room is last on the list. Wherever we’ve moved, it’s always been first because it’s important to me. The reason it’s slipped to the bottom of the list is because a wall needs to be knocked out. It’s only plasterboard and wouldn’t take long but at present it has some wallpaper tacked to it. That’s right. Not pasted. Tacked. And I do not want it moved. Now I’ll tell you why. Some of you may remember the late Jane Wenham-Jones’s wonderful book, Wannabe A Writer? She mentioned me several times in it. We were good friends. There’s a section in the book on how to keep in charge of your novel’s plot. It mentions thread charts, spider charts, black and…

Each month in WM, we feature creative writing by our subscribers. Selected pieces will be published in WM and we pay £50 for prose and £25 for poetry, and provide a mini-critique explaining what made the pieces stand out to us. This month’s issue puts the focus on ways we can nurture and grow our writing, and we’d like to invite submissions on the theme of ‘The Garden.’ Submit prose (fiction and non-fiction) up to 500 words and poetry up to 40 lines to wmsubmissions@warnersgroup.co.uk. Include your subscriber number. The closing date is 31 May. Next month, look out for the pieces we’ve selected from the submissions call in the May issue on the theme of ‘Genre’. SHORTLISTED Terry Baldock; Alan Bradman; Daren Carpmail; Debbie Casey; Antony Crossley; Veronica Colin;…

1. When and where did your journey as an author begin? This began in the early 2000s when I was a mommy blogger, sharing glimpses of my life as a mom with six kids. Over time, I found myself longing for a more creative outlet, which led me to fiction. Writing became my way of carving out a space for myself amidst motherhood. Most mornings, I’d wake before my kids, and sit at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a dream, writing while the house was still quiet. Those early hours became my sanctuary and the foundation of my creative journey. 2. What is (or has been) your proudest moment as a writer? One was finishing the first draft of my debut novel, This Too Is Love. It…

If you have a query for Lisa, please send it by email to lisacuttsenquiries@gmail.com Q If an escaped prisoner is found dead with a suicide note, and their next of kin were available to identify the body, would the Police still require fingerprint or DNA evidence to corroborate the identity? Gavin Lightwood via email A The police would ensure they had the correct person by other means. If he’s a prisoner, both fingerprints and DNA would be on record. Q A seventeen-year-old girl has witnessed her mother murdering someone. Her mother was experiencing a psychotic episode at the time; there was no premeditation. The girl’s father, who was not involved in the attack, disposes of the body in order to protect his wife, and the daughter, having lived in a…

Q I’m toying with the idea of self-publishing my own book. I know there’s a market out there for it but I can’t work up agent interest and don’t want to let all my work go unread. Will this always feel like second-best? A Whether to self-publish or not is a discussion I often have with authors at Cornerstones. The independent publishing market is growing and can work so well for writers, although there are measures one can take that will make this a more rewarding experience. The ideal is to have a beautifully produced product that has been rigorously edited for clarity and accuracy, which can reach the intended reader who will then be able to spread the word on just how good it is. Authors such as Amanda…

Eye Books Eye Books is a small, independent UK publisher founded in 1996, with the original aim of publishing books about the extraordinary things that ordinary people have done, often with a strong travel or geographical element to their stories, writes Gary Dalkin. Lightning is the company’s fiction imprint, launched in 2017. Published titles include Rosalind Russell’s The End of Where We Begin, which won the 2021 Moore Prize, and several titles by bestselling romance author Nichola May, among them Love Me Tinder. To make a submission email dan@eye-books.com with the word SUBMISSION in capitals at the beginning of the subject field, followed by your name and book title. You do not need to put anything in the body of the email whatsoever. Your submission should be a single Word…

Blue Planet Press Blue Planet Press specialises in speculative fiction anthologies, writes PDR Lindsay-Salmon. Currently the editorial team seek submissions to the anthology Far Futures Book Four of short stories, 6,000 to 10,000 words which explore the colonial possibilities of Titan. Titan is the largest moon of the planet Saturn and second in size only to Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede. With an atmosphere, ice, and stable bodies of liquid, Titan is often described as a moon-planet and it is said it may be more viable for colonization than Mars. The team want stories about how to settle there, how to adjust to long-term effects of a gravitational pull even less than Earth’s own moon. Stories must involve space travel in some form to Titan, exploration and/or colonization of Titan, and/or long-term…

Grain Grain, a journal of eclectic writing, publishes quality poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and works in other genres that are diverse and divergent, hybrid and experimental, and sometimes unclassifiable, writes PDR Lindsay-Salmon. Every issue also features ‘the unique artwork of a different visual artist.’ Open to subs from 15 September, 15 June of poems up to a maximum of 6 pages, fiction no more than 3,500 words, one to three works of micro-fiction, or flash fiction totally no more than 3,500 and literary nonfiction in any form, under 3,500 words. Include a cover letter with all contact information, title(s) and genre of work plus a total page and word count. A brief bio is welcomed. Payment is CAN$50 per page to a maximum of CAN$250, plus two copies https://grainmagazine.ca/ Guilty…

Poetry London Prize 2025 The annual competition from Poetry London is an international award that invites entries from poets writing in English worldwide. There is a first prize of £5,000, a second prize of £2,000 and a third prize of £1,000. Winners will be published in Poetry London. The 2025 judge is Victoria Kennefick. Enter original, unpublished poems up to 80 lines. The entry fee is £10 per poem for non-subscribers, and £5 per poem to Poetry London subscribers. The closing date is 30 June. Website: https://poetrylondon.co.uk/prize/ Ironbridge Poetry Competition 2025 The contest is run by The Pandemonialists on behalf of the Ironbridge Festival. The international competition is for original, unpublished poems on any theme, up to 40 lines. There are prizes of £300, £125 and 3 x £25. There…

Marketing a book that’s been out for a while can feel daunting, especially for self-published authors. The book world often prioritises new releases, meaning older titles can fade from view quickly. But don’t worry – there are still plenty of ways to give your book a fresh boost and attract new readers. Here are seven effective strategies to keep your book visible and grow your audience. 1. Acknowledge the challenge Media, retailers and reviewers tend to spotlight recent releases, making it harder for older books to stay in the conversation. But that doesn’t mean your book’s journey is over. Many authors find success by refreshing their approach and targeting new audiences with renewed energy and smarter tactics. 2. Use online advertising for visibility Targeted online ads are a great way…