Jim Bish

I always thought that one of the strengths of the SE course was the range of different books people were working on within each group if they were anything like mine – children’s, YA, fantasy,crime noir, women’s fiction, literary fiction and so on. It made it unlikely that you’d start picking up on each other’s styles.

Thank you for the book…[Read more]

Sometimes Harry talks a lot of blah. Sometimes he makes a lot of sense. But that’s true of us all, I guess. Agents/publishers do want writers with their own voice but they equally want something that they can sell and that, sadly, does mean it needs to fit into a category of some sort. It’s a difficult balance I think and there’s a lot of luck involved.

Apologies…409 words. 😉

By Tilda’s twenty-sixth attempt to produce an illuminorb, Silviu’s patience was wearing thin.

“Concentrate, Tilda,” the Ambakian powermage snapped.

“I am concentrating.” Tilda rubbed her palm against her trouser leg. It felt hot; surely she must’ve been close to pulling the Power down that time?

“Aga…[Read more]

Excellent idea Raine

Read this Richard as I’d watched the recent programme with the woman who is the lead in Silent Witness, an ex-prison governor with experience of serial killers and an ex-cold case copper, which looked at the Ripper story in light of modern techniques.

It was fascinating – a lot of the info I’d heard before, but what came clearly across is that…[Read more]

Congratulations @philippaeast

Thanks for that @clebs, great to see your enthusiasm. Some good thoughts there. I’m bogged down in various commissions with time running out fast at the moment, but will gather this all together asap

Fascinating as usual, Richard. A wonderful piece of story-telling.

Congratulations, elle!!

I was thinking a PM to the setter would be the easiest way, and not putting too much responsibility on a smallish group of people, but we can always try it for a while and see how it goes.

An alternating competitive-non competitive challenge is an option, but how would we decide who set the prompt for the non-competitive months?

Just to prove how stupid I am – did not realise that the camp didn’t let you post anything until the official start of the writing period. But at least I know where to find the thing to log word count – even if it’s not appearing yet.

Can you tell I’ve not done this before? *face plant*

I really like Squidge’s suggestion of a noncompetitive writing prompt.The previous format of having it be a comp to judge was slightly off-putting, for me anyway, because of the burden of that responsibility alone. I don’t have a lot of time to show up and chime in, so the idea of judging a comp was a daunting one for me. Now to show up and…[Read more]

Having never done Nano before, someone’s going to have to tell me how I log my word count, cos I can’t find where on the menu bar I do that. I have found stats… just not how to change them.

Sometimes I really hate technology.

OK, looks like I’m going to be ‘Silver Squidge’ as just Squidge was already taken…

Might join you – I can use it to be Camp NaNoEdMo again – that worked well for me once before.

For me, it’s about getting the time to think about short pieces, full stop. I’ve finally got going again on the novel, so my writing energy’s good, but I can’t commit to something every month on top.

If you wanted to split comp and non-comp, they could run on alternate months – that way, you can choose whether to be competitive or not. And I’ll…[Read more]

Good thought, thanks Libby. I do like the idea of regular writing prompts, but at the moment we seem to be struggling to assemble enough entries for the competition, so whether we could maintain both I don’t know. What’s the general feeling towards non-competitive prompts as well?