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.

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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):

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.

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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):

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.

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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.”

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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):

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.

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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:

• 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.

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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.

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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.

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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):

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

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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.”

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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):

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.

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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:

• 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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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!

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

The free 100-word comp is open for March (Jan results coming soon!)

Yes, February is closed and March’s theme of ‘going to camp’ is open, to be used however you see fit. For details, please take a look at the 100-word comp page.

January’s results are very late (sorry!) but will be published this week…

It’s a free competition and you can win free …Editing and Critique or my Creative Writing Online Courses.

The page also lists the upcoming themes for the next few months so you can write them whenever you like but don’t submit early as they’ll be disqualified. Good luck.

Results of Morgen’s 100-word competition: December 2020

Hello everyone and welcome to the sixty-fourth month of this competition. There were 51 entries from 25 authors for the theme of ‘the winter summer holiday’. NB You can all send in three stories for a better chance of being picked.

One was disqualified for being way over the 100 words (the author did leave a comment to admit to getting carried away). 🙂 Another was 98 words because four words should have been connected (get / together – as a noun, and ‘grand child’). Ditto another story for ‘grand kids’ and ‘Coke a Cola’ (instead of Coca-Cola, which is one word instead of three). And another because there were two sets of detached ellipses. Punctuation alone doesn’t count as a word. Fortunately the author submitted two other stories so they went through.

One of another author’s stories was disqualified for having ‘a snow’. Like money, snow is a collective noun so it should have been ‘snow’ on its own, making the story 99 words, or ‘a snowfall’ which would have been fine. Sadly it was my favourite story of the three so my second favourite went through to judging. Another story had ‘trees are laden with fruit hang upon branches’ – the same (collective noun) applies here and in the context ‘hanging’ (or hung) would have been the preferred (imho) choice, although my editor’s head would have chopped the ‘hang upon branches’ because we have the context (sorry, author!). There was also an apostrophe missing from ‘keeping ones spirit’ (one’s) alive. A lovely story though.

One story had a non-hyphenated title but this isn’t included in the word count so it was fine. Another had ‘it was really was’ so removing one of the ‘was’s took it down to 99. Fortunately the author had sent two other stories so they went through. Another lost a brownie point for having ‘whist’ instead of ‘whilst’. A spell checker wouldn’t pick it out because ‘whist’ is a word in itself but when I listened to the stories, on my Kindle Fire’s text-to-speech function, I spotted the error.

Other story missed out on a top-three slot by switching, in error, between past then present then back to past tense. Another from present tense to past tense (when it’s all one scene with no reflection). It’s easily done but it’s a shame.

Some stories that missed out on a place were the only entries by their authors. It’s always worth sending the maximum of three. It can’t guarantee a place but one of the stories would likely have a better chance than the other two.

Other observations:

• like compass points (north, south, east, west), seasons (spring, summer, autumn, winter/fall) aren’t capitalised unless part of a name, e.g. The Winter House bar. That said, the story that concentrated on these, used them as names so it’s fine. Although it was a strong story, the author’s second story made me chuckle – always a good sign – so that went through.
• adverbs (and nouns) should be used after the verb, e.g. ‘to go boldly’ rather than ‘to boldly go’ but there are exceptions such as a connected object: Tom put the pen down on the table. If something sounds better with the verb split (a split infinitive) then go with the more natural sounding.
• where the dialogue tag (he said) follows on from what is said there should be a comma before the speech marks / inverted commas then small ‘h’ for ‘he said’ or ‘s’ for ‘she said’ or equivalent. There still wouldn’t be capitals, unless for a name, after a question or exclamation mark. And it’s fine to use exclamation marks when someone’s yelling / shouting (then you’d often not need the ‘he / she yelled / shouted’), but just one ! 🙂
• 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.
• when talking to someone, we don’t often say each other’s names (and avoid too many endearments). Although dialogue doesn’t strictly reflect real speech, it should feel realistic and especially where you only have two characters in a scene and it’s been established who’s saying what, you can cut down on (or out) the name calling. Also rather than ‘Tom said’, have Tom pick up a mug or equivalent so the description, in the same paragraph as what he says, tells us it’s him speaking.
• ‘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. One story had two ‘just’s in consecutive sentences. They stand out to me more than most readers but less is more, especially in something this short.
• titles (and headings) don’t have full stops unless there’s more than one sentence.
• 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.
• 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 have ‘the phone rang’.
• I’m a stickler for unintended repetition. One story had a ‘rushing’ then ‘rush’. Another had four ‘all’s. I spot some early but other repetition leaps out when I listen to the document, alongside reading it on the screen. I recommend having some way of having something (or someone) else reading your story as you may well spot something you’d not picked up on the first (or second… third) time round.
• 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.
• where something is plural (a family name in this case) rather than possessive, e.g. the Smiths rather than something belonging to the Smith family, no apostrophe is required.
• it’s is a shortening for ‘it is’ – often used before a verb or description (e.g. it’s happening whether you like it or not / it’s brown not black) whereas ‘its’ is possessive – something belonging to something or someone, so usually before a noun (e.g. the dog was curled in its basket). Note: I’ve said ‘curled’ rather than ‘curled up’ because we know what curled means. You can often lose the ‘up’ or ‘down’ with a motion, e.g. he stood up, she sat down It’s only trimming a word but they add up(!) over the length of a novel.
• when writing past tense narration, ago is present tense so ‘two years ago’ wouldn’t be two years ago but two years earlier / before. Ditto tomorrow isn’t tomorrow (today isn’t today etc.). Tomorrow is the next day / the day after, today is that day, yesterday is the day before / a day earlier, tonight is that evening / night etc. Dialogue is present tense so they’re fine in speech. This is present-tense narration so it’s fine as it is but worth mentioning.

