Results of Morgen’s 100-word competition: Sept 2021

Hello everyone and welcome to the seventy-third month of this competition. There were 51 entries from 22 authors for the theme of ‘Harold goes shopping’. An interesting mix this month with a handful where Harold went into the shop one gender and came out (no pun intended) another. Very well handled as were several charming stories or loss. Some included historical Harolds, many amusing, some poignant.

Please note: I have decided to cease the competition at the end of the year to free up time for my writing. It’ll have been 76 months in the making and a pleasure but sadly, as December’s prompt is going to be, ‘sometimes good things have to come to an end’. Any prizes won up to/including that point will still be honoured until the end of February 2022 so if you choose the editing option, get those stories written. 🙂

One was disqualified for being 102 words and sadly the author had contacted me saying it had been correct on his Word but not on the word counter website. As there had been hyphens between four words, making them two, when separated (as it was an aside so longer dashes with a space either side) changed the word count.

Two from one author were disqualified for being 99 words as each story had a word (sweetheart, stallholders) incorrectly written as two words each. The third story went through to judging. Another author’s story had ‘paper boy’ rather than ‘paperboy’ so that ‘went’ too. As did a ‘door step’ (https://www.lexico.com/definition/doorstep).

Another was 99 words with no obvious reason other than having a word too few, although it had ‘five months old daughter’ instead of ‘five-month-old daughter’ which would have also affected the word count. It was the only one from the author which is a real shame.

https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/deja_vu is two words with accents on the e and a: déjà vu, so one story became 101 with it split. Another entrant’s three submissions were all 150 words so sadly disqualified.

One entrant’s only story was sadly for ‘screams from a now hoarsy throat’ instead of ‘screams from a now-hoarsy throat’, impacting the word count. A way of checking to see whether an adjective (‘modifier’) should be hyphenated is whether each word works independently. Here a ‘hoarsy throat’ would be fine but a ‘now throat’ wouldn’t. Ditto ‘old-school style’ rather than ‘old school style’ (one author’s only entry). 😦 And ‘heart-wrenching days’ https://www.lexico.com/definition/heart-wrenching (which was my favourite story from that author so I had to choose another). One story lost a brownie point for not switching tenses (referring to a previous time in the simple past when the story was already in the past), i.e. ‘he’d arrived’ rather than ‘he arrived’. This wouldn’t have affected the word count so it was still applicable. Another lost a point for switching point of view (from the main character to a secondary and back again) rather than having the main character know that was how the other person felt, so we stay with the MC viewpoint.

Other observations:

• I’m a stickler for unintended repetition, some of which may feel rather pedantic but I listen to the document on my Kindle (Fire’s text to speech), alongside reading it on the screen, and this leapt out. ‘just, ‘now’, ‘very’ ‘back’ and ‘all’ are often overused. In this case shopping. Harold ‘detested shopping with his wife and rarely went shopping without her’. We don’t need the second ‘shopping’. I recommend reading your writing aloud, or getting your computer (or Kindle) to do it for you. It really does help.
• When speaking to someone and using a name, nickname or term of endearment (which counts as a name), generalisation (guys, ladies etc.), you’d need a comma before the name, i.e. ‘Do you know John?’ is asking if the person knows someone called John. ‘Do you know, John?’ means that the character is speaking to someone called John but asking them if they know something. A subtle difference but you want to avoid confusing the reader so they jump out of the story. If what’s said is very short, e.g. ‘Hi John’, then the comma’s not so important.
• Stopping dead is a cliché (as would be stopping something or someone ‘dead in his / her tracks’).
• In the novels I edit, I check for nodding of heads and shrugging of shoulders to remove the ‘his / her head’ or ‘his / her shoulders’ because we only move with those parts of our bodies. Nods especially are often overused. We also only clap with our hands, and shaking heads are usually ‘side to side’ so the how isn’t needed. Certainly mention the body part (or other) if it’s done a different way.
• Although grammatically correct, I strongly recommend not putting commas between adjectives, and certainly not immediately before the noun / object. It slows the pace… really slows it where there are several. In my opinion, commas work best when the reader is supposed to breathe (or the writer wants to make the reader pause for a particular reason). They wouldn’t need to when describing an object and anything that slows what should be a fast-paced page-turning read is best avoided.
• Where it’s clear how something is said or a character feels, you can lose the ‘with…’ or ‘in…’ emotion, e.g. ‘exploded with rage’, or they jump because they’re startled/frightened etc – there the jumping is enough. As long as we have the context (the ‘show’) we don’t need the explaining description (the ‘tell’).
• One of the stories was particularly quirky, which I love, but I wasn’t sure – with the mention of a non-gender-specific cat, then ‘he’, presumably Harold, slipping into a plastic bowl – who all the ‘he’s were. I had already chosen another of the author’s stories (read the quirky one again, still went ‘huh?’, then filed it) but it’s a very useful prompt regarding gender. Where you have two characters of the same gender in the scene, it can be confusing with just ‘he, she, him, her’ etc. (they should always refer to the last character mentioned, e.g. Emma and Tim went to visit her grandfather. He thought the man looked tired. = Tim thought…).
• Where an action (verb) has ‘starts to’ / ‘started to’ or ‘begins to’ / ‘began to’ before it, most of the time they’re not needed because unless the action is interrupted, the verb alone works better / is stronger. An example would be ‘the phone began to ring’. If it stops without being answered then that’s fine (although it still rang!) but if not then just have ‘the phone rang’.
• Where speech has an unrelated dialogue tag, e.g. someone laughing, moving, smiling, waving etc. (with it capitalised: He laughed. She picked up the mug. etc.) the punctuation should be a full stop rather than a comma so: He laughed. ‘Say that again.’. Had it been related description, it would be a comma: ‘Say that again,’ he said while fiddling with his tie.
• Unless a continuation*, speech should always start a capital letter. *e.g. ‘When you go there,’ Tom said, ‘tell him I said “Hi”.’ (vs ‘When you go there, tell him I said “Hi”,’ Tom said.)
• I strongly recommend you don’t invert dialogue tags as it’s not how we would naturally speak if talking aloud, e.g. changing ‘said Tony’ to ‘Tony said’. We wouldn’t say ‘said I’ so the same applies when there’s a name rather than ‘I’. ‘said’s do tend to blur into the background so don’t try too hard to choose something else, e.g. ‘Tony postulated’, even ‘Tony exclaimed’ could be too much if we already have the likes of ‘Get out!’ If you have the character doing something then you don’t need the ‘said’ (or equivalent) tag – have the ‘doing’ (narration), e.g. Tony shook his head. ‘That’s not right.’. Or if we know who’s speaking – because there are only two people in a scene and the other has spoken then just have the dialogue. You can have up to three exchanges (He said/she said/he replied/she replied/he said/she said) without anything – as the reader is clever enough to keep up – before needing some narration or a ‘tag’.

I did a poll on Facebook back in June 2020 about this topic (https://www.facebook.com/morgenwriteruk/posts/3089287701133219) and there was a fair split on not liking (with some agreeing they’re not natural), not minding, not noticing and not needing so many (or any!) dialogue tags. I’m all for authors having a certain style but what we want to avoid is running the risk of alienating some readers, certainly by having too many and there were a lot of non-dialogue verbs (nodding, smiling etc), all of which I amended. As Ernest Hemingway is quoted as saying, ‘Easy reading is hard writing.’ And we both want as fluid a read as possible, especially for the hundredth reader (out of a hundred) who will pick up on everything.

The winning stories are ones that I reacted most favourably to. They were clever, surprising, eek-making (in a good way), or gave me a warm fuzzy feeling (without being sickly). Sometimes a story beats another because it has a stronger link to the theme so it’s worth writing a story to the theme rather than tweaking a story you already have to loosely fit it. Alternatively there may have been several stories on with same topic so I chose my favourite of those. With any competition, much rests upon the judge’s preference and it’s usually ones than garner a stronger (positive) reaction that do the best.

Often, for me, it’s where the author has thought outside the clichéd box. Although I would have preferred to have the winning story written entirely in past tense (rather than a mix of past and present), and it could have been read as the character leaving the shop then the shopkeeper speaking to him (which could have been possible had he/she followed him), it had the ‘wow’ factor.

You may have chosen a different order or indeed not placed one or more of them so if you entered and didn’t find your story / stories here, don’t lose heart. You probably only just missed out so do enter new stories this month*, next month, whenever you like (but not in advance!). It’s an ongoing competition and free, so you could win at any time. There were new and familiar names this month so anyone could win… it’s all dependent upon whether your story grabs me, for whatever reason (whether it be clever, funny, unusual, quirky, or sweet).

Apart from the top three and highly commended, there are some ‘Honourable Mentions’. They don’t win anything but they were so close to being Highly Commended that I wanted them to know how close they came. It’s still something for them to put on their CVs.

*The theme for October is ‘a sticky end’ and you can submit your entries (and do send three) at any time up to midnight (UK time) on Sunday 31st October. Details and entry forms on https://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/100-word-free-monthly-competition. So without further ado, below are the successful entries this month.

*

First place (winning free access to three of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £60 / $60) or a free edit and critique of up to 2,000 words (worth £30 / $42):

Julia Ruth Smith with ‘No Eyes That Have Seen Beauty Ever Lose Their Sight’

Harold went shopping for new eyes for his sister.

She’s going blind. She’s not easy to please with her flaming hair and wilful temperament.

Harold’s a military man but he shed a tear for the choice set out before him. There were eyes that had seen it all; violence, frightened women. There were hearths and happy children. He caught views of mountains and indigo water.

In the end he left the shop with his choice in a transparent bag. The storeowner begged him to be careful. The eyes of one who has nothing to lose are a sight to behold.

*

Second place (winning free access to two of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £40 / $40) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,500 words (worth £22.50 / $31.50):

Laura Besley with ‘The Price of Love’

Harold goes to the baby shop, trusting his instincts will kick in when he’s there.

Inside it smells of strawberry-sweet shampoo and talc. Stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves are dozens and dozens of babies.

‘Take as long as you like,’ the shop assistant says.

Eyes follow him as he inches along.

Then he spots her. Pudge-rolls near bursting around her wrists and knees, large gummy smile, lavender eyes.

‘Would you like her gift-wrapped, sir?’

‘Yes, please,’ Harold says. ‘She’s for my wife.’

Carrying her in his arms, Harold takes the long route home. Her bow blows in the late summer breeze.

*

Joint third place (each winning free access to one of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £20 / $20) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,000 words (worth £15 / $21):

Denise Bayes with ‘Vita’s Valentine’

White blooms surround him. Harold bends close to inhale sweet gardenia, fragrant roses. The florist shop is heady with scent, reminiscent of the garden they have created together at Sissinghurst. He shakes his head. She has all the flowers she could desire.

Maybe a vase? She could display her bouquets, position this stylish turquoise ceramic in the midst of their elegantly curated home. He knows she admires the colour, recalls her gift to Virginia.

Then Harold catches sight of the glass paperweight. Imagines it nestled on her desk as she is writing.

He holds out the heart to be wrapped.

*

Wendy Howard with ‘A Spirited Outing’

Harold saw his wife enter the charity shop. He knew Lou’s friend worked there and they’d talk, so he’d have time. She was donating some clutter from their last home. It had been time to downsize; he’d watched his collection being tidied and was pleased some pieces were kept.

Harold saw them hug – this might be his moment.

“Haven’t seen you in years! How are things?” That dreaded question.

Harold saw Lou tensing. He flew to her as she spoke.

“It’s been hard – I lost my husband.”

The butterfly was suddenly there, pretty around her face in the dowdy shop.

*

Highly commended (winning my Entering Writing Competitions course worth £20 / $20) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,000 words (worth £15 / $21) – in alphabetical order:

• Cathy MacKenzie with ‘Oh, to Live the Good Life’
• Darren York with ‘A Dog’s Life’
• Fiona McKay with ‘Becoming’
• Julian Cadman with ‘Harold Goes Shopping’
• Julie Gavin with ‘Ghostly Acquisition’
• Nicholas Marshall with ‘Still Smiling’

Honourable mentions (not winning anything but only narrowly missing out and still looking good on their CV) – in alphabetical order:

• Harry Ballantyne with ‘Where did these come from?’
• Jane Brown with Harold Goes Shopping For a New Name
• Joan Reed with Harold Watkins Esquire
• Paul Mastaglio with ‘Food Guide’
• Sue Massey with ‘Going Grey’

Congratulations, everyone. The entries for this month are already drifting in. Remember, you can send up to three per month so rather than miss out on a chance by sending one story, do submit more.

