Terrie

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]

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

At least the ghostwriting of books like O’Sullivan’s thriller will be keeping an author somewhere in gainful employment – and probably earning much more than if they had published it under their own name. If I’d got that gig I’d call it success

It’s undeniably scary when stuff like that happens, and you have my sympathy. In situations like this, staff training is worth its weight in gold. The trouble is that nobody really knows what to do in this kind of scenario when they are suddenly confronted with it, and can often either freeze up or make things worse. In a previous life I worked…[Read more]

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]

The not-getting-shortlisted thing is tricky. I had one story that was shortlisted in a major competition. I worked on it a bit more and submitted it to a few other places…and was met with silence.

@daedalus The law in the USA is basically the same, copyright rests with the creator as soon as the creation is in a tangible form. The difference is litigation, America’s national sport. To defend, or attack, is far less complex and expensive if you’ve registered the copyright. But, an important point, just putting the C-mark on your work,…[Read more]

A failure of mine is to take each failure to heart while not believing that successes are real or worthy