BREATHING AND HISTORY AND SYNCHRONICITY

Today a new collection of stories dropped through my letterbox. I tore open the envelope and flipped through the pages immediately. There was a story inside that caught my eye – it’s title something a little familiar somehow. I read it without sitting down, almost without breathing.

It was familiar because it was part of a project this writer and myself had worked on nearly ten years ago. It was all her own part and not a bit of it mine – the published thing in my hands. But it also felt like it would not exist if it had not been that we had worked together on this - and we were in step then, in tune and in time with each other, synchronised. I am pleased that it is in this collection – a part of me is pleased; but a part of me is something else.

It made me recall the project we’d shared for six months and the easy effort of that time and the enormous promise it held, and I could see from this published thing that now it will be no more than torn scraps. The piece that is published and which is in the collection I hold in my hands, it is tantalizing and incomplete and – for me – a little sad… like a torn bit of cloth that holds a snatch of pattern, all richly coloured and jeweled, but ultimately a scrap only and something less than the full bolt of cloth.

I am old enough to have regrets - they should only be had by the old and they should be few - and I regret that this writer and I fell out and I regret that this project is confined to the darkness of history; this torn scrap is a bright and brilliant reminder of what it could be if ever it was unearthed again.

H E BATES COMPETITION AND LOVELY HEAD JUDGE MAGGIE ALLEN

So, I recently did quite well in a competition – the H E Bates Short Story Competition which runs every year. I was placed third with ‘Mariska and The Bear’, and had another story on the ten-long shortlist. But better than that was that the head judge from the competition, Maggie Allen, contacted me to say how much she really liked my work, the writing, and how much she would like to work with me applying her expert editor’s eye to anything I had produced – only if I was interested. That was kind and unlooked for.


I have since sent Maggie Allen several stories, and each time her advice has been extremely good and acute in her observations and helpful in tightening some of my writing. And she turns things around in good time and she is kind even when there’s something in the writing that needs punished.


I know she is keen to pick up more work and so I am putting a link to her here – just in case you want to find out more for yourself. Maggie Allen is a professional ghost writer, which is nothing spooky at all. Check her website for yoursel

http://the-write-word.co.uk