Moustaches For a Reason...

Not on me I'm glad to say...

If you read any historical romance the only time the hero appears unshaven is when they have had a life threatening injury and are unconscious or in some situation where shaving isn't possible.
Okay that may be a bit of an exaggeration but the hero doesn't usually have a beard or moustache. Even in Victorian settings, when facial hair was more fashionable, the heroes still seem to be clean-shaven.

Now you may wonder why I'm mentioning facial hair in a writing context, well there is a good reason.

A fellow writer on the Talkback forum-Steven Chapman- will be growing a moustache for the whole of November. He is taking part in the Movember fund raising event for The Prostate Cancer Charity.

"During November each year, Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces in the UK and around the world. The aim of which is to raise vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men."

I live in a house of males- hubby and four sons- plus the numerous attractive males in the creative part of my brain, so it's not quite so strange to be giving a donation.

Steven reasoned that if all the people he knew gave even 50p each it would make a good amount.

So if you know a man who wants to take up the challenge, then point them in the direction of Movember. Or if you prefer you can make a donation to an individual, a team, or just a general donation- you'll find a link on the Movember page.

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I'm off to the New Writers UK Book Fayre and Festival on Saturday and hope to see the talk by Mills and Boon author Kate Walker.

So my weekend post will be a little late...

Why Do My Ideas Want To be Novels?

I had a slight problem the other day. A character that is going to be in my entry for the annual Mail on Sunday Novel Competition intruded into a piece of flash fiction I was writing. Suddenly Jennifer became Miranda- who on earth was Miranda? The character I was writing about at the time was most definitely a Jennifer...
Later that night as I was settling down to sleep Miranda explained who she was and that she was in my competition entry.

Now the competition mentioned above only requires 50-150 words of an opening to a novel with the word ROW used- fortunately the novel doesn't also have to be written, because if it did it would have to go on the waiting list...

This is where my problem starts- and this happens a lot now- what I think is going to be a short story will, by the time I've jotted down the ideas, have become part of a much larger and longer story. And I know from past experience that a story that goes that way just doesn't work by itself...

I know I should be glad that I have all these stories and characters buzzing around in my sub-conscious and I can fill my notebooks up with details to return to later, but I'm beginning to worry whether I can ever manage to come up with an idea that stays as a short story and doesn't want to be anything longer.

When I started seriously writing again- after many years of nothing-it was as much as I could do to write a 1,000 word short story, but as the years have gone by the natural length of my stories has increased: 1200-1300; 1,500 then 1,900 and now I'm having difficulty trying to get a story I've been working on to a 2,000 word length, when it actually needs to have another couple of hundred words, but it will then become an in-between length- not liked by some magazines...

Perhaps this is just a phase my writing is going through and in a few months I'll be coming up with nothing but short story ideas.

But at least I've got the ideas, so now I need to get on with some of them.

If you are interested in the start of a novel competition, Womag published the details on her blog last month, so go there. Good luck if you enter.