Must say a big thank you to Claudia on the Writing Magazine, Talkback Forum, for letting everyone know there were details available of this addition to the competitions on the Bridport Prize website.
This is the Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award for a first novel extract ( first chapter of a novel, minimum 5,000 words, maximum 8,000 words in total, plus a 300 word synopsis), with a £1,000 prize, expert mentoring and possible publication.
This will be a popular competition, so only the best will get through to the longlist and shortlist...
Entrants must be resident in the UK, 16 years old or over. Nor currently represented by a literary agent.
They can either have a completed, or a part-written novel. But do be aware that for the latter case, if you progress through the competition to the longlist stage, you will need to have a minimum of 15,000 words available, and for the shortlist a minimum of 30,000 words.
The longlist will only consist of 20, sifted by the Bridport Prize readers from all entries. Those 20 will go on to The Literary Consultancy and A. M. Heath Literary Agents, who will shortlist to 5.
The winner and runner-up (receives £500, plus other elements) will be chosen by them and the named judge, Alison Moore. There are qualifying criteria for the winner- not agented or previously published a novel (self-published is okay, as is being published in another genre, such as short stories, poetry, non fiction).
(Full details of entry, prizes, terms and conditions can be found via the above link.)
Bridport's entry fees are high, £20 an entry. Entries can be submitted online or by post (see the relevant links in the Entry Format section of the terms and conditions).
Closing date is 31st May 2014.
There is a lot to read on both the main page, and the one with the terms and conditions, but do read them fully.
When you have to pay a high entry fee, it's a shame to waste both your time and money by missing an essential piece of information that could result in your hard work being disqualified.
If you enter, good luck.
Carol Bevitt's blog on her writing and inspirations, along with occasional literature related news...
Sunday 2 February 2014
Saturday 1 February 2014
Connections and Respect...
Having got back into a steady routine of writing and blogging, my life was thrown upside down last weekend by not only losing my broadband, but my phone line too.
Okay, I know. If my phone line goes then so will my broadband. Unfortunately it happened the other way round for me...
I should add that we suspected our loss of service was 99.9% related to the engineer (from our provider) who was putting a broadband line in for one of our neighbours, as we lost our broadband about the time he would have been connecting up to the box in the pavement.
All the cables run under our pavements where we live, so we don't have any telegraph poles with wires running across.
But the provider's fault system requires you go through the testing routine, and of course their instrumentation said our broadband signal had no drop-out (!!!!) and the problem was our phone line-further tests then went on to blame our house wiring, and warnings that if the engineer came out we'd be liable to pay nearly £130 if it wasn't their equipment at fault.
So from Friday evening until the engineer arrived early Tuesday morning we were stuck. You get a lot of other things done with no phone calls, or Internet to distract you. (I read three e-books on my kindle.) But my desk had to be moved right up against my bookcase!
Very pleased to say that the engineer quickly found that the problem was outside, and as we'd suspected on the Friday when we started losing our service, it was related to what the other engineer had done.
Took about an hour+ to fix and test- even that wasn't trouble-free, but eventually we had a working phone and broadband line.
But it has taken the rest of the week getting the bandwidth back to where it was. And don't mention how many e-mails there were to sort through!
It's only when you lose your broadband that you realise how much of everyday life has moved online.
We communicate with friends and acquaintances from all over the UK, and in other countries, as if they were in another room. We use the Internet to interact with companies and services, even publishers! It's often easier to contact a company online than it is by phone...
The Internet has opened up so many resources that writers, a hundred years ago, would either have had to make a time-consuming trip to access the location, museum, gallery or specialist library and spend hours finding the information needed, or send lots of letters to get the answers.
My loss of broadband for those few days certainly increased my respect for those early writers. Their books may have been shorter word counts than we produce now, but they put as much, if not more effort, into producing their manuscripts.
It also makes you realise how much we take access to information for granted.
If the Internet hadn't been invented how many of those essential services and goods we writers depend on, would not have been invented? How many companies and organisations that employ, and sometimes support, people (including writers) may never have come into existence?
That's slightly scary...
Okay, I know. If my phone line goes then so will my broadband. Unfortunately it happened the other way round for me...
I should add that we suspected our loss of service was 99.9% related to the engineer (from our provider) who was putting a broadband line in for one of our neighbours, as we lost our broadband about the time he would have been connecting up to the box in the pavement.
All the cables run under our pavements where we live, so we don't have any telegraph poles with wires running across.
But the provider's fault system requires you go through the testing routine, and of course their instrumentation said our broadband signal had no drop-out (!!!!) and the problem was our phone line-further tests then went on to blame our house wiring, and warnings that if the engineer came out we'd be liable to pay nearly £130 if it wasn't their equipment at fault.
So from Friday evening until the engineer arrived early Tuesday morning we were stuck. You get a lot of other things done with no phone calls, or Internet to distract you. (I read three e-books on my kindle.) But my desk had to be moved right up against my bookcase!
Very pleased to say that the engineer quickly found that the problem was outside, and as we'd suspected on the Friday when we started losing our service, it was related to what the other engineer had done.
Took about an hour+ to fix and test- even that wasn't trouble-free, but eventually we had a working phone and broadband line.
But it has taken the rest of the week getting the bandwidth back to where it was. And don't mention how many e-mails there were to sort through!
It's only when you lose your broadband that you realise how much of everyday life has moved online.
We communicate with friends and acquaintances from all over the UK, and in other countries, as if they were in another room. We use the Internet to interact with companies and services, even publishers! It's often easier to contact a company online than it is by phone...
The Internet has opened up so many resources that writers, a hundred years ago, would either have had to make a time-consuming trip to access the location, museum, gallery or specialist library and spend hours finding the information needed, or send lots of letters to get the answers.
My loss of broadband for those few days certainly increased my respect for those early writers. Their books may have been shorter word counts than we produce now, but they put as much, if not more effort, into producing their manuscripts.
It also makes you realise how much we take access to information for granted.
If the Internet hadn't been invented how many of those essential services and goods we writers depend on, would not have been invented? How many companies and organisations that employ, and sometimes support, people (including writers) may never have come into existence?
That's slightly scary...
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