Short stories & Poems

As many of you will know, some of my Africa time, has been spent writing a children's book. ARK. This is now "out" with various publishers, and I have had two rejections thus far..I am undeterred by these and hope that eventually someone will pick it up; indeed I plan to start writing a sequel in December, when the heat drives me inside to the air-conditioning and the computer.
In the meantime, I begun to develop some stories in my mind and they refused to go away, so I decided to write some short stories and see where it took me. At least they would be exorcised from my mind, and I might also hone my writing skills and produce corporeal evidence of what has been muddling around in my mind for months now. This writing is in a totally different genre to childrens books And Fantasy
My dear friend Gerry agreed to cast a critical eye over the first story, and encouraged by her comments, I submitted it to the Telegraph monthly short story writing competition. My story has just been shortlisted.
I don't really know what this means, but I think that it will be sent to a published author [Still don't know who] who will crit it. As you might imagine I`m thrilled, to have any work applauded in some small way is enough to make me want to crack on with the idea that is developing, and it also adds a another line to my "Authorly C.V"

Photgraphic image of  SAE. printed on Linen

Added to this, I hope that in late October, my contributions to the "poetic conversations" in Rambling Poets at Cafe Cyber will be in print. Will keep you up to speed on this as the group of seven of us are currently struggling with what I believe are called "Artistic differences". I am keeping my head low, as I`m just thrilled to be a part of this rather racy group of authors. But we have had a little spattering of toys being thrown out of prams..in a cyber sense of course..Hey ho Artists and their egos.