Whisks

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

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]

Wow, Bella, that sounds awful. I’m not surprised it has rattled you! Hope you are home safe and recovering with lots of tea.

Re: what could have been done … I have a mixed record of dealing with stuff like this, but I do think it’s difficult to gauge what response will help de-escalate the situation. Would being confronted by some burly blokes…[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.

Oh, failure is hard! And so unavoidable. It’s a bit like the ‘slushpile’ term though isn’t it? Perhaps more negative than it needs to be for some of the things we are talking about. Things like not getting short listed in major comps, or not getting a story into a popular journal … are they really failure, or are they a lack of success? Maybe…[Read more]

I’m rather good at that too. Though how would I Know? In concrete terms I haven’t actually had any writing successes.

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

Oh goodness, yes – we are our own worst critics!!

On the cloud, we often talked about ‘failure’ and ‘success’ and how differently people perceived the definitions of them. So I completely understand that you view not being placed as failure – it was one of a whole range of responses we used to get.

Me – I enter very few comps because I hated…[Read more]

On the How to get an Agent thread, page 3. In any event, here is the course:
https://www.faberacademy.co.uk/creative-writing-courses/who-do-you-think-they-are-character-creative-writing-course-gic2.html

The course is horrendously expensive, and the course info is a little misleading in that the tutoring is only in the morning. Nevertheless, I,…[Read more]

Definitely not failure if you’ve tried some comps – you had to write the bloomin’ entry first! And from experience, competitions can be a matter of luck as well as great writing – does the judge like your particular genre? Your style? I know from peer-judging comps on the cloud, my own preference for reading material comes through in the kind of…[Read more]

@alanr, commiseration on the “failures”, but it’s never a failure to put your work out there and to try. Glad you got some useful feedback at your one–to-one and you’ve found a way to implement it

@bellam I am excited about the new computer. I do agree that we remain writers even when not physically writing. It’s nice that you can see that your…[Read more]

Hi @alanr. My hair IS kind of chestnut, but I wouldn’t call it vivid! So don’t think that was me…. Hope we will cross paths another time.

Yes @daedalus – I suspect there is a US / UK split. The writer I knew who kept putting “c”s on things was from the States.

I think I recall @Debi weighing in on the discussion previously to say no “c”…[Read more]