Womag Writers' Blogs - An Inspiration

On Wednesday I went for a lovely long bike ride out to Draycote Water. The sun was out and as I rode round, the views from the reservoir were spectacular . By the time I got back home I'd cycled a total of 12 miles and tackled some very steep hills.

The downside of this was that I felt too tired to do any writing in the afternoon. Instead I decided to do a bit of groundwork to get me back into writing fiction for the three main UK women's magazines, Woman's Weekly, Take A Break Fiction Feast and People's Friend.

One of my favourite womag writers is Teresa Ashby. I've been reading her stories for years and her fiction appears in almost every issue of the magazines shown above. Teresa has a great blog called A Likely Story and after reading a few recent posts, I then looked at her links to other well-known womag writers' blogs. The first one I clicked on was Wendy's Writing Now. Wendy Clarke started writing just over two years ago when the primary school where she worked closed down. Since then Wendy has sold over 80 stories to the women's magazines. That's over 80 stories sold in just over 2 years! Wendy certainly puts me to shame (I've been writing since the early 90s, but nowhere near as consistently! The last stories I had published in the womags was last year - two stories in the August 2013 issue of Woman's Weekly Fiction Special). Reading every single blog post Wendy's written since August 2012 was a huge kick up the backside for me. I'm determined to write more, submit more and sell more! Thank you, Wendy.

Despite spending a fair amount of time getting my son's laundry washed and ironed ready for his return to Uni on Monday and buying my daughter new uniform (yes, I know she started back to school two weeks ago!), as well as the usual food shopping, cooking, housework etc, I've got another story ready to submit (the second one this week) and have started a couple of new ones. I've also been avidly reading more womag writers' blogs and lots of issues of the magazines above, including the current ones. Hopefully next week will be even more productive!