Nose to the Grindstone

Many of you will already know about Grindstone. For a while now, I've been entering writing comps on its site, because they are reasonably priced, they don't go on for ever and the results are posted promptly. Best of all, though, everyone who enters gets feedback on what they submitted. I've yet to be a winner, but I have received some very useful comments on my submissions.

I'm mentioning this because Grindstone has had a face lift and has a new website that makes it easier to enter competitions and promises to offer all sorts of other useful stuff for writers. If you're interested, you can find the site here.

I have a story that's been sitting around for a while that I'm going to refresh and enter into Grindstone's next comp. It's a tale I'm rather fond of, but as yet I haven't been able to find a home for it. I hope there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it - but no doubt the team at Grindstone will tell me if there is.

How old is too old for a story, do you think? When is it time to accept that it's never going to appear in print and simply let go of it?

Accepting feedback

I sent a selection of stories that I've written to two of my friends for their opinion. They are both keen readers and they have each been a source of advice and inspiration in their own way over the years. I trust them and value their honesty. Even so, it was a bit of  a 'gulp - here goes' moment when I posted the envelopes.

Well, the results are in and I know what I have to do to improve what I've written. What I found interesting was that while Reader 1 gave me some honest feedback on the actual writing from a technical perspective, Reader 2 had a much more emotional response. As a result, while there was a clear favourite with both of them (the same story), the ones they didn't like so much were different. On these grounds it gives me comfort that the reason I have varied success in competitions is not always because what I'd submitted wasn't any good: it could just be that it wasn't to the judge's taste.

This week's task is to rework as necessary. I was going to publish on Kindle again. However, I had an email from Amazon this afternoon informing me that the email address linked to my account has been changed. Not by me it hasn't! Amazon has frozen my account while this is investigated, which is reassuring, but not a little annoying. I just hope the rogue who has invaded hasn't ordered anything embarrassing in my name.