Lines in the Sand …
We have some exciting news for anyone following our blog and interested in where our little publishing company is going next.
We have been chosen to produce a chapbook of flash fiction and poetry winning entries to the Bournemouth Writing Festival's 2024 Competition! We are honoured to have this responsibility and are very much looking forward to reading your submissions to find the best in each category, with the help of our excellent judges.
This is Bournemouth Writing Festival's first Flash Fiction and Poetry Competition. It will also be the Festival’s first publication, so it will be special. The theme is "Lines in the Sand", and you can take that anywhere you want to - yes, it reflects our location here on the beautiful south coast of England and the beach is probably the feature most people associate with Bournemouth.
Living here, we've all observed the way the sea changes throughout the year - the way we use and interact with the beach adapts accordingly. But there are other lines that can be drawn in the sand, and we want you to go wherever your imagination takes you. Astound us, thrill us, surprise us and impress us with your highest quality poetry and flash fiction.
"Ah, but ..." (you may be thinking) "you told us you were only going to publish poetry!"
Good point! Well, to us, flash fiction can be a very similar discipline to its close relative, prose poetry. Each word in a piece of flash fiction has to pull its own weight: there is no room for padding or unnecessary verbiage. It encourages creative inventiveness as a direct result of the constraints it imposes. Instead of having an infinite number of words, an author has a mere 400 (in this case) to achieve a credible narrative arc, engage us, retain our attention and leave us satisfied.
So we're in! Are you? Do you have the talent to write flash fiction, poetry or both? Then we encourage you to enter and be one of the 40 (yes, forty!) winners who will join us at the launch of the anthology and receive a copy of your work in print. In addition, all of the winners will have the opportunity to submit a collection of their work to us for potential publication. And, of course, since we will have up to forty winners and we're a new competition, your odds of winning may be that much higher.
You can enter now here!
The closing date is the end of February 2024 and even if you are not going to enter, this publication will be worth buying, so watch this space for more information as we move towards publication and beyond.
We'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for your interest in our work and are so looking forward to getting the copies of the chapbook ready to give to the worthy winners.
What do you have to lose - enter today!