Competitions - A two sided coin

Writing competitions, they are a staple of the writer’s journey, and can be a spring board to representation and publication or simply a nice little boost of confidence and something to bolster your covering letter. But they can also be a source of heart ache.

I’ve been plodding the road towards publication for a long time now. The pursuit of publication isn’t an expedition for the faint hearted; it is full of rejection and near misses. It is a path of resilience and a marathon rather than a sprint. Along the way there are many pit stops that can fuel your perseverance or drain it.

Competitions are one of these pit stops. Sometime fate is on your side and you get a long-listing, honorary mention or readers favourite. It’s exhilarating and you celebrate. You need to for your mental health, in a business where there is so much NO, and success (for pre-published writers) is binary, you are either published or not, celebrating the small stuff is essential. So you raise a glass, and you post on your social media your little success with the others you’ve met along the way, as much as a thank you for their support as it is a celebration.

But then there is the other, more frequent occasions, where the announcement comes out and you are not on it. Your heart sinks. Your hopes are dashed, and all you want to do is curl up in ball. But then inevitably, some of your friends made the cut, and you celebrate with them, even if you are wallowing with sadness and a wee bit of envy. I’ve entered dozen, maybe even hundreds of competitions over the years, and I’ve felt both side of the competition coin.

 

This week for the first time in a long-long time, I got some unexpected news; I made the long list for the Searchlight Novel Opening Competition. I was obviously delighted and went on to social media to celebrate. People congratulated me, and it was a much need boost, as I’ve been struggling to keep the faith recently. However one writer congratulated me, but also said they’d entered the competition and not been so lucky.

 

I felt terrible. Guilty for gloating. After all I’ve been there many times. I didn’t intend to add to anyone’s disappointment. So I replied sending love and positivity. But one word resonated with me ‘LUCKY’.

Yes this time I was.

Yes, my manuscript was polished over a number of years. Yes, I spent a good few hours preparing it for the competition. But I entered multiple titles and only one got on. All the other books had equal amounts of hard work and preparation. The difference? In my opinion, the difference- is luck. The luck of a particular story being assigned to the right reader that connected and engaged with it enough to advocate on its behalf for a place in the long list.

So yes, I was lucky, and I’m grateful.

But I do know what I feel like to not get on a longlist, and wonder where my luck is. So to everyone who is traipsing the road towards publication I wish you oodles of luck.

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Losing you literary Hero’s

They say that if you were alive when JFK was assassinated that you remember exactly where you were when you found out. For my generation our JFK is probably Princess Diana. Where was I when I found out? In Bed. The night before I was out celebrating my nineteenth birthday and I got woken by the shocked yelling of my Dad. We spent the whole day in front of the television hoping for news. Not just any news, but wishing for the news that it was a mistake and that she had miraculously survived.

But this wasn’t the first death of someone famous that the learning of their passing is engraved onto my mind. A few years before, upon getting to my form room to register for the day of school, I found several of my friends crying. Why? Roald Dahl had died. They were mourning the passing of a hero, and grieving not just at the loss of the author himself but at the fact that he’d write no more books. I didn’t cry. But I was sad, and I re-read all his books in my own little grieving process.

Out of all the deaths of famous people, it’s the passing of the authors of beloved childhood books that has the most profound affect on me. The 2014 passing of Jeremy Lloyd hardly caused a stir in the media, and his obituaries listed his main achievement as once being married to Joanna Lumley. I was devastated that there was no mention of his kid’s books, LP’s and cartoon adaptations of his creation, Captain Beaky and his band. This was the soundtrack to my early childhood, and I even performed one of the poems, Jock the Scottish Circus Flee in a school talent contest.

Jill Barklem, the creator of the exquisite Brambly Hedge died in 2017 it brought on another bout of grief and confusion for me, I couldn’t understand why other people didn’t seem to care or even notice. I discovered Brambly Hedge in my tween years and was obsessed my it’s intricate beauty. 

As a kid who aspired to be a writer illustrator, her books fascinated me, I tried to become her. In one of my anthologies of the series was an interview with Jill and a photograph of her studio – well bureau –which I tried to emulate. I brought myself an old wooden bureau from a junk shop and set it up like the photograph in the hope, that if I copied her working method, then I might gain an iota of her talent. 

 

Forward a couple of years and I’m in bed one morning, scanning through the headlines before starting the day, to find out Judith Kerr has died. Another author whose work so important and inextricably entwined with my childhood. I LOVED ‘The Tiger that Came to Tea.’ 

I got my Mum and younger sister to read it to me over and over. I was fascinated by thought that an adventure could come knocking at my door in the form of a wild creature. I read it for my Brownie reading badge (well actually I cheated, I had it committed to memory – so no reading required!) I even searched the shelves of our local supermarket for large tins of tiger food every week, just in case a big cat should call on us. ***ACTUALLY ONE DID! A LION which escaped from a circus that was in the park opposite my house, and was found in the next door neighbour’s garage! *** 

Since the passing of Judith, there’s been an initiative for a group reading of ‘When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit’ #PinkRabbitReadalong started by the lovely and talented author Lorraine Gregory and the awesome Annaliese Avery  over on twitter.

I’m a bit late for the party (it took a while to find my copy of the book after several house moves) and a bit slow (dyslexia) but I’m participating and finding it a poignant and lovely experience. For the first time since the passing of Roald Dahl, I feel that other people are feeling the pull of the loss of a talented author (illustrator) as much as me, and that we are together commemorating and celebrating the life of an extraordinary woman, brilliant storyteller and talented artist.