Bella

Sure! You are welcome to email the MS over to me (do you have my email?)

Let me know if you have any specific questions and / or any specific bits you are concerned about.

‘Failure’, like ‘rejection’ is such an emotive word. Whether or not you feel you’ve failed may depend on what you set out to do. Did you set out to win? Well, I suppose in terms of entering comps, we do set out to win/be placed. But I would not say it’s a failure if that doesn’t happen. Is it failure if you’re not ‘satisfied’ with your…[Read more]

I’ve entered the Bath Novel Award four times and been longlisted twice, but no further than that. It’s a good award, and well worth entering – there’s an excellent community around it if you have the time to engage.
Alan, it is judged completely blind, so there’s no favouritism going on, but it’s unavoidable that the judges of any award will…[Read more]

Oh yeah! That looks great. I know writer and Clinical Psychologist Stephanie Hutton has also now started running some similar courses herself. Great stuff!

As Ricky Nelson sang “You can’t please everybody so you gotta please yourself”

I am so sorry to hear that, Bella. That must have been extremely disturbing and frightening.

As others have said, I think it is down to the gym to now review their safety policies and how they handled the situation. It sounds like they had done their best in previously banning him, and the fact that he burst in meant no one knew how to handle…[Read more]

Thanks for the clarity @debi and @johnalty

I really like this thread. It feels quite cathartic to have a place to vent about “failures” and to reflect on how we define and learn from them.

It’s amazing how easy the thought “I’m a terrible writer” can come unbidden into our minds. I had this exact thought today, just because there is an element of my book I haven’t figured out yet. What…[Read more]

Nothing to add to Daed’s and Raine’s wise words except to sympathise Bella. It must have been very frightening.

To be honest, Alan, that the very act of having written something complete enough to be able to send it out to comps is a success, so I’d start off by saying Congratulations on that massive success before worrying about the relatively small “failures” that followed.
That said… It’s far easier to say these things than do them/feel them. My…[Read more]

crossed with you, Alan. Is failure not trying, or not winning? I’d say the former. Because if you don’t try, you might never win. And even if you don’t win because you never enter a comp, you have still succeeded in writing something.

Not sure ‘enjoyment’ comes into my reason for writing – it’s something that can feel like a chore at times! And…[Read more]

I think with anything creative, there’s the element of personal preference. You know I arrange flowers – well, I see some designs and think ‘how the heck is that flower design?’. Especially when it’s something like a single flower head and a twig. Yet others I see are amazing feats of engineering and have flow and rhythm or colour, and I’m blown…[Read more]