If you’ve enjoyed these stories and / or just want to leave a comment, please do so below and / or you can email me at morgen@morgenbailey.com., although I won’t (can’t) discuss forthcoming entries unless it’s a general query.

Results of Morgen’s 100-word competition: Aug 2021

Hello everyone and welcome to the seventy-second month of this competition. There were 46 entries from 22 authors for the theme of ‘an odd pairing’. NB You can all send in three stories for a better chance of being picked. As with most months

Please note: I have decided to cease the competition at the end of the year to free up time for my writing. It’ll have been 76 months in the making and a pleasure but sadly, as December’s prompt is going to be, ‘sometimes good things have to come to an end’. Any prizes won up to/including that point will still be honoured until the end of February 2022 so if you choose the editing option, get those stories written. 🙂 Speaking of which…

One was disqualified for only being 97 words. There were two exclamation marks which hadn’t been attached to the previous words but even so it would have only been 99. Shame. It had a three-word title so perhaps included. Another was 103 with no clear reason why, simply too many words. Another started as 100 words but dropped to 99 when ‘still warm’ washing was hyphenated. The author had sent in two other stories but one had two words with connecting ellipses but they still count as two words. When separated it made the story 101 words although there was technically a word too many (that’s all you do is talk = ‘that’s all you do’ or ‘all you do is talk’) so it could have been 100 words with the ‘that’s’ removed but not something the judge can do/does. An entrant’s only story was sadly disqualified for having ‘stubble covered’ legs and ‘clip on’ earrings, both of which should have been hyphenated. As should ‘too bold’ in another story. I have to be fair to everyone to stick to the grammatically correct word count.

Other observations:

• things are usually ‘that’ whereas people are usually ‘who’ (or ‘whom’ where it can be replaced by ‘him’ e.g. to whom / to him), i.e. he was the man who had lied (who = he had lied not him had lied) / it was the door that had been slammed.
• where an action (verb) has ‘starts to’ / ‘started to’ or ‘begins to’ / ‘began to’ before it, most of the time they’re not needed because unless the action is interrupted, the verb alone works better / is stronger. An example would be ‘the phone began to ring’. If it stops without being answered then that’s fine (although it still rang!) but if not then just have ‘the phone rang’.
• where speech has an unrelated dialogue tag, e.g. someone laughing, moving, smiling, waving etc. (with it capitalised: He laughed. She picked up the mug. etc.) the punctuation should be a full stop rather than a comma so: He laughed. ‘Say that again.’. Had it been related description, it would be a comma: ‘Say that again,’ he said while fiddling with his tie.
• like erm, we do say ‘well’ as a dialogue pause but it’s best not to include it in our writing, or at the most have it as a characteristic for one of the characters. Ditto ‘look’.
• https://www.lexico.com/definition/faint means barely perceptible, feeble, dizzy, to lose consciousness, have no idea (to not have the faintest) whereas https://www.lexico.com/definition/feint is a mock attack or the lines on printed paper.
• ellipses are one ‘character’ … rather than three individual full stops. Regardless of whether you put a word straight after them or have a space the two words () in this case count as two words.
• other than the likes of selfish, myself etc., most ‘self’ words are hyphenated. https://www.lexico.com/definition/self- provides a couple of examples. https://www.dailywritingtips.com/7-types-of-hyphenation-that-may-seem-wrong-but-aren’t also makes interesting reading. The same goes for ‘semi’ where most connecting adjectives (https://www.lexico.com/definition/semi-professional) are hyphenated (and therefore count as one word in a competition). Used alone it’s obviously not. See https://www.lexico.com/definition/semi.
• ‘out of the blue’ is a bit of a cliché. Clichés are okay (to a point) in dialogue but best avoided.
• I strongly recommend you don’t invert dialogue tags as it’s not how we would naturally speak if talking aloud, e.g. changing ‘said Tony’ to ‘Tony said’. We wouldn’t say ‘said I’ so the same applies when there’s a name rather than ‘I’. ‘said’s do tend to blur into the background so don’t try too hard to choose something else, e.g. ‘Tony postulated’, even ‘Tony exclaimed’ could be too much if we already have the likes of ‘Get out!’ If you have the character doing something then you don’t need the ‘said’ (or equivalent) tag – have the ‘doing’ (narration), e.g. Tony shook his head. ‘That’s not right.’. Or if we know who’s speaking – because there are only two people in a scene and the other has spoken then just have the dialogue. You can have up to three exchanges (He said/she said/he replied/she replied/he said/she said) without anything – as the reader is clever enough to keep up – before needing some narration or a ‘tag’.
  I did a poll on Facebook back in June 2020 about this topic (https://www.facebook.com/morgenwriteruk/posts/3089287701133219) and there was a fair split on not liking (with some agreeing they’re not natural), not minding, not noticing and not needing so many (or any!) dialogue tags. I’m all for authors having a certain style but what we want to avoid is running the risk of alienating some readers, certainly by having too many and there were a lot of non-dialogue verbs (nodding, smiling etc), all of which I amended. As Ernest Hemingway is quoted as saying, ‘Easy reading is hard writing.’ And we both want as fluid a read as possible, especially for the hundredth reader (out of a hundred) who will pick up on everything. 

The winning stories are ones that I reacted most favourably to. They were clever, surprising, eek-making (in a good way), or gave me a warm fuzzy feeling (without being sickly). Sometimes a story beats another because it has a stronger link to the theme so it’s worth writing a story to the theme rather than tweaking a story you already have to loosely fit it. Alternatively there may have been several stories on with same topic so I chose my favourite of those. With any competition, much rests upon the judge’s preference and it’s usually ones than garner a stronger (positive) reaction that do the best.

You may have chosen a different order or indeed not placed one or more of them so if you entered and didn’t find your story / stories here, don’t lose heart. You probably only just missed out so do enter new stories this month*, next month, whenever you like (but not in advance!). It’s an ongoing competition and free, so you could win at any time. There were new and familiar names this month so anyone could win… it’s all dependent upon whether your story grabs me, for whatever reason (whether it be clever, funny, unusual, quirky, or sweet).

Apart from the top three and highly commended, there are some ‘Honourable Mentions’. They don’t win anything but they were so close to being Highly Commended that I wanted them to know how close they came. It’s still something for them to put on their CVs.

*The theme for September is ‘Harold goes shopping’ and you can submit your entries (and do send three) at any time up to midnight (UK time) on Thursday 30th September. Details and entry forms on https://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/100-word-free-monthly-competition. So without further ado, below are the successful entries this month.

First place (winning free access to three of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £60 / $60) or a free edit and critique of up to 2,000 words (worth £30 / $42):

Nicholas Marshall with ‘Reflection’

They gather each 31 December in their finest clothes for the ball to welcome the next year.
Joanna, whose beauty is famous, always attends with an aged companion whose flesh does not seem human.
Between dances, when they rest, none of the other revellers choose to approach them.
For this year’s celebration, the ballroom is redecorated and mirrors are installed on every wall.
Joanna arrives with her companion and as they sweep across the ballroom others stand still and gasp.
Seen in the mirrors, her companion is a dashing young man, easily the most handsome ever seen at the occasion.

*

Joint second place (each winning free access to two of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £40 / $40) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,500 words (worth £22.50 / $31.50):

Darren York with ‘Driving Miss Dolly’

A risky job but I was desperate for money.
I picked Dolly up at eleven. A ten-minute drive to the bank. She shuffled inside dragging a shopping trolley containing the shotgun.
Polite and apologetic but she meant business. No mess or fuss.
I was young and fresh out of prison whereas Dolly was in her late seventies.
I helped her back inside the car then floored it.
Back at her house she made me a cup of tea and gave me my cut.
“Would you like to work with me again?”
Of course I did.
“Same time tomorrow then. Biscuit?”

*

Denise Bayes with ‘The Glove Counter’

“I’m so sorry. You see when my sister opened them, they didn’t match.”
Cora nods at the gentleman. She remembers him, of course. So handsome. A present for his sister’s birthday. She had covered the counter with shaped hands in soft kid.
He had asked her which she would choose, had looked into her eyes with such intensity. She had guided him towards the coral.
“I apologise. I don’t know how it happened.”
But Cora does know. As she had slipped a grey glove alongside the pink, she knew he would have to return.
She looks up into his eyes.

*

Third place (winning free access to one of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £20 / $20) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,000 words (worth £15 / $21):

Marcelo Medone with ‘Rufus & Juniper’

Rufus was the tallest man in the world. He had never found anyone to rival him in stature. Unfortunately, he had never found the love of his life.
Juniper was the smallest woman in the world. She lived alone in her little house, as small as she was, just outside the town where Rufus lived.
Life has its twists and turns. That’s something Rufus and Juniper learned the day their paths intersected.
Wandering aimlessly, Rufus arrived at Juniper’s house. Her heart skipped a beat. He stared at her, anxiously.
A feeling of sadness washed over them.
They never met again.

*

Highly commended (winning my Entering Writing Competitions course worth £20 / $20) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,000 words (worth £15 / $21) – in alphabetical order:

• Fiona McKay with ‘My Harvest’
• Harry Ballantyne with ‘A Pair of Tubes’
• Laura Besley with ‘Seeing Red’
• Raymond Brown with ‘Working The Streets’
• Sue Massey with ‘Pièce de résistance’

Honourable mentions (not winning anything but only narrowly missing out and still looking good on their CV) – in alphabetical order:

• Ash Nazir with ‘Happy Ending’
• Jim Latham with ‘Getting a Jump on Oaxacan Cuisine’
• Julie Gavin with ‘My One and Only’
• Wendy Howard with ‘Odd tastes, yet even, for the record’

Congratulations, everyone. The entries for this month are already drifting in. Remember, you can send up to three per month so rather than miss out on a chance by sending one story, do submit more.

If you’ve enjoyed these stories and / or just want to leave a comment, please do so below and / or you can email me at morgen@morgenbailey.com., although I won’t (can’t) discuss forthcoming entries unless it’s a general query.

Results of Morgen’s 100-word competition: July 2021

Dedicated to Jane Wenham-Jones, a great friend, wonderful lady who always had a smile on her face. I hope she knew how much she was loved and will be missed.

Hello everyone and welcome to the seventy-first month of this competition. There were 61 entries from 27 authors for the theme of ‘an unusual healing’. NB You can all send in three stories for a better chance of being picked.

Please note: I have decided to cease the competition at the end of the year to free up time for my writing. It’ll have been 76 months in the making and a pleasure but sadly, as December’s prompt is going to be, ‘sometimes good things have to come to an end’. Any prizes won up to/including that point will still be honoured until the end of February 2022 so if you choose the editing option, get those stories written.

Speaking of which…

One was disqualified for being 101 words; two sentences together with no space so when separated, the last/first words became two. Another was the same and simply had an extra word. It was then resent at the correct word count but sadly the rules state that the first version is the one accepted so both were disqualified. Another was 99 words as ‘finger nails’ is one word (https://www.lexico.com/definition/fingernail). That entrant had sent in five stories, where the max in one month is three, so the subsequent two were disqualified. One would have been anyway for having ‘ten year old boy’ instead of ‘ten-year-old boy’ which brought the word count to 98.

Another author’s submission was 99 words. There was a hyphenated word (after-lunch) so that could have been counted as two. Another was 101 for having ‘each other’ hyphenated.

One story lost a brownie point for having ‘clock strike’ rather than ‘clock strikes’ but an easy mistake to make. Another (same author) lost a point for ‘a air’ (an air) but it was disqualified anyway for having ‘with head wound’ rather than ‘with a head wound’ which makes it 101 words.

Other observations:

• where speech has an unrelated dialogue tag, e.g. someone laughing, moving, smiling, waving etc. (with it capitalised: He laughed. She picked up the mug. etc.) the punctuation should be a full stop rather than a comma so: He laughed. ‘Say that again.’. Had it been related description, it would be a comma: ‘Say that again,’ he said while fiddling with his tie.
• like erm, we do say ‘well’ as a dialogue pause but it’s best not to include it in our writing, or at the most have it as a characteristic for one of the characters. Ditto ‘look’.
• some stories had ‘no one’ as two words or ‘no-one’ as one word. Both are acceptable.
• careful of unintended repetition. One story lost a point for having two ‘now’s close together. technically, ‘now’ (‘by now’, ‘just now’, ‘right now’, ‘at the moment’, ‘at this moment’) is present tense, which is fine in dialogue but not in past tense narration. Had the narration been present tense, we still don’t need the ‘now’ because it’s technically happening now. All, now, very and just are often overused so I recommend, especially in a longer piece, seeing how many you have and chopping where possible.
• where an action (verb) has ‘starts to’ / ‘started to’ or ‘begins to’ / ‘began to’ before it, most of the time they’re not needed because unless the action is interrupted, the verb alone works better / is stronger. An example would be ‘the phone began to ring’. If it stops without being answered then that’s fine (although it still rang!) but if not then just have ‘the phone rang’.
• indirect (detached) action is where something is done by or to an object rather than character. i.e. have the character (Ted) throw the ball rather than say ‘The ball was thrown by Ted’. Also instead of saying ‘Ted saw the train speeding towards the car’, having the train speeding towards the car means you’re closer to the action.

