An Amazing Competition – but why did some people win and others not?

The Write2Ride creative writing competition began as a small idea and it snowballed into a huge event with its Facebook posts and website taking thousands of hits, generating hundreds of entries.

Most of the entries were short stories. In terms of numbers, poems came in second with non-fiction pieces also well represented. A few dozen in all categories also fell under the sub-category of racing themed.

Entrants’ ages ranged from four to twenty-five. A total of 63 prizes were awarded to 60 winners. Multiple entries were allowed and three people walked away with more than one prize. There was a huge range of prizes many of which were visits and lessons with international stars of dressage, show-jumping, eventing and racing. Click here for the full list of winners and prizes.

So why did the winners win, or more to the point, what stopped the non-winners from taking the prizes?

The judges were Penny Grubb, Danuta Reah and John Fairley. They are all writers. They’ve all judged competitions before. Between them they have a lot of experience. So for those who didn’t win, they provide some pointers on improving your chances for next time:

Read the rules: Don’t lose out because you didn’t read the rules. If the rules tell you to put certain information in a cover email, then make sure that’s where it goes – don’t bury it at the end of your entry. If the rules tell you which formats are permissible, don’t send something different. And if there is a maximum length, don’t go over it.

Was anyone eliminated for not following the rules? The organisers were very lenient. When people didn’t provide the correct information in the correct format, they contacted them and allowed them to resubmit. Be aware that doesn’t happen in most competitions. But the judges weren’t so lenient and yes, a handful of people were eliminated because their entries were 15% or more over the maximum word count.

Fit the theme: For this competition the piece had to be ‘horsey’, that was all that was required. However, a single mention of a horse does not make a horsey theme. For example, if you wanted to enter a recipe for fruit cake, that would be fine because non-fiction entries were allowed, but you would have to make it horsey – perhaps by telling how each stage of the process made you think about different aspects of horses or riding – but it would *not* be enough to start the piece by saying, ‘I once came home from a ride and decided to make a fruit cake,’ and then to give the recipe with no other mention of horses, ponies or riding.

Was anyone eliminated for not adhering to the theme? In a handful of cases where the horse was barely visible, we considered elimination, but because there had been an attempt to bring a horse into the picture, we decided to be lenient. However, these stories lost marks and this pushed one otherwise very good entry out of the major placings.

OK, you’ve followed the rules, you’ve stuck to the theme, what else can go wrong?

There were some stories that began beautifully, but their moments of drama were squandered; they drifted away from the point and fizzled out in disappointing and often irrelevant endings. These were people who could write well, but who had not learnt to structure their writing. It was frustrating to see an excellent start crumble into a story that failed to hold together as a coherent whole. With a bit of work, these will be the winners of the future.

How about errors and typos? Could you have been eliminated for spelling mistakes? Well no, this wasn’t a spelling competition. We didn’t kick out anyone for errors of spelling, punctuation or grammar. However, if an entry is so riddled with errors that it becomes hard to understand, it isn’t going to do well.

We had a lot of ponies ‘gazing’ on grass or in meadows when it was clear they weren’t simply enjoying the view. It’s just an “r” but it changes the meaning. How about this for a puzzler? ‘I was trapped, the door was not locked.’ It’s only one letter different but ‘now’ and ‘not’ mean very different things.

Here’s a worrying one: ‘After we’d finished, we lead the ponies back.’ What are these people doing to these ponies’ backs with the lead, and surely lead isn’t safe for back treatments? The word “lead” when it rhymes with “fed” is a soft malleable and poisonous grey metal. When you want to talk about leading horses, the word is “led”.

No one was explicitly penalised for minor errors, but here’s the thing; what if two entries are competing for a prize; they are both very good but one is full of typos and the other is largely error-free? It will be the error-free story that gets the prize. It’s like two people equally well turned out vying for the tack-and-turnout prize; the one who remembered the little things (e.g. taking out their earrings) is going to win out.

