March 1, 2018 – Katie Hale

February has been a month of opposites for me: up & down, success & failure, sun & snow. Mostly, though, I’ve been doing two things: walking along the beach and editing the novel.

I was lucky enough to get away from the chilly UK temperatures for a week, and spend some time soaking up the sun (and sangria) in Portugal with my parents. We stayed just outside a little town called Almancil, and did nothing more stressful than walk the 3-ish miles along the sand to the little collection of beach restaurants. Before I went, I was thinking of the trip as something of an indulgence. After all, I had a great long to do list to get through, and probably not enough time to get through it.

But something I’m coming to understand more and more is how important it is to take time to relax. To read a book (or three). To spend time with people you care about. To get outside and walk.

By the time I got on the flight home, I was completely ready to get back to working – which was good, because I was delivering a full day of workshops at Queen Katherine School in Kendal the very next day.

So moving into March, relaxing is something I’m going to make sure I incorporate more into my life – as a deliberate act, rather than just crashing out in front of Netflix because I’m too tired to drag myself upstairs to bed. March is shaping up to be a slightly busier month than February, too, so I think I’m going to need that discipline. Luckily, I’ve learned to crochet this month, so that should provide a good amount of down time to let my brain switch off & clear out…

February also marked an important anniversary (to me, at least): a year since I discovered I’d been accepted onto the WriteNow mentoring scheme by Penguin Random House. Looking back, it’s incredible to think that, within the space of that year, I’ve gone from thinking of myself as a poet who probably shouldn’t be dabbling in fiction because it’s not her ‘thing’, to thinking of myself as a poet & novelist, perfectly justified in giving equal attention to both forms. I’ve also gone from having a few thousand hastily-written words to being just a couple of days away form finishing Draft 7 of the manuscript. I’ve gotten to work with a wonderful & insightful editor, and also now have an agent – as well as gaining a whole group of friends in the other mentees, who have now become a kind of writing family.

WriteNow has given me so much confidence in my prose writing, and in my writing in general. I guess it just goes to show how much can happen in a year.

So I’m celebrating this anniversary by, well, continuing to work on the novel. (Also by consuming large quantities of hot chocolate & marshmallows, but that’s partly down to the snow.) Here’s to the next year!

February submission statistics:

This year, I’m aiming to submit to / apply for 100 things. Part of the point of this is to get a big enough sample size, so that at the end of the year I can show that writing isn’t all sunshine & roses; there are days when all you get are rebuttals, and those acceptances can feel few and far between. In a way, this goal makes it easier when I get rejections, as each ‘no’ is just another step closer to proving my point about how hard it can be to get on as a writer.

But this month, I’ve been finding it hard. I’ve always thought I was quite good at dealing with rejection (at least, with literary rejection), in a kind of shrug-my-shoulders-and-move-onto-the-next-thing kind of way. But after getting multiple rejections all within a few days of each other, it’s kind of starting to rub. Especially as a couple of those were for things I really wanted.

Having said that, I still have a lot of applications / submissions out there waiting for a response, and I did have one success this month (although it’s only loosely connected to the ‘writing’ part of my life, in that it’s arts-based: as of March, I’ll be working one day a week doing admin for the Brewery Arts Centre’s Youth Arts department).

So, with all that in mind, here are my February stats:

Submissions made: 5
Rejections: 5
Successes: 1

Time to start working on the March submissions…

The month in books:

A nice mix of prose & poetry this month, including one book that I think might make it onto my list of favourites: the incredible Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel.