The Pen Wrangler

I'm not doing well in the writing competition scene. I don't mean to be dramatic but how many failures is a judgement? I don't m...

I have sadly fallen out of another competition. I know the competition was fierce because the feedback I received was hugely positive. I...

...you can't figure out how to finish your story for a competition and the deadline is looming!

A group of writers of which I am a member on Facebook does a 30 word story every Thursday. It's an interesting way to try flexing your w...

Here's where things start to go wrong: At the start!  I haven't written crime fiction before.  I want to expand my skillset though, ...

I discovered via an acquaintance that there is a crime writing competition being run for crime stories set in Scotland and it is far too te...

It's that time of year when pumpkin spice latte is all the rage and people who hate Christmas are getting overly excited about Halloween...

Another story went in at the weekend. It felt good to be back on the wagon after a messy summer. I did submit stories over the holidays. I j...

Sad to say, I'm out of the 250 Word Microfiction Challenge. I was disappointed, because I was very proud of Litany (see below). I honest...

I couldn't really hold off anymore, so the story is submitted. I hope it does ok, but I won't hold my breath. In truth, I'm not ...

A bad pun of a title, but it leads directly into what I want to talk about. Normally when I start writing a story I get a title and an outli...

This... ... is ... ... sooo ... ... embarassing.  I wrote my story and submitted it and the next morning I realised that I had uploaded the ...

My only New Year's Resolution this year was to enter one writing competition every month. I have some money to spare each month, so it...

There is no way I'm getting through. I tried and submitted a story, but with no experience of the context at all it was beyond my skill ...

I'm in trouble. No, seriously. I've started a new writing competition and the setting I've been assigned for my story is a Summe...

It was competition day on Saturday. This one came to me quite quickly on Saturday morning from the Genre/Event/"word" prompts (Dra...

I've been getting on with the whole "living" thing. It can be tedious, so I like to break it up with a challenge or two to mys...

I've written my RomCom and that's an acheivement for me. I kind of like it. Not enough to want to write the next "When Harry Me...

What are the odds that my bad joke that I wrote on the day my friend was buried actually got me through to round 2? Well, that's what ha...

It's was an unfortunate circumstance that, on the day of my new competition, I was given a genre assignment of "Comedy". Why? ...