9:15pm, 23rd August 2016
It took me an embarassingly long time to work this out: conflict is everything.
Do you know what happened to the first story I wrote once I worked it out? When I first focused on deliberately working it into every paragraph? It won WotF.
If you only ever take one piece of advice from me, take this: you need more conflict.
TAGS: Anatomy of a Golden Pen, wotf32
5:00pm, 23rd May 2016
Being a writer, I'm full of self-importance and arrogantly believe everyone wants to read pages and pages of nonsense from me. As such, I'm going to start a series about my Golden Pen story from Writers of the Future volume 32, Squalor & Sympathy, dissecting it from various angles.
First up: all the historical accuracies and references in the story.
TAGS: Anatomy of a Golden Pen, wotf32
Matt Dovey is a writer of short speculative fiction. He is very tall, very British, and probably drinking a cup of tea right now. His surname rhymes with “Dopey”, but any other similarities to the dwarf are purely coincidental. More →
You're not a person, they say, circling. You're one of Them. From the other side.
”The cat followed him home.
Tomas Shine spent three and a half minutes in the stairwell hyperventilating. He heard Mrs Helen Acres, the widow from Unit Two, clatter and batter her way out her door, shopping bags in hand. She spotted the cat outside the stairway and reversed soundlessly into her unit.
Tomas sucked in a ragged breath, filling his lungs to the brim, and looked up. The cat waited on the far side of the glass door.
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"For Christ's... no, not knitted booties. Chain-sandwiched-between-thick-leather booties. What in good hell's use would knitted booties be?"
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