Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Roller-coaster ride

It's all ups and downs, 2010, so far. The hugely exciting news is from a writer friend that I am not allowed to share yet.. but congratulations, you know who you are!

My good news is that my story, Mugs, has been accepted for the wonderful 100 Stories for Haiti charity anthology, alongside many writer friends and familiar names - Claudia Boers, Katy Darby, Lauri Kubuitsile, Sylvia Petter, Julia Bohanna, Dan Powell, Nuala Ni Chonchuir, Martin Reed, Joel Willans, Teresa Stenson, Vanessa Gebbie, Patti Jazanoski, Alex irvine, Steve Moran, Charlie Berridge and others. The full list is here, more information soon on how to get hold of a copy.

The bad news today is that my application for an Arts Council grant for my writer-in-residence position at the University's Science Faculty was rejected. I am pretty upset about that - I moved to England with some dream of readily available funding for all sorts of Arts - but that was a fantasy, I know. It's a recession, everyone's struggling. I will try not to be too down and think of new ways to fund my residency. I did go to an excellent event last night run by Spread the Word about writers-in-residence which was very inspiring - and made some great contacts, so will ask for advice.

To end on a more positive note, the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association asked me to contribute to their Top Tips for Writing a Story for Radio to help anyone thinking of entering their 600-word short story competition. There are some great ideas in there, click on the link to open the PDF, then enter the comp. Entries will be accepted between Feb 15th- March 31st. Good luck!

5 comments:

Gay Degani said...

Tania,
I haven't commented lately but I've kept up with what's going one with you for the last few months and it is inspirational. I'm sorry to hear about your not getting the grant, but you'll get it next tie. You are doing soooo wonderfully. You've got fans and building...

Tania Hershman said...

Thanks so much, Gay! Just went out for lunch with the lovely Sarah H, we were talking about you. She says you're a whizz at revising stories, must get you to tell me how!

Rachel Fenton said...

Awe - sorry you didn't get a grant but something tells me your determination to succeed is far greater than any knock back and I know you'll work out a way to get some fundung!

Teresa Stenson said...

Hey Tania, just bobbed over to see the names of the writers in the Haiti Project book - isn't it odd how both our names and Vanessa's are next to each other? It's just because it's alphabetical by story title, but it's a nice little bit of synchronicity for me because you two are writers I've 'met' in the blogging world (although I did meet Vanessa in that real world in Bridport. Well, semi-real).

Pippa Goldschmidt said...

sorry to hear about the arts council rejection. did you get any feedback?