Competition Winners Announced.

Sanjit, Susan, Marc

It was competition night at the Windmill Writers. There was a good amount of entries for our first Short Story competition. The premise was for the great grandson Winston, to tell his great grandmother Constance that her younger brother, Joseph had died. The entries were put up around the room and each member had a marking sheet on which they marked each piece of writing out of 3. They were allowed to mark their own piece of work with only 1 mark and at the end, all the marks were totalled and the one with the highest mark won. We had a tie for the highly commended and commended slots. So those who were not involved discussed and re-voted to decide the placement.

The following titles were submitted: Bad Blood, Mistaken Identity, Trouble with Constance, Grave News and Bless his Cotton Socks.

Commended was: Grave News by Marc Abbot
Highly Commended was: Bless his Cotton Socks by Sanjit Joseph
And the winning entry was: Trouble with Constance by Susan K Franklin.

Yes, it was rather odd awarding myself the prize of the note book and new Windmill Writers pencil, but I do love my note books and I will find a good use for it. I will be setting the next trophy competition at the end of May and another note book and pencil writing competition in June after the adjudication of the trophy is awarded.  

As we had a little time left at the end of the meeting, Alan showed us some of his photographs that show orbs, it also showed us how well travelled his is. We also had an opportunity to listen to the reworked picture book Alan had been working on. It is really becoming a stronger story and with a few more jiggles and a little more characterisation it will be ready. Picture books are really hard to write as the wordage is limited and every word has to count and the story needs to stand alone and still give as much imagery as possible. Not an easy task. We are looking forward to hearing the changes next week.

It was also lovely to see one of our founding members stopping in for the night. He is sorely missed by us all and always has good feedback on material. However we were missing Nicki and Lucy from the team.

We now have eleven pieces of work that have been submitted to either competition or publishers in the Windmill Writers Submissions book. We keep this to encourage us to keep writing and as a stimulus to submit work. We will also share our successes and rejections; this way we can support each other when we feel we will never write again – although mostly this only take a few days to get over before our inner writer comes out again and we are off causing the keyboard to overheat with our enthusiasm.

A really great evening.