The Road Home
This will be a shorter WKDN than usual - my hard drive crashed this week taking everything (and I mean everything) with it. Please don't ask me if the files were backed up. My computer man has already told me off enough. So I'm tapping away on the pilot's very butch aluminium notebook, accidentally deleting as much as I manage to write ... Normal service will be resumed once they manage to stick my computer back together.
Back in April I suggested you might be interested in entering the People's Author competition ITV was running - just to show I do use my own prompts, I entered and found out last week I'm through to the televised finals. 16 writers are going head to head to win a publishing contract with Orion, and my heat is at the end of October. It will be shown on the Alan Titchmarsh Show on Monday 2nd November. I had a meeting in London at the publishers this week and it's all very exciting.
When you start out writing you get so used to rejections or a deafening silence when you submit work. It's all par for the course. Eventually your work gets better and things start getting accepted. Finding out about the TV show was a genuine, lovely surprise. To all of the WKDN regulars who are having tough times with contracts, agents, publishers - hang in there. It just goes to show if you stick with it and don't give up in spite of what's going on in publishing, things will turn around.
TODAY'S PROMPT: The book sample was great fun to write - I've never tried memoir writing before, but it's something I'd recommend to anyone. After all our recent losses it was good to take 'the road home' and go back to the past. The book spans twelve years through the seventies and eighties, and it will be as much an exploration of the countryside, childhood and a time that's gone as about one person's life. Writers have the chance to make sense of their lives in a way most people don't - we have the tools and skills to turn memories into stories. Why not take one important event in your life and write about it today?
