Legend Press offers work experience placements

Posted on January 25, 2021 by Judy

Cornish shore cr Judy Darley Legend Times is inviting applications for work experience placements with Legend Press, its fiction publishing company.

The independent book publisher was founded in 2005 by Tom Chalmers. Legend Press specialises in original fiction, crime thrillers and its Legend Classics series, with title including Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Much of the publishing house’s success has been due to keenness to innovate and to be a market-leader for new initiatives. As its ultimate mission, Legend Press aims to produce books of the highest quality, provide a global platform for authors and to inspire and thrill book readers around the world.

They are currently offering two-week unpaid work experience placements, covering a wide range of areas including editing, sales, media and marketing.

This is an opportunity to gain an insight into a varied and dynamic working environment and the full publishing process.

To apply, email info@legendpress.co.uk with your CV and cover letter, detailing your interest in the role and what you think you would bring to it.

Although Legend Times is based in London WC1E 6HJ, all staff are working remotely from home due to the current Covid-19 pandemic with flexibility likely to continue over the next year and onwards. It is therefore likely that work experience placements will include both home and office work once government rules allow a return to offices.

Find out more about Legend Press here.

Got an event, challenge, competition, opportunity or call for submissions you’d like to draw attention to? Send me an email at JudyDarley (@) ICloud (dot) com.

Book review – All Our Squandered Beauty by Amanda Huggins

Posted on January 21, 2021 by Judy

In her debut novella, Amanda Huggins casts her lyrical storytelling over the ruggedness of wild oceans, churning grief and raw adolescence with dizzying potency.

Set in 1978, the salt and tides of the North Sea flavour Huggins’ words as she introduces us to Kara, named after a sea in the Siberian Arctic and a guardian sprite who carried shipwrecked sailors “into the clouds in fishing nets” spun from her hair. Kara simultaneously thirsts for adventures beyond her field of vision while yearning to dive back into the safety of her past. Huggins captures this inner conflict beautifully, highlighting Kara’s confused emotions against a backdrop of motorbikes, unsuitable suitors, nature and art.

When Kara’s art teacher Leo informs her that she’s eligible for “a funded place for a gifted student” on a three-week art placement on a Greek island, Kara is swept away under a swell of first impressions that absorb every sense. Yet misgivings murmur beneath the surface, even as Huggins’ ribbons of words saturate us.

Continue reading →

Writing prompt – sneeze

Posted on January 20, 2021 by Judy

Art galleries may be closed, but street art is always open, and this Banksy piece appeared on the side of a house near me recently. In a time when the smallest hint of a cough or stifled sneeze is enough to make passersby cower, this image is brilliantly irreverent.

I love the way the old woman is sneezing so violently that her false teeth have shot out.

Can you take an aspect of the pandemic and transform it into a story or work of art that will make people smile? Perhaps someone breaking the UK’s two-metre social distancing rule to mug an old lady finds the handbag they’ve stolen brimming with Covid-19 laden used tissues! What can you dream up to shock and amuse the masses?

If you write or create something prompted by this, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud.com to let me know. With your permission, I may publish it on SkyLightRain.com.

Sky Light Rain – Underwire

Posted on January 14, 2021 by Judy

Have you ever created a fictional character who gained traits and powers you didn’t expect? You may have noticed that for a while now I’ve been offering ‘behind-the-scenes’ insights into the inspiration that prompted the flash fiction and short stories that make up my Valley Press collection Sky Light Rain.

A few weeks ago, entirely unintentionally, I completely skipped over my story ‘Underwire’. This tale is the twenty-seventh in the collection, and should have appeared in this series of posts between ‘The Sculptor‘ and ‘Breathing Water‘.

This most curious thing about this omission is that ‘Underwire’ tells the tale of a woman who chooses to disappear.

It originally washed up in issue 67 (Winter/Spring 2018) of Tears In The Fence.

The image above shows where the story ends. It begins:

The pebbles of the beach are cold lumps beneath my soles. A January wind whistles in from the sea, but I ignore the goosebumps sprigging my flesh and with effort I think the core of me into heat. That’s a trick, imagining an inferno lit at the centre of my gut, flames licking the ropes of intestines and keeping me warm.

