I caught this morning writers writing

I don’t have many short stories suitable for submitting to little contests, simply because the word limit tends to be 2,000-3,000 words and it’s not a length I’ve recently worked with. (The other competition ceiling is 5,000 words. That was the really nice thing about the Willesden Herald prize – no word limit. Though I sent one of the 4,500 ones, as it’s my best work to date.)

Anyway, I was pleased to check the website for a competition I entered back in December and find that I’m on the shortlist. Said list is here but the page has been overwritten at least once. (For reference – mainly my own – the competition guidelines can be found on Sally’s blog.) I presume the shortlist will vanish when the winners are announced, so what it says right now is:

Thanks again to everyone who took the trouble to enter our competition. With great difficulty we’ve narrowed the entries down to our short list of twenty. As writing club members ourselves, we know the disappointment of not getting this far. It’s been a difficult but democratic process and many individual’s favourite stories have not made this cut so please don’t give up if you’ve not made it this time in our competition.

And my story title is one of twenty on the list. Woot!

The group awarding the prize is the Brighter Writers Writing Circle, which name always sets me off reciting Gerard Manley Hopkins (specifically, ‘I caught this morning morning’s minion’).

Anyway, fingers crossed! It’s a nice little story, if I do say so myself.