Harvey: on the occasion of his tenth birthday

Arrrfff! Harvey here. I was ten last Thursday. Any gifts of tennis balls gratefully received. Total destruction guaranteed within twenty minutes.

What with one thing and another, Mrs Boss has had to join the ranks of the 6a.m. dogwalkers, traipsing the darkened streets with a torch. She says she doesn't mind clear mornings when the sky is all black and twinkly, but rain is not so much fun.

Also, while she is not the most social of persons (particularly at 6a.m) she is surprised to find the early morning joggers incapable of as much as a grunt of hello.

So anyway, while she may be too whacked to keep up the blogging right now, she just wants to say that she is still batting about. She was happy to have a poem commended in the Sentinel quarterly poetry competition. It has reminded her that she is supposed to be a writer, and therefore should be writing.

Before that, though, my next walk is due. Oooh look - it's raining!

Writing news, and a hot tip for cosy toes.

After a quiet summer, some writing news. A couple of weeks ago I went to the University of Wales Trinity St David in Carmarthen, to read at the prizegiving of the Ifanca Helene James short story competition. I had a lovely couple of days, featuring a scenic train journey, a male voice choir, and lots of walking uphill (never down).

I also found I had been shortlisted for the Doris Gooderson short story competition, run by Wrekin Writers.

I have entered more writing competitions than usual this year. In part this was because I wrote several pieces as homework for the writers' group which were too dark or strange for the magazines I submit to. Next year I plan to enter less competitions. It's lovely to win anything, or be shortlisted, but I have felt for some time that I should be focusing on a bigger project. I have a couple of novel ideas, but neither of those seems to be happening right now. So I have decided to see if I can put together the short story collection on a theme, which I've been contemplating since last year. It seems more manageable within my bitty work schedule.

With two recent short story sales to My Weekly, I shall not be giving up magazine writing though. I find it an excellent antidote to my workaday world.

On a different note, I saw Willy Russell's fabulous show Blood Brothers this week. You can not imagine how wonderful it was to see 'Tell Me It's Not True' performed so brilliantly, after my hours spent trying to learn even the most basic version on the piano! All the cast were great, but I must give a special mention to Niki Evans. Apparently she was an X Factor contestant a few years ago. She was absolutely outstanding as Mrs Johnstone, the woman who gives away one of her twins so she can afford to feed the rest of her family.

Finally, with dark nights and chilly temperatures, how would you like to win some lovely socks? Librarian, who blogs at From My Mental Library, has a mother with a talent for knitting. She sells some of her products via an Etsy shop. To win a free hand-knitted item from the range on sale, all you have to do is visit Librarian's blog and leave a comment on the 'Cold Season Giveaway' post. I love socks so much, I can barely close my sock drawer. Count me in!

The Ifakara Bakery Project Competition and Anthology: a guest post by Sharon Bradshaw

Today I am happy to introduce my writing friend Sharon Bradshaw.

Sharon is organising a writing competition to raise funds for a charity close to her heart.

I'm handing over to her now, to tell you all about it.

"I started to fundraise for the Ifakara Bakery Project Charity in 2010 when I met the organisers, Margaret and Eugene Schellenberg. They were giving a presentation about the work which the Charity was doing in Tanzania. It was difficult to listen to some of the things they were saying and to see the photographs of the hardship which the children, disabled and others, had to undergo. It's now a well told tale about Africa, but Margaret and Eugene had done something different. They built a bakery in 2001 which is currently run as a successful business by the local people and ensures that no-one need starve when there are problems with the maize crop, but there are still so many who have to survive without basic necessities.

They have continued to give Ifakara 'talks' and others have become involved in the fundraising so that the Charity is now able to provide additional money for irrigation, electricity, and education. There is an emergency fund too for when crops fail completely due to adverse weather. The Charity provides bread for the orphanage, nursery schools, hospital patients, those with leprosy and learning difficulties.

I have been a Solicitor since 1981 and started to write poetry a few years ago. I didn't realise at the time that writing can take you to so many different places, and I'm now running a writing competition to help raise funds. I asked David Howarth, editor of Park Publications, if he would support the project, which he has done by advertising throughout his magazines, Scribble and Countryside Tales.

I'm asking writers to send me their 'Hopes and Dreams' as poems or short stories with £2.50 per entry or £4.00 for two. A selection will be published by Park Publications in an anthology early next year. There's also prize money: £150, £75, and £25. I've managed to raise the prize money by various other fundraising activities and have had a stall at a local bric-a-brac fair to sell unwanted items, so that after the printing costs are paid all of the funds raised will be sent to Ifakara. The Charity does not deduct administration charges.

I would like to be able to help the children in Mhutanga to have clean water. Their school has grown from 30 to 90 children and has to be run on a shift basis. They have bread and a mug of sweet tea after lessons. Many of them have had to walk a long way to get to school, with little or no breakfast. Parents have then to walk a lot further to get the water for the tea as they cannot access good water where they are without a bore hole.

I've written articles about the competition for Writers' Forum and Writing Magazine and the entries have been coming in, but it would be lovely to receive more. An anthology for Ifakara would mean so much to the children, and you can help by letting me have your words before the closing date on November 30th, 2012. It's not yet the end of the story.

For more details on the work being undertaken please visit the Ifakara Bakery Project website. And for full details of the competition, please see the Park Publications competition page.

