Tuesday, 21 April 2009
A bit of inspiration for you
Since the blog is fairly quiet at the moment, I thought I'd check if you have all caught Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent. I guess most of you based in the UK will have seen it on ITV first time round or on YouTube subsequently, but it may not have reached the States yet. What relevance has it got to us? I guess it's that, watching her, it made me remember what it felt like to have my first book accepted. Watch it again and see if it gives you the same sort of feeling. "Yes, that showed them!" If you haven't seen it yet click on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPZh4AnWyk . Truly inspirational anyway.
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5 comments:
Worth seeing just for the look on the panel's faces! I just hope they don't airbrush her into another celebrity blonde, but leave her just the way she is.
Susan Boyle has hit the big time here in the States. She's been on all the morning TV shows and her performance has been played repeatedly. What inspiration.
Len, you're right. She made me think of the rejection slips I received until MNW picked up my book. Susan Boyle stood on that stage and sang in spite of the snickers and sneers. When people started cheering, she held it together and kept singing. She'll be remembered long after all the other celebrities have faded away. She was somebody special long before she took the stage. Bravo!
Am I overly cynical in dreading the backlash which must surely come? At the moment she's a good news story which we are all rightly relishing--sick as we are of talentless and manufactured 'celebrity'.
But you just know the tabloids will be raking through her bins soon once the good news stories stop selling papers.
(I must be the only person that hadn't seen Britain's Got Talent or the You Tube clip!) But I do remember that feeling. I was involved in a similar thing when Mike Barnard spotted me. I submitted The Secret War to the Richard and Judy Write a Novel competition way back in 2004. I wasn't amongst the six main winners, but a further dozen (out of 40,000 entrants) were spotted by Mike and co to head up the Macmillan New Writing imprint from the start. Of those twelve, I think only four books were eventually chosen for the imprint in its first year - The Secret War was one of them. I've still got the encouraging letters and e-mails from Mike collected in a scrap-book, and it really did feel like a life changing moment when they said they would publish the first novel.
It still does, even now.
I was one of those twelve, too, Matt. I wonder who the others are?
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