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...

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...

Having entered the Flash Fiction challenge on NYC Midnight, I was very happy with my first story but really disappointed with the second. Su...

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? ...

So, I've done it again. I've entered another microfiction contest. It opens next weekend and I'm a little nervous. The challenge...

I have no idea how to edit. I know this, because every time I have to do it, I end up staring at a page of words and not knowing what to do ...

I'm going through a couple of writing courses at the moment, which I sometimes use as a means of inspiration. Some of the more structure...

I'm on my 4th draft That isn't a boast, and it isn't strictly true. It is kind of my 3rd draft, because my second draft was bor...

Do you carry a notebook? Something to jot down ideas in, even if it is just a name that pops to mind, or a simple phrase that arises in your...

Inspiration is easy. I'm not kidding. Honestly. I walk around with my little notebook, hearing snippets of songs, snatched segments of ...

A long, long time ago, I posted about incredibly short stories. I was about to enter a competition that required a 10 word story in the vein...

It was without doubt that The Hunger Games trilogy is full of many of the tropes that pervade YA fiction. Present and correct is the tyrany ...

I'm trying to enter competitions. It is a challenge I'm setting myself that if I want to be successful as a writer I need to write. ...

[Spoilers for Catcher in the Rye, Life of Pi  and Atonement . Potential spoilers for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Curious Incide...

It was inevitable, I know. She was old and had been ill, but it was now, and that was unexpected. I suppose it normally is. Ursula Le Gu...