Chalk Scribblers

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.