It’s always worth double-checking your work, rereading your entry, getting someone else to read it through to see if they understand it the way you want it to be understood.

And what made the winning stories stand out? The six winners are being published and the judges’ comments have been published with the stories.

You can find the winning entries in each age group, along with the judges' comments in Equestrian Life. 

And you can find the winners of the racing-themed sections on the creative activities section of the Pony Club site.

Unwriting a children’s novel

I’ve just finished the full draft of my new crime novel, and can soon set off on the long-overdue sequel to my children’s horsey novel.

However, reaching “the end” is a long way from finished. I’ve written 8 novels (published) and have ~60 billion other completed manuscripts at the back of the cupboard, so these days even at the point where the novel is just an embryo idea, I know exactly how long the finished book will be.

This latest* was a sub-100k-word novel from the moment I saw a giant shipping container swinging from a crane. It has been a long time in the making over a turbulent couple of years. Nuances change in the course of writing a book. I don’t like to close off any routes to what might become a useful subplot or interesting twist, so the first draft gets everything wallpapered in.

The full draft was way too fat at 140k words, but at least I knew how it would end, so I went back with the editing pen and did a comprehensive slash and burn of all extraneous matter, and I took it down to exactly 99,999 words. How’s that for an accurate prediction?

Then it struck me; the sequel to the children’s novel could easily come in at 40,001 words. I have just unwritten the book that I’m about to write, and not one of those discarded words can be reused.

* Boxed In, featuring Annie Raymond, the Thompson sisters and two figures from Annie’s past that readers of the early books might remember; ex-boyfriend Mike and PC Jennifer Flanagan.

Boxed In is the latest book in the Annie Raymond series, following on from Falling into Crime, Where There’s Smoke, Buried Deep and Syrup Trap City.

Supporting #NHS Charities Together

Along with other authors, Mark P Henderson, Stuart Aken, Melodie Trudeaux, Sue Knight and John D Scotcher, I have joined an initiative to use book royalties to support NHS Charities Together during the current emergency.

The project comprises twelve books, including Cruel and Unusual PunNishments by Mark P Henderson, Blood Red Dust by Stuart Aken, Falling into Crime by Penny Grubb, Horse of a Different Colour by Melodie Trudeaux, The Boy in Winter's Grasp by John D Scotcher, Till They Dropped and Waiting for Gordo by Sue Knight.

The project was retired medic, Mark P Henderson’s idea. He told his publisher Fantastic Books Publishing that he wanted to donate the author royalties from one of his books to the NHS. Fantastic Books offered to bring other authors on board and to put some of their charity anthologies into the pot.


The anthologies chosen by Fantastic Books contain contributions from all four of these authors and also include the anthology that won the 2019 CWA Short Story Dagger.

In line with Fantastic Books Publishing’s current policy to cut down on the physical transport of goods, you are encouraged to buy ebooks.






See more detail, book previews and the full line up HERE.

Review: Red Sky by Carl Brookins

Red Sky by Carl Brookins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fast-moving tale of adventure and espionage set in and around the Virgin Islands. It has one of those slow-burn starts where you get wrapped up in the landscape and the minutiae of life aboard a yacht as married couple Michael Tanner and Mary Whitney enjoy an idyllic sailing holiday, but there’s an underlying tension because you know the peace is not going to last, and indeed it doesn’t. The trouble starts when Michael finds a considerable sum in used (and very wet) bank notes floating in the sea.

A stand-out feature of the book for me was the sailing and Virgin Islands background that was woven into the story. The descriptions were superb and pulled the reader right into the experience of sailing in the Caribbean. I know nothing about yachts but was fascinated.

If I have a criticism it was that at times the drama was unnecessarily diluted, for example by a change of viewpoint or a lack of character reaction that pulled the reader back from the action at key moments. I noticed one reviewer saying they thought some of the scenes were far-fetched and in my view that impression came directly from the fact that the drama was not always milked for maximum tension.

The story kept my interest and left a lasting impression of its amazing setting.


