Saturday 30 July 2011

The Poorly Computer...

Yes, my computer is sick and early next week it will be getting an big upgrade and my long minutes of waiting for image heavy pages to load will be over, no more waiting and waiting for the little hour glass to do something...

I like to read as many blogs as possible over the weekend, but I'm a bit limited at the moment, as not only am I in the middle of reorganising at home, among other things, the postcards are now in a pretty, larger box with plenty of room for new additions- but the washing machine is on the blink threatening to stop working completely- it's had a hard life with my family.

Last Saturday I came back from food shopping to find my OH had dragged the washing machine out of it's slot and was checking the pipes at the back, with a pile of wet washing in a laundry basket.
I'm glad to say he got it working again, but it keeps having stroppy spells- now that has given me an idea...

But anyway next week I will be discovering Windows7- and I hope by next Friday I'll be back surfing the web without any problem and catching up on the blogs I've been missing.

Technology and labour saving devices are great until they breaks down or get old...

Finally here is the writing related bit, I'm going to leave you with a blog to look at- Louise Wise-who has started a blog directory (by category) that you might like to peruse in the meantime.

Wednesday 27 July 2011

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...