The winning stories are ones that I reacted most favourably to (especially this month as ‘Richard’ was a long-deceased cat in one and non-deceased husband in another). 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 January is ‘Before the shot was fired… (as a sentence start)’ and you can submit your entries (and do send three) at any time up to midnight (UK time) on Sunday 31st January. 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.

*

Join 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):

Christopher Tattersall with ‘Season’s Greetings’

Behind the glass it was cold enough for snow, yet outside the sun shone bright.

He wore his warm coat with white fur lapels as he watched her outside enjoying the summer vacation.

He revelled in her joy, watching her splash in the paddling pool. As she played and her family made the most of summer, he travelled the globe, killing time until he was required again.

As the year progressed, their ambient temperatures slowly converged. Soon snow would fall from their skies again.

She replaced the ornament, watching in awe as the snow settled in his dome of glass.

*

Darren York with ‘Who Stole the Summer?’

I took it as it was poking its head above the horizon, bright orange beginning to fill every living thing. The previous year had been a miserable one, rain taking the place of the sun’s rays. Winter followed, giving us another season without the sun. So, in desperation, I’d bundled it into the back of my car, driven home and locked it in my garden shed. I waited until Christmas day to release its golden rays, making it the hottest Christmas in my house ever recorded. To this very day the sun’s still missing, but I know where it is.

*

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 Dream Trip’

Let’s pretend we went on our summer holiday and you got to wear your brand new dress.

Let’s pretend there was unremitting sunshine and we paddled happily in a welcoming sea.

Let’s pretend we got sand in all our creases when we rolled together on the salt-stretched beach.

Let’s pretend the weather was delightful and we remembered to send all our busy postcards.

Let’s pretend we had the most amazing time and there were no tiers.

Let’s pretend I didn’t cry all through December, aching for the warmth of you.

Let’s pretend we could still go.

Let’s pretend we went.

*

Jane Brown with ‘A Full House’

“Beach!” the Queen of Hearts demanded. “I want to show off my new bikini.”

“Come on, Queenie,” both the black Jacks said. “We all agreed our next holiday would be to the snow.”

The Queen pouted. “I refuse to go. All that cold air does nothing for my pores.”

The King of Diamonds groaned and put his head in his hands.

That night, all the cards (minus one) got together for a secret meeting.

The next day, they frolicked in a winter wonderland after one card took an unexpected trip down a pipe.

It’s hard to beat a straight flush.

*

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):

Sue Massey with ‘Winter Sunshine’

The volume of work makes it impossible to take a holiday in summer. Green Team sorts mail. Red Team builds bespoke creations. EffCee is in charge. Parcels and packages loaded sky high, he harnesses Pulling Team. They fly into the cold night sky full of twinkling constellations and bright planets. “Phew, last drop,” EffCee mutters. Thomas pops his sleepy head over the duvet. “Thank you, Father Christmas. See you next year.”

Exhausted, EffCee smiles. He steers Pulling Team back to base to pick up the others. They head off in search of winter sunshine for a well-earned and long-overdue holiday.

*

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:

• Bob Cairns with ‘Santa’s Sudden Summer’
• Kirtan Savith Kumar with ‘A Seaside Picnic’
• Kyle Barratt with ‘What’s in a Name’
• Linda Hibbin with ‘Heart-warming Memories’
• Sarah Robin with ‘The Escape’

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

• CJ Nicol with ‘Christmas Day, 2120’
• Laura Besley with ‘Dream Holiday’
• Stef Smulders with ‘Sloth’
• Yvonne Mastaglio with ‘Back on the Mountain’

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: November 2020

Hello everyone and welcome to the sixty-third month of this competition. There were 47 entries from 24 authors for the theme of ‘silence isn’t quite golden’.