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Day One: Lockdown Covid-19; echoes of New Year’s Eve

Not that we had a clue on New Year’s Eve, awaiting the dawn of 2020, that covid-19 was even a thing. No one knew at that stage, though hindsight would show it to have been around since the autumn.

On New Year’s Eve our attention had been drawn to our boiler. 

At around 11.30 pm it had given up the ghost, refusing us either heat or hot water. It was a cold night. We could see the pressure wasn’t right so we did things with valves and pipes to get things back where they should be, but nothing changed except that the night grew colder, and we realised we’d missed the Magic Midnight Moment. Not exactly ‘missed’, we’d arrived in 2020 after all, but failed to mark it.

It didn’t occur to us that the demise of one of the modern world’s handy pieces of kit at an inopportune moment might become the theme for the year.

Cue Covid-19 and Day One, Lockdown, and all our TV channels disappeared. 

Much resetting and checking of aerials, connections, wifi ... and the box gave us grudging access to just two channels.

One was some kind of beginners’ TV – the place where students go early in their career (very early, I would say) to learn how to work a camera, how to present the news, how to make a documentary. It had a certain shaky charm; the newsreader too low in the frame, who stared like a rabbit in a spotlight while he read through his lines, clearly terrified of linguistic traps; the documentaries were less fun, wobbly shots of cliffs, beach and sea that never quite gave a satisfying panorama and were too often cut through by the flapping close-up of a trousered leg.

When off-air to students, the channel turned itself over to live shopping and those stilted duets between couples who can never get the gizmo to work, and you find yourself wondering what would be the point even if they did.

The only other channel was a film channel. The first thing it gave us was a posse of cowboys riding into a crowded town street, rows of horses tethered to rails, every inch of road surface smooth and gleaming. Do they starve the horses before these shots?

An inauspicious start but in fact, when things are done, when we’re tired and want just to relax in front of the TV, we watch this film channel. We’ve become reacquainted with Dean Martin, Marilyn Munroe and Robert Mitchum.

As it turns out, a boiler can be repaired at New Year far more easily than a dodgy TV during a pandemic so we’re stuck with our single channel. Is it a problem? No, it’s really not. Gone is that checking through 120 channels in the vain hope of finding something worth watching, and we just sit down to whatever film happens to be showing.

The other night we watched Sheila Delaney’s A Taste of Honey with a very young Dora Bryan and an even younger Rita Tushingham and recalled what a stir it had created at the time. In fact, when it first emerged I was considered far too young to watch it at all. For an incredible glimpse of the 1950s meeting the 1960s: out-with-the-old (the stiff and starched young BBC reporter) and on-with-the-new (the late great Sheila Delaney) take a look at this 2-minute clip. 

Meanwhile, the books-to-be-read pile is going to start going down and as it does, this blog will revert to book reviews.

Stay safe!

Taking a pop at the fizzy drinks industry

The Accidental Spurrt by Walt Pilcher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Vintage Pilcher and a great follow up to Everybody Shrugged (which now looks prescient given the state of world politics). The Accidental Spurrt takes a pop at the fizzy drinks industry. Pilcher is a master of the absurd. The strands of multinational concerns, of personal relationships, of struggling individuals just trying to eke out a living all coalesce with breathtaking speed and you can only watch with gritted teeth as the collision happens in front of your eyes.

Mark Fairley is pushed into taking on a job for Spurr Nutritionals. He has no choice, having just been downsized out of employment. They want him to ghostwrite the history of the family business, no more, no less. They certainly don't want him, or anyone, getting wind of the bizarre accident on the bottling line. Mark himself wants no more than an uncomplicated relationship with the firm so he can do the job and get the dosh.

Alas, we don't always get what we want.

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The Forge: Fire and Ice - SciFan anthology

The Forge: Fire and Ice
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Forge: Fire and Ice is a science fiction and fantasy anthology. It has a fascinating Foreword by Doctor Who and Harry Potter actor, Simon Fisher Becker, who nicely ties in the title with the theme of the collection. The stories themselves are the winners and shortlist from a SciFan competition run by Fantastic Books Publishing plus two professional author contributions.

