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1ST PRIZE: £5,000

Judging Panel:

Kirsty Lang, arts journalist and presenter of BBC Radio 4′s Front Row
Val McDermid, award-winning novelist, journalist and short story writer
Novel Competition 2013Charlotte Robertson, literary agent at Aitken Alexander Associates

The three finalists will be offered free professional feedback by The Literary Consultancy.

The 12 shortlisted authors will be invited to meet literary agents and editors at a special networking event in London.

The competition is open to unpublished women novelists writing in any genre for adults, including literary fiction, women’s fiction, young adult fiction, science fiction, fantasy, chick-lit, crime fiction, thriller, historical fiction… but not nonfiction or fiction for under 13s. To constitute a novel, your book must total at least 50,000 words.

Closing date: 23 September 2013

Please note: This is NOT an annual competition. The next adult novel competition will not be until 2015 (TBC).
Please make sure you have read the rules THOROUGHLY before submitting

YOUR NOVEL
•Your novel can be in any genre, but must be for adult or young adult readers. Nonfiction and fiction for children under 13 is not eligible. To qualify as a novel, your book must total at least 50,000 words.
• You may submit up to 5,000 words, which must be the first 5,000 words of the novel. Any preface is included in your 5,000 words. There is no need to submit a synopsis.
• Please complete your novel before entering. Shortlisted entrants will be asked to submit a full manuscript and synopsis for the final stages of the judging process. Entrants unable to comply will be disqualified.
• Please submit your work typed, double-spaced on A4-sized paper, single sided, with pages numbered and your novel’s title on every page.
• Your novel will be judged anonymously, so do not put your name on the pages of your novel. Use a separate cover page with your name, address, telephone number and email address, plus the title of the novel you are submitting.
• No alterations may be made to a novel extract once submitted.
• Your submission will not be returned, so please keep a copy. If you want confirmation that we have received your postal entry, please enclose an SAE labeled ‘Acknowledgement’. Sorry, we do not send copies of the result to entrants.
• The winner will be contacted in February 2014 and announced in the Mar/Apr/May 2014 issue of Mslexia.

ELIGIBILITY
•This is a competition for unpublished novelists. Women who have had a novel published commercially, for any age group, in any country, are not eligible.
• Women who have had other types of books published (e.g. poetry, memoir, nonfiction), but have not had a novel published, are eligible.
• Self-published manuscripts are eligible.
• Novels should be in English (or English dialect) and should not have been published or accepted for publication by a commercial publisher.
• Novels should not be a translation of another author’s work.
• You do not have to subscribe to Mslexia to be eligible, but you do have to be a woman. We will accept novels from women of any nationality from any country.
• Employees of Mslexia are not eligible.

HOW TO ENTER
•Send your novel extract by post or enter online at http://www.mslexia.co.uk/novelcompetition.
• If entering by post, mark your envelope ‘Women’s Novel Competition’ and send it postmarked no later than 23 September 2013 to Mslexia Publications Ltd, PO Box 656, Freepost NEA5566, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 1BR. We regret FREEPOST is not available for entries from overseas, so please make sure you attach the relevant postage to your envelope.
• If entering online, be sure to follow the instructions on the website carefully. Novel extracts and cover sheets should be sent together as a single attachment.
• The entry fee of £25 allows you to enter an extract from one novel. You may enter as many novels as you like, provided each novel extract is accompanied by the £25 entry fee.
• Entry fees must be in pounds sterling. If you want to use a different currency, please pay online on our website via PayPal, which will convert your fee automatically into pounds sterling.
• You can pay by cheque (payable to Mslexia Publications Ltd) or by debit or credit card (phone +44 (0)191 204 8860 with your details). You can also pay online via our website, but in this case you must include with your entry a note of the date on which you paid, and the email address you used, so that we can trace your payment.

