Of Shortlists and Liberation

A meditation on the fragility of life, and solid-state hard drives.

I’m back home. We drive on the right side (which is the right side) and the government is permanently of the caretaker sort (which means they take care of very little … opinions are divided on whether that’s a good thing). It’s nice to be back, only somewhat dampened by my laptop breaking down yesterday. I’n typoing thus on ny phjone.

Anyway, Jericho Writers London Festival of Writing 2025 recedes in the rear-view mirror, and what an excitement that was. Making new friends, meeting old friends - people I’ve known for years but hadn’t ever actually met IRL - and finding a warm atmosphere in which people share their ideas, and pitches, and doubts. It was lovely to spend two days among like-minded people.

Having decompressed during the week, the conclusions are:

1. You’re talented. I mean, all of you. Pretty much everybody I met last weekend had something unique to say and an interesting way of saying it. They took their craft seriously and weren’t about to give up because of one (or ten, or a hundred) rejections. That’s it. You’ve got what it takes.

2. The world of publishing still struggles with genre. (Or perhaps we writers still struggle with genre, which makes it difficult for the world of publishing to deal with us, but anyway…) In one seminar, I learned that publishing is simply *gasping* for an interesting genre mash-up. In the next found myself sternly admonished that if I mix it up I may fall between two stools. I enjoy a bit of stern admonishment as much as the next chap, but the messages are mixed.

3. Emma Cooper is taller than you think, in real life.

4. Jericho certainly deserve a pat on the back for putting on a show like this. Gathering - what was it? - four hundred feedback-hungry writers into a small space and trying to give each of them, at whatever stage in their writing journey, something positive to take away from a weekend of seminars, agent meetings and a gala dinner (with the flagship Friday Night Live contest centre stage, of which more anon) - that’s a big ask. I saw a bunch of very happy people going home.

But, the highlight, for me, was the Saturday evening gala.

They call it Friday Night Live, but that’s just for old-time’s sake, because they used to do it on a Friday (and there’s some outfit in America that already do something called Saturday Night Live, apparently), but the idea is simple: submit the opening to your work-in-progress, the finalists read their work live in front of a scary audience of their peers, and the winner is crowned with eternal glory, and a small bunch of flowers.

The eventual winner - Kate den Rooijen - seemed suitably nervous (I would have been catatonic), and pleased with the flowers (oh, and the eternal glory - brilliantly well deserved, by the way), but before that happened I was rather bowled over by a small moment of my own. Before the finalists, a shortlist was revealed (no, I had no idea they did this either), and look whose name was on it:

OK, if that’s not totally clear:

Still not? How about this?

Do you see that? If you zoom in to a micro-pixelar level, that’s my name, right there.

OK, so you get the idea this means a lot to me. As somebody who’s never won so much as a goldfish at the fair, this is as close to victory as I’ve ever come. I don’t know how many people entered, exactly, but in the region of four hundred, and as mentioned earlier, that’s four hundred dead serious writers with - judging by the sample I met - four hundred cracking pitches. To be in the top twenty-ish feels like some sort of achievement. They say you become like the company you keep, so I guess I must be doing something right.

So, I hear you saying, what is this Liberation Day, of which you speak? A work in progress, of course, the opening of which (first 500 words, specifically) looked good enough to submit for the competition. The pitch goes something like this:

Bob is dead.

A member of the Dutch resistance, executed by the Nazis on the last day of the war, he never hears the bullet but a choir of angels and a thunderous applause. He’s in heaven.

He meets Ophelia, his guardian angel, and she shows him around. All goes well, until Bob, curious to see the lower circles of hell, leans too far and falls a million miles.

And wakes, next to a beautiful woman. He’s in Amsterdam, in 2025.

Life begins anew, and heaven must have been a dream - despite the angel wings tattoo he doesn’t remember getting - but when Ophelia shows up to bring him back upstairs, he’ll need all his worldly nature to stay on planet Earth.

Wanna hear the opening? Stay tuned. I’ll share it here, in the next exciting episode…

---