Almost as Difficult as Football

I was checking my blog stats – AKA engaging in a most unbecoming form of Google Navel Gazing – and noticed that some kind soul had fallen upon a blog post from March 2015: Number One Career. I couldn’t remember anything about it so had a click myself. It's about being a writer and as I come across so many tweets and posts about competition wins, near misses and 'good' (loads of promise but I just don’t love it enough) and 'not so good' (please don't be disheartened, we receive three billion submissions a week and only take on two to three new writers a year) rejections, I thought I'd post this again here. 

It was written just before I announced my
two book deal with Urbane Publications and hope it might serve as motivation to hang on in there if you're in that stage of high emotional swings, spending your days between clicking send/receive and trying not to. 

Or indeed, you're stuck in a gargantuan plot hole.

Keep going! If it was easy, they'd call it football 😉*

*This is my daughter's quote from when she was ten. It always amused me because having played hockey and netball for my whole childhood and beyond, I played football once at school when I inadvertently broke my friend, captain, and absolute star of our hockey team's leg and a second time in the Women's Puma Four, when our team of four were forced to add football to three other disciplines we knew better and let's just say, our friend's husband, dragged in to give us a crash course of training, found it rather amusing that after five minutes, I mean, really, five minutes, of sprinting after a ball and generally not connecting with our feet - side of our feet, I learnt that bit - we were exhausted, I was reminded that football is actually, really extremely hard. But I hope you know what I mean…