Though we picked our winners at random, we want to recognize some of the other very strong research and writing by the students of Lower Gwynedd Elementary School (and kids from other states, too) as part of the Three Fascinating Facts about Sharks contest. Some of the information that you all found is simply too good not to share! Helen, a third grader in Mrs. Salvitti’s class, wrote: 1. Some sharks remain on the move for their whole lives. This forces water over their gills, delivering oxygen to the blood stream. If the shark stops moving then it will suffocate and die. 2. A pup (baby shark) is born ready to take care of itself. The mother shark leaves the pup to fend for itself and the pup usually makes a fast get away before the mother tries to eat it. 3. Not all species of shark give birth to live pups. Some species lay the egg case on the ocean floor and the pup hatches later on its own. Photo: Gills of a nurse shark And how about these interesting facts from Shelby: 1. Sometimes they will take a bite out of their prey or just sink their teeth in to get a taste before they start really feeding. 2. A shark attack on a human usually occurs in less than 6 feet 6 inches of calm water, and within a relatively short distance from shore. 3.The Megamouth shark is one of the rarest of the shark species. It was discovered in 1976. Photo: Megamouth Shark We loved all these great comparisons from Zac: 1. Every shark has tiny sensors at the tip of its snout to help it find food like a metal detector finding treasure. 2. Sharks have teeth all over their body. Their skin has really tiny spikes, like a prickle bush. 3. A shark’s teeth are in rows like a roller coaster ride. If a shark looses one of its teeth, one will grow back right away and move forward to take the place of the old one. Just like when a person gets off a roller coaster, a new person will take their place for the next ride. Andrew, from 3Go, managed to come up with three unique facts that no one else submitted: 1. Nurse sharks are nocturnal predators. 2. Dogfish are a type of shark. 3. Horn sharks are oviparous. Photo: Horn SharkAnd finally this from fifth grader Cassidy S. This is practically an essay - your information is fascinating, indeed! 1. In New Zealand, there is a shark that barks like a dog. It is called the Swell Shark. It is a catshark of the family Scyliorhinidae. It is found in the subtropical eastern Pacific Ocean. 2. Most sharks give birth to their babies. Only a few sharks lay eggs. Most sharks have six to twelve babies at a time, but a Tiger Shark and Hammerhead can have as many as 40 babies at a time. 3. The Whale Shark is the biggest fish in the world. It has more than 4,000 teeth, but each is less than 1/8 inch long. A shark may go through 1,000 sets of teeth during its lifetime. When a shark loses a tooth, one replaces it. A Whale Shark weighs about 40,000 pounds. We also had two excellent entries from students who do not attend Lower Gwynedd School.Danielle age:11 teacher: Mrs. HavrgraveSchool: Harbins Elementary city: Dacula, GeorgiaFact 1: The blind shark got its name from the habit of retracting their eye balls, which makes their eye lids close.Fact 2: Some sharks don’t eat meat, they eat mollusks and clams and live close to the bottom of the ocean to get their food.Fact 3: Sharks eat different amounts depending on the kind of shark they are. Some sharks can eat a huge amount of food and live of the oils in their liver. When the oil gets low they have the instinct to eat again.Jacob age: 9 Teacher: Mrs Backlund School: Independence Elementry City: Big Lake, MN1. A great white shark can weigh up to seven thousand pounds.2. Sharks have existed for over 300 million years. They are older than the dinosaurs.3. The bull shark is the only shark that can live in freshwater and saltwater.Photo: Great White Shark Editor’s Note: We have checked all the facts and made a few edits to correct inaccuracies, so that everything you are reading here is true. And fascinating!

       In The Australian they have an adapted version of Helen Garner's keynote speech last month at the inaugural Stella Prize, the new Australian literary prize that only considers works by women -- though in speaking about The losing game of writing books to win Garner's focus isn't on the women-only aspect as instead she talks more generally:

about the bizarre effects of prizes on people's idea of their own worth, and about the undeniable fact that every girl who writes needs a bucket of cash to be thrown over her at least once in her life, so she can soldier on, and even feel for a while that it's been worth the torture.

If she could read, Pink would check out the tales of the Ginge Club and make sure she’s presented in the best possible light, as the most beautiful, alluring and fashionable pink cat who ever lived.  I’ve told her that’s exactly how she’s presented in the stories, and in the blog, but I don’t think she trusts me entirely.  That’s why she’s been staring at my Kindle, trying to see inside it.   She probably thinks it’s a mirror.  She knows what mirrors are because she spends hours every day staring into the one in our bedroom, preening herself and showing off to the looking glass.  Alleycat’s different.  He says he doesn’t care what anyone thinks so long as he can sleep whenever and wherever he wants and demand food at the drop of a hat.  Of course, he’s given me a few guidelines.  For one, thing. I’m never to give Snatcher too much attention or importance and for another I’ve got to impress everyone with Alleycat’s fine qualities.  Bamber alone of our three cats has little interest in such matters.  He doesn’t care about social media and his heart is set on being a cat and staying a cat and doing the best he can at being that.

I was in the mood for something light and funny the other day, so I went to see what the internet had to offer in the way of non-Charlie Chan novels by Earl Derr Biggers. I found Love Insurance, which was exactly what I was looking for, except in that it didn’t really thrill me in any way.

The premise is kind of excellent, to a point, and if the book had revolved around Owen Jephson, underwriter for Lloyd’s of London, I think I would have liked it more. Jephson specializes in insuring incedibly peculiar things: he’s insured an actor against losing weight, a duchess against rain at her garden party, etc. I want very badly for Herbert George Jenkins to have written a book about Jephson, but sadly the world doesn’t work that way. And Biggers is more concerned first with Allan, Lord Harrowby, who wants to insure his wedding date, and then, more centrally, with Dick Minot, who Lloyd’s sends to Florida and protect their assets by making sure that Harrowby’s wedding to the beautiful Cynthia Meyrick goes as planned. Minot, inevitably, falls in love with Cynthia almost at first sight, and that’s only the first of many complications — there are jewel thieves, long-lost relatives, blackmail, and a society matron who hires a guy to write bon mots for her. And that list barely scrapes the surface.

In general, I really, really like about the first 3/4 of any given Earl Derr Biggers book, but this one felt more consistent. I never liked it as much as the beginning of Seven Keys to Baldpate or The Agony Column, but I liked it pretty much equally all the way through. Possibly that was because it was pretty intensely predictable, but that was okay, beasue it was all pretty silly and fun, too.

This is one of those books I sort of vaguely like but can’t work up any enthusiasm about, and I don’t know whether that’s my fault, or if it’s that Biggers didn’t expend any effort on characterization, or that the most interesting character disappeared after the first few chapters or what. I suspect a lot of people will enjoy it more than I did.

It's almost four a.m. and what am  I doing up? I'm leaving for South Africa!  Our flight at 3:10  p.m. which means in twelve hours, we will in the air heading for Amsterdam, and then to Cape Town!  (Maybe I need a few more exclamation points there).
In case you're interested: the flight from Minneapolis to Amsterdam is eight hours. After a three-hour layover in Amsterdam, our flight to Cape Town is twelve more hours.

I've received quite a few messages in the last twenty-four hours from excited students. After all this time, all this reading, all this discussion...we are FINALLY GOING! 

All the prep time, all the hours Scott Fee and I sat together at the Coffee Hag or Wine Cafe, hammering out details, transportation, lodging, budget, proposals, plans, writing emails, answering the phone, getting paperwork done....it all comes down to today. We are truly going to South Africa.

A year ago in the spring, I was at Joe Tougas's 50th birthday party when Scott (Construction Management, MSU,M, who has traveled to South Africa about ten times) asked me if I would ever consider taking SCC students to South Africa. Four days later, we were in my dean's office, sketching out possibilities and asking permission to pursue this interdisciplinary trip. Chris Black-Hughes from MSU,M Social Work program joined in, and we are doing this collaboratively.

I've wanted to see South Africa since I read The Power of One  nearly twenty years ago.

There have been so many added responsibilities and a few surprises this week, that my grading did NOT get done on time. I'm done now, though. I just have to enter grades. Good grief. Finally. Then I'm headed to bed for a few hours. We'll take some photos at the airport. In nine hours!

Olga Stern is a visual development artist based in Toronto who also illustrates books. You can visit her website, blog, other blog, and portfolio blog to see her work.

Besides her character and environmental designs, you can see landscape studies that Olga draws in pastels. She initially learned to “paint” with pastels during a class taught by Bill Cone that was part of her three-month internship at Pixar. See her work from that class here.

       They're holding this year's 'Festival international du livre et du film' Étonnants Voyageurs this weekend -- and that's a pretty fine and packed list of participants they have there.

As of November 20, 2012 (that is, Midnight Eastern Time tonight) I am closed to queries. I will reopen to queries January 7, 2013.

If I already have your work, you should hear from me by January 7. (That's the point of taking the break, I have to catch up!)

