Sally Jenkins's Blog, page 6

What I Learned From the Copyedit and Proofread (plus a poetry competition)

My second novel for ChocLit (an imprint of Joffe Books) will be released into the big wide world in a few months. The cover design and marketing plan are underway. Structural edits, copyedit and proofreading have all been done – and each one of these stages has been an education.

On a ‘Happy Walk’ with my daughter’s dog, Sam.

I thought I was pretty good at grammar, punctuation etc. but I’ve realised: I’m not! For example:

The school subject ‘geography’ starts with a small ‘g’ rather than a capital ‘G’.There is no hyphen in armpit (I have habit of putting hyphens where they’re not needed).The novel mentions the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson. I was asked to change this to the ‘royal wedding’ to avoid referring to Andrew.Monetary values, such as £30, should be written in full, e.g., thirty pounds.“I’m alright.” Should be: “I’m all right.”

The points above are just a few of the corrections. There were a lot more!

Then there were the continuity mistakes which got picked up (thank goodness). For example, there is a cat in the story called Tibby and halfway through I had inadvertently changed its sex from female to male. I mention that one of the characters will have a birthday in a fortnight but a far greater timespan elapses before the birthday celebration takes place.

Needless to say, I am very grateful to all these professional people who have read the manuscript and stopped me from making a public fool of myself!

I’ll say a bit more about the book’s actual story when I have a front cover to show you. For now I’ll tell you that, like Little Museum of Hope, it falls into the ‘uplit’ genre of literature, i.e., by the end of it you will (should!) feel uplifted and positive.

If positively improving your mental wellbeing appeals to you, you might fancy entering this FREE poetry competition from Happiful magazine:

The magazine is looking for “poems that explore the topic of mental health and wellbeing in relatable, original, and empowering ways”. The winner will receive £100, and four shortlisted poets will receive a £25 National Book Token. All five poems will be published in Happiful. Closing date is Monday 20 November 2023. There are some useful tips on how to get started with poetry on the Happiful website.

Stay happy and positive everyone!

Competitions and Opportunities

A few writing competitions and opportunities have found their way into my inbox over the last week or so and they may be of interest to some of you:

First up, Readers’ Digest is once again running its 100 Word Story Competition. It’s free to enter and, as you might expect, stories must be exactly 100 words long. There is no specified theme. Closing date is January 5th 2024 and first prize is £1000.

The next one requires slightly more words. The Women’s Prize Trust, Audible, the Curtis Brown literary agency and Curtis Brown Creative are partners in the Discoveries writing development programme. It offers practical support and encouragement to aspiring female novelists and culminates with awarding the Discoveries Prize for an unpublished novel-in-progress. Submit the first 10,000 words of a novel with a synopsis of up to 1,000 words. Closing date is January 8th 2024.

Prototype Publishing is offering another development programme for writers who have not yet published a full length novel. There are eight places, with three reserved for writers from the north of England. To apply, you must submit a sample of work of up to 20 pages. This may be poetry, fiction, non-fiction or visual work. Details of your writing experience and interest in the programme are also requested. Closing date is 23rd October 2023.

Finally, Hannah Schofield of LBA Literary Agency is offering five romance writers from underrepresented backgrounds based in the UK,  feedback on their novel extracts. Submissions close 17th October 2023 and all the details are here.

And remember, you’ve got to be in it to win it!

The Positivity of Grudges

After being inspired by Sophie Hannah’s talk at the 2023 RNA Conference on ‘How to be a Happy and Successful Writer’, I went in search of self-help books by Sophie. I found ‘How to Hold a Grudge‘. The title didn’t inspire me – I was of the mindset that grudges are all about bitterness and negativity but I started reading anyway.

Sophie writes in the same chatty, amusing way that she speaks and the book is very easy reading. And she does not advocate any bitterness or negativity! In a nutshell she advises that when someone acts badly towards us, we should:

Recognise that a wrong has been done to usAcknowledge that we feel angry and/or upset and that it’s OK to feel like thisDo not try to immediately forgive, forget and move onRecord the grudge and learn from it. Simplistic examples of this are: accept that Fred is always late when you arrange to meet and therefore turn up a few minutes late yourself instead of waiting angrily, or learn to stop lending books to Jane because it upsets you when they come back damaged. This learning protects us from future hurt by these people.Having taken the above steps, we will find that the anger, bitterness, and upset we feel towards that person will diminish.

