Swings & Roundabouts (I got shortlisted!)

It was bound to happen, wasn’t it?

I knew the Times/Chicken House unpublished children’s fiction prize team were going to announce the shortlist at 1pm on Friday 30th September (that’s today).

I also knew I had a 1-hour presentation to deliver to 30 undergraduate students about how to network effectively (which if you’ve ever seen me network is… an interesting dichotomy, shall we say). So, I decided, sensibly enough, that I could go without checking Twitter until 2pm, when my session was finished. Just an hour, and I wasn’t going to be distracted mid-session.

Until, at 1:30pm, while I was midway through a live demo of my (as you can imagine, scintillating) LinkedIn profile… my internet failed. Utterly and totally failed. Catastrophically failed, under the circumstances: no WiFi, no Ethernet connectivity, not even a mobile hotspot because for some reason my 5G signal kept flipping to 4G, 3G… and then 0G.

I was in panic. Not actually because of the prize, honestly, but because I had 30 undergraduate students trapped in a Microsoft Teams call I couldn’t access. I couldn’t email anyone because my internet was down. I couldn’t send a WhatsApp to my work’s EMERGENCY SOMETHING HAS FAILED group, because… my internet was down.

In the end, I called my boss because at the very, very least that purest form of telecommunications was still, just, within my reach. And he answered, which was good of him.

All of this is to say that I couldn’t actually get on Twitter to see the official announcement until significantly later than I’d anticipated, but… I’m in the shortlist! It’s so exciting! And now I barely even care that my internet still keeps cutting in and out! I’mma bake a CAKE tonight!

I am genuinely surprised and delighted by this news.

Even a quick glance at the titles of all the longlisted projects told me it was a strong field to compete in, and the shortlist announcement today confirmed that: it was so strong in fact, that the judges found it impossible to narrow the list down to 5, so there are 6 of us who’ve made it through.

I can’t really explain how thrilled I am to be one of those six. I said in my last post that it’s just lovely someone seems to get what I’m trying to achieve with this book, and reaching the shortlist feels like that multiplied by a thousand. I’m feeling grateful, overwhelmed and slightly headachey (that’s just the panic-adrenalin comedown).

And, as previously stated, I’m off to bake a cake.