Archives for: September 2007
Creative Writing CV
Sarah's extensive poetry and short story publications and competition successes.
Why read Sarah's blog?
This short piece should help people find their way round the various categories of my blog so they can get the most of the many posts on offer.
Hypochondriacs!
It often seems like the world we live in these days is super-competitive - even when it comes to illness and suffering!
Bovine Brothels
Sometimes the very things that made a novel a great classic and literary landmark when it was written are what would cause it to be rejected by a publisher today.
(This was written as an entry for the writelink Classic Rejections competition and was a runner-up in the contest in October 2007.)
Beauty in the eye of the advertiser!
What is it about beauty ads on tv these days? Do advertisers really think I am going to buy their products simply because they use a few technical-looking illustrations and sophisticated-sounding scientific terminology (or pseudo-scientific babble-ology!)? I mean, do I look that stupid? Or that desperate?
Finding Mr Right?
Maybe it's me but sometimes I feel overwhelmed by choices. Nowhere more so than on the internet, take search engines for example. That's not to mention the proverbial field to play or fish in the ocean when it comes to modern dating. So imagine what happens when you combine the two!
Down-to-earth
The current writelink Classic Rejections contest calls for writers to imagine they are the author of a classic novel, play, poem or song and have just received a detailed rejection letter from a present day publisher or agent. But how do you deliver a down-to-earth rejection letter for a manuscript that still seems divinely written?
(I originally started writing this for the competition but as there is already another entry on the same work, I thought I'd post it here.)
chocolate, Chocolate, CHOCOLATE!
If only chocolate tasted like celery, I'd be a size zero and probably a whole load richer than I am now! I don't know what it is but even talking about that dark rich warm sweetness melting on my tongue seems to cheer me up - and make me feel ten times fatter!
Women can have it all - not!
Let me introduce you to the biggest myth of modern society - women can have it all!
By all one means children and high-flying career. But in my experience real life just doesn't work like that.
Men and PMT
What is it about men and PMT? Normally, they don't want to talk about anything that could be considered to come even vaguely under the category "women's troubles". Yet when it comes to pre-menstrual tension, they are only too happy to bandy the words round. Not that they want to discuss it like a serious issue, oh no. They just use "the time of the month" to cover for their own shortcomings, namely their inability to understand women even the tiniest little bit.
Opinionated (not to be taken too seriously!)
I've just set up this new category as a kind of a test, to see how it goes. A few months back I wrote some opinion pieces for a television website. Normally, I'm rather an indecisive, see both sides of the story kind of person but I quite enjoyed trying on different opinions for size. Anyway, I figure it may also come in useful at some point for creating short story characters and hopefully provide some amusement or spark some debate in the meantime.
Pondering performance poetry
Since yesterday's poetry reading,
I've been pondering (feeding
my desperate need to know
how to better my po-
etry) the differences between
the heard and merely seen.
Podcasts, poetry and people
I recently found Aidan Andrew Dun's Ode to a Postbox on the Guardian unlimited website.
Virtual cocktail bar Happy Hour
I thought I'd just set up this blog page/post as a substitute water hole while the writelink cocktail bar is being refurbished!
Sunflower
The twenty-eighth poem from my poetry collection Conception. It was shortlisted in writelink's New World in the Morning poetry contest in October 2005.
This morning
The twenty-first poem from my poetry collection Conception. It was shortlisted in Oxfam’s UK Poetry Competition 2004, donated to the charity and included in the anthology Poems for a better future in September 2004.
Tulips
The twentieth poem from my poetry collection Conception. An earlier version of Tulips was first published as the June 2004 poem on writelink.