S.J.Budd

I found that my progress as an aspiring writer accelerated a lot when I learnt my first golden rule of writing. Writing is a creative process but selling them is purely business If you are serious in taking your creative writing further by getting published, you'll need to adopt a professional attitude. Here's how. Find and research your market You must consider your market. Is there a market that will want your story? If your only objective is to write great stories you won't need to do this, but if you want to have them published then make sure you have an audience to market them to. You can determine this by having a search on Google, and Facebook is also a great way to find places to submit to. If your stories are considered horror, dark fiction or fantasy then do check out Short Dark Fiction Markets  as the research has already been done for you. It provides details of numerous magazine that accept submissions and is regularly updated. Write to

In the last six or so months I've really devoted my time to writing short stories and have managed to see two of them published. (Yey!) Which has been really great fun and rewarding, so much so that I was starting to forget why I started writing them in the first place. Ultimately my aim is to one day publish a novel. To do that I had to get good at writing, really good. Which only comes with practise, I've read somewhere that states if you want to master a craft you need to put in a bare minimum of 1,000 hours of practise. So you  have to be very focused, dedicated and incredibly stubborn. So I think the time has come to start on the dreaded second draft of my novel. I have't looked at it for months and I hope that when I read it  I'll  hopefully still find it worthy of my blood, sweat and tears. For me, the joy I experience with writing is that you have to get inside your story, live it as much as possible. This isn't too much of a task with short stories bu

Neil Gaiman is one of those authors everyone has heard of, even if you don't read. He's credited as helping to bring comics back to huge popularity. He's also is also considered a successful crossover artist who has brought fantasy literature into the mainstream book markets. He's written many books such as Coraline, Neverwhere, American Gods, The Graveyard Book and Anansi Boys. These books have become so popular that many of them have been made into very successful films. What I really admire about Neil Gaiman is his scope of imagination, it has no limitations, it just goes on and on and gives us these amazing stories that seem out of this world. Stardust is a prime example of this, a highly original yet mish - mash of every fairy tale you have ever heard. This is a tale of  a young man undertaking a heroic quest to find his heart's desire. If it were possible for words to dance upon a page it would occur in a Neil Gaiman novel. With stardust there i

I think that if you want to grow as a writer it's really important to write everyday, even and especially when you're not feeling creatively inspired. So, on that point if you want to get good at writing short stories and getting them published or winning at competitions, you need to write in a broad range and explore with different styles and themes. A really good way to do this is to find short story competitions and magazine submissions that are themed. At first it's really hard having your work dictated by a theme that's way out of your comfort zone, but it's a challenge worth persevering with as it will broaden your range. If you'd like to do this, and your passion is fantasy fiction why not try out Fantasy Faction's monthly themed writing competition , which I've mentioned before as I decided to give it a go. This is a great website that also has articles on useful writing tips, book reviews, interviews with top authors and the latest fant