Writing: Prizes, Publications and Works In Progress

SCRIPTS AVAILABLE TO PURCHASE - ROYALTY FREE

Ideal for amateur dramatics groups, indie film makers, emerging writers and content creators, the following scripts are available to purchase for just the set fee listed. (Title link will take you to PayPal - you'll receive the script within 24hrs of payment being received.)

. Rain Soaked Rainbows  £2.00
Cast: 4 
Themes: Queer Comedy, LGBTQIA+, Observational Life Humour
Run Time: 15mins (1-Act Play)

WRITING PRIZES:

 2024: Winner MANSIL Writing Competition:

Winning Entry: Goldless Kintsugi
Click here to read full book of all entries

2014: Winner Breckland Poetry Prize

2012: Winner Hostry Festival Creative Writing Prize

PUBLISHED WRITING:

Business Blog - The Productive Pessimist

Raglan's Streets - LGBTQ+ cosy crime seaside setting novel series:
Book 1: Raglan's Streets
Book 2: Noah's Beasts
Book 3: Woman's Will
Book 4: Inconvenient Crossfires
Book 6: Awkward Ambitions
Book 7: City Stripes
Book 8: Secrets Kept 
Book 9: Truths Revealed

Also Domestics - Recipes from Raglan's Streets

These books self-published via Amazon KDP as
Ashley Ford-McAllister

Happiful Magazine, September 2019 - Click here to read the article
Published as Ashley Ford-McAllister

WORKS IN PROGRESS:

Extract from The Debatable Species, a magical realism adult fiction that explores contemporary issues and social challenges:

" They started with the dogs; a low-risk, high-reward trial run that exceeded expectations. Braced for resistance, they found very little; the merest whisper of suggestion that something is the “responsible” thing to do almost guaranteed near-hundred-percent compliance, regardless of the population demographic and baseline attitude.

Even the most unrepentant, anti-authoritarian renegade, it seemed, wanted to be seen to be responsible.
We watched with bewildered concern, and not a small degree of outrage. To us, and our culture and society, “responsibility” looks like protecting freedom at all costs. Sometimes, that involves engaging in ways of living that, to outsiders, seem to remove freedom; however, those lifestyles only impact individual freedom, which is limited, and relatively unimportant; the freedom that matters is the freedom of the community - the freedom from harassment and invasions of communal and personal privacy.  The freedom from exclusion from those places we need and choose to be.  The freedom for individuals, within reason, to live as they pleased without government interference in those personal lives.  The freedom to be presented to wider society as a curiosity, not a threat. 
The freedom from violence. 
The freedom to exist.
We recognised that some aspects of personal freedom had to be surrendered in order to ensure the community freedom that protected ninety percent of personal freedoms.  For example, some of us, especially the younger ones, chafed at the fact that we did not participate in competitive sports outside our own community; they pointed out that our greater social concern, our heightened sensory perception, which caused more rapid overwhelm, and placed us at greater risk of fatal distraction, and our more limited colour vision, erased any biological superiorities our greater speed, strength, and endurance gave us over SolSpes.  Their points were valid, but irrelevant; the SolSpes could not see past the end of their overly short, functionally limited, but structurally highly complex noses; for a primarily visual species, they are very short sighted, and tend to only see the immediate, “common sense” data - usually, that which is most offensive to their sense of “fairness”, a term they routinely confuse with “equity.”  SolSpes became fixated on “unfair competitive advantage” when we tried to engage with them in any form of sport, whether solo or team, professional or amateur, and when SolSpes become fixated, they have a very short runway to violence.  Those too weak, whether physically or in terms of personality, to engage in violence turn to the legislators who oversee both them and us, but are almost always represented by them, and whimper and whine for “protection” and “their rights.”

 Our young want to know what about our rights.  Our elders, of which I am almost one, try to explain that we have always understood what SolSpes have yet to learn; that “rights” are not enduring VIP passes with the power and access privileges of an Amex Black Card.  They are, essentially, bribes, given to ensure quietude, compliance, and votes."

Flowers Backstage - an explicitly trans, working class re-telling of Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness, where the women hold their own - not just the hand of the "great masculine genius".  Set in Scotland, between Glasgow's Buchanan Street and the towerblocks of Easterhouse, Flowers Backstage contrasts smooth, successful millionaire entrepreneur Steven Golden with the gritty reality of life in Glasgow's Easterhouse for Seamus, his wife Babs, and their friend and lodger, Wanda.  All four are trans, all four have ambition - but what happens when their very different lives intersect?

MAN(AGE) UP! (non-fiction, business, sociology, gender) - an exploration of what non-toxic masculinity is, and why leadership needs an effective, responsible, and assertive form of it if business, government, and society are to survive and thrive in ways which allow everyone to achieve their best self.