Thursday 14 July 2011

A Little Bit of Awesomeness

I enjoyed Aubrey Hirsch's recent article over on Flash Fiction Chronicles, in which she offered up a few tips for dealing with the negative feelings that come from having your work rejected by editors - or, for that matter, seeing it disappear without trace in competitions. The most valuable piece of advice, by my reckoning, was her recommendation of making the effort to celebrate everything positive that happens to you, no matter how small. I think that's really important. It's all too easy to focus on the bad stuff and before you know it, you've convinced yourself you're a terrible writer and the path back to the keyboard/pen has become an arduous and intimidating struggle.

With that in mind, here's something relatively minor that brings a smile to my face:
Yep, it's my name, dropped casually into a list of authors and looking, dare I say it, very much at home. Dan Purdue, Author. I like the sound of that.

One of these days I'll get used to seeing my name in the paper. Until then, I'll be clutching my clippings and grinning like the Cheshire Cat and thinking, "So what if I didn't win that competition? I'm still an author."

After all, it's in the Guernsey Press. It must be true.

4 comments:

Chloe said...

It's in writing, it's definitley true! Soon your name will be in the headlines...

I had my first telephone interview for a paper yesterday. Only a little local one, but a start (especially as the journalist kept asking about the novel I'm writing - publicity before it's even finished?!)

Dan Purdue said...

Well done, that sounds great. Was the interview actually about your novel-to-be? Or was it something more general but the journo got sidetracked when he/she found out you're a writer?

These types of things are small, I suppose, but they're reminders that we're getting somewhere, and that's always a good thing to think about.

Chloe said...

It was about the short story anthology that I've contributed to and she was just trying to find out all about my writing generally I think. Today local newspapers, tomorrow the world...

Patsy said...

I can understand why that clipping makes you smile.