So, here it is, my first journey into the exciting world of blogging! Now, what do I say? I suppose I should start with my reasons for creating this space. I'm in my final year at university and really want to start expanding my creative writing portfolio. I have been published twice in anthologies, but that seems like such a long time ago that I really need to step it up a gear. Therefore, all this morning, I have been putting together a list of websites that accept submissions for SciFi short stories - and if they pay for them so much the better.
Although I have been writing since I was about nine years old, it was mostly horror (although I must admit that my very first attempt at a short story at that age was a terrible tale of astronauts being lost around Jupiter and kidnapped by fluffy aliens!) I still have a copy of it somewhere, badly typed up on an ancient manual typewriter (you remember those?) Anyway, I digress... For the last several years I had been pondering the idea of writing a novel along the lines of The Handmaid's Tale or Children of Men, but I was never sure what category it fell into (you'll be surprised how many SciFi books fall into the General Fiction category). Then, after a fantastic Short Fiction module in which a talk was given by Chris Beckett ('The Turing Test'), I discovered that SciFi doesn't have to be about spaceships and robots, it can be about alternative Earth realities. Perfect! My genre WAS Science Fiction after all! So, I for my final assessment I wrote a 2000wd short story called 'Atrophy'. I got an A grade. Then I thought, why not try and get this published? So, that's what I'm attempting to do. Wish me luck!
Now, after four years of procrastination (washing the dishes suddenly seemed like a preferable activity) I got my backside in gear and started writing the novel... (the first 8000wds will be my dissertation). I was hoping to enter the Terry Pratchett competition but I'll never have it finished in time - maybe next year...
Suddenly I realise that I should probably be doing that instead of this epic. With this blog, have I unwittingly created a new way of procrastinating, I wonder?
