Sunday 9 March 2014

500 Word Stories

Thanks to my awesome day job as a school librarian, I was lucky enough to get to spend today judging entries for Radio 2's 500 Word Story competition. 

I really enjoyed getting involved with this competition this year; there were so many original, well written entries and I was excited by the quality of the work. Writing a complete story in just 500 words is difficult to do, but is also a lot of fun. I think that after reading through my entries, my top tips for anyone taking part in this sort of competition in the future would be: 
1) Focus on originality - I read quite a few entries with similar plot lines
2) Make sure your work has a complete plot structure.
3) Just because you've only got 500 words, don't forget to put some effort into characterisation. 

If all of the entries were as good as the ones I was sent, I'm excited to see the finalists for this comp - they are going to be brilliant!

As someone who likes to enter my writing into competition myself, I feel like I've learnt a lot from getting the opportunity to do some judging. Hopefully this will help me to improve my writing in the future.

Reading back through Air (my first job of the day) I definitely came up with some ideas which would make some good 500 word stories (and much longer ones if I could find the time). 

I have now finished editing my first print copy of Air and have lots of adaptations to start adding in on my laptop. I'm extremely excited as Air is getting very close to a point where I can share it with some beta readers for feedback; and I can't wait to find out what they think!

However, following the beautiful weather we've had in the South East today, I think my chances of getting some snow for the front cover photography are growing increasingly slim...

Monday 3 March 2014

Read an Ebook Week

It's Read an Ebook week over on Smashwords, which means that until the 8th March, you can download both Fire and Water for free!

You can get hold of Fire from here and Water from here and the code you need to enter at the checkout to get them completely free of charge is RW100.

Once you've downloaded the Elements of Power, you can check out the other novels enrolled in the scheme here

I've gone on a downloading spree and have picked up Falling by Amber JaegerThe Fallen Star by Jessica Sorensen and The Mind Readers by Lori Brighton. And I'm still busy looking for more. 

   

On the subject of ebooks, the current novel I have open on my Kindle is Fire Study by Maria V Snyder. It's the final novel in the Snyder's Study Series and features one of my favourite ever heroes: Valek. If you haven't checked this series out yet, I really recommend it. 


Happy ebook reading! Let me know in the comments if you come across any bargains you want to recommend.