Taking Stock

A Femal Author Neglecting her Home and Child
 by Honore Daumier

What's The Story last Thursday evening featured a panel consisting of writers, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne and Martina Devlin, and Stinging Fly editor, Declan Meade, and as is usual with these events, I came home full of the short story and how it works, and how I can improve the chances of my submissions to magazines and competitions (by making sure it achieves what it sets out to achieve, if Declan Meade is the judge).

Next day, however, found me far from my short stories, instead delving deep into Self-editing for Fiction Writers, How Novels Work, and Imaginative Writing to find inspiration for a course I'm designing on revising and editing, which has found itself on the long finger for various reasons (see last post). It's coming, slowly.

Meantime, I'm soldiering on with the appropriately named Writing Against Time by Michael Clune, for review for Puffin Reviews, 'soldiering' not because it's not interesting - it is - but because it requires blocks of time which occur too rarely. (That my review copy is electronic doesn't help.) And the post just brought Entertaining Strangers by Jonathan Taylor for review for Necessary Fiction, which I'm eagerly looking forward to reading while simultaneously worrying about finding the time to write the review.

Also today, I got great feedback from Molly McCloskey on three of my stories, which provided plenty of ideas and the urge to get cracking on them right away, while the story I should be working on for my linked story collection, or novel(la)-in-stories as I'm starting to think of it, languishes, awaiting completion. My novel, Michaelangelos, will soon (hopefully) need to be edited. Then there's another novel, crouching in the starting blocks, awaiting the firing of the gun.

There's teaching too. And marking - and on one's first time in a university setting this is not a trivial matter.

And not a child in the house washed...