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! Comments are closed.
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