I have some great news. Out of 2452 entries from 78 countries, my novel ‘The Cut’ has reached the top 100 in the competition for the Bath Novel Award 2024. In football parlance, I am truly over the moon. The Bath Novel Award is a major international competition for emerging authors with a first prize of £5,000. I submitted the opening 10,000 words of the novel and a one page synopsis. All entries were read blind and the judges voted for the stories they most wanted to read more of. I shouted, jumped up and ran around the house with a huge grin on my face when I got the news. Despite a series of rejections from agents in London, this is proof positive that my novel is good enough.
Novel writing is a solitary pursuit with little opportunity for unbiased feedback on the quality of one’s work. Even attending a writers’ group, novelists only get feedback on around 500 words due to time constraints. But this feedback concerns just a tiny part of one scene, and a novel is made up of dozens of scenes which are interrelated in time and space. Like sculpture, good novels are supposed to emerge through the editing. As readers of this blog know, I’ve been grafting away for a couple of years on my manuscript, trying my best to improve it bit by bit. It has been a long and lonely process, with only rejection for company. But this accolade undoubtedly proves that I am finally getting somewhere. And it gives me renewed energy for the long and tortuous journey towards publication.
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