Debut Dagger Delights

Can't hold out. Any. Longer. Must. Blog about. Unofficial encouragement.

I entered the Debut Dagger awards a number of months ago, didn't make the short list, and stopped thinking about it. Last week, I received this email:

Dear Daniel,

First of all, thank-you for entering this year's Debut Dagger. As you've probably seen from the mailing list or the website by now, I'm afraid you didn't make the shortlist. One of the difficulties of entering a competion like this is that if you don't reach the shortlist, it's hard to get a sense of where you stand, so I wanted to write and let you know that you were a whole lot closer to the top than to the bottom. In the process of compiling the shortlist, we ended up with an informal longlist of about 25 entries from which the final 13 were chosen: Loving the Law was one of the 25.

I appreciate that it's a mixed blessing to know you came so close, but I hope the positives outweigh the negatives and you take this as a big vote of confidence in your writing. Just reaching the final 25 is no small accomplishment. At that stage, the differences between entries can be wafer thin, and the judgements we have to make are very finely balanced. I hope you take encouragement from the achievement, and wish you the very best of luck with your future writing. If you're still eligible for next year's competition and have some new or improved material, I for one would be very keen to read it.

It's not official, but it is the first feedback I've had from the world of writing. Printed out on extra bright white paper, this is now stuck on the wall behind my writing desk. It's there for whenever I start losing hope.

But I'm stupid, so that hasn't happened yet.