The whole world is dressed in shades of bruises today – bluish pebbles, the greenish sea, a sky like slabs of ice above.

I glance up the beach; see the violet trim of my sneakers where I kicked them off a few steps back. Nearby, my socks lounge untidily like patches of lichen or moss.

Sky Light Rain is published by Valley Press and is available to purchase here.

Discover the inspiration behind my other Sky Light Rain stories by clicking on the story titles below.

If you’d like to request a review copy of Sky Light Rain or interview me about my writing, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud (dot) com.

Writing prompt – roam

Posted on January 13, 2021 by Judy

With travel off-limits for a while, why not treat yourself to an imaginary journey? Reading, gazing at art, writing and generally being creative give us opportunities to roam countless miles within the confines of your own mind.

One artwork that sweeps me away is the above painting by my mum, Pauline Darley. It shows a corner of her garden, the space where I explored and adventured for hours as a child. To the right of the painting is an immense fir tree that contained whole universes, including the occasional dragon, when I was small.

Find something in your own home that carries you away from your here and now, and then see if you can harness that feeling as a prompt to write, paint or otherwise imagine visiting a faraway land.

If you write or create something prompted by this, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud.com to let me know. With your permission, I may publish it on SkyLightRain.com.

Sky Light Rain – Fin

Posted on January 7, 2021 by Judy

I can never resist a ‘behind-the-scenes’ glimpse into the workings of a creative endeavour. It’s why I launched this series of posts offering insights into the inspiration behind the flash fiction and short stories that make up my Valley Press collection Sky Light Rain.

The thirtieth story is ‘Fin’. It surfaced in my mind one rainy January when I was certain our cellar (the same cellar that brimmed with uncanny encounters in my story ‘Lodged‘) was filling with water.

The idea merged with a whale watching trip I’d taken the year before, when I’d seen and fallen in love with the majesty of fin whales.

The story is about an ending, so the title works on two levels.

The story begins:

It began after their trip to the Azores. Toby had booked it as a celebration of their years together, complete with a voyage to look out for whales. Rachel glued on a smile and let Toby take her hand when he reached for it. She didn’t know how to tell him it was over, but something in the skitter of his glance made her wonder if he’d already guessed. It was as though he no longer dared to fully see her, in case he mistakenly found himself staring at a truth he’d rather not face.

Of the numerous species those Atlantic waters attracted, it was the fin whales that deigned to make an appearance. While other tourists, including Toby, stood and snapped photos, lens to eye, Rachel sat back in her seat and drank the sight in. The slap of fin against the waves, the slide of an immense, narrow body swooning up then over and down into the depths.

“Second largest mammal after the Blue Whale,” their biologist tour guide commented. “These ones are behaving strangely. Normally they come up for air only, but these ones have risen, what, three, four times?”

Each time the pair rose, they came a little closer, and each time, Rachel felt herself singled out by their deep-set, knotted gaze.

Sky Light Rain is published by Valley Press and is available to purchase here.

Discover the inspiration behind my other Sky Light Rain stories by clicking on the story titles below.

If you’d like to request a review copy of Sky Light Rain or interview me about my writing, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud (dot) com.

Writing prompt – gloves

Posted on January 6, 2021 by Judy

I spied this curious shrine to lost gloves in Reykjavik, Iceland, in January 2017, and found myself asking a string of questions.

Who does each of these gloves belong to? What happened to those individuals? Where is their other glove? How have they solved the problem of having one cold hand? Or is this glove all that remains of them?

There are so many directions you could take this story in. Drawing on the island’s rich mythology, could it be an offering to Icelandic trolls, or, considering the Scandi Noir genre, a clue in a chilling thriller? Do they have the other glove in their home as a souvenir of some grisly act?

Or is it an altruistic act hoping to reunite people with their dropped knitwear, and the excuse for a Richard Curtis-worthy meet-cute?

Whatever strands you choose to follow, can you knit them together into a winter’s tale?

If you write or create something prompted by this, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud.com to let me know. With your permission, I may publish it on SkyLightRain.com.

