Category: Thoughts

Thoughts on Lucent Dreaming

Thoughts on… Lucent Dreaming [by Jannat Ahmed]

At the end of last year, our writers and funders received an email from me outlining a new publication timeline. It followed a long period of sporadic communication and delays. I referenced my mental ill health, exacerbated by grief and loss. I was grateful for the kind messages in response, all supportive and understanding. At the time, writing things out

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Thoughts on… Submission Fees and Business Models [by Jannat Ahmed]

What is a ‘good’ business model when it comes to publishing? Are submission fees all bad? And what part does public funding have to play? In this post, I share my thoughts on indie publishing, public funding and submission fees. Before we get to the main-meal of this, let me be clear that my personal views on business shape what

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Flash Fiction Contest 2019 – Judges’ Report

Over the last few weeks, the Lucent Dreaming team have been busy bees judging the entries for our first ever flash fiction competition. The stories have been read, re-read, read backwards, read sideways and read up-side down between squinting eyelids. And we have picked three worthy winners who all took different inspiration from our prompt word ‘lead’. Amongst the entries

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Thoughts on… Writing Effective Flash Fiction [by Matt Kendrick]

On the face of it, anyone who isn’t familiar with the form might presume that writing flash fiction (a story told in roughly 1,000 words or less) is much easier than crafting a 5,000 word short story or climbing the literary Everest of brewing up an 80,000 word novel. However, whilst it is true that flash fiction can be produced

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Thoughts on… Compassion [by Jannat Ahmed]

There is a lack of compassion in this world. I’ve spent my life wondering why there are places and spaces I feel safe and others where I feel ill at ease: anxious, dismissed and lost. It was only last year I realised that what I was lacking most in my life, and perhaps what we were all lacking, was compassion.

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Thoughts on… the Language of Feedback [by Matt Kendrick]

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post on the importance of feedback. It was a whistle stop tour of how to go about getting, giving and using feedback without being able to delve in too deep on any particular aspect. Since the first edition of the Lucent Dreaming podcast (Somniloquy) focused on the language of feedback, I’ve written

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Thoughts on… the Importance of Feedback [by Matt Kendrick]

Writing can often be a solitary process. Whether we are scribbling ideas on a notepad in a quaint little coffee shop or frantically hammering towards a word count goal on our half hour lunchbreak, most writers spend a lot of time looking inwards and consulting no one but ourselves on everything from a story’s structure to the minutiae of our

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One very important thing you should remember in 2019

Don’t be self-destructive. Since the rise of personal digital technologies and the consequential shift in the way we engage with the world, we’re beginning to reimagine our expression of power and control. One by-product of the mandatory nature of curating a self on social media is that our primary focus for our sense of control is ourselves. We must create

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