I've seen the success stories thread and thought more of us are likely to have failure stories to share. Well, this week I found out I didn't make the long list for the Bath Novel Award. I couldn't understand it. I mean I'm sure there is room for improvement, but my 1 Beta read couldn't fault my story and thought it was a great read. He said he would buy it when I let him read 1 chapter. And he would still buy it when I let him have the whole novel (perhaps that was a hint to his logic). Then I remembered the Bath Tweet that said they were cutting from 40 to the final long list - so I emailed to ask if I'd made the 40. Don't we all seek some encouragement from 3rd parties? Bath were very good and said they would check the top 100 if I wished. Needless to say - I wish I hadn't said yes please.
Was the novel about failure? Or was this story less ironic? Some people consider irony success too. I never heard about Bath though. Good luck on future occasions.
No hint of irony here. Just didn't make the cut. It was a Crime story. But I have just seen that homicide in the UK is at it's lowest for 38 years, so perhaps murder has gone out of fashion.
Letting your enemies live is quite original, considering killing them would put them out of their misery. I've only been around for 23 years, so I don't really know much. All I can say that mainstream themes generally cool down over time and seem to be forgotten by the masses, or vacantly like a hungover memory from last night's party. Don't let that distract you form creating greatness
Generally, I consider 'contests' which require entry fees ($35 in this case) to be little more than scams. Does anyone else find this construction odd?: "Our 2015 longlist includes seven international writers, based in Belgium, Canada, Ireland, North America, Singapore and Spain."
I must say I prefer not to pay to enter comps but writing is a cheap pastime, so I allow myself the odd comp entry. I reached the shortlist of the CWA DD last year (another one which costs, though I couldn't bring myself to pay the £95 fee for the awards dinner - multiply that by 2, add train fare and hotel ...). I thought this story much better than that one - but what do I know? I have entered free comps to find they have come with offers for discounted writing courses for the following 6 months. Both Bath & CWA attract international entries but are for unpublished writers.
That's still quite an achievement. I keep wondering if one day I should enter that myself but I've never actually written crime fiction before. I read a tonne of them though There was a CWA winner that I'd love to read, but I don't think it'd been published... meh
If you read tons of Crime why not have a go? Can't say I particularly enjoy crime procedural stuff. On the DD facebook group a few said how much they enjoyed 'The sweetness at the bottom of the pie', so i read that a while back and loved it.
Well, I just found out that I didn't even make the long list for this year's CWA DD. Strange as I never completed last year's as I thought there was so much wrong with it while this year's has been finished for a couple of months. Bum!
I did submit some poetry for my university magazine a few years back, but never heard anything from them and my poems never appeared. Guess you could say that was my first taste at rejection. The reason, looking back at it now, was because I stupidly didn't check to see what formatting they requested before sending in my poems written in colored text and weird fonts. I didn't realize it until it was far too late to do anything about it.
When I was 13 or 14 and Soccerlens was a pretty new site they were looking for article writers. I emailed the site owner a sample article and a few ideas for future articles. He emailed me back that I could pitch their staff ideas to write the articles. He was so nice about it too. I feel bad for putting him in that situation since I was still getting red scores all over my English homework at this stage in life.
No, no. Failure at forumming is measured in ban-hammers. As long as you have none of those, you're doing just fine.
Thanks! I thought that's the way it works, but like I said, I fail - at both understanding & communicating, so thanks for telling me that! Trust & fear issues, I think.
