Always the bridesmaid...

Found out last night I'd been shortlisted for the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize 2012 (officially announced next month). Of course would love to have been in the winners' category, but this is the first flash fiction I've ever submitted to an award, so I'm happy (I still feel *very* inexperienced in writing flash). Last year, I was shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize, so it maybe now feels a wee bit 'always the bridesmaid' (in distant past been shortlisted for both Asham and RLS Award), though I'm just pleased I can still write meaningfully as my output has been very thin and sporadic - necessarily so, and the uveitis saga didn't help - since The State of Me. I have an idea for a longer piece, a slim book, but I'm saying nothing until it is written (or has assumed a decent shape), I learned that the last time. Otherwise, for the next three, four, five years, everyone will be forever asking, How's the writing? And it is too much pressure, I can't write to deadlines, I can't write to order - I know from experience it makes me (more) ill -   and I certainly can't write every day, or even every week (at least, not anything remotely substantial): I write when I can and that is that. I must stick to my own pace.

I am a perfectionist and have huge self-discipline, from my pre-ME days, and no one puts more pressure on me than myself.

And, of course,  I read too;  so much of writing is reading. You have to engage with the world.

I have another fucking chest infection, only got rid of the last one six weeks ago - after two lots of antibiotics - and am now on a third lot. Coughing constantly is exhausting, you feel almost as if you're putting it on, is so dramatic sounding.