People are scared of all kinds of things; spiders, jelly (jello for our American cousins), heights or the Chuckle Brothers. I’m scared of the email message beep which tells me that important mail has arrived.
Have you ever been scared to open an email? It might be one from a prospective partner or from the recruitment department of a company you’ve applied to work for. Or it might be from Legend Press; the much anticipated correspondence which will inform me whether my submission for the new anthology, 8 Rooms, has been successful.
Use of email has made the submission process for aspiring authors much easier. But when an email bounces back, you generally have absolutely no idea of its contents. In the olden days when people still used the postal system for this type of thing, you could still make a qualified guess as to the response by judging the weight of the envelope and whether the publishing company in question had simply sent the whole story back, probably unread.
So, the email from Legend Press sat in my inbox for a solid four hours before I dared to open it. By which time I’d driven myself mad by trying to second guess its contents. You see, writing something which would be published by Legend Press has been an ambition of mine for some time now. I’ve watched their growth as a company which publishes the kind of stuff I want to write… and read. In 2008, my novel, When Elephants walk through the Gorbals was third place winner in the 2008 Luke Bitmead Writers' Bursary competition which was run by Legend Press. The prize was publication.
To come so close was a blow, but my attendance at the prize-giving evening, where I met Lucy and Tom, as well as Luke’s family, spurred me on to try even harder. It was with these people in mind that I finally opened the email and read that my story had been accepted… And then I read it again, having decided that my eyes had been playing tricks with me.
They hadn’t. My story, ‘A Galaxy far, far away’ will appear in the forthcoming anthology, and I can’t tell you how delighted I am. I’ve had fridge magnets printed up featuring the book’s cover and I’ve distributed them amongst everyone I know… What can I learn from the whole episode? I suppose I’ve learned that I‘m a wimp at heart. But this avoidance of ‘moments of truth’ is the only real similarity between my main character and I, despite the first person narration in my story. It’s fiction, people, please! And what’s it about? Well, I can sum it up in one, rather wordy, over-punctuated sentence:
When a baby enters Mark’s carefully-constructed world of convenience, he finds his boundaries re-drawn; everything that was once a certainty is now shown to be built on fragile foundations; they are as much fictions as the fabled ‘galaxy far, far away’ in his beloved Star Wars.
Andrew Kirby
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