Test Post - Blogger's Been Messing Today.

Now the creative writing courses I began back in 2011 have both finished I'm wondering what I should do next. I have managed to get the Open University Open degree which was my main ambition, if not the extent of it. During the courses I have been able to collect a small portfolio which I haven't been shy about putting into the outside world - though quite what the outside world will make of it or any part or parts of it is anyone's guess.

I had heard about the Costa Coffee short story writing competition a matter of hours before its cut off - I seem to recall it was something like 4 o'clock in the afternoon during one of the first days of August. Whenever it was, and I can't be precise, I had three hours to think of something to enter or (and I was tempted) to let it pass another year. The thing about the Costa Coffee competition is that it is free to enter - and that the business of entering is amazingly straightforward. Write something, create a file and put it on your desktop, fill out the simple CC form, upload the file and send it. Nothing could be simpler.  Providing of course that you have completed the first bit, the actual writing of something. 

Obviously I won't win. If I had spent the whole year on something nothing would change that fact - CC are doubtless deluged with entries from would be writers all of whom probably believe that they're at least in with a chance. I know how good some of these writers are having just spent two years with many of them as fellow students. And let's not forget the tutors - there's loads of them and most of them haven't been published, or if they have it's to very modest audiences through Kindle or very small publishers with very modest success. Yes they have Masters degrees and PHDs in creative writing, but at times like this, competition time, they aren't complacent enough to turn down an opportunity for a cool three grand as most of them are getting by on a living wage no matter what it says on their profiles. And let's not forget published authors - all of whom have hundreds of scripts kicking around that have rejected slips stapled to them.  A tweak here, a change there and presto! competition fodder - what's the difference between entering a rejected manuscript for a competition? Absolutely nothing. On reflection perhaps the only difference is that there is often second and  third prizes perhaps more, so it's redundant to think that this wouldn't appeal to all but the most successful writers out there.   

So the competition within the competition (if you will) is huge in size and in the scope of the ability of the entrants. Taking all this into account, I am not going to win, or anything like that. But it still feels satisfying to have something to enter, even if it's just a cobbled together patchwork of ideas with a theme running through it like a vein of hopefulness.  Enough to allow you to breathe breaths of relief after sending - a sense of geborgenheit that your hard graft is in the mix and maybe, just maybe, it'll claw it's way closer to the top of he heap instead of residing it's whole submitted life in the bowels of a hopeless pile. But I had a problem. The word count was 4000 and nothing I had was more than 2,500 - and I had less than four hours to either write something completely new, right off the bat, if you will allow me a writer's cliche (I'm listening to Test Match Special right at this moment, that's my excuse - and incidentally by the time I have finished this page - if I edit with any sense of pride - I'm fairly sure the whole of the England team will be out for less than 250 runs) or look to the work I have and start some judicious pruning, imaginative segueing, altering the ends and changing the beginnings. Then pulling together the disparate strands and unifying them in ways never before intended. making a new whole new world out of fragments born for very different purposes. And then from the grits and grains of a cutting room floor - dog-ends included, fashioned 4000 words into a trip spanning the first 18 years of my life.

It  was hardly surprising that the early stories and poems, and to an extent a lot of my later work, was based on my own personal memories - life writing peppered them, laced them, made them what they were - characters were based on me: they said the things I'd said, thought the way I had, saw, smelled, heard and thought what I had.  I'd woven these things into my fiction - I just needed to cut them out, strip them down, re interrogate them. Then, newly gussied, titivated and smartened, and re imagine them for a brand new role. 

And with minutes to go, I succeeded.