Collective Success

Back in late October/early November, Racers may have seen mention here of the 'Your Messages' blog set up by writers Sarah Salway and Lynne Rees. They co-wrote a book called Messages a couple of years ago, using a method where one of them wrote a 300-word piece, and the other wrote a 300-word response. This November, on the blog, they posted one Message from the book every day, and invited people to write 300-word responses in the comments box. They planned to select 30 of the responses for publication in a book to raise funds for charity.

I think they got more responses than they expected (around 1200 in total), because they ended up selecting nearly 60 for publication. And several of those were written by Novel Racers! Cally and Cathy each had two pieces selected, and Caroline, Rachel and, er, me each have one piece in. ( If I've missed anyone out, or if anyone was writing under a (different) pseudonym, please do edit this post to include them.)

I suspect Sarah and Lynne were surprised by the quality of the responses. I know there were a lot of fine pieces that weren't selected. I didn't envy them the job of judging; the selection process must have been very difficult. I hope those who weren't picked aren't too disappointed. I recommend dipping into the blog to see for yourselves how good many of the responses were, as well as of course buying the book when it comes out (well, it is for charity).

Overall, I think this is something for us to celebrate as a group, because it's such a good showing by the Novel Racers - with a particularly big 'yay' for Cathy, as it's the first time her writing has been chosen for publication. So let's have some group hugs, cheering, jumping around and popping of corks in the comments box!