Secret Attic
  • Home
  • Short Story Contests
    • Results
  • Weekly Write
    • WW Stories
    • WW Results
  • Long Short Story
  • Picture This
  • League Table
  • Secret Attic Booklets
  • Issues Online
    • Issue 1 - Online
    • Issue 2 - Online
    • Issue 3 - Online
    • Issue 4 - Online
    • Issue 5 - Online
    • Issue 6 - Online
    • Issue 7 - Online
    • Issue 8 - Online
  • Articles on Writing
  • Submissions
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Home
  • Short Story Contests
    • Results
  • Weekly Write
    • WW Stories
    • WW Results
  • Long Short Story
  • Picture This
  • League Table
  • Secret Attic Booklets
  • Issues Online
    • Issue 1 - Online
    • Issue 2 - Online
    • Issue 3 - Online
    • Issue 4 - Online
    • Issue 5 - Online
    • Issue 6 - Online
    • Issue 7 - Online
    • Issue 8 - Online
  • Articles on Writing
  • Submissions
  • Blog
  • Contact

Secret Attic Blog

Secret Attic Update

15/1/2021

0 Comments

 
Weekly Write Week #12 - Selected entries announced
December Short Story Contest Winner + Selected announced
The League Table updated
0 Comments

Costa Novel Award - Winner

4/1/2021

0 Comments

 
2020
The Mermaid of Black Conch: A Love Story by Monique Roffey
0 Comments

Changes to the Weekly Write

4/1/2021

0 Comments

 
Hi guys,

As there seems to be confusion running the Weekly Write from the forum I have decided that the running costs of the forum and along with the confusion it causes, that the Weekly Write will be run like every other contest: by email.

The Weekly Write #12, I've opened early and from now on, entries are to be emailed to me and selected entries will be published in an issue of the SA Booklet.

Check out the Weekly Write page on the website to get the dialogue prompts.

If you need any help, give me a shout!

This should also attract more interest in the contest!
0 Comments

Quotes (January 2021)

2/1/2021

0 Comments

 
The number one thing I am earnestly attracted to is intelligence. Writers are thus the pinnacle of intelligence. While actors are great and awesome, writers literally create new worlds from scratch. What is sexier than that? Personally, I don't know why every person out there isn't dating a writer.
Rachel Bloom

One nice thing about putting the thing away for a couple of months before looking at it is that you start appreciate your own wit. Of course, this can be carried too far. But it's kind of cool when you crack up a piece of writing, and then realize you wrote it. I recommend this feeling.
Steven Brust

Writing wasn’t easy to start. After I finally did it, I realized it was the most direct contact possible with the part of myself I thought I had lost, and which I constantly find new things from. Writing also includes the possibility of living many lives as well as living in any time or world possible. I can satisfy my enthusiasm for research, but jump like a calf outside the strict boundaries of science. I can speak about things that are important to me and somebody listens. It’s wonderful!
Virpi Hämeen-Anttila
​
Are we, who want to create, in some way specially talented people? Or has everybody else simply given up, either by preassures of modesty or laziness, and closed their ears from their inner need to create, until that need has died, forgotten and abandoned? When you look at children, you start to think the latter. I still haven't met a child who doesn't love - or who at least hasn't loved - drawing, writing or some other creative activity.
Natalia Laurila

Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer - and if so, why?
Bennett Cerf

People are certainly impressed by the aura of creative power which a writer may wear, but can easily demolish it with a few well-chosen questions. Bob Shaw has observed that the deadliest questions usually come as a pair: "Have you published anything?" – loosely translated as: I've never heard of you – and "What name do you write under?" – loosely translatable as: I've definitely never heard of you.
Brian Stableford

People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.
Harlan Ellison

To be a writer is to sit down at one's desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone – just plain going at it, in pain and delight. To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over....
John Hersey

I write to tell stories. I believe that there a some professions in the world that will last forever: doctor or a nurse, teacher, builder and a storyteller. I write also to become myself, more so day by day. Writing is a way to shape out visible and invisible, in myself as well as in the world.
Eppu Nuotio

I got to thinking about the point in every freelancer's life where he has to decide whether he wants to A, have a social life, and do art in his spare time, or B, do art, and have a social life in his spare time. It has always seemed to me that if you have any hope of making a living as an artist – writer, musician, whatever – you absolutely must learn to tell people to leave you alone, and to mean it, and to eject them from your life if they don't respect that. This is necessary not because your job is more important than anyone else's – it isn't – but because a great many people will think of you as not having a job. 'Oh, how wonderful – you can work whenever you want to!' Well, yes, to a point, but generally 'whenever you want to' had better be most of the time, or else you won't have a roof over your head.
Poppy Z. Brite

Writing isn't generally a lucrative source of income; only a few, exceptional writers reach the income levels associated with the best-sellers. Rather, most of us write because we can make a modest living, or even supplement our day jobs, doing something about which we feel passionately. Even at the worst of times, when nothing goes right, when the prose is clumsy and the ideas feel stale, at least we're doing something that we genuinely love. There's no other reason to work this hard, except that love.
Melissa Scott
0 Comments

    Categories

    All
    Announcements/Updates
    Booker Prize
    Costa Novel Award
    International Booker
    Literary Agents
    Mark Twain
    Quotes On Writing
    Sol Stein
    To Hull And Back
    Weekly Write
    Women's Prize

    Archives

    January 2021
    December 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020

    Tweets by Secret Attic
Secret Attic - Founded March 2020