Finished the edits of two stories today, one a revamp from a while back for re-subbing to some lit journals, the other something new for the Fish Short Story Prize which closes tomorrow and will be judged by the real David Mitchell (the author that is, not the star of Peep Show). I’ve been listening to a lot of writing music while prepping these, most notably A Winged Victory for the Sullen and Bill Ryder-Jones’ If. My Fish Prize story was heavily edited while listening to Lhasa de Sela’s excellent eponymous album from 2009, particularly this track:

Here’s hoping my story has a sliver of the emotion of this rather beautiful song.

In other news, I’m coming to the end of my first MA unit and feeling reflective so will be posting a couple of posts about that soon; the first about the recent proliferation of blog posts about the merit of Creative Writing courses (I know ……a post about other posts, how pathetically post-modern (see what I did there?)) the other about my specific experience spending a term reading and picking apart ten novels in ten weeks along with my rather brilliant online seminar group.

Also, probably best to expect at least a few best of 2011 posts from me sometime soon. Again, sad I know, but necessary.