how rotten! Now that my early burst of glee has found a warm home I was kept awake half the night by a throttling thought: I checked my email just as I dropped my book (The Scandal of the Season by Sophie Gee, very transporting) and read that yesterday's accepted story had been longlisted for a big fiction competition prize! Dammit! What the?!
Yesterday morning I'd written off to two other magazines and the friendly bloke running the competition I'd entered late last year with the same story, apologising for sending a spanner into the works with my simultaneous submission - but whoever thinks a story is on the brink of being accepted in two places? And yet what is one to do? Sit back and wait nine months for a reply or a total void? Or sneak out the same piece five or six times?
So there it swims away, flashing in the light, my first longlisting for a fiction prize. Grrr!
The only good bleep is that I even met the competition judge (glazed eyes, I know he thinks I am an ozzie wimmin's writer because of the title of my upcoming commercial book) and I have secretly scuttled under his 'serious literature' door. He longlisted me!
This is quite satisfying.
Something similiar happened to me the other year. I sent a short story to quite a big magazine and heard nothing for months. I sent out the story to another magazine and on the same day, both accepted. eeek.
ReplyDeleteSo what did you do? I felt my loyalties lay with the magazine that had accepted the story first (after 2 or 3 months) although the competition fellow was very sweet and encouraging all the same but what a disappointment to walk away from a longlisting! What to do? I have a lot of work swinging about..
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