And boy, a really strong month this time. There were several stories of loss so in another month they may well have been placed differently had there not been so many. The ones I chose were, to me, the more powerful ones. For me to read a story and go ‘wow’, that’s a very good sign.

When I receive the stories I copy/paste them into a Word document then read them in batches, placing them roughly where I think they may end up. It’s rare for me to have less than two winners, seconds, thirds, several highly commended and honourable mentions. I’m writing this at the point of my final whittling and I have three firsts, three seconds, four thirds, four highly commended and four honourable mentions. The latter, sadly, will have to go and the others staggered. I email them to my Kindle more than once as I rejig the order until I’m happy with the selection. It invariably means that some great stories are cut that may have been placed in other months and it’s especially true this time.

These are the ones that didn’t make even the first round…

• One was disqualified for only being 98 words. The title was three words so even if included would have been 101.
• A story lost a point for ‘creaked opened’ rather than ‘creaked open’ – a simple error. This sometimes happen with last-minute entries but it wasn’t the case this time. It didn’t affect the word count so it went through but was placed lower than it would have been without the error, and dropped off the list, which is a shame, especially as it was that author’s only entry – why it’s always worth sending three.
• Another lost a brownie point for ‘laying’ (placing something) instead of ‘lying’ (being horizontal). To lie is ‘I lay’ in simple past tense but in present tense, people lie, chickens lay. If you are putting down an object, you lay it down. If you are having a rest, you lie on the sofa. In past perfect, it would be ‘lain’ (people), ‘laid’ (object). http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/lay-versus-lie.
• A great story had an ‘of’ missing (little bit plain fun) so would have been 101 and therefore had to be disqualified, another shame as it was a solo entry and a great story. Another, again a solo entry, was disqualified for having a word too many (before they were commanded them to stop) – the ‘were’ or ‘them’ should have been removed, making it 99 words. 😦
• One was disqualified for incorrect word count for having unhyphenated ‘eight month old dogs’. 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.
• Another, unfortunately from the same author, was disqualified for having two ‘to’s together, reducing the story to 99 words by removing one.

Other observations:

• where a word is a generic noun rather than a name (e.g. ‘the doctor’ vs Doctor Smith – ‘a goddess’ in this case) there should be a small first letter.
• 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 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.
• in my writing I add commas where a reader would breathe if reading the piece aloud, which I always recommend the author do too, especially where a scene feels flat or you think it doesn’t work for whatever reason. Tip: 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.
• careful of too many adverbs, especially in short pieces like these (one had four). Where dialogue shows us how something’s said then we don’t need an adverb with the verb, or replace the whole thing with a stronger verb (e.g. ‘Get out!’ he snapped… rather than …he said angrily).
• there weren’t too many clichés this time. Even something as simple as sitting ‘bolt upright’ is a bit of a cliché so best avoided. No points lost but definitely worth choosing something original.

The winning stories are ones that I reacted most favourably to (despite the two ‘was’s in the first sentence of one of them). 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 December is ‘the winter summer holiday’ and you can submit your entries (and do send three) at any time up to midnight (UK time) on Thursday 31st December. 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):

Douglas Goodrich with ‘The Lost Oscar’

She always sits in the same seat every day, looking out at the large oak tree, outside the recreation room’s bay window. Gorgeous in her old age.

Margarette Felton is how she was known in Hollywood. Daisy Hinkler is how she grew up in Paris, Texas. Before the spoken words on screen, she was a goddess. Commanding a thousand dollars a week when others worked in sweatshops for a quarter of the salary.

But the elusive Oscar is what haunts her still today. She never won the gold. If only she’d have transitioned to the talkies, but silently she mourns.

*

Stef Smulders with ‘Animal Love’

When I bought the house, I hadn’t noticed next door’s dogs, five ferocious Rottweilers locked up in a tiny back garden.

Now their fights and endless waves of roars keep me awake at night.

“I’m afraid to approach them myself,” my neighbor said with a weird smile. Two sleeve tattoos covered his arms.

Then, one night, all is silent. A miracle! I go outside, curious to know why. Near the fence, I hear smacking noises. The dogs are eating.

The ‘I Love Dogs’ tattoo lighting up in the beam of my lantern tells me more than I want to know.

*

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):

Anne Maguire with ‘New Start’

Jean was my new neighbour and was very chatty. “It’s lovely and quiet here, you’ll not be bothered by noisy kids or music.”

