I am shocked, honoured, chuffed and shitting myself after being selected as one of the twelve winners of the 2025 Novel Fair at the Irish Writers Centre, to be held on 21 & 22 Feb in Dublin.
Here’s the announcement: 12 Aspiring Novelists Selected for the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2025
My dear mate Anthony, who was among my very first readers and has been an unwavering boot up my arse for years, told me about the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair in 2023. That year, I submitted a carefully crafted entry and allowed myself the arrogance of thinking I had a good chance of getting in. After all: they don’t pick one winner but twelve, you have to pay to enter, it’s only for unpublished writers, you need a finished (or nearly finished) manuscript, and it’s hidden away here on our wee island. Easy, right? But almost 500 people had the same idea and submitted their 10,000-word samples (the judges read them all). I was rejected. I took it to heart. I shouldn’t have. But we torture ourselves when we create, don’t we? We shouldn’t but we do. And in laying ourselves bare to the world we peel away our shield of pretence, confidence, apathy, whatever it is.
This year, a reminder popped up on my calendar to tell me that the Novel Fair should be taking entries again. This time it was a whole different, err, fare. I glumly grabbed an updated sample, lobbed it into the aether and promptly forgot I had done so. Several weeks, and some major life events, passed. Then my mobile rang. An unknown number from down south. I propped the phone between my shoulder and chin and carried on working at my laptop. The line faltered just as the lady on the other end said where she was from so I didn’t hear her or drop my assumption that she was trying to sell me something. So I was half listening when she told me I had been selected as a winner of the 2025 Novel Fair, out of a record 546 entries.
The sky fell in.
After I had put my first book up onto a digital shelf in the dark recesses of Amazon’s infinite library, the brief thrill of completion had faded and I had soon felt the story slipping away from me. It was then pushed further into shadow by those aforementioned life events. I had let in a case of the “now what?” despair. Weeks passed and then my phone rang. I swear, it rang on the morning after I had delivered a major project. It was the first day in a while that I had my head above water. The timing couldn’t have been better. And they told me I was in. And the sky cracked, opened, and spilled its guts over me and my desk and all my stupid self-pity. And we were back in the race. And this was real. And it was good. And here we go…