Writing prompt – WTF

Posted on December 31, 2020 by Judy

I love this little Nissan Figaro I pass on my daily walks. It’s such an elegant piece of engineering, and its number plate seems to sum up this past year. The fact it made this statement before hashtags even existed (ok, it’s not truly vintage, but still pre-hashtag at around 1991 or thereabouts) makes it even more endearing.

Imagine the owner of this glorious vehicle gliding through life nonplussed but unfazed. Can you build a story around this character navigating 2020, and wishing this horrible year a cheery farewell in a way that suits their personality and verve perfectly?

If you write or create something prompted by this, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud.com to let me know. With your permission, I may publish it on SkyLightRain.com.

Sky Light Rain – Reeds and Curlews

Posted on December 30, 2020 by Judy

I can never resist the opportunity to catch a ‘behind-the-scenes’ glimpse into the workings of a creative endeavour. It’s why I launched this series of posts offering insights into the inspiration behind the flash fiction and short stories that make up my Valley Press collection Sky Light Rain.

The twenty-ninth story is ‘Reeds and Curlews’. It carries us through a rainstorm to one of my favourite places, Laugharne in Wales, at the moment when a mother recognises the hazards of the age her son has reached following the death of one of his friends. Even as she attempts to shepherd him through his grief, she’s swept sideways by the relief that it wasn’t her son who died.

We all have those moments, don’t we? Those terrible, guilty feelings of “Thank goodness that happened to them, not us.”

An earlier version of ‘Reeds and Curlews’, then titled ‘Wriggler’, was published in the October 2018 issue of Ghost Parachute.

The story begins:

The suspension bridge tries to catch us in its wires as we drive from Bristol to Wales, chasing storm clouds as we go.

“It’s a spider with a gazillion legs,” Oli says, staring up throughthe sunroof.

I can’t help but smile. In those words I hear the little boy he used to be, just last year or the year before. Not that twelve is so very close to full maturity, but the perils in his vicinity seem disturbingly adult.

The thirsty July ground is too hard-baked to let rain soak in. Puddles form, then lakes and rivers, gushing down hillsides to meet us. The deluge fills me with a kind of fierce delight. I feel we’re amorphous – regressing to the amphibious beings we were in the womb.

“I was never a frog,” Oli says, holding tight to the backpack cradled in his lap. One hand is closed in a fist, gripping something I can’t see.

“No, but you were a wriggler,” I say, my own hands fixed to the steering wheel as we aquaplane for a second, and then regain the road.

Sky Light Rain is published by Valley Press and is available to purchase here.

Discover the inspiration behind my other Sky Light Rain stories by clicking on the story titles below.

If you’d like to request a review copy of Sky Light Rain or interview me about my writing, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud (dot) com.

Enter Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 2021

Posted on December 28, 2020 by Judy

Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 2021 invites you to submit your finest flash fiction tale for a chance to get 2021 off to an excellent start.

The deadline is 31 January 2021.

The word limit is 1,000.

First prize is £1000.
Second prize is £200.
Third prize is £100.

Shortlisted entrants will be offered the chance to be published in the end of year digital anthology.

You can choose to enter one flash at £6, two at £10 or three at £14.

A limited number of free entries are available to low-income writers. Find out more here.

Rules of entry

All entries must be formatted as a single-spaced word document or PDF.
Font: Arial, 12pt. This is to standardise entries so that all stories are treated equally. Only entries that are under the 1000-word limit (not including the title) will be accepted.

All entries must include the title of the story but not the name or address, or any identifying information of the entrant.

This is an international competition, and all entries must be in English.

All entries must be the work of the person entering and must not have been published anywhere online (including blogs and websites) or accepted for publication elsewhere. The copyright remains with the author.

Entries will not be accepted without payment, and any entries that do not comply with the competition rules will be disqualified.

No corrections post-entry can be accepted or refunds given.

The results of the competition will be published online and the decision of the judge(s) will be final.

The closing date for entries is midnight (UK time) on the 31st January. Winners will be notified by email within six weeks of the closing dates.

Find full details here.