Short Stories and Women's Magazines...

The petition begun (last week) by the Society of Authors against the cuts being planned by Radio 4 to short story slots from spring 2012, has reached over 5,000 signatures and will be presented to the Radio 4 Controller Gwyneth Williams on Thursday afternoon at Broadcasting House. It will be accompanied by a number of authors and the director of the National Short Story week too, read the Bookseller.com article about it, here.

As to Women's magazines...

Best magazine (that stopped their story slot last year) are running a short story competition for which you need to collect tokens- the first one is in the 2nd August issue out now, so you'll need the following three August issues for the remaining tokens. The entry form will be in the 6th September issue.

At the moment the terms and conditions they refer to at the back of the magazine don't give any information on required length or any rules of entry, nor what rights are involved. Hopefully they will reveal that soon.

I read and buy the magazines that do fiction, I don't buy the magazines that are full of supposed real-life stories. I want to be entertained and those type of stories don't do that.
Sadly many of the women's magazines when they revamp seem to consider these as essential. And with that goes the celebrity/soap items. (Okay many do like these slots, personally I don't.)

I like fashion and make-up, but please, affordable, available and not just suited to young and skinny women please.

Am I the only older (okay, I admit I'm 50+) but still young, woman, who feels the weekly women's magazine market is not catering adequately to my age group?

Compared to my mother's generation, the fifty plus women of today are very different, we lead much more active lives and many of us still have children/teenagers going through the education system.

And short stories please...

So magazine editors start considering us. There is a gap in the market that you are missing out on, and we all know that when it comes to the head honchos in the magazine business world, sales matter...

Reorganising- I Found...

I've been getting on with the sorting out I mentioned recently.

There's been a lot of shredding and recycling going on in my house over the weekend and the bin for dry recyclables is filling up quickly, unfortunately it isn't due for emptying for another week.

I have to admit that I don't like throwing magazines and newspapers away. I will, but only after I've checked that I've removed interesting items for future reference- and of course they then sit there waiting to be used or filed for future use...

So in my effort to get organised and make space for these items I've started on the book shelves, well the cardboard magazine files that I started with some years ago. And as I realised when I pulled out the first one, it was some years ago- 2004-5... That's what happens when something is so tidy you forget it's there.

I went through a dozen magazines, cut out snippets, pages, stapled where needed and then discovered I'd run out of the thin clear plastic A4 covers.

Well I did find a few interesting items. A piece about Priest's Holes and a short list of properties that contain them. I'm considering if I can put one of these 17th C. examples to use in a story set in a later time period.

Another item about the changing face of beauty and the power beautiful women could wield as a result.
Clever women throughout history have gained power by using their looks and their bodies to get what they wanted, and who could blame them when men decided their futures, and usually their views weren't considered at all.

I think I'm going to need to have a box just for the items that spark ideas as I go through- thank goodness for post-it notes.

Next for cannibalising are the old family history type magazines, and I know there are always useful and inspiring articles in those.

So I've made a start. Now I just need to be ruthless...