There are so many meanings, phrases and idioms associated with the word hook. This morning I’m exulting, just a little, in being off that hook, which is another way of saying that one particular task, or exercise, is no longer immediately necessary.

I’ve had my head down, this past month, working towards a reasonable number of words in my developing novel, a completely different genre to the science fiction efforts I had earlier engaged with. It may be a total indulgence (after all, what writing isn’t?) but I’m loving the new effort just the same. I’m thinking it’s a romantic historical fiction novel, and I’ve just hit the half-way mark. You could say I’ve been hooked, by both the concept and the execution, that are required to achieve a reasonable story.

The stimulus was another competition, age-restricted to an older generation like mine, for debut unrepresented authors (the ones who have not yet secured an agent), with the caveat that after the first stage of assessment (of some five thousand words), entrants should be aware that long-listed candidates would be required to submit a minimum of sixty thousand words of their debut oeuvre. I had some twenty thousand, under my belt already, but the parallel story running through the history looked like being another twenty, anyway. I reasoned that if I made it to the deadline with say forty thousand words, then I could generate the next twenty during the preliminaries, so that I’d have the remit taken care of should the call come for more.

I did hit my target word count, and I got the material ready to submit. Just before sending things off, I checked the rules one more time, to be sure I had everything just so. To my chagrin, I discovered a new line inserted into the eligibility requirement: aspirants having self-published a novel, or two or three, are definitively not eligible! They don’t tell you about that sort of issue, the folks who love to promote the delights of self-publishing, like JerichoWriters.com for example, when they inveigle would-be authors to try their hand.

So I felt disappointed, for sure, though that feeling was mixed with delight as well: I’d managed to reach the half-way point, after all, in my diligence, thanks to the competition stimulus. That felt like something to celebrate, anyway.

Nursing my wounds, I did another little search for novelistic competitions, and found another one. Pricey, this one, but even with my own self-publishing bookshelf, my new work was still eligible. What was even better was that I had achieved the required word count already, in the event of a second, or even a third call for more. The deadline was the same, the end of May, so I revised my submission, and hit the button on the Submittable platform.

Ah . . . and now a fallow period stretches ahead, as I luxuriate in being off the hook for the immediate future.

Aspiring authors like me probably yearn as much for the long-listing, for any positive consideration at all, as for the ultimate prizes, which in any event feel completely unreachable. But the stimulus, the challenge, remains the same.

If you don’t try, you don’t succeed. And trying is the point. The process is the activity. A writer is not a writer unless they write. And you won’t get better at the craft unless you keep working at it, learning the right approaches, fixing things and drafting and re-drafting. Finding the joy, as it were, in all of these attempts, even when the result is not the apparent success you’d hoped.

When I have sufficient financial resources, and when I’ve finished a good first draft of my new effort, I may join a global community of like-minded souls, the Alliance of Independent Authors, who seem to be encouraging in a non-profit sort of way. There are strategies to look forward to, not least of which is the exercise in research into place, which we’ve been thinking of, for this autumn’s sojourn in Harry Hymer.

But for now, it’s just lovely to jump back into daily searches for joy, while ideas for novelistic developments, catharses, recriminations and resolutions, percolate along.