I wanted to tell her how I missed the sound of kids, of Sally playing her flute – really badly – and me smiling proudly. How I missed her incessant chatter about life at eight and all its intricacies. How I missed her shouting about how awful a mum I was.

Alex says I’ve not to keep bringing it up. This is a new start, he says. They don’t need to keep hearing about a dead child, he says.

*

Paul Mastaglio with ‘A Christmas Break’

Captain Ben Johnson made his way carefully along the trench. Where was everybody? Carelessly discarded mess tins littered the dusty floor while a helmet sat abandoned next to sandbags. There were no hushed conversations as cigarettes were rolled. No scraping sounds as weapons were cleaned. Nothing moved.

His reverie was broken by the sound of loud cheering coming from above. Ben hastily climbed a ladder and looked across no man’s land. British and German soldiers were chasing each other as they competed for possession of an old leather football. A smile creased his lips. Why couldn’t Christmas Day last forever?

*

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):

Jane Brown with ‘To Boldly Go’

‘Why did you become an astronaut?’ the reporter asked.

‘To explore new places and stick flags on planets,’ I replied grinning.

I lied. I wanted to get away from Mother. The constant phone calls and visits had become unbearable. Even moving to a different country hadn’t helped. Funnily enough, she had been silent recently, ever since I’d told her I was leaving Earth.

I gazed into the blackness as an unexpected rocket approached my ship.

‘Surprise!’ Mother’s voice crackled over the comms. ‘I become an astronaut too! Isn’t it going to be fun up here? Just the two of us.’

*

Julian Cadman with ‘Silence Speaks Volumes’

Silence isn’t quite golden, when awaiting her call after giving out your number.

Silence isn’t quite golden, after you’ve told her parents what you do for a living.

Silence isn’t quite golden, when you’ve just proposed.

Silence isn’t quite golden, after your best man’s told what he thought was an acceptable anecdote during his speech.

Silence isn’t quite golden, when you wake up and realise you’ve forgotten to switch on the baby monitor.

Silence isn’t quite golden, after you’ve asked the consultant if it’s curable.

Silence isn’t quite golden, when stepping through the front door alone for the first time.

*

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:

• Bob Cairns with‘A Prayer Falls on Deaf Ears’
• Cath Barton with‘The Angelic Glow’
• Joyce Bingham with‘When Will You Leave, When Will You Tell?’
• Katie Jones with‘The Silent Partner’

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

• Alan Barker with‘Oh Dear, What Can The Matter Be?’
• Carol Allison with‘The Commuters’
• Darren York with‘Noose’
• Michael Harries with‘Cwtch’

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: October 2020

Hello everyone and welcome to the sixty-second month of this competition. There were 52 entries from 25 authors for the theme of ‘creep’. NB You can all send in three stories for a better chance of being picked. Not an easy month to whittle down to the successful stories.

One was disqualified for only being 99 words. Another, from the same entrant, started as 99 but had ‘over turned’ as two words rather than one so it went down to 98 words. Fortunately the author’s third story was 100 words so that went through. A similar thing happened for another author (‘work load’ instead of ‘workload’ https://www.lexico.com/definition/workload) but one of the other stories was my favourite of the three so it wasn’t a problem.

Another ended being 99 words as there was an adjective (now-former) before a noun so it ‘lost’ a word. Another, from a regular entrant, was disqualified as there was a hyphenated word (battle-cry) that, sadly, shouldn’t have been hyphenated: https://www.lexico.com/definition/battle_cry. So separating them made it 101 words. It’s a shame as it was a great story but I have to be fair to everyone to amend any ‘errors’. Another of the same author’s stories had a word (‘her’) too many so removing that made it 99 words, so also disqualified. A different author had a story disqualified for ‘entry way’ which is (https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/entryway). Both of these examples are the same in UK and US English so no allowance for nationality unfortunately.

One 99-word story (from a regular entrant) had a hyphenated word so perhaps it was counted as two.

One story had a title that should have been hyphenated (One-way) but the title’s not included in the word count so it’s fine. Another (different author) had an adjective (‘white knuckle’ ride) that should have been hyphenated (because it’s not a white ride) so the 100-word story dropped down to 99 and was therefore, sadly, disqualified.

Another author submitted four entries but the third and fourth appeared to be the same. The first version of the story is the one accepted so I ignored the second.

One story had two standalone hyphens in the story which (and it’s in the rules) don’t count as words. As – hyphens, rather than (correctly) – dashes, Word does actually count them as words so sadly it only came to 98 words. Fortunately the author had submitted the maximum of three so the other two went through.

