I'm waiting for news.
Writing news, that is. Which has got me thinking; back in 2012 I decided to enter my scruffy and ugly, nascent but promising story - Sleepwell and Fly, it was called - into the Times/Chicken House Children's Fiction competition. What followed was weeks of waiting for news. For a writer, waiting for news is good. It means total defeat hasn't yet darkened your door. There are still irons in the fire, right? All is not lost. News came little-by-little following my competition entry. The longlist was announced... and I was on it. The shortlist announcement, I was told, would come in a few weeks. I was waiting for news again. The shortlist announced... and I was on it. The final winner would be announced in due course, I was informed. I was waiting for news again. Maybe you know how this story goes. I was phenomenally lucky... I won the competition and got my first novel published in 2014. I was un-agented at the time, and being sort-of addicted to waiting for news, when Poison Boy came out, I sent it to twenty film companies with a covering letter. This would make a great movie, I told them. You'd do a fabulous job. I was naive, I knew then, but waiting for news had become kind of addictive. I was lucky; I got a couple of nice rejection letters. My wife, a student studying Landscape Architecture back in 2015, got bitten by the bug and she too went on the hunt for waiting-for-news. There was a design competition offering a tasty prize for the winners. She put months into her entry, working alongside a colleague. The deadline came and went. All was quiet. She and I were waiting for news again. The news, when it came for her, was good. Some of the news I'm waiting on is Payback related, and maybe - if it happens - I'll get to share it here sometime soon. Some of the news is related to a new project. I'm excited, scared, up one day and down the next. I'm a nervous wreck on Mondays, weirdly excited on Tuesdays, distracted on Wednesdays... ...but basically just thankful to be waiting for news. I'd recommend trying it yourself. You could start here! |
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