A good writing weekend

While I was away catching up with friends in Durham last weekend I received good news about a couple of short stories I'd entered in writing competitions. The winners of The Sunday Post's annual writing competition were announced last Sunday. For the second year in a row one of my stories made it to the final ten.

I'm enjoying reading the winning stories and looking forward to seeing 'Sugar Lumps' in print in the coming weeks. It was a delight and honour to be a finalist again and lovely to receive my certificate and book token prize in the post. 

On Monday the World History Encyclopedia fiction prize published their longlist.

I was excited to see my short story 'Court Games' about Mary, Queen of Scots included in this longlist. Fingers crossed for the next stage in the competition...

I may not have done any writing last weekend, but there was plenty of inspiration in our visit to Beamish museum for when I do sit down to write again.

The best of days

Bright autumn sunshine and blue skies were an indicator there was a good day ahead yesterday as we made our way to the Seamus Heaney centre at Queen's University, Belfast.  

It was a different venue for our SCBWI Belfast social get together in the morning. Over tea, coffee and biscuits we caught up on news.

It was good to see new faces as well as welcoming back people we'd met at previous get togethers. We had a varied range of writers working on picture books, MG and YA books as well as editors and translators, all willingly sharing experience in their area.

After lunch we we held a picture book workshop, led by New York Times best selling author, Ann Whitford Paul. I've been working on the planning of this event with Ann for a while, so it was great to be part of the workshop.

We all benefitted from Ann's vast experience and her expert and insightful teaching as well as the discussion and practical writing exercises. 

When I agreed to take up the volunteer SCBWI Regional Adviser role for Ireland, almost three years ago, I had a vision for building our children's writing community.  Thanks to connections I'd previously made, hard work, persistence, planning and new connections I've cultivated over the last three years, yesterday was the best of days for our kidlit community. We were all buzzing after a great day. Here's to many more!

Don't cry over spilled tea

Last night we had a productive SCBWI Ireland Picture This, Write Now session. Armed with seasonal prompts, participants drew and wrote in this creative space for almost an hour and a half, creating something new and special.

It was all going well until I spilled my mug of lemon and ginger tea over my notebook! Thankfully all was not lost. My inky words weren't washed out and I was able to keep writing, spurred on by prompts that kept me interested in the storyline. It's a very rough first draft that I will revisit in time.

Back at Coney with writing pals we used creative prompts on Saturday and I wrote a new piece of flash fiction. Again, it's a very rough draft, but it's something to edit, rather than a tea stained blank page.

It was good to get back to writing and to write something new. We had lots of news to catch up on over coffee and apple and cinnamon muffins. Thankfully no tea or coffee was spilled then...