I am so thrilled to welcome Stuart Aken this week who has very kindly agreed to talk about his highly acclaimed and varied work. I’m going to jump straight in because as you will see, Stuart’s got a lot to tell and I didn’t want to cut any of it!

Q1. What kind of books do you write?

It’s tempting to answer this facetiously with ‘Great!’ but I’ll be a little more considered.

My dislike of the cubby-holing and restrictions of genre has persuaded me to ignore it as a guide to my writing. My books tell stories first and foremost. I’m interested in the human condition, justice/injustice, the abuse of Big Business, and the environment, but I’m also fascinated by our capacity as a species to produce wonderful objects, design complex and intriguing theories to explain our world, to love, to hate, to kill and to create. So, I…

Every now and again I get unfollowed. And every now and again I unfollow a blog. Is it a big deal? Should it be a big deal?

At first, it can seem hurtful to find that someone has unfollowed you on any sort of social media, but really it shouldn’t be. Somehow, I find that I now follow a huge number of blogs, most of which I love, and I do wish I had more time available to read them more fully and comment on them, but I don’t. This means that every now and again I sacrifice one for the common good.

But, never without good reason.

First up, one thing that does irritate me, is when I visit and read a blog, leave a response – sometimes a quite lengthy one – and never receive any sort of reply. One blog that I initially followed was like this…

Time is just an agreed upon construct. We have taken distance (one rotation of the earth, and one orbit of the sun) divided it up into segments, then given those segments labels.

-Author Unknown

Before man decided to differentiate between the periods when the sun had risen, and when the moon had taken its place, there was no such thing as time. Before days, hours, and minutes ever existed there were merely rotations of the earth that brought about phases of light, and periods of darkness. But our quest for intellectual enlightenment, coupled with human curiosity urged mankind to quantify and label the earth’s rotations.

Early Egyptians divided the day into two twelve hour periods, erecting huge obelisks that rose into the sky, allowing them to use shadows to track the sun’s movements. The Greeks and Persians used water clocks called clepsydra. And Plato even went as far as to develop…

There are more short story competitions than words I’ve written. And I’ve written a shit load of words. But finding a FLASH fiction comp (under 1000 words) is a bit of a rarity, so when I do find one, I get a bit giddy.

But lately, I’ve had to weep myself to sleep over the number of writers who have told me they never enter competitions because either: they don’t know how to find them or didn’t know so many existed.

*Tut*

Seriously?! Don’t make me use Caps. The fastest way to get recognition, more often than not is through competitions. The road to traditional publishing (if that’s where you want to go) is like the final fight in Lord of The Rings – fucking endless. Don’t take for granted the ease of entering competitions. Most of you enter weekly writing challenges, like my writespiration, or Esther’s or Charli’s. So…

Image via Flickr Creative Commons courtesy of Pedro Travassos

Today we have a special treat from Dr John Yeoman, PhD Creative Writing. He’s going to give us some ways to tackle one of the biggest problems plaguing writers—the inability to finish what we start.

*gets popcorn*

Take it away, John!

***

Do you live in a world of unfinished stories? Across the year, you’ve jotted scraps here and there, stuck an opening scene beneath a flowerpot, a closing line in a shopping list and a great cameo incident… well, you’ve forgotten where it is now but it was awesome.

Join the Club of Interrupted Scribes

Image via Drew Coffman courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons

You’re not alone.

We all know what happened when Coleridge was interrupted, when finishing Kubla Khan, by ‘a person from Porlock’. All that remains of his epic is an unfinished scrap.

More fragments, abandoned by…

Ray Bradbury, 1997
(Photo Credit: Steve Castillo/Associated Press)

I’ve just finished rereading Ray Bradbury’s brilliant but brief book on writing – about how he wrote, and what he thought writing should mean to all authors – and I must say that I feel particularly exhilarated, refreshed, and ready to write again! It’s like receiving a much-needed kick in the seat of my pants to be refocused by his words.

And there are any, many quotes I’ve underlined in my print edition (Bantam Books, 1992) and I will trot them out as necessary. Some you’ve probably read before in those lovely quote boxes that circulate on Facebook and other social media. But I wanted to mention one in particular, because what he says here reminds me of a blog post I wrote previously.

What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn’t it that day when someone rushes up to…

After numerous arguments, fallings out, and snide comments about each other’s judgement, we have a longlist! First, let me say a massive thank you to everyone who entered: it’s been a delight reading such a diverse range of writing from all over the world, and it’s been really hard to select just 30 pieces to go forward to the next stage of judging. There were several stories we agonised over and inevitably some of our choices came down to subjective factors: there are stories we couldn’t fit onto the longlist that I’m sure will find success in other markets. There were also some very strong pieces that we decided we had to exclude in the interest of fairness since they didn’t meet the stipulated 2000-5000 word limit.

However, for all the stories we’re sorry to lose at this stage, the thirty we have left form a mouth-watering selection. The list…