It’s hard to believe that this is my last journal for the programme. Six short entries seem insufficient to really capture six months of growth and learning, six months of new experiences and the assistance of an amazing mentor, a publishing company that wants to boost writers with potential, and the many wonderful organisations that contribute to making it all happen.
We have until the end of the month to submit our manuscripts, and I’ve been working hard on mine, making changes, tightening plot lines, adding new scenes and restructuring others. Sometimes, I can work on a scene for so long that I’m left wondering if I’ve done anything that makes a difference, but I trust in the process and in my mentor.
And, in me. Which is new. And lovely.
‘Thanks to this programme, I now have more confidence in my ability to write.’
Thanks to this programme, I now have more confidence in my ability to write. We’ve crammed exponential growth into a short period of time, and I’ve developed a newfound ability to revise my own work. It’s always been easy to look at other people’s stories and tell them how they can improve, but it’s a skill that’s much harder to apply to my own stuff. I’m no longer afraid of making big changes or getting it wrong.
I feel like I’ve finally breached the wall that’s been holding me back.
Like anything is possible.
Which is good, because coming to the end of the mentorship isn’t really the end. It’s just the beginning.
Once Butcherbird is off to Huia Publishers, there will be new writing projects and the research associated with them, new phases of my writing career. It’s the end of this process, but as a writer, there are always cycles starting and ending, always more learning to delve into, story playlists to create, new stories creeping up on you, unique characters knocking on the door in your mind.
And I’m excited to see where they take me.
I just want to say thanks to anyone who has been reading along, and thank you to everyone who contributes towards this fantastic programme. I’ve enjoyed doing these posts and enjoyed the mentorship immensely, and I encourage anyone who has been thinking about it to apply to the next round.
If you want to keep tabs on what I’m doing, you can follow me at the links below – and hopefully, sometime in the near future, one way or another, you’ll get the chance to read my book, Butcherbird.
I tweet, blog and Instagram sporadically, because I’d rather be writing ?.
