LITERARY CONTESTS: A SHORT LIST TO GET YOU STARTED The first thing I discovered when I searched online for “literary contests,” was that there are an awful lot of them. It was like shopping for toothpaste at Walgreens. I waded through, chose a few at random and, once I got started, have enjoyed the whole […]
Submissions. Stories and Essays
Yes. There are competitions for short stories and essays– in case you’ve written any short stories or essays. An essay is a blog by another name, and you’re reading one right now. With some rewriting of blogs, you can produce a piece of short non-fiction, aka, an essay, and submit it all over the place. […]
The Mysteries of Writing a Mystery: Patricia Allison’s Deke and Loomis Series
A BLOG ABOUT WRITING BY ALISON DANIELS When they compile the lists of the best-selling authors of all time, Dame Agatha Christie is always either number one or second only to Shakespeare. I have never had cause to doubt it. I would think that at least one of her two very different detectives could satisfy […]
Submissions. The Novel
Having overcome my near paralyzing anxiety about submitting my novel to two contests, I submitted it to three, one of which I had deleted from my list two months ago because I thought their attitude was, well, snotty. Maybe snooty. All the text on their site was a flashback to the very worst days of […]
What you do is you write the Author’s Note, read up on the details of the contests, then ask your friend, Alison, to read the manuscript. After that, you won’t have to worry about what to do because Alison will suggest one or two additional chapters you could write. Then you write them, insert them where she suggested–in the middle of your manuscript and then you can kill some time renumbering all the chapters after the new ones.
As a kind of footnote to last month’s blog about titles, I have–yes, I really have–changed the title for what I hope will be the final time. To recap: My Name is Emily Cade Ainsworth was followed by The Bustle in a House, and then by The Queens, any one of which is a perfectly adequate title. […]
What do you do when there’s nothing left but the Author’s Note and a couple of contests you’re afraid to enter and you didn’t expect to be here for another six months?
My first instinct is that I am not, in fact, really “here,” by which I mean that I am only fooling myself that what I’ve written is anything even close to a completed manuscript, that actually I’ve been delusional all along as I’ve published–with a publisher and by myself–these 250-300 page books and told myself […]
Snowed In: Is it possible to spend too much time with your novel?
Looking out my old casement windows the morning after the big snow For nearly a week now I have been confined to my apartment, too wise to take a chance on the icy sidewalks. My balance has gotten bad in the last few years, and I simply don’t dare risk falling. At my age, […]
Rediscovering Southern Women in the Mirror
Today, in my corner of southeastern Virginia, I woke to snow. For this coastal city, it is a more than respectable accumulation, actually close to the predicted 8-12″ I was sure wouldn’t come. In answer to a question from a friend on St. Simons Island, off the coast of Georgia, I […]
The Bustle in a House: A Change of Title and a Deeper Journey into the Lives of Those I Loved and Thought I Knew
I could have figured it all out many decades ago. Even for someone who trembles at the sight of numbers, the math isn’t complicated. In 1920, my mother was five years old, and it was in 1920 that my grandmother took six of her seven children, ranging in age from twelve years old to only […]
My Name is Emily Cade Ainsworth: A Life Remembered and Imagined
“When I refer to Aunt Cade’s ‘big house downtown,’ I am talking about a house that, to my child’s eyes, was a castle. It had turrets and towers and lots of slanting roofs, and it was dark, looming over the street, completely shadowed by the big trees that surrounded […]
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