(Apologies to Sophie if I haven’t got the above spot on. There’s a lot more advice in the book than those few bullet points!)

The book is an absolute delight to read – especially the details of some of Sophie’s own grudges which, having learned from them, she keeps in her ‘grudge cabinet’. However I would say that a much better (and more realistic) title for the book would be ‘The Positivity of Grudges’.

I’ve also read (and learned from) Sophie’s more recent self-help book, ‘The Double Best Method‘, which is all about how to make decisions – great for ditherers like me!

Ghost Stories at the Bookshop

The Petersfield Bookshop is running a ghost story competition and it’s free to enter!

One overall winner will receive £100, two runners up will receive £50 each. The winning stories and others selected from among the entries may be published in an anthology and a complementary copy of this book will be sent to all those whose work appears in it.

Stories can be up to 2,500 words and the judges would like ghost stories with a sense of place – your place. They would like you to draw on where you live, its history, folklore and landscape.

The closing date is November 23rd, 2023 and the winners will be announced on December 7th. On December 21st there will be an evening event in the bookshop at which the winners’ stories and possibly others will be read aloud by candlelight. Spooky!

As always, please read the full terms and conditions before entering.

Happy haunting!

My First RNA Conference and an Award

I’ve just returned from my first ever Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA) Conference and my head is still in a complete whirl. I feel enthused, energised, educated and exhausted!

It was a hurricane of informative sessions on How to be Happy as a Writer, How to Write 19K Words in a Weekend, Marketing, Author Branding, Synopsis Secrets and much more. Sarah, Duchess of York and successful romance author, Marguerite Kaye were there to talk about how they write collaboratively – unfortunately I couldn’t make that session but I was told that it was brilliant.

All of the above was interspersed with meeting lots of new people, catching up with the few I already knew and meeting, in the flesh for the first time, some of the other Choc Lit (an imprint of Joffe Books) authors.

The weekend had three stand out highlights for me:

Firstly, the chance to meet up with Emma and Jasmine, Editorial Director and Project Editor respectively from my publisher, Joffe Books. We were taken out to to a swish bar off the College Campus and given wine!

Secondly, the terrific atmosphere at the Saturday night Disco. The dance floor was full of women (& a tiny handful of men!) all night. Who knew romance writers were such party animals?! The DJ looked on in a very bemused way.

Thirdly, the announcement that I was the winner of the Elizabeth Goudge Award for my one thousand word opening for a novel on the theme: Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder. Nobody can have been more shocked than me!
My award made the evening a full house of awards for Joffe Books because another of their writers, Katy Turner, won the Joan Hessayon Award for New Writers with her novel, Let’s Just Be Friends. This award is for authors whose novels have been through the RNA’s New Writers’ Scheme and are subsequently accepted for publication.

I now need to go and lie down in a darkened room to get over my ‘conference lag’.

The Seven Sisters Series (continued)

At the beginning of 2023 I posted about how much I was enjoying the books in Lucinda Riley’s Seven Sisters Series. That post has become one of my most popular ever (alongside Icebreakers for Creative Writing Classes) and therefore I’m following it up with a ‘part two’.

Since January I’ve read books four and five in the series: The Pearl Sister and The Moon Sister. Again, I completely lost myself in the stories and learned something along the way.

In The Pearl Sister, Ce Ce, the fourth daughter of Pa Salt, travels to Australia and follows clues to the discovery of her ancestors amongst the pearl industry of a century ago. There’s love and relationships as well as mystery and intrigue.

