Sunday 28 February 2010

Positive Rejection

Success is a fleeting, insubstantial thing. At the recent, excellent,  VWC Get Writing 2010 conference, one of the speakers quoted a saying that is worth repeating here: 'A successful writer is only a failed writer who did not give up.'

Success, however,  is an impostor, like Triumph and Disaster in Kipling's If, and yet we writers still labour in search of that spectral destination, sometimes to the detriment of health and relationships.

Perhaps, then, success should be regarded not so much as a destination but a journey? Framed in those terms, as R L Stephenson wrote, it may be '...better to travel hopefully than to arrive'. Indeed, the key to success may reside in something seemingly transient and painful but in truth substantial and positive, like receiving better rejections.

Monday 22 February 2010

On Relativity and Constipation

I suppose a writers' conference seems an unlikely place to gain empirical proof of Relativity?

It wasn't the conference as a whole, of course. Said proof was contained in one – relatively brief (nudge, nudge) – aspect of it.

For the record, that same aspect of the conference kicked an adrenaline rush like the Winter Olympic Skeleton Bob run.