The winning stories are ones that I reacted most favourably to. They were clever, surprising, eek-making (in a good way), or gave me a warm fuzzy feeling (without being sickly). Sometimes a story beats another because it has a stronger link to the theme so it’s worth writing a story to the theme rather than tweaking a story you already have to loosely fit it. Alternatively there may have been several stories on with same topic so I chose my favourite of those. With any competition, much rests upon the judge’s preference and it’s usually ones than garner a stronger (positive) reaction that do the best.

You may have chosen a different order or indeed not placed one or more of them so if you entered and didn’t find your story / stories here, don’t lose heart. You probably only just missed out so do enter new stories this month*, next month, whenever you like (but not in advance!). It’s an ongoing competition and free, so you could win at any time. There were new and familiar names this month so anyone could win… it’s all dependent upon whether your story grabs me, for whatever reason (whether it be clever, funny, unusual, quirky, or sweet).

Apart from the top three and highly commended, there are some ‘Honourable Mentions’. They don’t win anything but they were so close to being Highly Commended that I wanted them to know how close they came. It’s still something for them to put on their CVs.

*The theme for August is ‘an odd pairing’ and you can submit your entries (and do send three) at any time up to midnight (UK time) on Tuesday 31st August. Details and entry forms on https://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/100-word-free-monthly-competition. So without further ado, below are the successful entries this month.

Joint first place (each winning free access to three of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £60 / $60) or a free edit and critique of up to 2,000 words (worth £30 / $42):

Coralie Kavanagh with ‘The Stranger’
‘Shall I jump with you?’
Startled, she realised someone was talking to her. Her feet dangled precariously over the cliff edge, her body rigid, her face set.
‘Do what you like.’ She couldn’t care less.
‘I’m sick of living, just heartbreak. Let me come. Please. Better to go together. I’ll hold your hand.’
‘Hold my hand?’ That broke her. Emotion flooded her being, tears streamed from her surprised eyes, and she understood. She wanted to live! So determined had she been to end it all.
Carefully swinging her legs to safety, she turned to her stranger.
There was no-one there.

*

Jane Broughton with ‘Cultivation isn’t always civilised’

He called her ‘Rosebud’, stroked her satin and cradled her potential with cupped hands. The smell of loam embraced and nurtured her. She swelled, growing steadily as she arched towards the sun. The day she blossomed she burst like a supernova. Her fragrance swirled, escaping the confinement of her crimson corset.
The garden was slick with rain. He sighed as he plucked her. Rain bounced down, pebbles pounding the parched flowerbed. Petals cascaded, bruises bloomed. In her dreams there were always thorns, rusty red spikes hidden in everyday detritus. She tasted blood and welcomed the quiet healing of his absence.

*

Second place (winning free access to two of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £40 / $40) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,500 words (worth £22.50 / $31.50):

Fiona McKay with ‘An Unusual Haunting’

My mother comes back to haunt. As a fly. Every time I eat outside – a melting ice cream cone or bag of vinegary chips – there she is, buzzing me, in circles.
In the end, I buy a sticky fly-strip and drape it beside me as I tuck into an aromatic garden meal.
When the buzzing stops, I set the paper beside a perfect web and watch as the fly is slowly coated, crisscrossed, laced up with silk – then eaten.
I’m less hungry now, less alert for her buzzing: concentrating on the conversation. But what I eat, I now enjoy.

*

Joint third place (each winning free access to one of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £20 / $20) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,000 words (worth £15 / $21):

Denise Bayes with ‘The One You Left Me For’

I knew you would be here. Find you across the gaggle of mourners, balancing cups beside tiny plates of cake.
I have never met you. And yet I know you.
Our eyes lock.
I have hated you for so long. Sunday nights when the children returned full of how much better your cooking was, how much kinder you were. Their careless comparisons poked deep into my heart.
Again.
Like that first time. When he said he had found love with you.
You smile. The people move apart as I walk towards you.
We embrace each other, joined in our grief.

*

Nicholas Marshall with ‘Slimy and Yucky’

“Will it be us today?” Slimy asks.
“Might be,” Yucky replies.
Suddenly a scoop is plunged into their tank and they are lifted out so fast it makes them feel giddy.
Carried with many strangers in the darkness of a box, they hate their long journey.
At last they arrive at the hospital and know it is time for work.
Soon they are busy and slowly becoming bloated.
After forty minutes they fall back from the healing wound.
“Wow, we did such an amazing job,” Yucky says.
“Try to get this into proper perspective,” Slimy responds. “We’re only medical leeches.”

*

Highly commended (winning my Entering Writing Competitions course worth £20 / $20) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,000 words (worth £15 / $21) – in alphabetical order:

• Jim Latham with ‘Carnitas Tacos’
• Joan Reed with ‘Beside the Sea’
• Liz Hardie with ‘Puppy Power’
• Sue Massey with ‘Ouch’
• Tracey-anne Plater with ‘Sylvester’s Gone’

Honourable mentions (not winning anything but only narrowly missing out and still looking good on their CV) – in alphabetical order:

• Anthony Ramsawak with ‘The Gift’
• Christine Law with ‘Jemma’
• Dillon Trinh with ‘Roger and Roger’
• Douglas Goodrich with ‘Here Comes the Rain Again’
• Wendy Howard with ‘Loco-motive’

Congratulations, everyone. The entries for this month are already drifting in. Remember, you can send up to three per month so rather than miss out on a chance by sending one story, do submit more.

If you’ve enjoyed these stories and / or just want to leave a comment, please do so below and / or you can email me at morgen@morgenbailey.com, although I can’t discuss forthcoming entries unless it’s a general query.

Results of Morgen’s 100-word competition: June 2021

Hello everyone and welcome to the seventieth month of this competition. There were 56 entries from 22 authors for the theme of ‘the tourist trap’. NB You can all send in three stories for a better chance of being picked.

Please note: I have decided to cease the competition at the end of the year to free up time for my writing. It’ll have been 76 months in the making and a pleasure but sadly, as December’s prompt is going to be, ‘sometimes good things have to come to an end’. Any prizes won up to/including that point will still be honoured until the end of February 2022 so if you choose the editing option, get those stories written. 🙂 Speaking of which…

One was disqualified for being 101 words with no obvious reason for the extra word. Another had too but original included as one word (catch’em) so increased when separated. Fortunately in both cases the authors had submitted at least one more story of the correct word count so they went through.

One story was submitted twice (with a slightly different title and a few days apart) so the first one was accepted, as per the rules.

An author’s final story (submitted a few days after the other two) was only 95 words but with a five-word title (coincidence?) so was disqualified. The other two were 100 exactly so a sad blip.

A piece was disqualified for having ‘chewing gum’ hyphenated. Making them two words took it to 101. Had they preceded a noun, e.g. ‘a chewing-gum smile’ it would have been fine. The same went for ‘already deceased Philip’. I’d placed this joint second then noticed and disqualified it, a real shame.

The easiest way to know whether something should be hyphenated is to check whether each word would work before the noun, e.g. ‘a chewing smile’ or ‘a gum smile’ in this case. They don’t (in theory) so it would need the hyphen. The complication is when one of the words is an _ly adverb.

Another was disqualified for having ‘slow moving vehicles’ instead of ‘slow-moving’. There were still two stories to choose from. ‘to’ is a very simple word but also simple to get wrong. A story lost a brownie point for having ‘I don’t want too’ instead of ‘…to’ and had a full stop at the end of dialogue preceding a dialogue ‘tag’ (whispered) but that’s easily done.

Other observations:

• When we have someone’s/something’s age, we don’t usually need the ‘years old’ or ‘years of age’ because the number – within the right context – is sufficient. There would also only be a hyphen if preceding a noun (or implied), e.g. a fourteen-year-old girl / a fourteen-year-old. Had there been a non-exact name using ‘something’ (or similar), the ‘something’ represents an unknown number so it would all still be hyphenated as the likes of ‘twenty-two-year-old nurse’ would have been. One story was disqualified for having ‘Seventy-eight year old’ which when conjoined then made 98 words. Sorry but I have to be fair to everyone.
• Decades, when written in digits, don’t need apostrophes because they’re plural rather than something belonging to them, e.g. the man’s wife. Had it been, say, a 1970’s car then it would have an apostrophe because it’s a car belonging to the 1970s or someone being in their 20s (which is better as twenties so the text blends rather than stands out). As full text they’re a standard noun so seventies, eighties, nineties etc.
• https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/hoard is ‘a bulk of items often kept secret’ whereas https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/horde is ‘a large group of people’. A misspelling may lose a brownie point but it’s a cruel judge who disqualifies your story because of it.
• I strongly recommend you don’t invert dialogue tags as it’s not how we would naturally speak if talking aloud, e.g. changing ‘said Tony’ to ‘Tony said’. We wouldn’t say ‘said I’ so the same applies when there’s a name rather than ‘I’. ‘said’s do tend to blur into the background so don’t try too hard to choose something else, e.g. ‘Tony postulated’, even ‘Tony exclaimed’ could be too much if we already have the likes of ‘Get out!’ If you have the character doing something then you don’t need the ‘said’ (or equivalent) tag – have the ‘doing’ (narration), e.g. Tony shook his head. ‘That’s not right.’. Or if we know who’s speaking – because there are only two people in a scene and the other has spoken then just have the dialogue. You can have up to three exchanges (He said/she said/he replied/she replied/he said/she said) without anything – as the reader is clever enough to keep up – before needing some narration or a ‘tag’.
• Where the speech has an unrelated dialogue tag, e.g. someone laughing, moving, smiling, waving, blushing etc. (with it capitalised: He laughed. She picked up the mug. etc.) the punctuation should be a full stop rather than a comma so: He laughed. ‘Say that again.’. Had it been related description, it would be a comma: ‘Say that again,’ he said while fiddling with his tie.
• Where an action has ‘starts to’ / ‘started to’ or ‘begins to’ / ‘began to’ before it, most of the time they’re not needed because unless the action is interrupted, the verb alone works better / is stronger. An example would be ‘the phone began to ring’. If it stops without being answered then that’s fine (although it still rang!) but if not then just have ‘the phone rang’.
• Like ‘dear’, and other endearments, ‘sir’ is only capitalised when used as a name, e.g. ‘Thank you, Sir Lancelot.’ rather than ‘Thank you, sir.’ Ditto madam – see https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/madam.
• If you’re going to have a twist, I recommend leaving it until the last sentence, especially with such a short word count. Plus the shorter the sentence the more impact they make which is especially important at the end of a paragraph. Also the stronger the final word the better as the nearer a word is to the end the more memorable it is / impact it has. Where there’s dialogue and narration, I usually recommend the narration going first so what’s said has more impact.
• Although grammatically correct, I recommend you don’t put commas between adjectives, and certainly not immediately before the noun / object. It slows the pace… really slows it where there are several and anything that slows what should be a fast-paced page-turning read is best avoided. If you wanted a secondary adjective emphasised then use the first comma but add a second (a ear-piercing, continuous, scream) so the secondary adjective is highlighted. I recommend having neither.
• The drink Coke is a trademark name so should be capitalised. The generic equivalent would be cola with a small c. Ditto coke as in cocaine.
• ‘that’ – like ‘that was’, ‘which was’, and ‘who was’ – can often be chopped. If the remaining text makes as much sense with or without it, it can come out.
• Where you have two (or more) characters of the same gender in the scene, it can be confusing with just ‘he, she, him, her’ etc. They should always refer to the last character mentioned. ‘Denny lacked a white horse, but he’d parked his motorbike’, as an example from one of this month’s stories could be read as the horse parking a motorbike. Animals are usually ‘it’ rather than ‘he’ or ‘she’ until we know the gender but anything that could potentially pull a reader out of the story is best avoided. In another story there was ‘I speak Italian to the gondolier, tapping the sides of the vessel. I smile when she looks at me…’ where the ‘she’ meant the narrator’s companion but again the gondolier could have been female, we’re not told.
• It’s always difficult, as a writer, to know how readers are going to interpret your writing. In one of my favourite stories there was ‘There was no hot water and the welcome package, a selection of cheeses and nuts, was missing.’ It made me wonder – as it’s missing, how the narrator knew what it was. It is, however, the perfect opportunity for me to mention that negatives work really well. We often write about what’s there but rarely what’s missing. This was a nice touch.

The winning stories are ones that I reacted most favourably to. They were clever, surprising, eek-making (in a good way), or gave me a warm fuzzy feeling (without being sickly). Sometimes a story beats another because it has a stronger link to the theme so it’s worth writing a story to the theme rather than tweaking a story you already have to loosely fit it. Alternatively there may have been several stories on with same topic so I chose my favourite of those. With any competition, much rests upon the judge’s preference and it’s usually ones than garner a stronger (positive) reaction that do the best.

You may have chosen a different order or indeed not placed one or more of them so if you entered and didn’t find your story / stories here, don’t lose heart. You probably only just missed out so do enter new stories this month*, next month, whenever you like (but not in advance!). It’s an ongoing competition and free, so you could win at any time. There were new and familiar names this month so anyone could win… it’s all dependent upon whether your story grabs me, for whatever reason (whether it be clever, funny, unusual, quirky, or sweet).

Apart from the top three and highly commended, there are some ‘Honourable Mentions’. They don’t win anything but they were so close to being Highly Commended that I wanted them to know how close they came. It’s still something for them to put on their CVs.

*The theme for July is ‘an unusual healing’ and you can submit your entries (and do send three) at any time up to midnight (UK time) on Saturday 31st July. Details and entry forms on https://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/100-word-free-monthly-competition. So without further ado, below are the successful entries this month.

First place (winning free access to three of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £60 / $60) or a free edit and critique of up to 2,000 words (worth £30 / $42). This story can be read downwards as two separate entities (columns) or one horizontal piece. Very clever.

James A. Beaumont with ‘The Tower Plot

I’m sealed in                                                                       This bloody tower! I’m here

and there’s nothing I can do                                         to score points with her

but think about what I’ve done                                    so that maybe tomorrow, if I’m

to deserve this treatment, about how un                 lucky, maybe I’ll get laid.

Prepared we all were. Caught in                                   Hell, I’ve been learning

the act: there were twelve of us, and they’re            history, the gunpowder plot,

celebrating now probably, planning different         dates – all stuff to impress her with.

schemes – never had one to begin with.                  But man, this place, this waiting

This bitter end of Death                                                  is so god damn boring.

*

Second place (winning free access to two of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £40 / $40) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,500 words (worth £22.50 / $31.50):

Joan Reed with ‘Travelling Back’

A weekend in ghostly York. Exciting. I explored everything from Castle Museum to markets.

I noticed an intriguing antique shop with dimpled windows, in a busy street below the shadow of the Minster. As I opened the door, a bell tinkled, and I shivered at the coldness.

A small girl sat on the counter dressed in white. A blue sash matched her eye colour. Her face, pale and unsmiling seemed to search mine.

The doorbell tinkled. I glanced round. Nobody entered.

Looking back, the girl had vanished.

I moved to leave the shop. Locks clicked into place.

The bell tinkled.

*

Third place (winning free access to one of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £20 / $20) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,000 words (worth £15 / $21):

Nicholas Marshall with ‘Caught’

When the animals hear a plane landing on the airstrip they begin to gather behind bushes near the dirt road.

Soon a safari minibus carrying ten tourists bounces towards them and a cheetah lies down in the road with legs in the air.

The vehicle skids to a halt and the tourists cautiously gather round the big cat which appears lifeless.

Suddenly the other animals rush out from behind the bushes and throw a large net over the tourists.

The driver of the minibus winks at the cheetah which stands and stretches.

Eventually the tourists will become used to captivity.

*

Highly commended (winning my Entering Writing Competitions course worth £20 / $20) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,000 words (worth £15 / $21) – in alphabetical order:

• David Filce with ‘Return to Childhood’
• Douglas Goodrich with ‘Interplanetary Knock-Off’
• Gemma Roche with ‘The Entrepreneur’
• Isabel Flynn with ‘Will I, or won’t I?’
• Jeremy Chotzen with ‘Beware of the girls at the gates’
• Sue Massey with ‘We never complain’
• Wendy Howard with ‘The Trapper’

Honourable mentions (not winning anything but only narrowly missing out and still looking good on their CV) – in alphabetical order:

• Denise Bayes with ‘A Family Business’
• Helen Sant with ‘Knight in Shining Leather’
• Kyle Barratt with ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’
• Lestie Mulholland with ‘Parisian Gewgaws’
• Liz Hardie with ‘The Look Looked Man’

Congratulations, everyone. The entries for this month are already drifting in. Remember, you can send up to three per month so rather than miss out on a chance by sending one story, do submit more.

If you’ve enjoyed these stories and / or just want to leave a comment, please do so below and / or you can email me at morgen@morgenbailey.com., although I won’t (can’t) discuss forthcoming entries unless it’s a general query.

Results of Morgen’s 100-word competition: May 2021

Hello everyone and welcome to the sixty-ninth month of this competition. There were 48 entries from 22 authors for the theme of ‘going round in circles’, a particularly strong month this time. NB You can all send in three stories for a better chance of being picked.

Please note: I have decided to cease the competition at the end of the year to free up time for my writing. It’ll have been 76 months in the making and a pleasure but sadly, as December’s prompt is going to be, ‘sometimes good things have to come to an end’. Any prizes won up to/including that point will still be honoured until the end of February 2022 so if you choose the editing option, get those stories written. 🙂

One was disqualified for having ‘over grown’ instead of overgrown, taking the story down to 99. It actually started as 101 but had ‘carry on’ as a noun (a carry-on) – it’s a verb as two words, so connected it took the story down to 100 but then I go to ‘over grown’ and it was game…er, over. 🙂 Another (from the same author) had a comma separated so when conjoined it brought the story down to 99. Fortunately the third story was 100 so that went through. It’s always worth sending three, just in case. One entry was submitted twice so the first was accepted, the second deleted.

Another story was disqualified for only being 99 words. There was a section separation asterisk which is punctuation so not counted as a word so this must have been the reason. The author had sent two other stories but one was 98 words because of an asterisk and …ellipses. The third story had two words hyphenated (double-doors in addition to ‘double-door louvre’ which was correct) where they shouldn’t have been, making it 101 words so all three stories were disqualified. I have to be fair to everyone to stick with the correct grammar. 😦

Almost the same thing happened to another author; two 99-word stories, one with a dash, the other ellipses. The third story went through.

One author submitted one story which was sadly disqualified for ‘high top trainers’ where ‘high top’ should have been hyphenated, bringing the story down to 99 words. The easiest way to tell is whether ‘high trainers’ or ‘top trainers’ would have made sense on their own. This is why I always recommend submitting three stories. Another solo entry was disqualified for have Facebook as two words.

I always recommend reading and rereading your stories several times. One story started as 100 words but had a ‘a’ or ‘the’ missing (I have played xxx record). The entrant had submitted two other stories so they went through.

One (of three) story lost a brownie point for having ‘bother’ instead of ‘brother’ but it was disqualified anyway for being 99 words (incidentally had two sets of ellipses). Ditto another story with ellipses which originally sat separate to a word which regardless doesn’t count as a word so made the story 99 words. The author had submitted two other stories so they went through.

Other observations:

• When speaking to someone and using a name, nickname or term of endearment (which counts as a name), generalisation (guys, ladies etc.), you’d need a comma before the name, i.e. ‘Do you know John?’ is asking if the person knows someone called John. ‘Do you know, John?’ means that the character is speaking to someone called John but asking them if they know something. A subtle difference but you want to avoid confusing the reader so they jump out of the story.
• When referring to family, mum/mom, dad, gran, uncle, aunt etc. should be capitalised when used as a name, e.g. “I know, Mum/Mom.” When used as a ‘job’, e.g. my mum/mom, my dad, my doctor etc. then it should be a small m, d etc.
• Although grammatically correct, I recommend that you don’t put commas between adjectives, and certainly not immediately before the noun / object. It slows the pace… really slows it where there are several and anything that slows what should be a fast-paced page-turning read is best avoided.
• Technically, ‘now’ (‘by now’, ‘just now’, ‘right now’, ‘at the moment’, ‘at this moment’) is present tense, which is fine in dialogue but not in past tense narration. Had the narration been present tense, we still don’t need the ‘now’ because it’s technically happening now. All, now, very and just are often overused so I recommend, especially in a longer piece, seeing how many you have and chopping where possible.
• Where there are only two people in a scene chatting, you don’t need too many ‘said’s (or equivalent). Once it’s been established who’s first to speak, the reader can follow for a while. You can then use description, e.g. have a character do something before needing to add a said ‘tag’.
• Be careful of having too many paragraphs (or indeed sentences) starting with pronouns (e.g. I, he, she, the character’s name). Even if they’re quite long paragraphs so they don’t leap out, it’s something to be mindful of. So if a section feels a bit flat, it could be that you have too many sentences / paragraphs starting with a pronoun, e.g. ‘Barry did this…’ or ‘He did that…’, or that you have too much narration (Andy was angry) vs. dialogue or the character ‘doing’, e.g. “Get out!” Andy slammed his fist onto the desk.
• One story had the main character’s name nine times. Where you have two (or more) characters of the same gender in the scene, it can be confusing with just ‘he, she, him, her’ etc. (they should always refer to the last character mentioned) but the only other characters mentioned were ‘parents’ so have the relevant name instead of he/she next but ‘she’ from then on. A story might be marked down but certainly not disqualified for this. The story in this case though had less of a connection to the theme than many of the others so unfortunately missed out for that reason.
• teatowel / tea-towel is another error I come across occasionally. As https://www.lexico.com/definition/tea_towel shows, it’s two words so a story missed out for therefore being 101 words.
• Stopping something or someone ‘in his / her tracks’ is a big cliché (as would be ‘stopping dead’).
• A comma is generally not needed where ‘too’, ‘al/though’, ‘n/either’, ‘then’ and other conjunctions / conjunctives ends the sentence. It would if the remainder of the sentence made sense on its own, e.g. ‘Tom wasn’t finished in Glasgow, though he only wanted to go home.’ Commas slow the pace but I generally include them where a reader would take a breath.
• I love stories with a twist but do recommend not have the title of the piece giving away that twist, as a couple of the stories did this month. Also leave the twist until as late in the story as possible for the ‘oomph!’.
• I try to chop commas where I can, i.e. where there wouldn’t be a natural pause (adjectives before a noun) but there are times when they’re needed to avoid confusion. In one story there was ‘pulls a lever, they notice he has no face’. Without the comma it could be read that they’d noticed a lever.

The winning stories are ones that I reacted most favourably to. They were clever, surprising, eek-making (in a good way), or gave me a warm fuzzy feeling (without being sickly). Sometimes a story beats another because it has a stronger link to the theme so it’s worth writing a story to the theme rather than tweaking a story you already have to loosely fit it. Alternatively there may have been several stories on with same topic so I chose my favourite of those. With any competition, much rests upon the judge’s preference and it’s usually ones than garner a stronger (positive) reaction that do the best.

You may have chosen a different order or indeed not placed one or more of them so if you entered and didn’t find your story / stories here, don’t lose heart. You probably only just missed out so do enter new stories this month*, next month, whenever you like (but not in advance!). It’s an ongoing competition and free, so you could win at any time. There were new and familiar names this month so anyone could win… it’s all dependent upon whether your story grabs me, for whatever reason (whether it be clever, funny, unusual, quirky, or sweet).

Apart from the top three and highly commended, there are some ‘Honourable Mentions’. They don’t win anything but they were so close to being Highly Commended that I wanted them to know how close they came. It’s still something for them to put on their CVs.

*The theme for June is ‘the tourist trap’ and you can submit your entries (and do send three) at any time up to midnight (UK time) on Wednesday 30th June. Details and entry forms on https://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/100-word-free-monthly-competition. So without further ado, below are the successful entries this month.

Joint first place (each winning free access to three of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £60 / $60) or a free edit and critique of up to 2,000 words (worth £30 / $42) in alphabetical order:

Colleen E. Kennedy with ‘The Cave’

All of a sudden, you knew that this wasn’t the correct way. The twisted woods became darker and more menacing with each step. The path ended abruptly at the mouth of a yawning cave.
Yet, you knew this place: you’d been here before. And you recalled you had died in this cave before, and you had died many times before. But you knew that you would always find yourself at the forked path again, able to choose left or right.
To explore the cave, please turn to page 39.
To turn back the way you came, turn to page 87.

*

Darren York with ‘Mind the Plot Holes’

Sheila kills John in chapter one but he reappears in chapter two talking to their neighbour.
So I turn him into a ghost, but he appears in chapter three, in a divorce court sat opposite Sheila.
Sheila shoots the neighbour to cover up the murder; but drinks coffee with her in chapter seven.
Alternatively, John kills Sheila in chapter one which leaves Derek in chapter five still waiting for Sheila at the bar for the entire novel and their unborn daughter jailed for John’s murder.
Derek kills John in chapter one, then meets Sheila, who kills Derek for killing John…

*

Joint second place (each winning free access to two of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £40 / $40) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,500 words (worth £22.50 / $31.50) in alphabetical order:

Julian Cadman with ‘Going Round In Circles’

It was the first time Harry had been on a plane. And being allowed to sit in the cockpit was awesome. The racing car was cool too. Ella’s highlight so far was sitting on a unicorn. Riding on a horse for the first time was also brilliant. Why do days like these have to end?
Jenny waved at her children as they passed by, and then looked across at her husband, back turned, playing with his mobile phone. Had their relationship gone from carousal to carousel?
Were they going round in circles as the attraction was coming to an end?

*

Nicholas Marshall with ‘Railway to hell’

Two passengers sit in the small railway cart as it trundles by itself down a gentle slope.
At a bend there is a sign with an arrow and the word “Hades”.
The cart then gathers speed for a while before coming to rest where the track divides.
“Which way?” the passengers ask a uniformed man who merely shrugs.

As he approaches them and pulls a lever they notice he has no face.
The cart speeds off along the track leading to a loop on which they will circle forever, endlessly stopping at the same stations and confronting the expected abominations.

*

Joint third place (each winning free access to one of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £20 / $20) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,000 words (worth £15 / $21) in alphabetical order:

David Filce with ‘Wake, Work, Eat, Sleep’

Wake, work, eat, sleep.
Wake, work, eat, sleep.
Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Life is like sitting on a roundabout. Spinning, turning, round and round. The days are no more than a blur, merging into one seamless mess.
It wasn’t always like this for him.
Before she became ill life was fantastic. There were surprise trips, candlelit dinners, long walks and snuggles on the sofa.
But that was then. Then he lost her. That part of his life ended as she slipped so sadly away.
Now he fills his world with that mundane cyclical sickness.
Wake, work, eat, sleep.
Repeat, repeat, repeat.

*

Gemma Roche with ‘Loneliness’

Tumbledown stone archway, check. Large jutting rock, check. Dilapidated faux castle, check. Finn was retracing his regular circular route. As he got older, it seemed to take longer each day and remembering the order of the comforting features increasingly tricky. The wider landscape also seemed to be diminishing, everything beyond tarnished a dull decaying green. It had been a long time since he’d had visitors. These days he was lucky if they dropped the measly stale golden flakes, which apparently provided him with sustenance, more than once a week. But still he continued to swim, round and round and round.

*

Joyce Bingham with ‘Where did it say I could speak to a human?’

‘Please press one to hear the menu again.’
I look at my phone, bring up numbers.
‘Please press one for your balance, two for your fitness level, three for your vital signs.’
What were they again?
‘You have sixty calories remaining in your daily allowance. Choose carefully.’
I swear at the phone.
‘You have not reached your activity goal today, go for a run.’
Jabbing at the screen I hiss through my teeth.
‘You have raised vital signs, please install Calmness app.’
Press four, why not.
‘Please press one to hear the menu again.’
Not worth the calories I decide.

*

Highly commended (winning my Entering Writing Competitions course worth £20 / $20) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,000 words (worth £15 / $21) – in alphabetical order:

• Isabel Flynn with ‘Our Inner Circle’
• Kyle Barratt with ‘The Funeral’
• Sue Massey with ‘Amazing Maize’
• Teresa Heeks with ‘Pigeon Pie’
• Tracey-anne Plater with ‘Forever Train’

Honourable mentions (not winning anything but only narrowly missing out and still looking good on their CV) – in alphabetical order:

• Helen Sant with ‘Dressed To Kill’
• Jane Broughton with ‘Lock-down List’
• Julie Gavin with ‘Exasperation’
• Philip Kingsley with ‘Never A Cross Word’
• Wendy Howard with ‘First Ride’

Congratulations, everyone. The entries for this month are already drifting in. Remember, you can send up to three per month so rather than miss out on a chance by sending one story, do submit more.

If you’ve enjoyed these stories and / or just want to leave a comment, please do so below and / or you can email me at morgen@morgenbailey.com., although I won’t (can’t) discuss forthcoming entries unless it’s a general query.

My review of ‘100ne Hundred’ by Laura Besley

I stopped doing reviews a while back but when I was asked by Saira at Arachne Press to review Laura’s collection, I didn’t hesitate. Flash fiction is my favourite form of creative writing and Laura is a regular, often successful, entrant to my monthly 100-word competition so two reasons to say ‘yes’.

Split into four seasons, each section contains 25 stories, some of which are familiar territory but most new to me.

I love titles, especially quirky ones, and ones like ‘How to be Normal’, ‘Raining Colours’, ‘The Pupa Stage in the Lifecycle of Audrey Brown’, and ‘Housewife 500’ were ones I was especially looking forward to… and they didn’t disappoint.

Speaking of quirky, although I know Laura’s writing well, I challenge anyone (not for money!) not to be hooked on the opening of the first story: Dave carries his girlfriend in the left-hand breast pocket of his shirt. 

It’s a very emotional collection. As a competition judge (for others, not just my own) the best stories tend to be ones where you have a reaction at the end. A ‘huh?’ is not good and it goes from there all the way to ‘wow’. With this collection I soon lost track of how many ‘wow’s I was uttering to the point where my dog had that ‘here she goes again’ look.

The stories take us to various points around the globe but one thing that links them all is humanity. I love characters, and while most stories are understandably plot-led, there is a wealth of characters we can relate to, even if they’re nothing like us, or we’ve not been through what they’ve been through – for that we should be thankful!

Some films started life as short stories (The Shawshank Redemption and Brokeback Mountain to name two) and while Laura’s are incredibly short, many lent themselves to being the start or plot of a larger work. There are unions, reunions, meetings and greetings, thought-provoking pieces, and those simply there to entertain.

Although I read this collection in one sitting, it’s the kind you could dip in an out of and let these stories linger, returning for a second, third and umpteenth read.

I’d love to share with you my favourites but there were simply too many, although one in particular made me chuckle as a character loves his Alexa (Amazon Echo device) even more than I do.

As well as being a competition judge, I’m an editor. While I would have made very minor tweaks had this been something sent to me for editing (e.g. sighing isn’t a dialogue verb so should be a separate sentence to what’s said, some words hyphenated or unhyphenated, a ‘his’ changed to the character’s name where another of the same gender has just been mentioned, I’d have chopped some ‘said’s where the character’s doing something, and some of the ‘just’s 🙂 ), the stories are written to such a tight (100 words exactly) format that losing a word or two would have meant ‘padding’ to return to the correct figure.

I had high expectations and was not disappointed, as I’m sure you won’t be when you read this wonderful collection. It was published on 27th May 2021, so hot off the (Arachne) press! Available from https://arachnepress.com/books/short-stories/100nehundred-laura-besleyand where good books are sold, as the saying goes (ISBN: 978-1913665272). Laura can be found on Twitter and Facebook.

My thanks go to Saira and of course Laura, not only for creating this endearing collection but for being one of the many stalwarts of my competition.

*

Laura

About Laura Besley: Laura Besley writes short fiction in the precious moments when her children are asleep. She has been listed by TSS Publishing as one of the top 50 British and Irish Flash Fiction writers. Her work has been nominated for Best Micro Fiction and her story, To Cut a Long Story Short, will appear in the Best Small Fiction anthology in 2021. 100neHundred is Laura’s second short fiction collection.

 

About 100neHundred: A man carries his girlfriend in the left-hand breast pocket of his shirt. During World War II, a young soldier searches the houses and barns of the families with whom he grew up. An astronaut wonders whether she can adapt to life back on earth.

In her second collection of short fiction, Laura Besley explores a kaleidoscope of emotions through 100 stories of exactly 100 words each.

Results of Morgen’s 100-word competition: April 2021

Hello everyone and welcome to the sixty-eighth* month of this competition, a huge one this time. There were a staggering 94 entries from 40 authors for the theme of ‘learning something new’’. So with only a small amount of places there were sure to be some that were really good but missed out.

NB You can all send in three stories for a better chance of being picked. *bit of trivia: eighth is the only word in the English language that ends ‘hth’. 🙂

As happens occasionally, some stories were great but had little or nothing to do with the theme or there were a few similar (learning to ride a bike and paint – not at the same time 🙂 – were popular). There were a few this month and they’re likely ones that missed out.

One story was disqualified for only being 95 words (some of the ‘some thing’s corrected to ‘something’. It arrived at 96 but had ‘about’ twice together so remove one… Another from the same author was disqualified for the same reason. Fortunately the third story was 100 words exactly so went through to the judging. Or so I thought… I read it and realised it had a word missing, ending with ‘What to with him?’ What a shame.

Ditto another story that was missing an ‘a’ (he was qualified guide dog) which would have taken it to 101. It’s a shame as it was my favourite story from that author. Another regular submitted three with one at 101 so that was disqualified.

Another went to 99 as ‘silver bodied’ should have been hyphenated and another story to 101 for ‘upside-down’ without a noun following (, i.e. it was upside down rather than an upside-down cake https://www.lexico.com/definition/upside_down). The easiest way to tell if something should be is whether each word makes sense on its own. A ‘silver fish’ would but ‘bodied fish’ wouldn’t have.

Another 99-word story was so because ‘mocking bird’ should be one word (as it’s the name rather than any type of bird that mocks). https://www.lexico.com/definition/mockingbird It’s a shame as it was my favourite of the three stories sent by that author but another was a strong piece so that went through.

Finally, a new entrant to the competition missed out with their only submission as it was a word short. Such a shame.

Other observations:

• numbers under 100 are best written in full so they blend with the rest of the text (especially where they are 1^st, and the likes, as eReaders tend not to like ^superscript) so I’ve amended the ones that are. That said, I think all numbers unless titles (BMW Series 5) etc. are best written in full. For info., decades are plural so no apostrophe required.
• when referring to family, mum/mom and dad should be capitalised when used as a name, e.g. “I know, Mum/Mom.” When used as a ‘job’, e.g. my mum/mom, my dad, my doctor etc. then it should be a small m, d etc. NB. There’s a comma before ‘Mum/Mom’ here because when you’re writing someone’s name – and a nickname or term of endearment counts as a name – when another character is speaking to them, you’d need a comma before the name, i.e. ‘Do you know Sam?’ is asking if the person knows someone called Sam. ‘Do you know, Sam?’ means that the character is speaking to someone called Sam but asking them if they know something. A subtle difference but you want to avoid confusing the reader so they jump out of the story.
• when a character asks a question (using a question mark) or shouting (exclamation mark), then the he/she said would still be small ‘h’ or ‘s’. If we have the character doing something or it’s obvious who’s speaking then you could remove the s/he said.
• I strongly recommend you don’t invert dialogue tags as it’s not how we would naturally speak if talking aloud, e.g. changing ‘said Tony’ to ‘Tony said’. ‘said’s do tend to blur into the background so don’t try too hard to choose something else, e.g. ‘Tony postulated’, even ‘Tony exclaimed’ could be too much if we already have the likes of ‘Get out!’ It’s not so bad when you don’t have a name but having the ‘said’ or equivalent is more natural where you have a character’s name.
• I come across a lot of dialogue narration where it implies a character is speaking and smiling, grinning etc. at the same time. This is particularly difficult. Although ‘said’ blends better than more unusual verbs, there can still be too many. Where you have something like: “I like it,” Laura said, smiling. “I like it.” Laura smiled. Or better still: Laura smiled. “I like it.” So we know it’s Laura speaking before she speaks. As https://www.geist.com/writers/writers-toolbox/gerunds-and-participles-avoid-ing-words says less (‘ing’s) is definitely more.
• I’m a stickler for unintended repetition, some of which may feel rather pedantic – should you ever have anything critiqued by me – but I listen to the document on my Kindle (Fire’s text to speech), alongside reading it on the screen, and certain words or phrases leap out. In one of the stories, there were two ‘empty’s which may have been intentional but it jarred with me (sorry!). A touching story though so it went through.
• me vs I / I vs me / me vs. I / I vs. me etc.: the easy way to work out whether something should be I or me is to remove the ‘xxx and’ or ‘xxx and’. If it still makes sense, then you’re fine. An example would be ‘Adam and I are going shopping.’ Changing the plural verb to singular, it would be ‘I am going shopping.’ You wouldn’t say ‘Me and Adam are going shopping’ because you wouldn’t say ‘Me is going shopping.’
• things are usually ‘that’ whereas people are usually ‘who’ (or ‘whom’ where it can be replaced by ‘him’ e.g. to whom / to him), i.e. he was the man who had lied (who = he had lied not him had lied) / it was the door that had been slammed.
• words often overused include ‘all’, ‘now’, ‘very’ and ‘just’. There were four ‘just’s in one of the stories. I recommend searching for them with a space either side so – for ‘ just ’ as an example, it doesn’t pick up ‘adjust’, ‘justice’ etc. I’d recommend only keeping the ones for emphasis or detract from the sentence if chopped, or changing to ‘only’ where appropriate. And the likes of ‘just’ can be swapped for ‘only’ where appropriate but better to chop so whatever you swap it for doesn’t get used too often either.
• like erm, we do say ‘well’ as a dialogue pause but it’s best not to include it in our writing, or at the most have it as a characteristic for one of the characters. Ditto ‘look’.
• when we have someone’s/something’s age, we don’t usually need the ‘years old’ or ‘years of age’ because the number – within the right context – is sufficient. There would also only be a hyphen if preceding a noun (or implied), e.g. a fourteen-year-old girl / a fourteen-year-old. Had there been a non-exact name using ‘something’ (or similar), the ‘something’ represents an unknown number so it would all still be hyphenated as the likes of ‘twenty-two-year-old nurse’ would have been.
• when speaking to someone and using a name, nickname or term of endearment (which counts as a name), generalisation (guys, ladies etc.), you’d need a comma before the name, i.e. ‘Do you know John?’ is asking if the person knows someone called John. ‘Do you know, John?’ means that the character is speaking to someone called John but asking them if they know something. A subtle difference but you want to avoid confusing the reader so they jump out of the story.
• where an action has ‘starts to’ / ‘started to’ or ‘begins to’ / ‘began to’ before it, most of the time they’re not needed because unless the action is interrupted, the verb alone works better / is stronger. An example would be ‘the phone began to ring’. If it stops without being answered then that’s fine (although it still rang!) but if not then just have ‘the phone rang’.
• some stories were really well written with intriguing plots but their endings let them down. ‘oh’ or ‘huh?’ are not good reactions. While you may not always get ‘wow’, you certainly want ‘ooh’.

The winning stories are ones that I reacted most favourably to. They were clever, surprising, eek-making (in a good way), or gave me a warm fuzzy feeling (without being sickly). Sometimes a story beats another because it has a stronger link to the theme so it’s worth writing a story to the theme rather than tweaking a story you already have to loosely fit it. Alternatively there may have been several stories on with same topic so I chose my favourite of those. With any competition, much rests upon the judge’s preference and it’s usually ones than garner a stronger (positive) reaction that do the best.

You may have chosen a different order or indeed not placed one or more of them so if you entered and didn’t find your story / stories here, don’t lose heart. You probably only just missed out so do enter new stories this month*, next month, whenever you like (but not in advance!). It’s an ongoing competition and free, so you could win at any time. There were new and familiar names this month so anyone could win… it’s all dependent upon whether your story grabs me, for whatever reason (whether it be clever, funny, unusual, quirky, or sweet).

Apart from the top three and highly commended, there are some ‘Honourable Mentions’. They don’t win anything but they were so close to being Highly Commended that I wanted them to know how close they came. It’s still something for them to put on their CVs.

*The theme for May is ‘going round in circles’ and you can submit your entries (and do send three) at any time up to midnight (UK time) on Monday 31st May. Details and entry forms on https://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/100-word-free-monthly-competition. So without further ado, below are the successful entries this month.

*

First place (winning free access to three of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £60 / $60) or a free edit and critique of up to 2,000 words (worth £30 / $42):

Laura Besley with ‘Sliding Scale’

You can learn to cry so no-one on the ward can hear you, you can learn to find positions in bed so you’re in slightly less pain, you can learn to enjoy the hospital food, you can learn to be less embarrassed about a bed bath, you can learn to abide the physio’s chirpiness, you can learn to be happy you can take a few steps.
You can’t learn a word that means thank you for rescuing me, caring for me, sitting with me, supporting me, saving me. It doesn’t exist.
You say thank you, and hope it is enough.

*

Joint second place (each winning free access to two of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £40 / $40) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,500 words (worth £22.50 / $31.50):

Jane Brown with ‘A Mother’s Applause’

“Every girl in our family could do a backflip by ten years,” Mum said. “If I can’t teach you, I’ll be letting down our ancestors.”
“Chill, Mum,” I said, laughing.
She rolled her wheelchair closer. “I know you can do it, Annabelle! Be confident.” She coughed and smiled. “I’ll find a way – somehow – to show how proud I am when you do it for the first time.”
Two months later, I stood on the grass, bent my knees and did it. A perfect backflip.

Stunned, I turned to her tombstone. It was covered in white butterflies, all flapping their wings.

*

Mary Lawton with ‘Non-traditional’

Tom hears the whispers and sniggers as he makes his way to a seat in the lecture theatre.
“Isn’t he too old for this class?”
“Mature students are the pits.”
“Let’s hope there’s a First-Aider here. He looks like he’ll fall over any minute.”
Laughter.
Sighing, Tom sits back.
“If I get him as a partner, I’m quitting this class.”
“Yeah, it’s probably a hobby to him, not like us. That generation makes me sick.”
Tom stands, then walks to the lectern.
“Welcome to Sociology: Tolerance and Intolerance in 21st Century Society, a necessary learning experience for many of you.”

*

Third place (winning free access to one of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £20 / $20) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,000 words (worth £15 / $21):

David Klotzkin with ‘A Lesson in Photorealism’

“My *pictures* of flowers attract bees,” said Famous Artist tipsily (while the bees hummed over his drink garnish).
Chuck thought he could draw that well, with practice.
Maybe better.
Later, he showed Famous Artist a pastoral sketch of a deer and a tiger in a flowery meadow.
“So? No bees.” Famous Artist sniffed.
Then paper bees flew from the paper and buzzed away, seeking the sea and alphabetical order. The tiger bounded out, saw Famous Artist, and fled, terrified (he was just a paper tiger). The deer walked daintily from the picture into the field, leaving behind a paper trail.

*

Highly commended (winning my Entering Writing Competitions course worth £20 / $20) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,000 words (worth £15 / $21) – in alphabetical order:

• Anne-Marie Smith with ‘Playing the yoyo’
• Julian Cadman with ‘Put Off Course’
• Lorna Stewart with ‘A Self-educated Man’
• Nina Steer with ‘Too old, they said’
• Tony Cleaver with ‘Inflated Expectations’
• Tracey-anne Plater with ‘Hermit Crabs’

Honourable mentions (not winning anything but only narrowly missing out and still looking good on their CV) – in alphabetical order:

• Clare Law with ‘I learned to cook with Mama’
• Darren York with ‘Paint a Vulgar Picture’
• David Filce with ‘Sarah’
• Elyse Russell with ‘Blue and Green’
• Helen Sant with ‘The Thief Whose Heart Was Stolen’
• Kaitlin Woodland with ‘Camping Blunders’

Congratulations, everyone. The entries for this month are already drifting in. Remember, you can send up to three per month so rather than miss out on a chance by sending one story, do submit more.

If you’ve enjoyed these stories and / or just want to leave a comment, please do so below and / or you can email me at morgen@morgenbailey.com., although I won’t (can’t) discuss forthcoming entries unless it’s a general query.

Results of Morgen’s 100-word competition: March 2021

Hello everyone and welcome to the sixty-seventh month of this competition. There were 48 entries from 20 authors for the theme of ‘going to camp’. NB You can all send in three stories for a better chance of being picked.

One was disqualified for being 103 words, another 99 words and a third (unfortunately all from the same author) 97 because there were three ‘camp site’s instead of https://www.lexico.com/definition/campsite. I have to be fair to all authors to correct any errors. Another author’s story ended up being 99 words for ‘camp related quips’ which should have been ‘camp-related…’. Fortunately another story went through. The same happened for a story with ‘egg shells’ instead of https://www.lexico.com/definition/eggshell.

One of another author’s stories had a ‘booked-in’ as a verb (They’d booked-in) where it should have been ‘booked in’ so again disqualified for not being 100 words. Sorry!

One author’s only story was disqualified for having ‘on board’ rather than ‘onboard’. It’s why it’s always worth submitting three stories. Another of the same author’s stories was disqualified for counting two words with ellipses between as one word (see observations below).

Other observations:

• when speaking to someone and using a name, nickname or term of endearment (which counts as a name), generalisation (guys, ladies etc.), you’d need a comma before the name, i.e. ‘Do you know John?’ is asking if the person knows someone called John. ‘Do you know, John?’ means that the character is speaking to someone called John but asking them if they know something. A subtle difference but you want to avoid confusing the reader so they jump out of the story.
• I strongly recommend you don’t invert dialogue tags as it’s not how we would naturally speak if talking aloud, e.g. changing ‘said Tony’ to ‘Tony said’. ‘said’s do tend to blur into the background so don’t try too hard to choose something else, e.g. ‘Tony postulated’, even ‘Tony exclaimed’ could be too much if we already have the likes of ‘Get out!’ It’s not so bad when you don’t have a name but having the ‘said’ or equivalent is more natural where you have a character’s name.
• this is very much personal preference (I’m not a fan) but ‘cried’ can imply physical tears rather than an exclamation and the exclamation ‘cried’ implies a volume. Anything that could be distracting is best avoided.
• where the speech has an unrelated dialogue tag, e.g. someone laughing, moving, smiling, waving etc. (with it capitalised: He laughed. She picked up the mug.’ etc.) the punctuation should be a full stop rather than a comma. Had it been related description, it would be a comma.
• like erm, we do say ‘well’ as a dialogue pause but it’s best not to include it in our writing, or at the most have it as a characteristic for one of the characters. Ditto ‘look’.
• as mentioned above, https://www.lexico.com/definition/on-board can be hyphenated or not. When used as an adjective in relation to a vehicle, it’s hyphenated, e.g. the on-board catering staff whereas computer related would be ‘onboard memory’. Used as a verb, e.g. to onboard a client, there’s no hyphen.
• I often come across ‘ing’s following ‘said’ and there are three here. A way to avoid that is to split the sentence but where there’s narration, especially the character doing something, the ‘said’ could go, e.g. “That’s not fair.” Taylor pushed forward the note… rather than: “That’s not fair,” Taylor said, pushing forward the note.
• ellipses are one ‘character’ … rather than three individual full stops. Regardless of whether you put a word straight after them or have a space the two words (Tents… yes / No… tense) in this case count as two words. One of the stories therefore ended up being 102 words because of it.
• a comma is generally not needed where ‘too’, ‘al/though’, ‘n/either’, ‘then’ and other conjunctions / conjunctives ends the sentence. It would if the remainder of the sentence made sense on its own, e.g. ‘Tom wasn’t finished in Glasgow, though he only wanted to go home.’ Commas slow the pace but I generally include them where a reader would take a breath.

The winning stories are ones that I reacted most favourably to. They were clever, surprising, eek-making (in a good way), or gave me a warm fuzzy feeling (without being sickly). Sometimes a story beats another because it has a stronger link to the theme so it’s worth writing a story to the theme rather than tweaking a story you already have to loosely fit it. Alternatively there may have been several stories on with same topic so I chose my favourite of those. With any competition, much rests upon the judge’s preference and it’s usually ones than garner a stronger (positive) reaction that do the best.

You may have chosen a different order or indeed not placed one or more of them so if you entered and didn’t find your story / stories here, don’t lose heart. You probably only just missed out so do enter new stories this month*, next month, whenever you like (but not in advance!). It’s an ongoing competition and free, so you could win at any time. There were new and familiar names this month so anyone could win… it’s all dependent upon whether your story grabs me, for whatever reason (whether it be clever, funny, unusual, quirky, or sweet).

Apart from the top three and highly commended, there are some ‘Honourable Mentions’. They don’t win anything but they were so close to being Highly Commended that I wanted them to know how close they came. It’s still something for them to put on their CVs.

*The theme for April is ‘learning something new’ and you can submit your entries (and do send three) at any time up to midnight (UK time) on Friday 30th April. Details and entry forms on https://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/100-word-free-monthly-competition. So without further ado, below are the successful entries this month.

