About us
Welcome to the Chalk Scribblers.
We’re an international online group, and occasionally a rabble, of writers working on improving our skills. We run two types of activity to help each other achieve that:
Our core activity is our Saturday critique workshop. Once a week, we get together to discuss a story or part of a larger work that one of us has written. We exchange our opinions in a frank but constructive way that helps to develop not only the work being discussed but also the writing skills of the people giving and receiving the critique.
Our speaker events usually happen on Wednesday evenings, although they’re often subject to when the speaker can make it. The format is that we ask people who can tell us something about writing and publishing that we don’t know. Sometimes they’re authors, sometimes they’re publishing professionals, sometimes they’re people with expertise that can come in useful for writers and sometimes they’re our own members whose successes we want to celebrate.
Most of our events are free to join although some of our speaker events have cover charges that go toward our overheads.
Our members cover a broad range of fiction, creative non-fiction and screenwriting. However, we’re not the best group for poetry, songwriting and game writing.
Our activities are based on reciprocity between peers. If you’re looking for something more structured, we suggest the Indie Novella 9-week course which runs three times per year: https://www.indienovella.co.uk/writing-course
The group’s organisational structure is described here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WuhkZbzYRSTnS8URRx0SVKnwbpl0Fw9KZ-Q1uSEC2s0/edit?usp=sharing
If you’d like to see what it’s all about, sign up for an event and jump in.
Follow us on Bluesky at @chalkscribblers.bsky.social
Publications by Chalk Scribblers in 2025
Wyldblood magazine issue 17 contained two stories by Chalk Scribblers:
· No Such Thing as Monsters by DJ Cockburn.
· Beyond Hearing by Hugh McCormack.
Other Scribbler successes were:
Manda Benson’s mystery novel, The Hoard, was accepted by Sparsile Books and is due for release in September 2026.
Hugh McCormack had two stories published in addition to the one in Wyldblood, including his debut pro-level sale, and one contest placement:
· The Beekeeper’s Gift was published in DreamForge Anvil online issue 22 and print issue 17.
· Purple Leaves was published in Ink Nest Poetry – A Literary Magazine.
· The Tome of the Watermelon Harvest achieved an honourable mention from the Writers of the Future contest.
Layla Sabourian has had a few achievements:
· She is now represented by Chandler Crawford of the Transatlantic Agency.
· Red Tulips was published in The Day that Changed Everything, an anthology of memoir published by Brightspring Books.
· Her review of Liquid by Mariam Rahmani was published by Tint Journal.
Ana Sun’s major success this year was her first short story collection, Futures to Live By, published by NewCon Press.
She’s also had several stories published:
· Emily’s Farewell Coat in the Vivid Worlds anthology, edited by Donna Scott and published by Slab Press.
· For Tomorrow’s Moon in the Our Dust Earth anthology, edited by Todd Sanders and published by Air and Nothingness Press.
· Coriander in the Bright Green Futures 2024 anthology edited by Susan Kaye Quinn and published by Twisted Press.
· Where the Garden Grows translated into Italian and published in Future Fiction’s Solarmarx: Il mondo oltre il Capitalocene anthology. The English language version will be published in 2026.
Ana laid out some of her ideas on the wider significance of solarpunk in How Solarpunk Can Help Us Rewild Our Lives, a paper coauthored with Susan Kaye Quinn and published in Ecological Citizen.
Prashant Vaze had two stories published this year:
· The Food Fighters was published by Anthropocene.
· The Hotel Wall was published in Earthbound: Climate Stories from South Asia.
Upcoming events
54
Chalk Scribblers workshop: the mystery plot
·OnlineOnlineWe fill page after page with words but how do we make our reader keep turning them? One way to do it is to put a mystery in the middle of the story that’s so all-consuming that the reader can’t stop reading until they know what it is.
The purist practitioners of the art of mystery are the authors of the whodunnit: a story in which the protagonist’s primary goal is to find out who committed a crime. However, a mystery is a plot device that can be applied to any genre. Any protagonist can, after all, be motivated by a need to find out something they don’t know and piquing a protagonist’s curiosity is an easy way to pique a reader’s.
We’ll start by discussing examples of the form from the reading list, and then extend the conversation to talk about how it can be applied in other genres and possibly in our own works in progress.
The reading list is divided into two parts:
The core reading is the two stories that will start the discussion so while it’s not compulsory, you’ll get more out of the workshop if you read them in advance. The stories are:
- Arson Plus by Dashiell Hammett (1923): Hammett is the author who, in the words of his contemporary Raymond Chandler, ‘gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons’. His stories remain formative to the genre and his spare prose makes it easy to see the structure driving a mystery story.
- My Heart Is Either Broken by Megan Abbott (2013): Abbott shows that a mystery story need not be a whodunnit; the protagonist is not trying to investigate the crime that opens the story but is preoccupied by the mystery of his wife’s character.
The extended reading is there to show the evolution of the mystery story for anyone who is interested. The stories are:
- The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe (1841): widely credited as being the first mystery story, Poe introduced the detective as protagonist and the logic puzzle as plot.
- The Adventure of Silver Blaze by Arthur Conan Doyle (1892): one of the stories that placed the detective at the centre of Anglophone literature, as well as introducing an idiom that’s still widely used.
- The Abominable History of the Man with the Copper Fingers by Dorothy L Sayers (1928): the sort of story that Chandler credited Hammett with taking murder back from, in which the crime is outlandish and the detective is not hardboiled. It’s also an example of the ‘reverse whodunnit’ structure, in which the reader knows who did what to whom before the detective.
- The Leopold Locked Room by Edward D Hoch (1971): a locked room mystery from late in the pulp era, this story has a plot and structure that remains widely used in TV crime shows, which are where short-form crime fiction has moved to since the demise of most of the short-form crime magazines.
Some of the stories have adult themes that may be explored in the discussion.
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Past events
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