Helen Rowlands, LISP 2025 Short Story Finalist, 'I am Shala'

Could you please tell us about yourself and your daily routine?

I moved to a remote area of Scotland in 2022, soon to retire with my new husband to walk the hills and beaches with our twin agents of chaos (four-year-old Border Collies). Our house has been totally up the wall since we lost my mum and dad moved in. I’m about to have the first of two desperately needed hip replacements and have been dependent on my husband to. Do many jobs that I can no longer do. He is now very inconsiderately in recovery after open-heart surgery, so I’m now the one looking after us all.  

My aching bones have turned me into an early bird, and I have learned to embrace those quiet moments. Sometimes rising at five, most often six, I get a good couple of hours writing in before the rest of the house wakes. Keeping the curtains closed, I light a candle and armed with my coffee, write whatever I feel. Sometimes it is a story for a deadline such as our writer’s group or the Deadlines for Writers online group. Sometimes it is more of a journal in response to a prompt. Sometimes, it is for a blog I write as the Cocktail Queen, each featuring life with a cocktail on the side.

When and how did you start writing?

Never one to sit still, I worried what I would do once I had retired and laughed that I might just write a book. It was that simple. I started with bullet points and before I actually had retired, I had around 40,000 words. Nobody was more surprised than me. I set about finding a local writing group to join, but there wasn’t one, so set one up with another villager, now a dear friend.

It was the Carradale Writers Group that got me started on short stories. We challenge each other with prompts, word counts, genres and create incredible stories that we read aloud and discuss each month. These women are strong and supportive of each other, and it was thanks to them that I entered and subsequently won the 2025 Scottish Writers Association’s Dragon’s Pen for that very same novel (under its provisional title ‘Sadie’), now complete at 85k. I’m still seeking representation to be able to share ‘The Tree of Lost and Found’ with others, and I’m hoping that achieving recognition from a renowned institution such as LISP will help.

How frequently do you write? Do you have a writing routine? And what inspires you to write?

Since dad moved in, and quiet space is harder to find, we built a shed in the garden for me to write in. Rita, the writing shed, will shortly be complete once the much-anticipated log burner is fitted, but until then, you’ll find me in the shed at different times of the day. I’m mostly wearing two coats, have a heated seat pad, a hot water bottle, a flask and fingerless gloves. But despite already being able to see my breathe, you’ll find the door wide open so that I can listen to the wind, the rain and the birds all around me that make it so much easier to lose myself in my story.

How does it feel to have your work acknowledged, whether through being a finalist in a competition or having it published? 

Receiving that finalist email gave me an instant boost, and I have been able to get back to the next big story that is in my head, but this time I am challenging myself in a different way. With ‘Tree’, I simply put my fingers to the keyboard and the story flew. The characters were clear in my head, so I let them take me where they wanted to go within my hometown of Liverpool. This next story, still untitled, needs planning. It features mythical creatures and a touch of magic woven by a group of women, beginning in 1900, and taking us to the present day. I keep my ‘Dragon’s Pen’ trophy right in my eyeline in Rita, and I will definitely be keeping the printed Anthology right alongside for when inspiration is slow.

What's the most rewarding and challenging aspect of writing a story? 

Writing is never an obvious process: I don’t just open up the laptop and expect to right. Sometimes though, when I’ve seen a competition open, with a specific prompt, my fingers can’t fly fast enough. And then I love the discipline of editing down, because it is always down, to fit the word count. The more I delete all of the ands, ifs, and buts, and for me that and of course, the less I need to delete them going forward, which is great. But then applying learning points from other stories is challenging too: we’re our own worst critics, right? So working out if I’ve included enough show not tell, or kept in the same narrator’s voice, or applied the same tense throughout is also a challenge, and I will often set out writing a particular story to address one or more of those points. I don’t always succeed of course…

How did you come up with the idea for your LISP-selected story? Is there a story behind your story? And, how long have you been working on it? 

Being placed as a finalist with ‘I am Shala’ has thrilled me more than you could ever know. This is a story that began as a series of one hundred word prompts each day in January of this year (except Sundays if you’re doing a word count). I had the fool idea to not just write to the prompts each day, but to turn them into one complete story. By day fifteen I was questioning my wisdom, but by day twenty there was nothing going to stop me completing the challenge; although I wasn’t making any promises for the quality of the story. But by the time I was complete, I loved it. I had intended to edit, rework paragraphs, but in truth it felt like interference, not improvement, so I have changed very little. I have also stuck to the one hundred words per paragraph which is a discipline I thoroughly enjoyed.

Please share a few tips on writing stories

I have two tips to share that I know have helped me, the first is simple: write. Every day. Write something. Fiction, blog, journal. Who cares if nobody ever even sees it. Just write.

The second takes time and a little more commitment. Find your tribe. Find communities to join. Find other writers or even artists who will support you. Who will support you when you are feeling like there’s no point, and celebrate with you, no matter how seemingly small your achievement. Our writer’s group are small but perfectly formed and give so much more than the sum of our parts; I wouldn’t change a thing. But I also write on Substack, which has given me so much in a different way. On the 7^th, when I received that finalist email, I couldn’t help but share my news on Substack in a simple note. Just thirty-three words. That simple note has received more than 550 likes, which for me counts as viral, but also congratulations from 67 people who I don’t know from Adam. They are all writers or artists and understand how BIG this seemingly small win to others might be. I needed that. You need it. Go find your tribe.

What is the best aspect and the most challenging aspect of competitions? 

I am quite discriminatory about the competitions I enter, spending my entrance fees on competitions which will give me something other than a cash prize. It’s not that I don’t want your cash, I do, but what I want more is feedback or a presence. A presence such as featuring here, and definitely featuring in the Anthology, which is super exciting.

The most challenging part though, that’s a hard one. I think perhaps picking the right ones and not spending all my time writing for competitions, which would be easy to do. Here, I entered a story I had already written and saw it as an opportunity to edit my early draft. That’s not always the case though, so I need to remind myself to balance short story writing with time for my novel. Not always easy though.

Finally, would you recommend that the writers consider submitting to LISP?

Writing short stories allows me to try out different voices or genres, and I love the challenge that a restricted word count brings. I would definitely encourage writers to submit to LISP because without trying, you will never know. Here I am, not the winner, but taking the huge win that is being a finalist for the first time ever. It has given me such a boost and am so glad that I can shout it from the rooftops!