*

Joint first place (each winning free access to three of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £60 / $60) or a free edit and critique of up to 2,000 words (worth £30 / $42):

Kaitlin Woodland with ‘Scissors’

If at the start I knew that when I left everything behind all I would be doing was going to camp, I would not have gone through all the struggles, hardships and pain for next to nothing. I suffered many months struggling blindly through the tightly woven folds in the fabric of war, only to get tangled within the frayed ends of the camp walls. The camp from which I am stuck in. I am labelled as a refugee but I am really just a person seeking scissors. The scissors I need to cut myself free and finally find freedom.

*

Sarah Robin with ‘Mother and Son’

Several hours had passed when I awoke from my mother’s lap at the sound of distressed voices. The train was slowing down, passing huge mounds of luggage as tall as buildings, and hundreds of soldiers paced the grounds in their green uniforms. The red, black and white flags flapped rhythmically in the wind.
The train finally stopped and the soldiers barked loudly as they approached the train, their guns swinging on their backs. Women started screaming and children cried hysterically.
My mother gripped my leg tightly as they reached our carriage. That was the last time I felt her touch.

*

Joint second place (each winning free access to two of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £40 / $40) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,500 words (worth £22.50 / $31.50):

Douglas Goodrich with ‘Hello from Camp Wann-Tona-Pooa’

Dear Mom and Dad,
Hello from Camp Wann-Tona-Pooa.
I’m writing to inform you of the atrocities that are committed here every day. Last week my roommate, the immature Daniel, decided it would be funny to put ants in my pants, literally.

After three hours in the medical tent, I discovered that my diary was stolen and Monica, my future wife, obtained a copy informing her that I thought she was beautiful. Then, someone hung my dirty underwear (with my name on the tag) up a flagpole for all to salute.
Hope you’re well.
PS. Kiss Bullwinkle for me.
Sincerely,
Charlie

*

Nicholas Marshall with ‘We’re Off’

Inside the cupboard excitement is growing.
The tent pegs are singing “We’re off to camp today.”
“Don’t forget the painkillers,” says one. “The mallet is brutal.”
“You’re pathetic!” yells the rope.
“Get knotted,” the tent pegs reply.
The cooking pot wakes and says she’s ashamed of her rust.
“Nothing a good scour won’t remedy,” advises the pan.
Some gleaming plates don’t want to get dirty again.
“Don’t worry,” says the chief plate. “Remember we’re dishwasher safe.”
When the cupboard doors are opened the chatter stops.
Everything goes into large bags.
“Oh no,” says a tent peg, “we’ve forgotten the painkillers.”

*

Third place (winning free access to one of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £20 / $20) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,000 words (worth £15 / $21):

Jane Broughton with ‘Better Safe than Sorry’

Derek had been up since sunrise packing camping equipment into the car. Florence watched from the comfort of her armchair. She heard his cheery whistling and shuddered. For the last twenty years she’d endured his idea of a good, cheap, holiday while yearning for hotels with cocktails, and memory foam mattresses.
“Come on, Flo, hurry up!” he shouted.
Florence picked up the large wooden mallet.
“You won’t need that, silly,” he said. “Remember, we’ve got a new pop-up tent.”
She ignored him and swung the heavy object into the boot. She added the cast iron skillet too, just in case.

*

Highly commended (winning my Entering Writing Competitions course worth £20 / $20) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,000 words (worth £15 / $21) – in alphabetical order:

• CJ Nicol with ‘Camp Anonymous’
• Darren York with ‘Be Back Soon’
• E. Rhodes with ‘Yukon Territory 1992’
• Mike Rymarz with ‘Third Time’s a Charm’
• Yvonne Mastaglio with ‘Inside Out’

Honourable mentions (not winning anything but only narrowly missing out and still looking good on their CV) – in alphabetical order:

• David Filce with ‘Going to Camp’
• Joyce Bingham with ‘Three Nights of Bliss’
• Paul Mastaglio with ‘A Turn for the Worse’
• Robert Cairns with ‘Summer Holiday’
• Sue Massey with ‘Your Tent or Mine?’

Congratulations, everyone. The entries for this month are already drifting in. Remember, you can send up to three per month so rather than miss out on a chance by sending one story, do submit more.

If you’ve enjoyed these stories and / or just want to leave a comment, please do so below and / or you can email me at morgen@morgenbailey.com, although I won’t (can’t) discuss forthcoming entries unless it’s a general query.

Results of Morgen’s 100-word competition: February 2021 (finally!)

Hello everyone and welcome to the sixty-sixth month of this competition. Sorry it’s so late! There were 43 entries from 22 authors for the theme of ‘a tall tale’. NB You can all send in three stories for a better chance of being picked.

One was disqualified for only being 99 words. It ended in ellipses which the author may have counted as a word although they were attached to the final word. It’s a shame as it was that entrant’s only submission. 😦 Another was disqualified for having a character being ‘seven-foot-tall’ as one word. A ‘seven-foot-tall object would have been fine but sadly it should have been ‘At over seven feet tall…’ so was 102 words not 100, and at the time the author’s only story. Another was only 96 words. There were ellipses (…) so even if each one was (were) counted as a word, despite being attached to the previous word, it still would have only made 99. 😦

A lone story from a new entrant was sadly missing a word (sitting at ‘a’ table) so adding that made it 101 words rather than 100. It was a really good story so such a shame. Another was 101 words simply for having a word too many. And one became 101 when ‘pocket-watch’ was unhyphenated (https://www.lexico.com/definition/pocket_watch).

One story had a semi-strong word in it. I try to keep this blog as family friendly as possible. Fortunately it wasn’t my favourite of the three by the author submitted anyway so it went by the wayside. With a handful of the stories, despite reading more than once, I struggled to see how they fitted the theme. These were either disqualified or placed as ‘honourable mention’, likely to then be ruled out of the competition at the whittling-down stage.

Another was disqualified for having ‘old- fashioned’, correctly hyphenated but as two words, dropping the story to 99 when conjoined. It’s really sad as it was such a fun story.

Other observations:

• It doesn’t matter so much in a competition story – as long as there’s only one – but in the novels I get in I check for nodding of heads and shrugging of shoulders to remove the ‘his / her head’ or ‘his / her shoulders’ because we only move with those parts of our bodies. Nods especially are often overused. We also only clap with our hands and shaking heads are usually ‘side to side’ so the how isn’t needed. Certainly mention the body part (or other) if it’s done a different way.
• Where an action has ‘starts to’ / ‘started to’ or ‘begins to’ / ‘began to’ before it, most of the time they’re not needed because unless the action is interrupted, the verb alone works better / is stronger. An example would be ‘the phone began to ring’. If it stops without being answered then that’s fine (although it still rang!) but if not then just have ‘the phone rang’.
• This won’t get your stories disqualified but useful to know (makes you look more professional): unless more than one sentence, a title doesn’t have a full stop at the end. It would also usually be title case, e.g. The One-time Thing rather than The one-time thing.
• While you want to give as much information as possible, there’s a fine line between not giving enough – the stories I go ‘huh?’ at… and if I read them again and still go ‘huh?’ it’s not a good sign (and usually get an honourable mention / drop off) – and telling too much, i.e. having a great punchline but then explaining it. Trust the reader to know what you mean, providing you feel it’s clear without an explanation. I always recommend having someone – especially an honest someone – else read your story for their reaction. I also recommend having your computer or someone/thing else (I use my Kindle Fire’s text-to-speech) to read the stories aloud. This would have picked up the missing ‘a’ (table) above.
• Try to avoid repetition where you can. It’s easy to miss (one story had ‘clutch’ twice but maybe intentionally) especially where they are regular words such as ‘just’, ‘now’, ‘all’ and ‘very’.
• We speak in contractions (e.g. I’m rather than I am, isn’t rather than is not etc.), and it’s fine (preferred) to use them in dialogue and first-person narration though less so in third-person narration / description.
• Things are usually ‘that’ whereas people are usually ‘who’ (or ‘whom’ where it can be replaced by ‘him’ e.g. to whom / to him), i.e. he was the man who had lied (who = he had lied not him had lied) / it was the door that had been slammed.
• Where an age precedes a noun, it should be hyphenated. When we have someone’s age following, e.g. ‘Tom was ten’, we wouldn’t need the ‘years old’ or ‘years of age’ because the number – within the right context – is sufficient. There would also only be a hyphen if preceding an implied noun, e.g. the fourteen-year-old (shortened from ‘the fourteen-year-old girl’). Had there been a non-exact name using ‘something’ (or similar), The ‘something’ represents an unknown number so it would all still be hyphenated as the likes of ‘twenty-two-year-old nurse’ would have been. One story was disqualified for this reason.
• Again not a dealbreaker but numbers under 100 are best written in full so they blend with the rest of the text (especially where they are 1^st, and the likes, as eReaders tend not to like ^superscript) so I’ve amended the ones that are. That said, I think all numbers unless titles (BMW Series 5) etc. are best written in full. For info., decades are plural so no apostrophe required.
• https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/washing-up is hyphenated regardless of whether it’s used as an adjective, e.g. a washing-up bowl, or noun: the washing-up. The verb, however, would be to wash up. A story was disqualified for having a character ‘washing-up’.
• I strongly recommend you don’t invert dialogue tags as it’s not how we would naturally speak if talking aloud, e.g. changing ‘said Tony’ to ‘Tony said’. ‘said’s do tend to blur into the background so don’t try too hard to choose something else, e.g. ‘Tony postulated’, even ‘Tony exclaimed’ could be too much if we already have the likes of ‘Get out!’ It’s not so bad when you don’t have a name but having the ‘said’ or equivalent is more natural where you have a character’s name.
• Where the speech has an unrelated dialogue tag, e.g. someone laughing, moving, smiling, waving etc. (with it capitalised: He laughed. She picked up the mug.’ etc.) the punctuation should be a full stop rather than a comma. Had it been related description, it would be a comma.
• Words often overused include ‘all’, ‘now’, ‘very’ and ‘just’. I recommend searching for them with a space either side so – for ‘just’ as an example, it doesn’t pick up ‘adjust’, ‘justice’ etc. I’d recommend only keeping the ones for emphasis or detract from the sentence if chopped, or changing to ‘only’ where appropriate. And the likes of ‘just’ can be swapped for ‘only’ where appropriate but better to chop so whatever you swap it for doesn’t get used too often either.
• Instead of adverbs (e.g. dropping quickly) try to use more interesting verbs e.g. plummeted, wherever possible.

The winning stories are ones that I reacted most favourably to. They were clever, surprising, eek-making (in a good way), or gave me a warm fuzzy feeling (without being sickly). Sometimes a story beats another because it has a stronger link to the theme so it’s worth writing a story to the theme rather than tweaking a story you already have to loosely fit it. Alternatively there may have been several stories on with same topic so I chose my favourite of those. With any competition, much rests upon the judge’s preference and it’s usually ones than garner a stronger (positive) reaction that do the best.

You may have chosen a different order or indeed not placed one or more of them so if you entered and didn’t find your story / stories here, don’t lose heart. You probably only just missed out so do enter new stories this month*, next month, whenever you like (but not in advance!). It’s an ongoing competition and free, so you could win at any time. There were new and familiar names this month so anyone could win… it’s all dependent upon whether your story grabs me, for whatever reason (whether it be clever, funny, unusual, quirky, or sweet).

Apart from the top three and highly commended, there are some ‘Honourable Mentions’. They don’t win anything but they were so close to being Highly Commended that I wanted them to know how close they came. It’s still something for them to put on their CVs.

*The theme for March is ‘going to camp’ and you can submit your entries (and do send three) at any time up to midnight (UK time) on Wednesday 31st March. Details and entry forms on https://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/100-word-free-monthly-competition. So without further ado, below are the successful entries this month.

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First place (winning free access to three of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £60 / $60) or a free edit and critique of up to 2,000 words (worth £30 / $42):

Linda Hibbin with ‘What Every Girl Dreams Of’

Courtship. Petite woman. Tall, dark, handsome man. She feels feminine, a fragile flower in his arms, sheltered from life’s crises.
Wedding. He is attentive to his beautiful bride.
Honeymoon. He complains throughout the flight about the lack of legroom. Same problem for her in the marital bed.
New home. Mirrors, cupboards, shelves too high. He mislays the pedal extensions she needs in the car. He acts as though socially above others, pretends not to hear her in a crowd.
Family. Children, grandchildren inherit his genes. Tower above her. Talk over her head.
She shrinks with age.
They don’t miss her.

