Last night, as I was preparing to send out feedback to non-longlistees for the Little Wonder competition, I encountered an IT disaster which basically ruined everything. The discs on which I had the data were corrupted, and I lost thousands of files – the scripts, the notes, recordings, work-in-progress, two of my own plays, and, perhaps most painfully of all, more than 50,000 words worth of feedback to writers that did not make the longlist. To be honest, I’m still rather in shock. And I’m very, very sorry to everyone that was hoping to receive feedback[i].
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I won a thing!
It was slightly surreal, but just as we were reaching peak activity with the Little Wonder Radio Play Competition I won a stage play competition. I’m certain that organising the first helped me with the second, although the two were quite different. Cité 27 wanted a 27-minute-long stage play, to be played in a 27m2 space, to an audience of 27 people, using only 3 actors. One of the organisers got in touch with me about 10 days before the deadline to say “hey, have you seen this, you should think about submitting”, and because I love a) a deadline and b) a brief, I said “sure, great.” The next day my wife went into labour.[i] Somehow, I managed to finish some sort of play and send it the day before the deadline.
A couple of weeks later I got a lovely email confirming my play had been selected. How? How could such a thing happen? Did I really write a winning play in a week at the same time as dealing with a new baby and very tired wife? Just how many chickens did I sacrifice to Satan?
Well, I can promise you that no chickens were harmed, and that it certainly had nothing to do with talent. But I do have some thoughts about what worked. Read on if you’d like to learn how to fluke your way through a play competition.
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Sucks, doesn’t it.
So, you didn’t make the longlist. You read the list of names. Then, you read it again. Then, if you’re like me, you went looking for chocolate.
All our judges are writers. That means all of us, at some point, have been rejected. Again, and again, and again. Rejected when we’ve poured our hearts and souls into a piece of work. Rejected when we really thought we’d got it this time. It hurts. I’m sorry. We don’t want anyone to feel like that.
The most important thing to remember is that rejection is part of the process and happens to everyone. In this post I’m going to talk a little about how we made our decision, the most common mistakes that kept people off the longlist, and those qualities that saw our 17 longlistees make it through. Hopefully you’ll find it useful – more importantly, you should find it encouraging.
We need you to re-subscribe (sorry!)
I hate to do this, but I need to ask all our subscribers to re-subscribe. And encourage anyone not subscribed to subscribe, because it’s awesome. I promise it’s for a good reason.
After the huge response to our competition and the massive increase in audience both for About Writing and Little Wonder, we’ve been having some logistical problems. Basically, Microsoft thinks we’re a spambot. Many of our mailings are getting rejected, bounced, chucked in junk bins or just going where they’re not wanted.
Giving you a better service (or, erm, any service at all)
To fix this, we are switching back to the Jetpack/WordPress subscription system. The good news is that it will let us be GDPR compliant, make posts you receive easier to customise, and make it more straightforward to unsubscribe if you don’t love us any more (sob).
The bad news is that means we have to unsubscribe everyone then ask you to re-subscribe. Manually. Uurgh. If you are on our current subscribers list, you should receive an email in the next couple of days asking you to confirm that you want to be subscribed. Please click confirm! If you don’t receive the email, or you aren’t subscribed and want to be, then fill out the subscription box to the right or at the bottom of this email. Hell, as long as you’re here, just stick your email in the box. Better safe than sorry. I strongly recommend this if you are taking part in the competition/are interested in are radio shows or writing articles/if you want the good karma that comes with doing nice things to writers. You can see a picture of what it looks like at the top of this post (don’t try to fill in the picture. It won’t work).
The other bad news is that we won’t be able to do our monthly newsletters anymore. I’m going to put our last roundup in this post, and after that you’ll get more prompt notifications when we have new content (lets face it, I was never very prompt.) So, if you’d like to hear more about stuff that happened this month, press more. And please do subscribe!
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On Thursday night our Radio Short competition closed with a whopping 298 accepted entrants. Thank you everyone for your hard work and enthusiasm taking part. And huge thanks to the BBC Writers Room for promoting this event.
The last hundred entries were submitted within the last 24 hours, which has created some small (but happy) logistical problems for us. As a result, the timetable for results and resubmission will be as follows:
Teasing of Longlist Notes: Weekend of September 29th on twitter @littlwonder
Longlist Released: October 1st
Longlistees sent full feedback: October 7th
Resubmission of plays with changes by Longlistees: November 5th
Shortlist Announcement: November 26th
Public Performance at Moving Parts: December 16th
Winner Announced: December 31st
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