Linda Parkinson-Hardman's Blog, page 5

6 reasons why new small businesses fail

There have been a lot of words written over the years explaining why businesses fail. A little research though shows it mostly boils down to 6 common factors and themes.

Starting your business for the wrong reasons. Many people start businesses as a result of a change in their working lives. For instance, they may be made redundant and can’t find alternative employment so decide that they may as well work for themselves to earn some money. Others believe that working for themselves will give th...

New Beginnings

Everything starts somewhere and this month I’m exploring the idea of new beginnings and in this word square you have a lot of opportunities to think about your own new beginnings too. In this one, simply choose one word from each column and create an introductory sentence for a short story, flash fiction or a novel using each of the words.

My effort is below.

“My gown fitted perfectly, everyone said so. It flared out at just the right point emphasising my hourglass figure. You could hardly tell ...

High days and holibobs

This week is a photo prompt. You know the drill by now. Take a look at the photo and write the first sentence or paragraph that comes into your head.

High days and holibobs are the best days on the calendar in my opinion. A day to kick off the traces and do something different, unexpected, or relax from the usual routine and daily activities that usually consume our time.

This picture reminds me of a day that highlighted the end of one era in my life and the start of a new one. A journey that’s...

Short, shorter, brief

I was wandering around the web looking for inspiration for this week’s writing prompt whilst thinking about a video I’d seen yesterday of a musician who had challenged several creators to do a mashup of Beethoven’s 5th. And I wondered if something similar could be applied to poetry.

It occurred to me that I could take a poem about April and ask you to remake it, so it’s the same but different, but that seems a bit too close to being copyright infringement. As I was looking I came across Ogden Na...

Get started with five easy techniques

Welcome to the second in the series of blog posts I’m writing during my time as the 2022 Hysteria Writer In Residence. Last month I talked about submission guidelines and why it really matters to pay attention to them when submitting to competitions and journals. For this month I promised a discussion about getting started and revising, and as I come to write this blog post the topic has really made me smile.

Some of you reading this will have read one or two things I’ve written, or at least kno...

How to juxtapose a tree

The challenge is to expand our vocabulary and think about what words mean to us. The word of the month in May is ‘juxtapose’ as once again we find ourselves at various crossroads.

I’m really keen on expanding my vocabulary, not just because I’m a writer, but because I love the feel of words in my head and as I speak them. I mean, who on earth came up with the wonderful supercalifragilistic? And when you stop to consider a word, how did it come to represent the thing it does. How for instance did...

When Belle goes looking for Pip

I cannot imagine how cold it is in the seas off the coast of Britain at this time of year, but lots of people swim year round and my dog Belle (aka The Beeble) is no exception. Give her a beach with an easy access into the water and she’s off, ears flying as she throws herself into the waves.

This is pretty prosaic as pictures go, a dog in the water. But what could you do with it to make it more surreal or alternative? Is there anything you can’t see in the picture that suggests a bigger story?

...

Water water everywhere

There is nothing quite like being by the water. Whether your preference is for the beach, a cliff, stream, canal or even a long lazy bath, water has the power to calm and quiet us in ways that other spaces can’t really compete with.

This week’s word square challenge is loosely themed around water and various iterations of it. What could you do with one word from each column?

The word square is below, and for those of you who have never seen one, the idea is to take one word from each column and ...

How to avoid entrepreneurial failure

Starting a business and becoming an entrepreneur can sometimes seem like a bit of a lottery. Will you get the key deal you need? Will you be able to hang on through years one, two, three and five? There are many things you can do to mitigate any problems and to do your best to ensure success and perhaps the key is to be aware of the classic mistakes that almost all entrepreneurs make when they first start out.

1. Ignore Your Detractors

We all have nay-sayers amongst us, those that say ‘you shoul...

Synonyms and other interesting words about peace

This year’s Hysteria Writing Competition has a theme of peace and it would be easy to fall into familiar tropes and themes. Whilst a retelling in a fresh way can excite a reader, it’s rare to get something truly different so in the spirit of helping everyone along I thought I’d trawl the web’s best dictionaries and thesauri to come up with a definitive list of words/topics you could use in any writing competition that has a theme of peace.

Remember, you don’t need to use the word itself, just th...