As a long-time member of The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), I always keep an eye on the SCBWI British Isles Facebook group for writing competitions that are coming up, and I’ve entered SCBWI’s own competition – the Slush Pile Challenge – several times, over the years. A few years ago I was a runner up in a Slush Pile Challenge competition, and since then I’ve been long listed and even short listed for various other competitions, but I’d never been an actual competition winner. But this never stopped me from entering every competition for children’s writers that I came across!
The January 2023 Challenge, which appeared on the SCBWI BI Facebook page on the very first day of 2023, was to submit the opening 750 words and synopsis of a story for either young readers or middle grade readers. When I read that the judge also loved stories with humour and adventure, I knew that I wanted to submit the middle grade ghost story that I’d been working on. I was a bit concerned though; I was only a few thousand words into the book, and although I’d written a synopsis to guide me through writing the rest of it, it was very far from complete. But I emailed the competitions team to check if that would be OK, and when they assured me that it would be, I submitted my entry.
It must have been all of ten seconds after I’d clicked ‘send’, that I realized I’d pasted the synopsis onto the entry form incorrectly. While the dog rolled his eyes at me from the sofa, I emailed the team for a second time – this time to ask if I could submit it again. Luckily my original entry hadn’t yet been acknowledged, so they were able to delete it and let me send in a corrected submission. Phew!
Over the next month, I became convinced that my ghost story was complete rubbish – a pretty common thought when I’m a few thousand words into a book – and I decided to leave it alone and move on. I started toying with ideas for either a twisted fairy tale, or a chapter book set in a witch school, and drew up synopses for both. My ghost story had been completely abandoned and left in some kind of virtual drawer on my laptop, so you can imagine how excited I was in early March, when I received an email to tell me that my story had been selected by Charlotte Colwill of the Colwill and Peddle Agency, as the winner!
In my next blog post, I’ll talk about my prize – a meeting with Charlotte Colwill, literary agent with Colwill and Peddle.
Catherine Rosevear 