Thank you, Sharon, for sharing this with us. I do hope some visitors to Zigzag Road will feel inspired by your enthusiasm, and send in a story or a poem. Personally, I think it's refreshing to see how a small number of determined people can make a real difference to the lives of others.

International Tree Foundation

I wish I could remember for sure which blogger posted the link to a recent short story competition run by the International Tree Foundation. I would like to say a big thank you to that kind person, as I have won second prize.

In the picture on the left you can see some of the lovely contents of my prize goody bag. (There was also a nice green tie, but my husband has already taken to wearing it and he's gone out!) For the competition results and three top stories, just go to this page on the International Tree Foundation website.

It may have been Patsy who originally mentioned the competition. If not, I think Patsy deserves thanking anyway, for all the competition details she shares with us. Well done Patsy - keep it up!

Yesterday I met two writing friends in London. We spent most of the day in the Victoria and Albert Museum, admiring beautiful gems in the Jewellery Gallery, seeing the famous Great Bed of Ware, and of course buying the obligatory postcard and fridge magnet in the shop.

Here's a heron who was posing perfectly in Kensington Gardens on my way from the station.

New Year News

Merry New Year from Harvey and me.

I always begin January full of beans, writing and submitting in a frenzy of good intentions. But it's oh so hard to keep that up once spring comes and the weather improves. My challenge for 2012 is to hang onto my New Year momentum beyond crocus time.

To do this I am going to have to be much stricter about using any spare minutes constructively. So, I, Joanne Fox, hereby declare I shall only visit Facebook every other day. I am also resisting the urge to rearrange my study yet again. There's an irritating chap called General Clutter in there, and all my attempts to evict him have been in vain. Therefore I hereby recognise that rearranging the study is another displacement activity, rather than a way of achieving anything. Shut that door!

Now I can share some positive news to kick off the year. As a result of entering the Earlyworks Press short story competition in 2011, I will have my story included in their competition anthology. I know I shall be in some good company, and congratulations to the overall winner.

Here's to less faffing about in 2012!

Spilling Ink

Extra treats for Harvey this week, as I heard I'd won second prize in the Spilling Ink flash fiction competition.

Until last year I had something of a blind spot where flash fiction was concerned. I'd never tried writing it, because I couldn't imagine being able to develop characters in the way I wanted within a word count of perhaps only 500 or less. For me, characters and relationships are the things I really like to explore in stories, way ahead of plots or themes.

But then for some reason I went through a bit of a sea-change. I started experimenting with flash fiction, and found I enjoyed the challenge. I realised that if the main character was clear enough in my mind, it was possible to pin them down on paper. It was just a matter of working hard within the tight focus of the story, and not getting distracted by rambling sub-plots as I am inclined to do. That may sound obvious, but I am a great believer in the principle that we only really learn by doing.

So the moral of this particular tale is that even if you think you can't, have a bash anyway. You may find that you can!

Words With Jam

A small "hurray" from me this week. The latest issue of 'Words With Jam' came out and I discovered I made it to the shortlist in their first annual short story competition. I was particularly pleased with this because the story I entered was one of those that arrived in my head out of nowhere. Even now I could not tell you what inspired it. Often I seem to do better with those types of stories than ones where the idea has been a long, slow struggle to figure out. Well done to the winners of the competition, whose stories are published in December's magazine (or I should say e-zine, as it is only available electronically).

If you haven't seen 'Words With Jam', subscription is free. All you have to do is go to the website and complete a short form, then you will receive an email with a link to the current issue. You can either read it online, or download it as a PDF. And in December's issue you have the chance to win a four day writing retreat in Cornwall. I love Cornwall! That's another one for my personal competitions calendar.

Make 'em laugh!

I confess I find humour difficult to write. For one thing, it is so subjective. I'm afraid of sounding artificial or strained if I deliberately try to be funny. When I think about what makes me laugh, the humour tends to arise out of a combination of characters, rather than just being a witty one-liner. Take Basil Fawlty, for instance. Always in trouble and frustrated by those around him. However many times I watch Fawlty Towers, it always has me in stitches.

In fiction, there is a moment in one of Anne Tyler's novels where a character accidentally shoots his mother with an arrow. (Non-fatal, I must add!) I read Anne Tyler's books over and over, but every time I come to that particular section, I cry with laughter. It's not only the incident itself, but the way all the characters interact.

I've concluded that the challenge of writing humour is setting up that whole situation by going back to the basics of character building. What do these characters have in common, and how are they different? There you begin to see that potential for humour in how they will bounce off each other.

The reason I'm thinking about humour today is that I've been reading judges' reports on some of the bigger writing competitions in recent years. Several times I've seen judges comment on a general lack of humour in the entries. For example, Tracy Chevalier, after judging the Bridport Prize in 2007, said she wished the entrants had been "jollier about it"!

So why the focus on gloom, doom and death? Ok, we are in a recession and the news is pretty depressing. Maybe we think a funny story will be too lightweight for the judges and won't impress as much as a serious one. But every story needs some light and shade, and just because a story is humorous doesn't mean it cannot also have a serious theme.

If you are blessed with the gift of humour, making judges and editors smile could be a point in your favour. We all need a laugh sometimes, don't we?

A competition

Just popping in to pass on news of a writing competition run by Claire Apps at her website Creative Writing for All. The theme is domestic violence and any profits made will go to Women's Aid. There are short story and poetry categories. Prizes in each category are £70, £35, £20. Closing date November 30th 2010.