Let me tell you a story #3

Hello again...may you be well, may you be happy, may you be at peace.

I’d better finish telling you the story of the story before my mind starts rambling off on something else. So...

A few days after I’d seen the results on the website I had to send off master copies on paper and disk and a mini bio to go in the back of the book and I sat back and awaited the proofs. I waited and waited, I emailed the editor and they explained they were having some delays but would be back in touch and a few years went by. This is not an exaggeration! In the meantime I wrote a few more stories in different styles and about different things and sent them to other competitions. Some no one but me ‘got’ at all, sometimes they were highly commended and once one was a runner up again and appeared in another anthology. When that happened I had more of an idea how the process worked and sent more emails and letters to the original people and made a phone call or two but to no avail...

Then last year out of the blue they wrote to us all and said the wheels were back in motion again and finally, finally we had our proofs and publication went ahead and now I have ‘two books on the shelf’, two books that is that have stories in by me that other people thought should be there, and that makes me smile every time I think of it! So this definitely worth including on here on a gratitude list but would be counterproductive and cheating to put in my list everyday...see the book that inspired the practice if you want further, more scientific explanations.

One of my book bios said I wanted to be a writer from the age of three when my grandmother taught me to read but had allowed my hands and mind to be distracted by other occupations in the intervening years. Writing in that sense meaning published fiction I suppose. But of course everyone who writes is a writer, and having studied English language at nit-picking navel gazing degree level recently, I accept and embrace the concept that any kind of language at all beyond the absolutely basic functional is creative language and ‘writing’ takes on many different forms. It absolutely fascinates me that lines and squiggles on a page (for example) or pixels on a screen can create emotion in the brain. How amazing is that?

I think I may write more on this later... ha ha!