I was torn between two stories from an author and marginally preferred the one I deferred (more polite than ‘shelved’) but the title gave away the ending so an easy choice in the end.

Other observations:

• when speaking to someone and using a name, nickname or term of endearment (which counts as a name), 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.
• we mumble / mutter / whisper under our breath so wouldn’t need ‘under my / his / her breath’.
• 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.
• 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’.
• there were the occasional ‘creep slowly’ (and ‘slowly creep’ which is a split infinitive’). By default, ‘creep’ implies a slowness so the adverb can go. 🙂
• there was a story with two characters whose names started with the same letter. They were different in gender and length (Amy/Andrew) and it’s such a short story that there couldn’t be any confusion but I recommend using as few duplicated letters as possible. I use a table to keep track and you can find one for novels at https://morgenbailey.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/1c-names-table-novels.doc and short stories at https://morgenbailey.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/1c-names-table-stories.doc. Whether you’re editing something you’ve already written or starting a new piece, it’s worth using something like this to ensure originality, even for instance if it’s avoiding having a character called Katherine when you’ve got a church called St Katherine. (Note: no full stop after the ‘St’. The same goes with Mr, Mrs, Dr etc. They’re more common in the US but I recommend not having full stops after these shortenings to avoid any readers thinking they’ve come to the end of the sentence.)
• 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’.
• although ‘rooted to the spot’, ‘frozen on the spot’ (or similar) is a cliché it won’t count against you but clichés are best avoided. http://www.be-a-better-writer.com/cliches.html is a great list of 681 clichés to avoid.
• there were some stories with some fabulous onomatopoeic words and ‘active’ verbs (crash, plunge, rumble, races, howls, shrieks). Look at your verbs and see how they can be more vivid.
• ‘police’ is a generic noun unless forming part of a title, e.g. ‘West Midlands Police’. Like group, money, company, couple, family etc., is a single entity should be a single verb (e.g. ‘was’ rather than ‘were’). That said, it depends on how natural it sounds.
• it’s always best to ‘show’ us how a character is feeling rather than telling us. Instead of saying s/he’s infuriated, have her/him do something like growl or say something that ‘shows’ us.
• 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.

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 November is ‘silence isn’t quite golden’ and you can submit your entries (and do send three) at any time up to midnight (UK time) on Monday 30th November. 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):

Stef Smulders with ‘Attic’

There’s a madman in the attic. At night, his shuffling keeps me awake. I wait for the stairs to creak but nobody descends.

By day I sit at my desk and rock my body, fighting the anxiety that’s creeping up on me.

One night, I listen behind the bedroom door. Silence. I exit and climb the stairs. At the top, my head at floor level, I stop to look around. Minutes pass.

There’s nobody there.

Feeling safe, I enter and crawl into a corner.

There’s a madman in the attic. At night he shuffles around.

But there’s nobody listening downstairs.

*

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):

Anne Maguire with ‘Project Creep’

I’d heard the term several times in the meeting.

At a break I asked Andy and he said “project creep” was when a project got out of control via lots of little blips rather than a big mistake.

He said, like when your rug creeps four inches nearer the telly rather than moving into the dining room.

I thought about life. I’d expected to be married to a man and with kids by the time I was thirty but here I was less than that, married to a woman who was pregnant – my rug was definitely in the dining room.

*

Jane Broughton with ‘The Name of the Game’

I’m a creeper. I creep up walls and around windows. I’m tenacious and can adapt to any surface. I use the smallest chinks in mortar to anchor myself to a building. I dig in and then up I go, steadily and stealthily. I probe as I ascend; seeking out open windows, loose frames, gaps in roof tiles, any opportunity for access. Once I spot my chance I exploit it mercilessly. You won’t know your house has been cracked by the creeper. Not until you remark on the small absences, a wallet here, a necklace there. The name is my game.

*

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):

Joyce Bingham with ‘The Dead are Watching’

As she approaches, the smell of the cemetery, damp soil, leaf mould, and worm casts is replaced with the iron hint of blood, the stench of rotten soul.

Her transparent dull aura reveals her vices, her nature.

I can feel my fellow residents moan and writhe, some in pain, others in pleasure. She is a creep, a troll, carrying, with delight and glee, photographs which will destroy a life.

She cuts across my plot, I will the ivy to trip her, the device cracks as it hits my headstone. I send a pestiferous breath across its surface, the electronics fry.

