Not dead

You might have been thinking that I’ve gone and died on you all, but not so much. I just haven’t felt like writing anything here. Every time I’ve sat down and thought about blogging my mind’s gone blank. And I don’t think it’s because there’s not anything going on in my life these days, because there is. I’m actually going to England on Wednesday, for a week – and to see the play “In Celebration” in London on Friday. Yes, that’s the play with Orlando Bloom in it – I’m really looking forward to that.

Other things going on in my life:

I decided to postpone the final dissertation for the MA till December (we can choose if we want to hand it in in August or December) since I still haven’t got my assessments back from the university. Apparently they’d been sent to my English address, even though I had given them my Norwegian one, and then returned to the university. They are probably on their way to me here in Norway now.

I am thinking a lot about changes I want to do with my Viking story before sending it to the next novel competition, but still haven’t got any actual writing done. This isn’t new when it comes to me and writing though. Before I wrote the first draft of the novel, I thought about it for almost a month before putting pen to paper, so I always do a lot of thinking about how I want things to be before I get down to putting words on paper.

It seems likely that I will be travelling to Gran Canaria again on the 10th of October, to stay for two months this time, till the 5th of December. I’m not 100% sure that this is happening yet, so I’ll tell you more about it when I know more about it myself.

And that’s pretty much it.

That’s that then: result from the novel competition

I got a letter from Schibsted publisher today saying:

We have now found our winner of the novel competition.
Unfortunately your manuscript wasn’t the winner.
We thank you for letting us read it and wish you the best of luck.

So that’s that then, I didn’t win.

Yes, I am disappointed, not so much that I didn’t win – but I have to admit, I thought this might at least be a manuscript that they would’ve wanted to publish outside the competition. But this is also part of being a writer; no one has ever said it was going to be easy. So, I’ll just have to keep writing and sending things off to the publishers when I feel it is good enough.

Now I’ll have to keep working on this manuscript and edit the things I didn’t have time to edit before I sent it off to this competition. After all, there is another, quite similar competition, with another publisher, that has a deadline on the 1st of November, only in that competition the prize is bigger and you get the chance to be published in all of the Nordic countries. I guess that’s what I’ll be doing next with this manuscript, because I still think I’ve got a good story and that it is good enough to be published.

More waiting

I’m back from my holiday in Herning – Denmark and Waren – Germany. It was a nice holiday even though the weather was bad and sometimes even horrible. The three days we stayed by the Müritz lake we froze a lot. The ice wind blowing in from the lake (the biggest lake in Germany) was so cold it felt like being on a mountain top in mid winter. We did stay at a very nice apartment though; Haus Kim. We rented a suite with 2 bedrooms, two bathrooms and a total of 115 sqm, and the price was only 145 Euro a day for the whole flat. It was a great place, and if you’re ever going to Waren I’d really recommend staying with Haus Kim.

We made it back to Norway on Wednesday night after having driven the 1200 km from Waren and back home in 16 hours. It was quite a long ride, but it was good to get back home. We didn’t really feel like stopping the night anywhere and delaying our arrival home with one day. I was very tired yesterday even though I’d spent the whole of the day before sitting in a car.

And now I’m doing some more waiting…

I still haven’t heard anything from the publisher even though their letter, which I got in the beginning of June, said that they would make a decision in July. And I still haven’t received my two last assessments from the university, which I could really need to do the final work on my MA dissertation.