LATEST NEWS

The North Carolina Press Foundation is offering four of Artie’s serial stories to Newspapers in Education (NIE) newspapers across the United States. This year’s theme is Dig into Reading. In addition to the NIE, the foundation will also be offering Artie’s work to libraries and other newspapers throughout the United States. To read the stories please click on the NC Press Foundation link listed above.

Two of Artie’s children’s books will be featured on Ameba TV beginning this summer. Based in Canada, Ameba TV is presently streamed worldwide in million of homes.

Ameba TV’s rich, diverse content library delivers thousands of hours of educational, preschool, musical, and multilingual programming to children ages 2 to 12. The popular children’s streaming TV service features award-winning shows, like WordWorld, The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That, BusyTown Mysteries, and Ruby Skye PI.

More to come!

View from a Zoo – Bored with her life, a housecat seeks out adventure in this new fully illustrated picture book coming in the summer of 2013. Written by Artie, the book is being illustrated by the incredibly talented Indian artist Sunayana Nair Kanjilal. More to come as the book’s release date gets closer….

Use of any of the content on this website without permission is prohibited by federal law

After seeing many tantalizing mentions of Tara Books over the last few years, I was delighted to receive Joydeb Chitrakar and Gita Wolf’s The Enduring Ark and get a firsthand look at one of their creations.

They say that from time to time, the world must be made all over again. Ancient stories remember from an age when a huge flood destroyed the earth. Almost everything as we know it disappeared under water, and it was only later, in the course of time, that new life emerged again from the remains of the old. You may have heard this story before, but great tales deserve to be repeated — and so let me tell it here again, in my way.

So begins Gita Wolf in her version of that old story in The Enduring Ark, but even before we read this text we’ve seen a huge eye seemingly merging into water signaling to us that this will be a retelling like no other. That is because of the unique accordian-style book making and Joydeb Chitrakar’s vivid illustrations done in the West Bengali Patua style of scroll painting. Readers can immerse themselves in Wolf and Chitrakar’s intertwined words and art by conventionally turning the pages or by opening the book to view them all at once. Water flows through the book from that first enormous eye of warning, tinkling through the gentle stream at Noah’s home, on as he collects his creatures, rising with the flood, and ending with the water merging with a rainbow of hope. The Enduring Ark is a spectacularly gorgeous book, one well worth reading again and again.

And Tara Books is a remarkable publisher, a co-operative founded by writers and designers and committed to feminist and egalitarian principles and gorgeous visual bookmaking. Based in Chennai, South India, many of their books are completely handmade and they are focused on celebrating the range of Indian art. For a fascinating look at how their books are made and more I recommend taking a look at their blog.

I’m a runner. You can call me every insult in the book and I really won’t care. I will probably even laugh. But the second you call me a JOGGER…all bets are off.

———
Make your running even FASTER…posts HERE, HERE, and HERE.

More Runner’s Strip comics and cartoons HERE.
———

1) What’s something that non-runners say or ask you that may annoy you?

2) Do you use runner and jogger interchangeably or do you definitely keep the adjectives in line?

3) How do you usually react to insults?
Usually I do end up laughing.

Olga Stern is a visual development artist based in Toronto who also illustrates books. You can visit her website, blog, other blog, and portfolio blog to see her work.

Besides her character and environmental designs, you can see landscape studies that Olga draws in pastels. She initially learned to “paint” with pastels during a class taught by Bill Cone that was part of her three-month internship at Pixar. See her work from that class here.

       I missed this last week, but they've announced the longlist for the (South African) Sunday Times Fiction Prize -- where, unusually for a literary prize, once again: "A large number of books on the longlist this year are crime novels".
       Among the authors of note with books on the 31-title-strong longlist are: Michiel Heyns, Nadine Gordimer, Imraan Coovadia (with the wonderfully titled The Institute for Taxi Poetry -- which I'd love to see), and Andre Brink.

