I heard back from the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. I’m not longlisted. Not shortlisted either of course, not hovering near anything, not in a “we really liked it but…” category like the agent responses. Just a clean and efficient no.

Which is fine. It is. I’m not sitting here devastated, staring out of a rain-streaked window questioning my life choices, though maybe I should. Except it’s not raining, which makes it tricky.
This is more like recalibration. I think I was waiting for it. Time to re-edit maybe?

And then, being a Yorkshire lass, you make a cup of tea and carry on. Competitions and writing are odd like that. I took a lot of solace from reading Stephen King’s book On Writing, where he talks at length about the rejections and his stoicism. Which makes it infinitely easier to develop such resilience knowing he had to do the same and look where he is now.

You send your work off, knowing perfectly well it’s going into a pile with a lot of other work, some of it probably brilliant, some of it probably not, all of it written by people who, at some point, thought yes, this might be the one. Then, at some later date, someone you’ve never met decides where it sits.

So that’s the end of the The Lucy Cavendish competition for me. I’m thinking I might re-edit and try The Bath Novel Award, I have almost six weeks. Which is enough, I think.
Someone, I forget who, said treat it as a task to get as many rejections as possible. By that I think they mean have the resilience to expect the no, but the fortitude to keep going until someone eventually says yes. And they might. Who knows.

I shall tighten my manuscript again, re-think the entry pages. And in the mean time I’ll write the next thing. I already have. Another short story is out there, on the internet, loitering as part of another competition. I’ve already had one very nice competition result this year with Boudicca’s Breeze. So I’m not about to dramatically lose all perspective.
It would be a bit ridiculous and whilst I do love theatre, I’m not here for the drama.
On we go.