*

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:

• Lesley McLean with ‘Annelida’
• Sarah Robin with ‘Another Stormy Sunday Afternoon’
• Scott Rhodie with ‘Not the Life of Riley’
• Sue Massey with ‘The Hole’
• Valerie Fish with ‘Douglas’

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

• Anne-Marie Chaplin with ‘In The Wild’
• Douglas Goodrich with ‘Cheers!’
• Liz Aiken with ‘The Dance of Life’
• Patricia Cooksley with ‘Cowboys and Indians’
• Paul Mastaglio with ‘The Perfect Shot’

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: September 2020

Hello everyone and welcome to the sixty-first month of this competition. There were 53 entries from 22 authors for the theme of ‘the swimming pool’, a popular one this month. And as you’ll see more successful entries. (You’d think I’m feeling particularly generous but actually just less able to lose some great stories!)

One was disqualified for having an ‘any more’ (quantity) where it should have been ‘anymore’ (time). I have to be fair to everyone… sorry! It was the only entry from that author so they were disqualified*. What a shame. Another was disqualified for having ‘into’ twice which, removing one would have made it 99 words. Fortunately the author had submitted two other stories. NB You can all send in three stories for a better chance of being picked.

All three stories from one (regular) author were disqualified for being 97, 98 and only 81 words which was a shame. Another story, the only one by that author, was only 95 words. I can’t stress how important it is to ensure your story is the correct word count. They’re only 100 words long so you can do it manually or copy/paste onto something like www.wordcounter.net.

One story had full stops as ellipses (i.e. . . . instead of …) but fortunately the author hadn’t counted these as words and the story was 100 spot on. Another also had an ‘any more’ that should have been ‘anymore’ affected the word count (thankfully it wasn’t my favourite of the three submitted). ‘anymore’ is time whereas ‘any more’ is quantity so the latter is correct here. The easy(ish) way to remember is that quantity is usually followed by a noun, e.g. ‘Do you have any more cake?’ And anymore often appears at the end of a sentence, e.g. ‘I don’t want this anymore.’

One solo entry was unfortunately disqualified for having a hyphenated word that shouldn’t have been. Had the words been before the noun then it should have been. An example is: ‘the doctor on call’ vs ‘the on-call doctor’. https://www.lexico.com/definition/on_callprovides other examples. Tricky but again I have to be fair to everyone.

A new entrant had, on first view, sent four stories. The maximum is three so I was going to submit the first three only for judging until I saw the third was a resend of the first story with the title’s incorrect spelling corrected. Another entrant had sent two versions of the same story (with very minor alterations). The first version of a story goes through and a spelling error won’t see a story disqualified (that’s usually only for non-100 words – for no reason other than too short or long, or if a word is missing so would go over if added, or if a piece has not been written to the theme) but it’s always worth creating your story in another format first and reading and rereading it before you copy/paste it into my page’s form. If it’s a good enough story it won’t make a difference but does lose a brownie point. Another had ‘Mum’ (the name) as ‘mum’ (my/a mum) rather than capitalised. Again not disqualified for that but worth mentioning.

One story had a title that should have been hyphenated (A Girls-only Holiday). Titles aren’t included in the word count so that’s okay. The same author though had a word within a different story (cold induced) that should have been hyphenated so when it was corrected, it dropped the story to 99 words. The easiest way to know if a word should be hyphenated is whether either word can stand alone as an adjective. In this case it was ‘cold induced heart attack’. ‘cold heart attack’ wouldn’t make sense. Ditto ‘induced heart attack’. Although the latter is better, we need to know what the induction was. In this case it’s ‘cold’ so needs to be ‘cold-induced’.

Although one of an entrant’s three stories appealed to me the most, I chose a different story because it focussed more on the swimming pool rather than a brief mention. I’m sure (like to think) the stories were written for this competition but the closer to the theme a story is, the more likely it is to succeed over those who may have already existed but be tweaked for the relevant theme. Also, try not to make your story too cryptic. There were a couple this month where I read them and went “Huh?” Still the same reaction the second time so they sadly didn’t go through to the final judging.

Another story (one of two submitted) had ‘sole’ instead of ‘soul’. Again, not something that would disqualify a story but more losing a brownie point. I preferred the other story anyway so that went through. Another had ‘dove’ which https://www.lexico.com/definition/doveconfirms is the North American spelling of the past tense ‘dived’ so no error, although I always recommend having the spelling correct for wherever the story is set (if we know). Other observations:

