Read my stories! And other fiction...
The creative writing group I attend every month publishes anthologies of members' work, and I heartily recommend buying them for your entertainment and delight
On the third Tuesday of every month, without fail, except when I don’t, I go to a creative writing group at the Union Club in Soho. The Writing Salon started at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden, which closed during the Covid-19 pandemic and never re-opened, but the host, my friend and business partner Mark Heywood, kept the community going virtually until lockdown began to fade and we found a new permanent physical home. None of this is remarkable in itself, as I know quite a lot fo writers and many go to writing groups of greater or lesser formality.
What makes the Writing Salon unusual—it may even be unique in this respect—is that it publishes anthologies of its members’ work. This is not, I stress, vanity publishing: Mark’s creative co-operative Inkjockey did some of the early financial lifting but the anthologies are now at least paying for themselves, or rather each pays for its successor, and the idea of profit is a part of the long-term exercise.
The first volume, Lips on Unfamiliar Skin, was published in 2021 and contains short stories and poems by 10 members of the Writing Salon (full disclosure: I am among that number). It is a slender volume but the reviews on Amazon were complimentary and came from people who had no need to be positive.
In 2022, we published a second volume, Twelve Hours to Del Mar, half as long again with 17 contributors (again, full disclosure…). Some had had their work in the first volume, some were new faces. Again, the reviews are positive. One should never quote one’s own reviews but “Mrs J” observed on Amazon, “Thought provoking and well structured new work. An absorbing read”, though I liked the slightly backhanded nature of the review by “andrew sabapathy” which enthused “I love this, it’s diverse and has a weird timeless quality!”
The third volume, as yet untitled, is currently in the editing process (again, full disclosure…) but we hope to publish this calendar year, which will mean three volumes in four years. I don’t think that’s bad given, well, everything else that’s been happening. The titles, incidentally, are quotations from the stories or poems, so I’m as curious as anyone to see what ends up headlining volume three.
Anyway, my point is simply this: these are good. Even if you don’t want to read by contributions, you can skip those, but my fellow authors are genuinely talented men and women and their work should have an audience. So buy them, if you can be persuaded, and recommend them to your friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, clinicians, therapists, probation officers and people you meet in the street. And if you do (I know this is tedious but it makes a difference commercially) do leave a review, however brief. After all, short stories and poems: the ultimate low-commitment art form. What could be better for our battered attention spans?
At the end of all that, if your desperate, all-consuming thirst for fiction is not slaked, you can always read the first short story I had published (as an adult, anyway), a snappy, bleak tale of Cold War espionage entitled There’s A Problem: it appeared in the Spadina Literary Review in June 2018.
My first published work? Ah, my first byline was The Sunderland Echo when I was six-and-a-half. A cracking read…