Emma Robinson

Congratulations, Ath. I love your story. Very well deserved win.

Thank you Janette for setting the competition and for everyone’s entries. They are a very enjoyable selection of stories.

PS 495 words including title

Somewhere to Bloom

The cottage on the lane had a garden of pink, blue and mauve flowers on plants she couldn’t name. They faced her in clumps and drifts. On the lane she considered the pretty cottages, each one wearing its garden like a skirt, patterned, pastel – standardised, or something. And, even more annoying, they coped with the early May…[Read more]

@sandradavies

Sandra, this is an atmospheric depiction of the personalities within a family, all so economically written. I’d never heard of furanocoumarins. What an interesting thing to discover! You built tension with all the possible problems resulting from letting children loose in the kitchen, then there was a fine twist at the end. Very e…[Read more]

Ten days left to enter the monthly competition for April!

Details here

Monthly competition April 2025

Thanks, Sea! 😃

Thanks, Ath – as I’m sure you remember, they came to life in a short story in one of you winter writing challenges. Now I’m about to start writing book 3.

Thanks, Libby!

Book 1 in the series was a bronze winner in the Wishing Shelf Book Awards last week too. So I’ve had lots to celebrate on the writing front. A very nice feeling after the years of drought when I was chasing agents!

Thank you, Knicks! @knickylaurelle

Thank you, Ath!

Thank you, @sandradavies I really didn’t expect that. The other entries were so good.

I’ll be back later with a comp for April.

They’d Chosen Me for Being Good at Isolation

Those harbour houses had slope-ceilinged attics with dormer windows. I’d been instructed to stay in one garret, squint out between curtains, send situation reports every two hours. A reconnaissance man, a civilian thought to be steady, I watched the quay below, admired the yachts and motorboats moo…[Read more]

Congratulations, Sandra! I love your story.

Thank you, @Seagreen for the comp. I enjoyed doing my pastiche of The Big Sleep. I find that kind of thing a useful exercise. Recently my own  sentence structures and vocabulary have seemed stuck in a rut. Studying someone else’s gives a necessary jolt.

It’s a fun thing to do if other Denizens want to…[Read more]

Before this competition was set I’d been thinking about the opening from The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, specifically how it builds humour and tension in the first paragraph. I decided to use Chandler’s first two paras as a template for the story comp, possibly a daft and murderous thing to do but a bit of fun.

***

The Blush

It was the s…[Read more]

What a well-deserved winner, Seagreen. Such beautiful writing.

Thank you, Richard, for the prompt.

impromptu

you’ll come to a bad end, said my dad in our hallway, in his pyjamas, hands at his sides, knuckles curled, though – as far as I know – he never raised his fists, and what’s more he was too clever for cliché most of the time, but that evening when I came home from the gig with a scent of sweat and beer, I was grinning, shifting from foo…[Read more]