• Where the speech has an unrelated dialogue tag, e.g. someone laughing, moving, smiling etc. (with it capitalised: “That one?” He laughed as she picked up the mug.) the punctuation should be a full stop rather than a comma. Had it been related description, it would be a comma (“That one?” he asked as she picked up the mug.). Note: that the ‘he asked’ would always be small ‘h’ even after a question mark, exclamation mark etc.
• 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.
• I also recommend not inverting dialogue tags (and there were some), e.g. ‘said Simon’ instead of ‘Simon said’. ‘said’ tends to blend so also better than more flowery expostulated, cried* etc. https://www.proofreadingservices.com/pages/said is a list of 272 (reasonable) alternatives, although it includes coughed, laughed and chortled where they aren’t directly speech verbs. *this is very much a personal preference but I do think ‘cried’ should only be when someone’s shedding tears.
• 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…
• ‘feet’ should be foot when preceding a noun, i.e. a ten-foot pillar vs the pillar was ten feet tall.
• 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’.
• Technically, ‘now’ (‘by now’, ‘just now’ and ‘right now’) 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 in a piece and chopping where 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 October is ‘creep’ and you can submit your entries (and do send three) at any time up to midnight (UK time) on Saturday 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.

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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):

Darren York with ‘A Dead Cool Pool Party’

“My glass is empty man, fill her up now,” barked an inebriated Sinatra, irking Bogart and Monroe canoodling together on a sunlounger.

“Over here, waiter, without delay,” bawled an impatient Noel Coward, causing me to spill his martini.

Stan Laurel calmed him with a joke and he dived into the pool to cool off, watched by Kennedy, suspecting anyone and everyone. “Relax, John,” I said handing him a cocktail, “you’re dead now.”

Liberace plonked himself down at the piano and, ignoring a cacophony of groans, let rip with eager fingers.

Vera sang her song. We’ll meet again? I hope not.

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Oliver Barton with ‘Left Behind’

Behind the Methodist chapel is the swimming pool. Was. There is only the chapel in the village (now a holiday cottage), the Post Office (closed last lifetime), the pub (the Last Resort). And this ex-pool, an insolent donation to the villagers by the self-appointed squire of yesterday. Now it is full of stuff: a shopping trolley, aspirations, dreams, abandoned hope. From a crack in the middle, springs a tree. Sycamore? Yggdrasil? Into its boughs, local youths have flung pairs of trainers that hang dangling, votive offerings to Lastbus, the God of Getting Away From Here. Alas, he went, aeons ago.

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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):

Sue Massey with ‘Fantasy Swimming’ (a tough choice between this and ‘Bikinis and Boys’)

Carrie dangled her feet over the edge. Cool water lapped at her calves. Through blue-tinted goggles the swimming pool became the Mediterranean Sea. She plopped into the water, took a gentle breath, and submerged. Little bubbles escaped from her nose and mouth. She was a submarine. Carrie loved that first gentle length. Tight muscles released, aching joints creaked into life, and her body tingled. After a thirty-minute swim, she took off for the Bahamas to soak up the heat of the sauna, then showered in the monsoons of India, dressed, and cycled off to work. Tomorrow she’d swim with dolphins.

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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):

Liz Aiken with ‘Who Defines What A Swimming Pool Is?’

It is the two-legged ones, the ‘hoomans’, I call them.

They like this game. I play to please. Finding, retrieving, and returning the ball. He tells Jo she will never be a bowler with her erratic throwing.

Exhausted by running, chasing the red ball. Panting with the heat instinct takes me towards…

NO! – resonates loudly through the air. With deaf ears, my four legs ignore the command. Water’s allure is irresistible – jumping into the pool I swim. They see a stagnate water, I see a cooling paradise.

Wagging my tail joyfully as they tell me I am a filthy dog.

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Valerie Fish with ‘My Water Baby’

Living on the coast, we’d be in the water all year round, whatever the weather. We knew the tides, the dangers; you would have thought we’d be safe in a public swimming pool…

If only swimming caps hadn’t gone out of fashion. If only she’d tied her hair back…

The coroner concluded there was a fault with one of the filters; the council was heavily fined, and we were awarded compensation, but no amount of money could bring my precious girl back.

Now my little water baby is swimming with the angels.

I will never go in the water again.

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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:

• Anne Maguire with ‘Drained’
• Bailey Winters with ‘Endless’
• Dhananjay Bapat with ‘Primal Rage’
• Jane Brown with ‘Changing Colours’
• Jennie Cordner with ‘In at the Deep End’
• Joyce Bingham with ‘Be Careful What You Wish For’
• Julian Cadman with ‘The Ripple Effect’

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

• Cath Barton with ‘Moonlight Serenade’
• Clare Law with ‘The Pool in the House on the Island’
• Flissie with ‘Solly O’Sullivan’s Last Words’
• Laura Besley with ‘Chatter on the Sidelines’
• Lesley McLean with ‘The Drowning’
• Paul Mastaglio with ‘Horror by the Sea’
• Stef Smulders with ‘Cupcakes’

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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: August 2020 (finally!)

