Womag Writer – Guest Post by Patsy Collins

It’s an honour to welcome Patsy Collins to my blog today to talk about the Womagwriter blog.  Patsy is a short story writer and novelist. Like myself, she has always found Womagwriter a brilliant resource for short story writers. So when she was asked if she’d like to take over the blog – what did she say? Here’s her story.

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When I first started submitting short stories to magazines, I did a lot by guesswork. As a result, quite a lot of my submissions stood no chance of being accepted. Stories fell between usable word counts, were in 1st person for markets taking only 3rd, included taboo subjects (yep – I had someone ill in a story I submitted to The People’s Friend!) Naturally that didn’t help either my acceptance rate or my confidence.

Then I discovered http://womagwriter.blogspot.co.uk. On there were guidelines for every magazine I’d ever considered submitting to, plus some I’d never heard of. There was advice and updates, plus comments from other writers. It was a huge help for several years. Then Kath McGurl who ran it got a book deal and stopped writing short stories. She kept the blog going as long and as well as she was able with very limited time, but eventually I took over.

These days the blog still contains current guidelines for all the UK women’s magazines which accept fiction submissions, plus as many foreign ones as I can find out about. There’s also lots of tips, information and advice – not just from me, but from many different writers and even a few editors. There are interviews giving an insight into the lives and writing process of other writers. Guest posts offer encouragement or explain a particular writing or submission topic. Sometimes you’ll find special offers on womag related books, or details of new releases. Occasionally there will be links to workshops or other useful events. There’s a page where people can ask questions. Hopefully the blog is as useful now as when I first discovered it.

I enjoy running the blog – particularly when people take the trouble to comment on posts to say they’ve enjoyed them or found them useful. It does take up a lot of time though, so help is always welcome. If you discover a new market or hear any womag news, please let me know, either through the comments, or using the contact information on the blog. Please look through the posted questions occasionally, in case you can answer. If you can contribute a guest post that will be useful to womag writers, or you’re a womag writer, editor, illustrator etc who’d like to be interviewed, please get in touch.

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Thanks so much, Patsy. It’s lovely to have you. As well as writing short stories for womags, Patsy has published four novels. The most recent, Firestarter, is a romantic comedy with a hot fireman and a few flames. Check it out here. http://viewbook.at/Firestarter

Patsy’s website is at http://patsycollins.uk