Friday 11 December 2009

SEVEN DAYS LEFT

Seven days left to enter The Willesden Herald Short Story competition. Always comes with a fair dollop of passion this one, it's run purely for the love of good writing and love of the short story form - and nowt else.
Past final judges have included Zadie Smith and Rana Dasgupta.
This year's winner, Jo Lloyd, went on to win The Asham Award for new women writers. Standards are high, and a couple of years back Willesden H were brave enough to decline to award the prize, for lack of suitable winners. There was lots of whinging about that.

I sent them a story that year. It WASNT GOOD ENOUGH (thats the key, peeps!) for the longlist let alone the shortlist, and it got absolutely nowhere. Then I used the Willesden Magic Formula list, available FREE on WH, HERE with huge thanks to the WH team to edit. And won 2nd at Fish this year with the edited version.

Mr Willesden Herald knows what he's doing. Good luck all! WILLESDEN HERALD - HERE.

4 comments:

Tim said...

Hi Vanessa,

interested to hear about Willesden, but can't find the Magic Formula (story of my life :-)

Could you link to it please ... pretty please :-)

Tim

Vanessa Gebbie said...

Hi Tim

magic list is here; http://willesdenherald.blogspot.com/2008/02/common-faults-in-short-stories.html

and have linked on the post above.

Julia Bohanna said...

I smiled, laughed and nodded at that very extensive list. Particularly liked 'Pinky said this, Perky said that.'

Vanessa Gebbie said...

Good stuff, insn't it? Glad you liked it, J.