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Second place (winning free access to two of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £40 / $40) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,500 words (worth £22.50 / $31.50):

Darren York with ‘The Magic Pen’

“How did you do it?”
I wanted to say that writing a novel was a lot of hard work and nothing comes easy but I was feeling in a mischievous mood.
“On a trip to the Congo I met a witch doctor who cast a spell on my pen which made writing the book effortless. I didn’t even need to do any editing and published it within a week.”
His face lit up.
Off he went to the Congo with a suitcase full of pens.
He could have borrowed mine.
It still had a bit of magic left inside it.

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Third place (winning free access to one of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £20 / $20) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,000 words (worth £15 / $21):

Nicholas Marshall with ‘Uncharted waters’

Skip introduces himself to the four friends who have not sailed before.
“We’ll have a great time,” he says.
The yacht slips out of the marina on the afternoon tide and soon the rising swell is uncomfortable.
As darkness descends, a gale tugs violently at the reefed sails and there is a howl that is not the wind.
The second hand of the cabin clock starts to sweep backwards.
Suddenly, in a brightness belonging to midday, the four friends who have not sailed before wait on the quay.
Skip introduces himself to them.
“We’ll have a great time,” he says.

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Highly commended (winning my Entering Writing Competitions course worth £20 / $20) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,000 words (worth £15 / $21) – in alphabetical order:

• Alan Barker with ‘Painting The Town Red’
• Dorothy Cox with ‘Low Tide’
• Jane Broughton with ‘Saturday Job’
• Nina Steer with ‘Pigs Leave No Trace’
• Stef Smulders with ‘Boarding’

Honourable mentions (not winning anything but only narrowly missing out and still looking good on their CV) – in alphabetical order:

• Joyce Bingham with ‘It Fell Out Of The Sky’
• Paul Mastaglio with ‘A Little Accident’
• Rebecca Coles with ‘The Morning After The Night Before’
• Sue Massey with ‘Cock And Bull’

Congratulations, everyone. The entries for this month are already drifting in. Remember, you can send up to three per month so rather than miss out on a chance by sending one story, do submit more.

If you’ve enjoyed these stories and / or just want to leave a comment, please do so below and / or you can email me at morgen@morgenbailey.com., although I won’t (can’t) discuss forthcoming entries unless it’s a general query.

Results of Morgen’s 100-word competition: January 2021 (finally!)

Hello everyone and welcome to the sixty-fifth month of this competition… a bumper month this one. There were 64 entries from 30 authors with a sentence start of ‘Before the shot was fired’. A number of stories were quite similar so some missed out purely for that reason. NB You can all send in three stories for a better chance of being picked.

One was disqualified for only being 98 words. It also had the prompt at the end of a sentence rather than the beginning. One, two max, word/s before it is fine but not at the end (or in the middle). Several stories were disqualified for this reason, including three each from two authors.

‘sentence start’ was mentioned twice on the https://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/100-word-free-monthly-competition page while the competition was running, on the entry form, plus on the countdown right-hand strip until updated on 1st February (and I posted when I realised, not long after announcing December’s results, a post emphasising this). Because there was clearly some ambiguity to me saying the prompt could be used anywhere in the story, I contacted those three authors and invited them to submit another story each.

Another story was disqualified for being 101 words. It started as 100 but two words (‘gunshot’ and ‘then’) were joined incorrectly so when separated totalled 101. Fortunately the author had submitted another story so that went through. Another had ‘smiley faced tablets’ – a lovely image but unfortunately the ‘smiley faced’ should have been hyphenated so it drops the story down to 99 words.

One story lost brownie points for ‘had to looked’ rather than ‘had to look’ (an easy mistake). It wasn’t my favourite story of the three submitted so it wasn’t a problem.

Other observations:

• where the speech has an unrelated dialogue tag, e.g. someone laughing, moving, smiling, waving etc. (with it capitalised: He laughed. She picked up the mug.’ etc.) the punctuation should be a full stop rather than a comma. Had it been related description, it would be a comma.
• like erm, we do say ‘well’ as a dialogue pause but it’s best not to include it in our writing, or at the most have it as a characteristic for one of the characters. Ditto ‘look’. I’m a stickler for repetition and there were two ‘well’s, albeit only one as dialogue, very close together.
• crowd, like money, company, group etc. is a single entity so the verb would also be singular (like he / she) and is therefore ‘was’. That said, it depends on how natural it sounds.
• ‘sir’ is only capitalised when used as a name, e.g. ‘Thank you, Sir Lancelot.’ rather than ‘Thank you, sir.’ Ditto madam – see https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/madam.
• where the speech has an unrelated dialogue tag, e.g. someone laughing, moving, smiling, waving etc. (with it capitalised: He laughed. She picked up the mug.’ etc.) the punctuation should be a full stop rather than a comma. Had it been related description, it would be a comma.
• where an action has ‘starts to’ / ‘started to’ or ‘begins to’ / ‘began to’ before it, most of the time they’re not needed because unless the action is interrupted, the verb alone works better / is stronger. An example would be ‘the phone began to ring’. If it stops without being answered then that’s fine (although it still rang!) but if not then just have ‘the phone rang’.
• when speaking to someone and using a name, nickname or term of endearment (which counts as a name), generalisation (guys, ladies etc.), you’d need a comma before the name, i.e. ‘Do you know John?’ is asking if the person knows someone called John. ‘Do you know, John?’ means that the character is speaking to someone called John but asking them if they know something. A subtle difference but you want to avoid confusing the reader so they jump out of the story.
• I strongly recommend you don’t invert dialogue tags as it’s not how we would naturally speak if talking aloud, e.g. changing ‘said Tony’ to ‘Tony said’. ‘said’s do tend to blur into the background so don’t try too hard to choose something else, e.g. ‘Tony postulated’, even ‘Tony exclaimed’ could be too much if we already have the likes of ‘Get out!’ It’s not so bad when you don’t have a name but having the ‘said’ or equivalent is more natural where you have a character’s name.
• although not grammatically incorrect, I strongly recommend not putting commas between adjectives, and certainly not immediately before the noun / object. It slows the pace… really slows it where there are several.
• I’m very much a fan of showing rather than telling / explaining but sometimes there needs to be more detail. One of the stories was about a particular historic event but even having read the story a couple of times I still hadn’t worked out which!

The winning stories are ones that I reacted most favourably to. They were clever, surprising, eek-making (in a good way), or gave me a warm fuzzy feeling (without being sickly). Sometimes a story beats another because it has a stronger link to the theme so it’s worth writing a story to the theme rather than tweaking a story you already have to loosely fit it. Alternatively there may have been several stories on with same topic so I chose my favourite of those. With any competition, much rests upon the judge’s preference and it’s usually ones than garner a stronger (positive) reaction that do the best.

You may have chosen a different order or indeed not placed one or more of them so if you entered and didn’t find your story / stories here, don’t lose heart. You probably only just missed out so do enter new stories this month*, next month, whenever you like (but not in advance!). It’s an ongoing competition and free, so you could win at any time. There were new and familiar names this month so anyone could win… it’s all dependent upon whether your story grabs me, for whatever reason (whether it be clever, funny, unusual, quirky, or sweet).

Apart from the top three and highly commended, there are some ‘Honourable Mentions’. They don’t win anything but they were so close to being Highly Commended that I wanted them to know how close they came. It’s still something for them to put on their CVs.

*The theme for February is ‘a tall tale’ and you can submit your entries (and do send three) at any time up to midnight (UK time) on Sunday 28th February. Details and entry forms on https://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/100-word-free-monthly-competition. So without further ado, below are the successful entries this month.

First place (winning free access to three of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £60 / $60) or a free edit and critique of up to 2,000 words (worth £30 / $42):

Darren York with ‘Pasta la vista’

Boiled alive, Macaroni was the first to succumb to Rigatoni’s takeover. His blanched corpse was found the next day under sheets of lasagne.
Ambushed leaving the colander, Fettuccine was thrown into a steamer and hot sauce poured over him as he begged for his life.
Penne would stop Rigatoni’s abhorrent crimes by shooting him as he exited the cupboard, but Rigatoni had got wind of the plot. Before the shot was fired he was tripped up and chopped into pieces then rested on a plate as a warning to others.
There can only be one pasta dish on the menu!

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Joint second place (each winning free access to two of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £40 / $40) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,500 words (worth £22.50 / $31.50):

E. E. Rhodes with ‘The Heist’

Before the shot was fired he’d hoped they’d get away clean.
Before that he’d hoped there’d be no trouble from the bank manager about the combination.
Before that he’d hoped everyone would do as they were told and there’d be no reason for Ken to totally lose it.
Before that he’d hoped it was early closing and the bank would be shut.
Before that he’d hoped the car wouldn’t start and Jake would call the whole thing off.
Before that he’d hoped he’d miss his alarm call.
Before that he’d wished he hadn’t needed the money.
Just.
Before. Before. Before.

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Kyle Barratt with ‘Consequences’

Before the shot was fired, Bob Marley would have not needed an alibi.
JFK could have enjoyed the drive and Oswald may have not been The Patsy.
King would have stayed dreaming, while Lennon would have kept imagining.
Brenda would have ‘still’ disliked Mondays, but maybe ‘The Man’ would have no reason to meet ‘Liberty Valance’.
Gandhi’s protests could have stayed peaceful and Lincoln would have enjoyed the performance.
World War One may not have started, so what would have Franz Ferdinand called their band?
Unfortunately, the ‘before’ is the unknown and the ‘after’ is the history that we know.

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Joint third place (each winning free access to one of my online creative writing courses (currently worth £20 / $20) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,000 words (worth £15 / $21):

Gary Stark with ‘Mother, We Need To Talk About Father’

Before the shot was fired, Zarcon knew he himself would cease to exist. He had been sent from the future to kill his father who had invented “The Weapon” and that meant his own birth wouldn’t happen. He fired and the man fell. Zarkon waited… and waited, but he still existed. How? Then he realized why people always joked that he looked like Axintel, his father’s best man. It seems his mother had tested that accolade and he was the result. Anyway, back to the future where peace would now reign. But he’d have to have a word with Mum.

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Linda Hibbin with ‘Lord! Love a Duck!’

Before the shot was fired the ducks prepared themselves.
‘You OK, Cedric?’
‘Bit sore.’ The ducks sniggered. Cedric was in the middle. Not an ideal position but he loved being the centre of attention, not just flipping over, but wildly spinning!
Jefferson sniffed. ‘I’ve a cold coming.’ He was on the end, open to the elements. He fancied Beatrice on the bar below. A sharpshooter would send him swinging down, his head level with the back of hers. He’d blow kisses, flirt, make her giggle.
‘Get a grip, guys. He’s focusing,’ chorused fluffy rabbits dangling above.
BANG!
‘Sweetheart!’ screamed Jefferson.

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Susi J Smith with ‘Shot Down’

“He’s a big shot.” Gerald pats my arm, my chance of promotion lies bleeding beneath my desk.

Malcolm Bennett. What kind of name is Malcolm Bennett? He blows me a kiss. Scowling, I turn to the desktop.

It’s dark before I find what I’m looking for.

The next morning I wave Malcolm Bennett goodbye as he’s dragged from the building. Printing Mr Hotshot’s mug shot was a cheap shot, but it worked.

Gerald sidles over. “About that job…”

Before the ‘shot’ was fired it was all I wanted, but now…

“Sorry, Gerald.” Patting his arm, I head for my desk.

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Highly commended (winning my Entering Writing Competitions course worth £20 / $20) or a free edit and critique of up to 1,000 words (worth £15 / $21) – in alphabetical order:

• Douglas Goodrich with ‘One Last Shot’
• Joyce Bingham with ‘The Announcement’
• Kirtan Savith Kumar with ‘Apple’
• Paul Mastaglio with ‘Before the Shot was Fired’
• Penelope Henry with ‘Arsenal’
• Sarah Robin with ‘Caught’

Honourable mentions (not winning anything but only narrowly missing out and still looking good on their CV) – in alphabetical order:

• Bob Cairns with ‘Bugged’
• Dettra Rose with ‘The Love of Generations’
• Kaitlin Woodland with ‘Living the Litter-Tray Life’
• Lesley McLean with ‘Rusty and Rosie Rebel’
• Nicholas Sebastian with ‘Farewell’
• Sue Massey with ‘Why?’

Congratulations, everyone. The entries for this month are already drifting in. Remember, you can send up to three per month so rather than miss out on a chance by sending one story, do submit more.

If you’ve enjoyed these stories and / or just want to leave a comment, please do so below and / or you can email me at morgen@morgenbailey.com., although I won’t (can’t) discuss forthcoming entries unless it’s a general query.