The five major prize winners are the stand-out stories. Forged by Dan Staniforth, a haunting tale that plays with memory, is the worthy winner. It’s a story that will stay with you. All the Time in the World by JX Plant took second place; the story of a future catastrophe told through the very tight lens of a bed-bound protagonist. Third place went to A Worm in the Toffee Apple by RL Kerrigan, a gripping story of a future society, the lens again focused down to a single protagonist.

Along with the winners, three more stories were singled out as highly commended. These were Tim Gayda’s edge-of-seat space adventure, The Button; Kitty Waldron’s Speak Before You Think, exploring the potential nightmare of AI systems gone wrong; and Boris Glikman’s The Light of Their Lives, a truly original take that explores what happens when the advertising moguls get their hands on light itself.

The professional contributors are Danuta Reah with Out Of Her Mind, a tense psychological tale; and Stuart Aken with Greed is Good, looking at mankind’s worst excesses.

The rest of the collection comprises nineteen stories from the competition shortlist: All the King's Men by Katie Lewis looking at the human story behind future genetic augmentation; Blind Alley by Emily Wootton, a spine-tingling chase through a future urban landscape; By the Grace of the Two Suns by Ed Newbould, cleverly playing with the fire and ice theme in a world of superstition and vigilante justice; The Yellow Bus by Helen Parker is a delightful tale of a mobile library with a portal to the worlds of the books it carries; Damned If You Do by Alan Paine is the futuristic tale of someone with a stark choice: death by fire, death by ice.

Elemental Sacrifice by John Hoggard brings fire, ice and drama into a well-crafted fantasy world of dwarves and wizards; Lagoon, a second story by RL Kerrigan, plays with the ideas of isolation and global threat; Responsibility Discharged (Fired and Iced) by CM Angus is another of the ones that plays ingeniously with the theme, where a fired employee has literally been put on ice. Fire and Ice by Louisa Morillo is a superbly described restaurant scene, one to avoid reading with your dinner. The Mandarin by Robin Bilton explores the machinations of a future society through the concepts of obligation and betrayal.

Frost Fires by Pierre Le Gue, set on a train journey with a difference, is one of those stories where the air of menace grows gradually; Frozen Fire by Rachel Lovat is one of several tales that uses man-made climate change as a theme albeit a far-reaching one, and is also one of those stories where the menace creeps up slowly as you shuffle ever closer to the edge of your seat. The Cold Ones by Joseph D Wheeldon again racks up the tension, taking fire and ice, heat and cold to the heart of a survival tale; Justice in the ’Pool by Jonathan Edwards has an entertaining take on the book’s theme, using it to create a futuristic police drama; one of several stories that made me smile.

Lucantha by Sue Hoffmann neatly winds the topic of the book around the idea of tales told by the fireside; The Separation of Fire and Ice by Mira Callahan is a crisply told narrative that has an interesting synergy with the winning story, Forged, although they are very different. Indeed, it is a recurring thread through the book, the way that the stories – all unique – bounce off each other as the fire and ice theme is explored.

On the Slope of Survival by Lynn McInroy is one of the stories that explores extreme climate shifts and follows a community on a treadmill of second guessing what the new seasons will bring, cleverly mirroring the real fire and ice with the ebb and flow of the main character’s key relationship; The Despoilers by Dominic Bell gives a different take on climate change where catastrophe comes from off-planet in a story with a strong sense of place that gives a global view; and finally, Adolescent Rebellion by Ann Bupryn, plays out in a single room, exploring the relationships between three generations through the focus of the fire in the grate and the ice in granny’s cup.

The stories from the competition shortlist are all worthy supporters of the excellent winning half dozen and the pair of professional contributions. All of this set of charity anthologies is professionally edited and it shows in what is overall a slick, professional collection that makes for a page-turning read.


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