It’s Tiggy’s turn to discover her roots in The Moon Sister. Tiggy is a nature lover and wildlife conservationist. Her story spans the wilds of the Scottish Highlands in the present day to the gypsies of Granada in Spain several generations ago. This is the only book in the series that made me do a ‘second take’ on one of the sentences. Towards the end of the book, Tiggy is in conversation with someone she particularly admires and decides that this lady is who she aspires to be one day, describing her as a ‘… wife, mother, homemaker, full-time vet and lovely, lovely human being.’ It made me wonder how healthy it would be for a person to strive to be all of those things. That goal sounds like a recipe for stress overload – I’m sure many of you will agree that for a woman to ‘have it all’ is very difficult. However, it didn’t spoil the book, it just made me think – and surely that’s a good reaction to a book?

I’m going through the stories gradually because I find they are better enjoyed with a gap in between, during which I read lots of other genres including crime and also novels for the book group which I run. I save The Seven Sisters for high days and holidays when I have the time to read big, indulgent chunks in one session. I’m looking forward to picking the next one up in a few months’ time!

And if you enjoy books about people, their pasts and their relationships, you might also enjoy Little Museum of Hope, described in one review as, “one big blanket of optimism to wrap around the reader. I loved it”.

What I Did on my Holiday plus some Hysteria

Other people’s holidays are boring but I’m writing this anyway to show you that I am a real person and not just a continuous, automatic loop playing ‘buy my book‘!

So here’s a bullet point gallop through my seven days in Suffolk last week:

We stayed at the aptly named (for me) Old Library in Wickham Market, almost directly opposite the current library – which is actually open on a Sunday! The best cup of tea of the week came from the Tea Shed in Walberswick. They serve loose leaf tea in a proper teapot with a jug of hot water on the side plus a timing device to indicate how long the tea should be brewed for.Full marks to senior National Trust ranger, Andrew, at Orford Ness for his talk about the rare breed sheep on the site. And even better than Andrew, was his trainee sheepdog, Sweep. Sweep did a great job of rounding up the herd and keeping them together during the talk.An unexpected highlight was watching the shipping containers move around the Port of Felixstowe. They were ferried from giant ships to railway line in perfect synchronicity. I was in awe at the size of everything and at the behind the scenes computer system that must be ensuring that everything is in the right place at the right time.The weather gods were smiling on us and overturned a dismal forecast to provide lots of sunshine. We went walking everyday and only got wet once.

As a reward for politely reading through all of the above, here’s a reminder about the Hysteria Writing Competition.
The categories are: Short story – maximum 1,000 words, Flash fiction – maximum 250 words and Poetry – maximum 12 lines.
The theme is MAGIC and the prizes are: Overall category winner for each category – £300 plus publication in the Hysteria 10 anthology and the 9 runners up in each category will also be published in Hysteria 10.
Entry is a modest £3 and if you sign up to the competition newsletter, you’ll receive a free copy of Hysteria 3 so you can check out earlier winning entries!
Closing date is August 31st 2023. As always, make sure that you read the full rules before submitting.

ALCS Focus Group & Networking

Last week I took part in the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) focus group in

ALCS = Free Money!

Birmingham and in the networking event that followed. It was the first time ALCS had ventured out of London since Covid and the first time I’d taken part in any sort of focus group.

For those of you who don’t know, ALCS makes sure that writers receive the money they are entitled to for secondary uses of their work, such as when someone photocopies a magazine article or a book extract. Understanding where ALCS get the money they pay to writers is complicated and I suggest reading what it says on their website.

There were ten of us ALCS members, ranging from academics to poets, novelists and indie authors,  around the table in the focus group plus various ALCS staff members (as well as cookies, muffins and hot drinks to fuel us!) Various topics were thrown at us for discussion and the ensuing conversation was recorded. Points that came up:

Initially some people had been reluctant to sign up to ALCS because ‘free money’ in exchange of bank details sounded like yet another internet scam.The fact that the membership fee is only taken from a writer’s ALCS earnings was a major selling point, because there is no risk of not receiving enough money to cover the joining fee.Very few of the writers present were aware of the ALCS podcast.Few of the writers present properly understood where ALCS source the money and how it is shared out – we were just happy to receive the payments!The big discussion point was Artificial Intelligence and how it might be used to plagiarise our work or to create new, ‘original’ pieces of writing. ALCS are currently lobbying MPs and the government to bring in laws that will protect writers from any negative effects of AI.

