Stinging Fly

Stinging Fly is a literary mag edited by Declan Meade. It offers mostly fiction but also some poetry. In my personal opinion they usually choose urban, often depressive, sometimes look at me I've used drugs at some point in my life, now let's slit our wrists, type stories. And I'm not just saying this because my diverse offerings have been universally rejected by them (!) But the collection of short stories published last year 'These are our Lives' is worth reading.

Anyway they are running an open competition to get in on a free workshop with Sean O'Reilly on Saturday October 27th. Submit a work in progress, short story or extract by September 14th. Submissions should be clearly marked Fiction Workshop and sent to The Stinging Fly, PO Box 6016, Dublin 8.

8-10 participants so you will get a personal assessment but it says 'the selected participants will discuss and review the submitted pieces.' Sounds like a normal writers group to me except you won't know the participants beforehand so don't know how to approach the work and critique.

Two more rejections on the book front since - Harper Collins and Headline, no with positive comments.

No work from movieextras.ie yet either.

My statistics for this blog show 2 readers a day averaging a 2 second stay. What can you read in 2 seconds? Most seem to be automated spiders, I think.