Claire Waller

A very happy new year to all Denizens! The advent competition didn’t have 25 entries as I hoped, but by way of compensation, those that were submitted are all gems that I would be happy to find behind a calendar window.

Janette: A New Opening
A truly positive response to the Covid restrictions. This was beautifully written with a powerful feeling…[Read more]

@dougk if you’d like an alternative to a sedative, you can read the exhaustive cautionary tale of my small press experience here https://airandseastories.com/2019/01/30/my-publishing-nightmare-the-story-of-a-book-deal-gone-bad-part-1/

Good article @dougk.

For anyone looking to submit to Indie Presses in the UK and Ireland, the Indie Press Guide produced by Mslexia is a good place to start. Also, if you don’t have an agent to check a contract for you, the Society of Authors in the UK will check it at no charge. I’ve found them VERY thorough!

So pleased with the news! Simply brilliant.

You’re quite right Richard. Although the lack of hoovering and the pile of christmas cards still waiting to be written might point to a different conclusion!

‘Instant hit of relateable truth’: yes, that a good way of putting it.

Jane, if you got a result you haven’t been wasting your time, have You?

They do have that sort of instant hit of relateable truth don’t they? Ironic, or perhaps not, that Roche’s career might apply to the principle of ‘Connections’, even though it’s clearly about something much more personal. A missed connection here or there is the difference between national treasure status and obscurity.

Also interesting for me to…[Read more]

I’ve just wasted an hour, thanks to you Richard, trawling through the internet searching for Brian Patten who was my particular favourite and ordered a copy of Little Johnny’s Confession which I am sure is the book of his I used to have. Fingers crossed.

Jane, I suspect that, er, somewhere on the way you too encountered that anthology, so long ago you’d forgotten about it until my post reminded you.

Yes, I like the Liverpool Poets too. It’s only one aspect of his talent, but Roger McGough has raised that lowest form of wit, the pun, into an art form. Like this, from The Mersey Sound:

The Act of…[Read more]

From JaneShuff (copied from the wall)

Thank you for this, Richard. I spent my childhood and teenage years in Liverpool and The Liverpool Poets were a big part of it. I thought I hadn’t heard of Pete Roche but, amazingly, I found myself able to recite Somewhere On The Way as I read it so the poem must be buried somewhere inside the dusty old a…[Read more]

Weirdly enough it helps my way of working which is to do intensive bursts of writing and then let myself be distracted for a brief while before I attack again!

@sandradavies thanks, I will look that up. I’m a fan of keeping speech tags/descriptions to a minimum and I often write scenes with dialogue first and then build the other stuff around it, so this is very much up my street

Great competition Sandra, am really intrigued to read the story that inspired it now. Well done Ath, and everyone else, good set of stories