Blog About Your Dog

"Tess" courtesy of @sing2heart (Thanks Keili!)

Those of us used to entering writing competitions are also used to having our entry met with complete silence, finding out that we didn't win (again) only by accident or deduction. Not so the Penguin Ireland/RTE Guide short story competition which, in an altruistic gesture towards The Literature Project, offered a writing and publishing day for all those who made the longlist. [You can read the great winning story, Soft Rain, by Trisha McKinney here]

I was lucky enough to be there, and it was a jam-packed day, with talks from Jane Alger of Dublin UNESCO City of Literature, Patricia Deevy of Penguin Ireland, three Penguin authors (Sinead Moriarty, Niamh Boyce and Mary Grehan), Faith O'Grady (agent), Rachel Pierce (editor), Cliona Lewis (Penguin Publicity Director) and Donal O'Donoghue from the RTE Guide and Stephen Boylan, Easons Book Buyer. I took pages of notes, and I hope to plunder them in due course and share the gems with readers of this blog.

Meantime, as many of the speakers touched on social media and the effective use of same, I thought I'd follow up on one tip right away and blog a picture my dog!