Let me tell you a story #1

I haven’t been as feeling as upbeat the last few days as I’d have liked and that makes it hard to write on here as its supposed to be about recording and sharing joy.

So, I thought as most of you are strangers and you don’t know much about my life until it came to this I’d share a story about a story I once wrote which has a touch of the feelgood factor. It’ll be in instalments so my hands and your heads don’t get tired but then the best stories are...

I was living alone and isolated in a tiny one room flat after some less than successful life changes I’d made when I heard on the Richard and Judy show that they were having a short story competition. I fancy myself as having a bit of a way with words and I thought this might be a way to turn my life around for the better but I couldn’t think what to write...The word limit was only 1000 words and that’s shorter than a newsy letter so that was a challenge too and inspiration wouldn’t come.

After the competition had been running for a week or two they were reading out extracts of some of the entries they’d had so far and saying basically why they didn’t like them. There emphasis was write about what you know and hinted about the kind of things they thought we would know about...just ordinary things to do with an ordinary British family life...but I was devastated as it brought it home to me how far mine had diverged from anything the general public would consider normal for an intelligent middle aged woman. And looking back it seemed that all I’d ever really known was about not fitting the mould and being an outsider...

So I decided to write about that... and the story was called The Woman with no Fire of her Own.

And I sent it off so sure that it had something special in it and it would change my life...and never heard anything more again! And I decided that I was totally wrong and I really couldn’t write and put the thing away and forgot pretty much all about it...

A few years later things had looked up a little, I had a flat with a tiny separate kitchen and bathroom and had reconnected with a friend from a few years earlier. I can’t remember why exactly, whether I’d been talking about being a misfit or about being a ‘failed’ writer but I emailed him a copy of the story. And he raved about it. He’d done a bit of work as a story teller so I felt maybe he wasn’t just being kind, and his reaction was so positive that I gave a printed copy of it to another man friend and he too said it was great. He actually said it made him cry and he wasn’t a man given to expressing emotion so this was high praise indeed...

So then I felt a bit more positive about the little tale and it’s telling and showed a few more people and they were quite positive too. And eventually I was persuaded to enter it in another competition...