Last week after word got out that Disney was seeking to trademark “Día de los Muertos” in preparation for its 2015 release of a Pixar animated feature inspired by the traditional Mexican holiday, several online communities were outraged. The backlash kicked into high gear when cartoonist and illustrator Lalo Alcaraz shared a poster of a Godzilla-like Mickey Mouse under the words, “It’s coming to trademark your cultura.” [image above]

Social media has always kept Disney in check, and this time is no different. Latino Rebels, an online community that has done a terrific job of tracking Disney’s depiction of Latino culture, helped handle and report on the groundswell of public outcry over the last few weeks. After several petitions and pressure, Disney announced last Tuesday that they would withdraw the trademark filing, claiming that it was no longer necessary since they had changed the title of the fim.

In an interview with Cartoon Brew, William Nericcio, a scholar specializing in the representation of Latinos in American pop culture and author of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America, said, “[Hollywood's] attitude towards culture is like a pelt hunter from the 19th century. They need the skin that people recognize and value in order to sell a project that will yield predictable profits.”

Nericcio acknowledges that Pixar and Disney face an uphill battle in producing their Day of the Dead feature, which is to be directed by Toy Story 3 helmer Lee Unkrich: ”I think it’s wonderful that Pixar is working on a Mexico, cultural-based project. But it’s a public relations nightmare. They’re not really equipped to talk about other cultures in a way that shows even the slightest sensitivity.”

While Nericcio supports the critical eye cast by social media, he does express concerns over extreme backlash. “The downside of it is, companies like Disney could get scared off of projects that might be focused on Latin American culture, just because they got burned,” he explains. Ultimately, the appeal of a Dia de Los Muertos film is undeniable; the imagery connected to the celebration is so lush, providing a palette that would inspire any moviegoer. “It’s good business to green light a project on la cultura Mexicana. Everybody’s loving the wrestlers, the icons, the color, the exoticness,” Nericcio says. “But when you have the patent lawyers involved, they come off looking terrible.”

Nericcio, a self-admitted Pixar fan would love to see a Dia de los Muertos animated film, as would so many others. Fortunately, there’s another film on the horizon—Guillermo del Toro and Jorge Gutierrez are currently producing and directing (respectively) their own Day of the Dead-themed feature at Reel FX called The Book of Life, to be released through Fox in October of 2014, more than a year before the Disney-Pixar feature. There’s no word yet whether Mexico-born del Toro and Gutierrez will seek trademarks of their own.

I was sitting in the movie theater today, minding my own business, (and Captain Kirks!), when all of the sudden three words came to me. “Change Your Destiny”. I was so surprised that I dug down into my purse ( the black hole), looking for my notebook so i might them down.
Along with the words came a sudden rush of hope and direction for my future. Instead of watching the Star Trek movie I began thinking of things I could turn around in my life that would mean a different future, even 3 months from now.

How many times in our lives do we stay the course because it is easy or familiar? What would happen if we chose three things in each day, and purposed in our hearts to do them differently? Perhaps that wild mean venturing out to see a neighbor you hadn’t seen in a while? Or put down that cheese sandwich and opt for a salad? Why not carve out an hour of the day to work on your novel or write a letter to a relative? Maybe it’s time you tackle your To Do List?

I will think out loud here and list some different areas of interest to me.

God
Family
Friends
Job
Exercise
Diet
Home front
Hobbies
Inspiration
Gardening

Under each heading could be multiple topics.

Imagine if you took a new course of action for each heading, each day. How might that change your life by this time next year? Just think! You could come to the end of the year a new person. Or perhaps you might become the person you were meant to be? What area might you work on this week?

Heaven! The final frontier! But what will you do before that??? I LOVE the thought of CHA CHA CHANGE!!!

Are you with me?

Pretty sure we are on version Critter 3.0...

Introducing Cork Critters!!

I'm going to write a little more about hunting for your story (something that happens to somebody and its significance) with setting, because I recently finished reading a book that illustrates my point. Speaking From Among the Bones by Alan Bradley is the most recent of the Flavia de Luce books. They're written for the adult market, but their protagonist, Flavia, is eleven years old, making them appropriate material for Original Content.

These books are very, very dependent upon their historical setting. As I wrote after reading the first one:

"Setting this book in 1950 was a stroke of genius. Flavia is a bit over-the-top. Oh, hell, she's a lot of over-the-top, which is what makes her so marvelous. But no one could begin to believe she could exist in the twenty-first century. Her extensive knowledge of...all kinds of things...could only be acquired in a world without TV, malls, dance lessons, sports, and, it would seem, traditional schooling. (School is never mentioned.) And, for me, a big stumbling block with child mysteries is the fact that kids can't get around places on their own. But Flavia's always jumping on her old bike and pedaling off all over the place. It's believable in a pre-suburban world. I have ridden my bike to the library and even a church tag sale, but it's a huge undertaking, taking a big chunk out of my day. Traffic being what it is, I'm taking my life in my hands every time I do it. But in Flavia's world, it works."

