Guest Blog by Sue Howe

I'm so pleased to announce that prizewinning short story writer, Sue Howe, is my guest blogger this week. Many of Sue's wonderful stories appear in Triclops, available at all good online bookshops. Here, Sue explains how the book came about:

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I couldn’t have been more thrilled, two and a half years ago, when a couple of writers whose work I admire asked if I would consider joining them in producing an anthology of short stories. Would I? I nearly bit their virtual hands off.

Avery Mathers, Lee Williams and I met on youwriteon.com, a peer review website aimed primarily at writers who are new to putting their work up for external scrutiny. Over a relatively short period, we had seen our work improve and climb high in the YWO charts and we had overcome our initial indignation at strangers slapping our babies in public. We were all ready for a new challenge.

It was amazing how the proposal boosted our productivity over the next few months. We wrote many new stories and sent them to each other for comment and, although our writing styles and subject matter differed, we managed to look objectively at each others’ work. When any of us hit a barrier, there was always help to get us through. It was a tremendously useful and constructive process and I can honestly say, even when we were disappointed by the feedback, there was never a cross word. We trusted each other’s judgment and, increasingly, we learned to trust our own and only gave way on suggestions we knew in our guts constituted real improvements. We gave the anthology a name – Triclops – and Avery wrote a prologue/epilogue to draw the collection together.

Within a year we had enough material and were ready to go. So why did it take two and a half years to produce the finished, printed product?

Read On

Triclops is available at amazon.co.uk and amazon.com

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