No, I haven’t been wandering around all year in a long raincoat being entirely inappropriate, just in case you wondered, but I have been very busy feeding my addiction of teeny tiny stories. As a new flash author, this has been my first full year of writing and entering competitions and submitting my work to literary journals so, as it draws to close, it feels appropriate to reflect on how it’s all gone.
Reading back through this blog gives a pretty accurate reflection of how I felt at the start of the year and how I feel now. The whole reason I started this blog in the first place was because I was feeling pretty rubbish about my new wannabe career and needed somewhere to moan. Or lament, or explore my feelings. Think of it however you prefer. The essence of my problem was that I’d found something I loved doing and desperately wanted to be good at but had experienced very little success at. With constant rejection and no positive feedback and hours poured into trying, I was feeling depleted. I felt embarrassed to tell people what I was trying to do. Without signs of success, such as publication, I struggled to identify as a writer. Fast forward most of the year and I’m happy to say I’m ending 2019 feeling much more chipper. Getting my writing out into the world through competitions and submitting to journals has been by far the best way of moving forward. Once I embraced a ‘if they don’t like it, what’s the worst thing that’s going to happen?’ attitude and just merrily sent stories out, the better I felt. I felt better still when I started to get the odd long-listing. I somehow also managed to get a couple of ‘highly commendeds’ and a ‘runner-up’. I think the key thing these achievements have done for me is to validate my work. I know I shouldn’t need someone else to validate it for me, but I kind of did. I had no idea whether I was any good at writing or not and certainly not whether my words would ever be good enough for publication. That external validation has helped enormously; each little success making me braver to try something else or enter something else. It also gives me confidence that the way I write is a good enough way to write. It stops me thinking I should make my stories more like x or y’s stories; that my stories are ok as they are. It makes me braver to push deeper into my weird imagination and to be even less cautious in how I express myself. I’ll always be grateful for the competitions that are available and the literary journals who do accept open submissions because without them, I would still be weeping and wailing and may well have given up. I certainly wouldn’t be as creatively satisfied as I currently feel. I like all the tweets writers are doing at this time of year to share their statistics. When you are a very new writer, you have no idea how many stories people write or submit or how many rejections they get or how many stories they get published. It’s all a bit of mystery and it’s tempting to think people are getting hundreds of things published and are never being told ‘no’. When authors honestly share their stats, it busts those myths which can only be a good thing. So, in the spirit of myth busting, here are mine for my first year of flashing: I made a total of 76 submissions – 26 were to competitions, the other 50 to journals. For some reason that I haven’t quite figured out, my success rate in competitions is far better than it is for direct submissions. I honestly would have thought it would have been the opposite, but there we are. Of those 26 comps, I have been long-listed 7 times. Of those long-listings, 2 pieces went on to be highly-commended and a further one was runner-up. A couple of the competitions are not yet closed. In terms of direct submissions, of the 50 I made, only 3 resulted in publication. That’s a whopping 6% success rate! Or, more hilariously, a 94% rejection rate. No wonder I wasn’t feeling good about my new career. It makes little sense then, that my success rate for competitions based on the same year is 27%. Though I am very happy indeed with that figure, it still goes to reassure anybody new to this that most of what you do does get rejected and I assume that to be normal within this industry. For my first year of finding my feet and figuring out how it all works, I’m very pleased. Obviously I haven’t actually won anything and that still feels a fairly out of reach notion. I’ve been published 6 times, which again I’m very happy with, but it is a small number compared to some and something I’d ideally like to build on next year. Whilst the figures do fascinate me, the most important thing for me, is how I’m feeling about it all. I think I’d sum it up with the word ‘hopeful’. I’m hopeful I can build on what I’ve started this year. I’m hopeful I’ll get my novella-in-flash and my novel completed in 2020. And I’m hopeful that they might make it. I’m not delusional – 6 published pieces of flash does not a novelist make – but hope is important in this career. If you don’t hope you’ll get there one day, how do you keep coming back to the keyboard or keep picking up that pen? Hope is a far better feeling to take with one into the New Year than despair. I hope you all have a lovely holiday season. I’m planning plenty of family time, dog walks and, hopefully, some snatched hours of writing. Merry Christmas and a happy, healthy & hopeful 2020, Nicola xx
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September 2023
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