Bits and Bobs...oh and a pledge!

These weeks little gem:

Ceraunophilia (n). Loving thunder and lightning and finding them intensely beautiful. The term is derived from the Greek "keraunos" meaning " lightning" or " thunderbolt."

I have posted this as I am keen to work this one into a short story I am writing for a competition.

There will be more about that later.

I have been a bit quiet on the writing front for the last few weeks; after all, you can’t call yourself a writer if you don’t write!

To this end, I have made a pledge to write at least 500 words a day. For me, this is about 30 minutes of work. Today, Sunday 6^th October, I have written over 700 words in about 40 minutes. I have a file where I just write for however long I want to write, just whatever comes to mind. I call it my Free Writing or Consciousness Writings file.

I’ve also made the decision that I will update the blog weekly, probably on a Sunday, so please keep following the blog.

In further news, my article to a dog’s magazine was read by the editor. She found it very interesting and very suitable for their audience. However, unfortunately, they don’t have the budget for ‘out of house work’.  I did ask her to bear me in mind for any future work to which the reply was will do! I felt that there were more positives than negatives. Really happy that I’m starting to be seen as writing in a professional way.

Yesterday I went to a signing event at the bookshop in Ottery St Mary to support two of the Ottery Writers at the launch of their books. Grenville Gilberts ‘More Honest to God’ is a collection of poems following Grenville’s journey through his faith. I have only just started to read it but already I feel inspired by his writings. Also inspiring me is Cynthia Ash’s ‘Little Slice of Paradise’ set in the Caribbean and based upon Cynthia's winter visits. I arrived after the end of the England v Argentina Rugby World Cup game and it was pleasing to hear that it had been well supported. Good luck to you both. I know all of us at Ottery Writer are extremely proud of you both and we have a little gem of a bookshop in Ottery that we all need to support.

Ok, so more on my short story.

I am looking at a couple of short story competitions; one is the Writers Bureau’s short story competition and the other is the Fish Short Story Competition. Both are required by 30^th November. I really need to read the entry rules as I am not too sure that I could enter the same story in both competitions.

I am going to present the first few paragraphs of the story at Ottery Writers on Monday (tomorrow night) to gauge the responses. I had a quick edit of it this morning but I still feel that there is a sentence that might need to come out and I will be interested to hear what people think about the pacing. Both competitions are looking for 4000 words and I’ve got 350 so far. Well, I have more but they are not settled yet. The ending hangs on the beginning, which I need to nail down and I will be able to crack on with the rest of it.

In amongst all of this, I have Assignment N4 to complete for my course. This requires me to study two different magazines and come up with an article for each. I also have to write a query letter for the editor of each of the magazines with the full aim of getting published.

I already have an idea for either the Devon or Exeter Life magazines. Over the last few days I have come up with another idea, but I need to do a bit of research on which magazine I will be pitching it too.

I will be looking for another publication for my Dog article, so a busy week ahead.

Finally, a bit of news on the job front; it looks like I will be staying with Health and Social Care Coordination Team a bit longer and there will be other opportunities as well.

Have a great week everybody!