A moment of fiction #3

As promised, herewith the third in the now ongoing series of posts reporting on happenings what might interest writers around and about the great Mamucium.

This month, we take a look at the various free-to-enter competitions requiring submissions right this very minute. First off, fabulous arty website Creative Tourist has teamed up with the wonderful interactive literary landscape that is Rainy City Stories to offer writers a platform for their work, two top prizes of £100 and tickets to events at October's Manchester Literature Festival. All the rules and small print are here, but basically you need to submit a short story of no more than 3,000 words by Friday 2 July.

Next, Didsbury Arts Festival, the second incarnation of which is rolled out from 25 September, has two open writing contests: one for short stories (full details here); another for poetry (full details here). In a nutshell, the closing date for both is Friday 16 July, and writers can enter two 2,500-word short stories each or six poems of 40 lines. There will be a glittering awards ceremony during the festival and, as well as glory and fame, book tokens will be yours for the taking should you win.

Finally - for this is the order in which the deadlines are rolling in - we have "creative eavesdropping" project Bugged. Listen in to conversations on Thursday 1 July, then use what you hear to inspire some writing (poems of up to 60 lines, stories up to 1,000 words, flash fiction up to 150 words, scripts up to five minutes long). The closing date for submissions is Sunday 15 August (T&Cs here), after which you may spot your words on the Bugged blog or even published in a special anthology alongside work by the likes of Manchester-based author David Gaffney and fellow Manchester Blog Awards winner and local novelist Jenn Ashworth. The book will be launched at the aforementioned Manchester Literature Festival, which takes us neatly full circle.

Uncreative times, Story #3

And finally. For this piece of writing, the brief was to mention all five senses (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste) along with something you had overheard.

The main sail blows taut with a snap and the halyard dings against the mast like a bell. The sudden gust propels us forwards into the surging surf and horses' tails flick up over the bow. I lick salt from my lips and concentrate on grasping tight to the smooth hard rudder which is pulling excitedly at this speed. Wiping the hair and spume off my face with my diesel-soaked glove, I squint into the sun and the froth. The song I overheard in the cafe that morning when I went in for Gauloises is stuck in my head, disappointing me by reminding me where I'd left the soft pack. (110 words)

I replaced the word "spume" with "mist" when I was nicely forced to read this out to the rest of the group on Saturday, just because spume sounds a bit, er, physical and I needed to doublecheck in a dictionary that it was what I thought it was and wasn't going to bring great embarrassment on me and my family. As it happens it is what I thought it was and I think it works pretty well largely because it sounds like the other and therefore I think has certain rumbling rude undertones after the rudder description.

Anyhow, talking of things overheard and indeed writing projects, check out Bugged for all your "creative eavesdropping" needs on July 1st.

Uncreative times, Story #2

Two out of three. For this exercise, we were given the following subjects to incorporate into a story, either all or just some: a new house; two people who look like each other; a hospital; cheerleaders; some diamonds. There were some slow starters, so the line "apples are nice" was also offered up to help get things underway in the face of writers' block or despondency. I used neither the opener nor all the subjects, for fear of the story turning into an episode of Holby City.

We'd been at the new house a little over a week when she came to the door. John and I were in the dining room, hemmed in by boxes from the move. Despite the stifling heat, we'd agreed to try and unpack as much as we could, and we were sitting marooned on a patch of carpet, surrounded by a sea of scrunched up newspaper and floating palaces of glass and crystal. The doorbell shook us from our lethargy, but John was the first to his feet, plotting a clear passage though the expensive wedding present debris. He told me later how odd that in itself had been, let alone opening the front door to a woman the mirror image of his wife. (123 words)

Reading this back brought to mind the time I was stuck in Liverpool a couple of years back waiting for the weather to improve so I could sail the Irish Sea. I spent a pleasant afternoon pottering around Sefton Park Palm House - a lovely glass house and mini Crystal Palace - and the once glorious park, which seemed home to the entire Merseyside mistle thrush population that day.

Uncreative times, Story #1

As promised, the first of three ramblings generated in a Paper Planes creative writing workshop at the weekend. The starting point for this one is the line "attached to the earth by a thread", which was selected at random by Happy Accidents workshop organiser Anthony Sides from his co-coordinator Steve Waling's poetry collection Travelator.

Attached to the earth by a thread, I look down on a verdant blanket dotted with multitudinous multicoloured jewels. It's funny how the flowers return every spring at the mere glimpse of the sun, once the bright white fields of snow have ebbed to nothing. The light is still dazzling up here in the thin air, but in a different way in this summer-filled mountainscape. A gentle breeze tumbles down the slope I'm climbing up, but dangling above. The chairlift swings slowly to a special rhythm all its own... (89 words)

Duomo, 2010, David Wightman
acrylic on wallpaper and linen
83 x 99 cms

Lots of the people in the class wrote about balloons, either traditional kids' ones like in Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (a weirdly interesting film set in Paris and starring the fabulous Juliette Binoche) or the ones full of hot air. That did cross my mind, but I thought (obviously correctly) that it was a bit of a cliche, so I went with the Alpine story instead, inspired partly by my sister-in-law going through the process of ski lodge puchasing in the French Alps and partly by artist and new online friend David Wightman concurrently and coincidentally creating some new works of Swiss chalets.

Uncreative times

I've just finished reading Joshua Spassky by Gwendoline Riley. I really liked her previous works, Cold Water and Sick Notes, but I'm remaining non-commital about this one. Maybe the mentions of Manchester (including two references to the Temple Of Inconvenience) were too sparse for me. Or perhaps it was the literary name-dropping I wasn't bothered by, or all the verging-on-cliche writers-talking-about-being-writers sections.

Oh well. Here's one passage about writing that I did appreciate: "I like writing," I said. "I like it for about fifteen minutes, on aggregate, every two years."

My sentiments exactly, for the very reason that I'm always scribbling things down, either in the middle of the night in my trusty 60gsm recycled lined paper spiral-bound notebook or here as a draft blog post, then it never goes anywhere and I'm left somewhat deflated in the shadow of failure. In fact, only this Saturday, I was feeling a bit of a spare part at a special Chorlton Arts Festival creative writing workshop called Happy Accidents. It was quite a struggle trying to get anything to come out of my pen, while all the other folk around the table (oh, except one, who headed for the door and never looked back) seemed to go through reams and reams of paper, and not just because their handwriting was big.

Oh well. I ended up with three pieces, which, because it took such an effort and because my brain is mush from doing all the press and PR for the festival in my spare time, I will share with you here as the week progresses. Since it's been a bank holiday, you can have a piece a day for the remainder of the working week. You have been warned, but it would be interesting to hear any comments, as long as they don't put me in a mood.

Before I get the process underway, here's a little information on the organisers of the workshop, poet and Commonword trustee Steve Waling and Comma fiction writer Anthony Sides. As a rule, they hang out at Fuel in Withington Village every second Saturday under the guise of Paper Planes. Get there for coffee at 11.30am or for the four-hour session upstairs at noon. Places cost £12/8 and you can get in touch with them via paperplanes@hotmail.co.uk or through their Facebook page.