The Purbeck Literary Festival

Sometimes life gets in the way of writing and recently I’ve been cutting down on author events. However, I did manage to spare a few hours at the weekend to join my fellow Littoralis, Laura James and Kathy Sharp to run a panel event at the Purbeck Literary Festival.

Kathy Sharp manning our table of books

The title of our event was ‘A Foot in the Door – A guide to getting published.’ where we talked about the benefits of being with a small publisher and discussed our experiences.

Although the focus of the day was largely on self-publishing, I hope that many of the authors who attended our event will feel encouraged to explore the small publisher route as a viable option. Certainly our experiences have been very positive, even though we all write in different genres and are published by very different publishers.

Events like this are always a good networking opportunity and it was nice to catch up with local authors. If you are in the area the Purbeck Literary Festival has events running all week so do check out their programme and see if anything takes your fancy.

And if you would like to know a bit more about the Littoralis – four Dorset authors inspired by the sea - then do visit out facebook page for regular updates.

This Little World: stories from Dorset Writers

About a year ago I became involved with an exciting initiative from the Dorset Writers Network. The idea was to run a series of writing workshops across rural Dorset to encourage people to have a go at writing a short story set in the county. These stories could then be entered it into a competition being run by DWN for inclusion in an anthology.

I ran workshops in my local village hall and at a local secondary school as well as being involved in the judging and mentoring for the adult entries.

There have been many people involved throughout the process and on Saturday the project reached its culmination with the launch of the anthology This Little World: Stories from Dorset Writers.

The This Little World book launch and Writers Day took place at Dorchester Library. At the launch event the organisers talked about the project and some of the featured authors read out their stories. A couple were stories that I had picked out which is a lovely feeling, but I have to say I was particularly impressed with the children’s entries! What a wealth of young talent this county has!

As well as the launch itself there was a series of writing workshops covering all sorts of subjects from writing dialogue to poetry and screenplays and The Littoralis (me and fellow local authors Laura James and Kathy Sharp) hosted a panel event where we discussed our experiences with our publishers. Despite all of us being published by small mainstream publishers our routes to publication and our experiences of the process couldn’t have been more different!

The whole event was extremely well attended and the anthology sold out within minutes! But fear not. The paperback version is available on Amazon and an e-book edition will be following soon. It is packed with a wealth of wonderful Dorset set stories and would make a perfect Christmas present.

Skylarks and Storyslingers

One of the main disadvantages for a writer of living in a remote corner of rural England, is the fact that the publishing industry tends to be very London orientated. As a result opportunities to network with agents and publishers are few and far between.

But one such opportunity did arise recently when the relatively new Skylark Literary Agency decided to venture out from the city and visit writers around the country. One of their visits on this tour was to the Storyslingers writers group in Shaftesbury.

I felt particularly honoured because the Storyslingers invited me along to give an author’s perspective on the industry, so I packed up my bag of books and hit the road north.

The drive to Shaftesbury is, for me, a long and winding one, not helped by the fact that Friday is changeover day and the roads are clogged with holidaymakers. Or that this particular Friday every tractor in Dorset seemed to be on the same road as me!

The venue for the talk was in Gold Hill museum, at the top of that pretty hill, immortalised by the Hovis advert of the 1970s. The Room we were in looked out across the fields and hills and the view was stunning.

Amber and Jo spoke to us about the agenting business, what they provide for their authors and what they are looking for in clients. The Q&A which followed covered all aspects from negotiation of contracts to the agent author relationship and the use of pen names.

It was a lovely evening, interesting and insightful, wonderful to see the Storyslingers again and to chat with Amber and Jo. So thank you to the Storyslingers for organising such a useful and informative event, and to Skylark for coming all that way to talk to us. It was really nice to meet Amber and Jo in person –it’s always good meeting an online acquaintance in the real world!

Here’s a picture of us at the top of Gold Hill. We’re standing on a slope though so I’m not as tall as I appear.

Dorset’s Digital Stories

On a bright but bitter February morning I was joined in my local village hall by thirteen eager writers. The reason for this? Well, the Dorset Writers’ Network is running a competition for local writers. The aim is to produce an e-book with stories up to 500 words, which reflect the diversity of the county. In order to encourage people to put pen to paper a series of workshops were scheduled at rural locations during January and February, and I was one of the writers involved in running these.

As sunshine streamed in through the windows of the Old School Hall we explored setting and sense of place. We then went on character development and touched on dialogue and self-editing. I could see some really interesting stories starting to develop and I do hope the participants go on to complete these and enter them. Workshop participants can enter their first story for free but even if you didn’t attend a workshop you are still able to enter.

The Dorset Writers’ Network is run by professional writers and arts facilitators and its aim is to promote events, projects and training opportunities for writers in the county. The Dorset’s Digital Stories project is funded by Arts Council England's Grants for the Arts and Dorset Community Foundation and the book is scheduled to be published later this year.

For more details and to check out the competition rules visit the Dorset Writers Network website.