Readers accept this quite unbelievable child because her stories are set in the past, and we believe things were different in days of old. We're more willing to accept Flavia's apparently self-taught brilliance because we can accept that children in the past may well have worked harder on their own and achieved more that way. If these books were set in the here and now, Flavia wouldn't work. Her wandering all over town on her own wouldn't work in the twentieth century, either, because in our culture we would fear for unsupervised children. But the past, we think, was safer--even though in every book Flavia is nearly killed. We Americans also have this image of England, especially England in the past, as being a small place with villages close together. We believe a child could bike from one village to another. Could she bike from one suburban town to another in 2013? Not where I live.

Placing those books in 1950's England has a big, big impact on the story and what can happen in the story.

Think, also, of eleven/twelve-year-old characters in fantasies. They do ridiculously unbelievable things--lead others in battle...defeat gods...escape from repressive governments. But the fantasy settings are ridiculously unbelievable to begin with. Once that setting is established, the writers can make things happen that they couldn't make happen in a real-world setting.

Related to setting is place. Check out The Five Pillars of Place at Ploughshares.

So, the point here is work on your setting to help you determine what is going to happen to whom and its significance.

Last weekend was my alma mater’s high school graduation. A thrilling, momentous (and gorgeous) day! It made me think back to my own graduation and the fact that what scared me at 18 scares me still: moving forward into the unknown. In fact, if I could go back and give myself advice it would probably be this: The future is scary. It never stops being scary. Get used to it. And don’t be scared.

Don’t get me wrong, I was excited to leave high school, to venture out of state to college, to make new friends and take classes towards two majors I was passionate about (screenwriting! creative writing! so much writing!). But I was also terrified. My high school was a cocoon of all that was familiar and comfortable and good. Not that every day was bliss. There were fights and tears and stress. But what I realized on graduation night was that I wasn’t ready to leave. I’m never ready to leave: not school, not a party, not vacation. I’m not ready to leave for work in the morning, and I’m not ready to leave work in the afternoon. And I’m NEVER ready to go to bed at night, no matter how tired I feel.

I spent much of the summer before college doing what I loved: reading–and finally there was no required reading. Free to read what I wanted, I think I read nothing but Orson Scott Card. I’m not going to get political here because this was during an innocent time before the internet gobbled me whole, so these books were merely the words on the page and what I brought to them.

I remember it so clearly. I was sitting on the deck at my parents’ house, feeling sorry for myself because in a few months time I would be far away from the beautiful rolling hills, when I came to one specific passage.

Alvin grimaced at him.  ‘Taleswapper, I’m not ready to leave home yet.’
‘Maybe folks have to leave home before they’re ready, or they never get ready at all.”

I stopped and read it again. Because although I had not named it out loud, that was me. I was Alvin. And Taleswapper’s words were exactly what I needed to hear: it’s okay to be scared. It’s okay to not feel ready. Because if you wait to feel ready, then you’ll be waiting forever. Sometimes you have to jump out of the plane and trust that your parachute will open.*

*(Please note, I have never been sky diving, but I know someone who has, so that’s almost the same thing, right?)

It’s funny to think back to that day, because it it planted a seed which has motivated me many times since. Not always, of course. Sometimes I still chicken out. But sometimes when anxiety refuses to release its stranglehold: a new relationship, a new job, a new adventure–I find myself thinking back to those wise words, and I realize that I will be okay, because I’m always okay.

And if Orson Scott Card is not your bent, a good friend of mine recently gave me a new mantra, one that she repeats to her daughter whenever she is scared worried. “You are BRAVE. You are STRONG. You are WONDERFUL. And YOU will be fine.” What better words could you ever need?

There are so many things I could have missed out on, if I gave into fear:

So do you embrace the future at full tilt? Or are you worry-wart* like me?

*(Officially diagnosed by my 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Burton. Thanks for that.)

What gets you through the scary times?