Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

Submission Call: Stories about Houses and Homes

For stories about the buildings we live in, and how they affect our lives.

Deadline: open now / deadline 30 September 2019

Word count: 1,000-20,000 word

https://www.thefictiondesk.com/submissions/stories-about-houses-and-homes.php

 

Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff clears the way for good, or forms a base on which to build something better.

Competition Open Till 31 May 2019

Organised by the Yeovil Community Arts Association, this is your opportunity to enter four very different categories of writing. Aspiring writers throughout the world should enter this prestigious writing competition.

• All genres are welcome.
• Agents and Publishers regularly search our winner lists for new talent.

More here

‘…Success is all the more gratifying to Hadley “because it came later”. After 20 years of struggling to write, Accidents in the Home, her first novel, was published when she was 46. Much has been made of this late start but, as she points out, it’s hardly as if she were Penelope Fitzgerald (who was 61 when her first novel was published).

…she was seized with a “devouring, painful need to write … pushed down with shame when I thought: ‘How dare I think of it.’” Her fervent reading only increased her “hunger to do it”. Once her boys were at school, she tried more seriously, “in secret, not really making too much of it”, finishing four novels. “But my books were no good. That was agony.” She was “trying to write other people’s books in other people’s voices”; Bertolt Brecht inspired one, Nadine Gordimer another, “but in all of them I was faking it in every sentence”. She told herself to give up because it was making her so miserable, “but the trouble was, I couldn’t”. After each rejection letter she would immediately start thinking about “the next novel and that I would get this one right”.’

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/09/tessa-hadley-interview

I am not fearless. I am terrified but I write anyway. I pretend no one is going to read my words and I try to make sense of this world that is so breathtaking and beautiful and complicated and hideous.