At the end of the discussion we were joined by other writers and offered prosecco, wine and lovely little canapes! It was interesting to discover all the different types of writing served by ALCS. I spoke to a script writer for the Horrible Histories children’s television series, a feature writer for Bauer magazines, an indie romantic novelist and an academic who got nothing on publication of a textbook but had received regular payments from ALCS because it was widely photocopied.

Conclusion: ALCS are definitely on a mission to protect and campaign for writers’ rights. If you have had anything published then you have nothing to lose by joining ALCS and you may well receive some free money!
(Members of the Society of Authors receive free ALCS membership)

A Plethora of FREE 2023 Writing Competitions

Four writing competitions for you – in a mix of genres!

Short Story – Run by Green Stories and the theme is ‘Microbes’.
The main prize for the winner is £500 plus up to three runner up prizes totaling £300 (or the local currency equivalent).
It may help to have a scientific bent as the aim of the competition is to use fiction to raise awareness of Environmental Biotechnology and what microbial systems can do for us. However, the website has a video explaining Environmental Biotechnology and there is also a free virtual workshop linked to the competition.
Closing date is 21st September 2023. Full details are here.

Poetry – Poetry on Loan’s 2023 poetry competition is open to anyone who lives, studies or works regularly in the West Midlands (which is a very big area!). This year the theme is ‘Refuge’.
The prize for adult entries is a paid performance as part of a Poetry on Loan event. The junior prize winner will receive book tokens to the value of £25. Plus there is a special ‘fresh poet’ prize.
Closing date is 1st September 2023. Full details are here.

Novel – The Writers College is running a novel writing competition. Any genre of novel qualifies. Submit the first three chapters plus synopsis.
First Prize is a full ‘Write a Novel Course’ and ‘Advanced Novel Course’ (value $4000; 24 months of mentoring with an award-winning writer up to 70 000 words) from the Writers College.
Closing date is 31st July 2023. Full details are here.

Self-publishing – Amazon is running its annual Kindle Storyteller Award. This has a massive £20,000 prize and is very competitive (full disclosure I interviewed Rachel McLean, the 2021 winner, for Writers’ Forum magazine and she worked extremely hard). However, anyone self-publishing a novel on Amazon KDP before the closing date of 31st August 2023 can enter by including “StorytellerUK2023” (without quotation marks) in the “keywords” metadata field as they publish the book. Full details are here.

And if you are thinking of taking your first steps into self-publishing, you might find Kindle Direct Publishing for Absolute Beginners (newly updated for 2023!) or Kobo Writing Life for Absolute Beginners useful.

Good Luck! Let me know if you’re successful in any of these competitions – I have the bubbles ready to celebrate!

Find Your Next Read with Shepherd

Most of us are familiar with Goodreads as a source of inspiration for additions to our To Be Read pile but there is a new(ish) kid on the block: Shepherd.

Ben Fox is the founder and driving force behind Shepherd and he feels so strongly in the concept that he is using his savings to fund its development.
“I created Shepherd to add magic and serendipity to online book discovery,” he says.
Ben (rightly!) believes that books are one of the biggest net positives in the world and deserve something more than the often soulless experience of buying a book online. How does he wave a wand and create this wonderful, virtual cornucopia of books?
“I’ve asked 9,0000+ authors to share five of their favorite books around a topic, theme, or mood and why they love each book. This infuses each book with a bit of magic and meaning,” Ben explains.

I was approached by Ben early this year to contribute my five book choices. At the time I was busy editing to a tight publishing deadline and had to delay putting together my list and my reasoning behind each book. But Ben was happy to wait and my choices for The Best Life-Affirming Books are now live on the Shepherd website. What do you think of my selection?

Ben is very approachable and full of exciting ideas to make online book browsing an even more pleasurable experience (beware once you start exploring the Shepherd site, time will disappear in a flash!) – which is brilliant for readers and authors alike.

Have a search around and see what new treasures you discover!