Hello everyone and welcome to the sixtieth! month of this competition. My apologies for it being so late this month… it’s been a manic one.

There were 41 entries from 22 authors for the theme of ‘update’, with the complication of not being able to start a sentence with a pronoun (the characters’ names, I, You, He or She, A/The (thing or person)).

Three, unfortunately all from the same entrant, were disqualified for being 98, 99 and 101 words. The lower two had punctuation separated from words so when reconnected, they brought down the word count. Another was disqualified for having a word missing (‘what they WERE talking about’) which would have made it 101. It’s a simple error and should have been detected before submission. Fortunately the entrant submitted another story which went through to the judging. This wasn’t the case however for another entrant who was disqualified for the same reason (cruel as TO take) and it was their only story. This is why it’s always worth submitting three.

Another entry had a word (https://www.lexico.com/definition/spaceship) as two words so when conjoined made the story 99 words. I have to be fair to everyone so it’s always worth checking sites like lexico.com if you’re in doubt. And another story had a ‘that’ missing. I’m all for chopping ‘that’s but not when the rest of it is incorrect or doesn’t make sense. 😦

I noticed that a few stories had inverted dialogue tags, some where the verb isn’t a dialogue verb, e.g. smiled, laughed, coughed… basically any action that’s directly connected with the speaking. While a publisher is unlikely to reject a story for that reason, I highly recommend

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.

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 ‘the swimming pool’ and you can submit your entries (and do send three for a better chance) at any time up to midnight (UK time) on Wednesday 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.

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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 £14 / $18):

Carmina McConnell with ‘Befriended’
Thank you for your purchase of the update for household robot ‘Dreamer’. Model 2023 has a host of new features surpassing any other on the market. Let me talk you through these. First: a flying control so your ‘Dreamer’ can now keep your ceilings spotless alongside the former floors and upholstery cleaning facilities. Next: the new culture button ensures you will never again venture outdoors into unhealthy arts venues. Finally: the ‘companionship’ mode is now so sophisticated that all former friendships become obsolete. Don’t worry about the update payment: ‘Dreamer’ Model 2023 has already taken control of all your finances.

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Stef Smulders with ‘Mail Order’
When she first presented Robbie to her friends, they were thrilled.
“Wow, Carrie, you found the ideal man! Where? How?”
“Through mail order,” Carrie answered.
All burst into laughter.
It hadn’t been all that easy. Searching the dark web for hours, days, weeks on end. Copy-pasting Chinese texts to Google Translate. But it had been worth the effort.
Although the instructions clearly stated that the robot was not programmed for sex, Carrie couldn’t resist the perfection of Robbie’s body, his muscles, the smooth skin.
“What are we doing?” Robbie asked, Carrie on top of him.
“Just updating your software, Rob.”

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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 £11 / $14):

Darren York with ‘A Job Worth Doing’
Blue jeans; red top; blond hair, glasses and slight limp. Shops every morning after dropping his wife off at work. Quick hello, before one slice across the throat does the job. Step back before a crimson fountain stains the shoes. Escape in car.

Message update: do not kill. Abort job.

Return to scene stemming bleed with scarf. Target still breathing; still alive. Call ambulance; he’ll live.

Message update: good to go again.

Follow ambulance to the hospital. Wait around posing as doctor; turning off life support. Get out. Another bloody update… drop my phone into river… updating my curriculum vitae.

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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 £7 / $9):

Cath Barton with ‘My Sister, Former Masterchef Contestant, Announces Her Intention to Visit’

‘Just a flying visit,’ she’d texted, ‘on our way to the coast. Be with you for coffee at eleven. Don’t go to any trouble.’
Knowing how particular my sister was, I went to considerable trouble and baked biscuits, iced them too.
At 10.45 on the day she sent a message: ‘Delayed setting off. With you by lunchtime.’
Panic stations! Shop-bought was never good enough for Yvonne. More baking, with me getting hotter than the oven.
At 12.45 another update pinged in: ‘Sorry, no time to stop, children mad for the beach.’
Mad didn’t begin to cover the way I felt.

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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 £7 / $9) – in alphabetical order:

• Carol Allison with ‘The Home Office’
• Joyce Bingham with ‘The Hit Man’
• Laura Besley with ‘Awakening’
• Lestie Mulholland with ‘Incommunicado’
• Wendy Hayko with ‘After Life’

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

• CJ Nicol with ‘King of the Castle’
• Elena Canty with ‘A Different Kind of Virus’
• Patricia Cooksley with ‘Introducing Eric’
• Yvonne Mastaglio with ‘Waste of Time’

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.