Fellow Writers of the Future Winner (WOTF) (and golden pen winner) Michael Kuester wrote an excellent ‘Survival Guide’, all about getting through the week.
It had just one minor drawback! The week itself was brilliant. Sure, surviving the pace of the week was tough, but it didn’t feel like surviving: It felt like living the dream - and not the depressing, recurring one where you’re driving your car in your shabbiest underwear, and discover the brake pedal’s stopped working, or the surreal one where the toilet’s developed a bronx accent and has started giving dodgy life advice (to be fair, now I think about it, it’s arguable it’s just regurgitating what it had to swallow).
No, it was living the career dream where you’re signing books and chatting to your heroes and meeting like-minded people and learning so, so much. It’s also where writing, actual writing, is your priority, and not something you have to guiltily squeeze into your day when there are a hundred other things you should be doing instead.
The Aftermath though. Oh dearie me, the aftermath. The cratering down to earth with an extinction event level wallop. Let me admit it, surviving the come down has been tougher. It’s taken three weeks for my head to feel connected to my spine again, and even now I suspect there’s a few loose nerve endings still spraying sparks.
So anyway, here’s my own thoughts on three things to focus on to restore some level of tranquility to your head without paying a fortune in counselling fees. They may be mostly bonkers and not work for anyone else. I make no promises about their usefulness. They’re just the things I’d want to transmit back in time to the version of me that’s about four weeks younger than I am now.
1. Catch up on your sleep
The WOTF event is held in California, but it’s truly international. There were winners from Japan, South Africa, Australia, Slovakia - and I myself had gotten catapulted across the Atlantic from dear old Britain.
Anyway, mixing together jet lag, excitement, and coffee on tap - then adding a sprinkling of latish nights and early starts on top - turns out this isn’t a recipe for feeling well-rested and pinpoint sharp.
Thankfully, I shared a room on the first few nights with Mike Strickland, who once had to teach himself how to sleep on an aircraft carrier, directly beneath where the planes were taking off (the deck beneath, he wasn’t actually rolled up in his sleeping bag on the runway, because that would have been suicidally daft). This meant that when I was inventing topologically improbable ways to interweave myself with my duvet, at least he could keep sleeping soundly in his bed on the other side of the room.
So once it’s over, treat yourself to some decent naps. You deserve ‘em. With luck, there’ll be some great dreams that don’t involve chatty porcelain.
2. Keep the momentum going
Despite the gloom of it all being over, it isn’t. There’s still media appearances and - if you’re brave enough - strolling into local book stores and waving the gorgeous book with your story/art in it under the noses of the owners and saying, ‘hey, why not stock this baby? Go on, you know you want to. Go on, go on.’ [Note: you may want to work on your sales technique though, if you don’t want them to think you’re a loon.]
However, perhaps most importantly, it’s a chance to take stock of your time to work out where you can squeeze in some extra hours to do the thing that turned you into a WOTF winner in the first place. Especially now you’re better armed with some top advice on how to improve your art - and how the industry works.
3. Stay in touch
Mike’s survival guide already nails the experience of meeting other winners, and how you’ll bond and discover that these are your people. The inevitable downside is that when it’s all over, you will miss them.
What other group will you meet that can talk about encoding messages in vat-grown limbs or how colour perception works for shrimp? Who else will you get to discuss new angles on old tropes with (such as ‘World’s best user of X technology goes off the rails and it’s up to his protege to stop him’). Who else will (rightly) put you in your place when you ask about the physics of dragon-flight by telling you: “I’ll let the dragons worry about the physics of dragon flight.”
However, this is the age of social media and messages can ping across oceans in nano-seconds sliced so thinly that the light shines through.
Is it as fun as all being together in the same room? Well no. Is it as easy to bounce ideas off a group of people at once. Also, no. But getting in the habit of staying in touch immediately afterwards will still keep you connected to the people and the week.
4. Anything after this is gravy
Yes, I know I said three things. I lied. I’m good/bad at that depending on your perspective. But I’m working on the basis that if you’ve made it this far, you might not mind so much.
Anyway this is a bonus point - because anything that comes after will be a bonus too.
The week is amazing and hopefully it will be a springboard to the dream career you’ve always wanted. However, even though it turns out I struggle to count to three, I can still manage other math. There have been forty-two WOTF contests of twelve winners each (with the first winners of WOTF 43 already having been announced). That means more than five-hundred people have won before you.
The inevitable truth is only a fraction go on to make it big. Some of course do (Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss anyone?). So be kind to yourself. Perhaps you will be one of the ones who’ll get other books published and see your tomes hit best-seller lists and so on.
But you know what? If that doesn’t happen for you, that’s OK too. This isn’t to say don’t try - those able to put most time into it are those most likely to make it, in the same way that the more times you roll a dice, the more likely you are to throw a six. But if nothing else ever happens in your dream career again, you still had that great week. You still met those great people. You will always get to keep those great memories. They’re yours. They’re part of you.
So do keep writing. Do keep trying. Do keep placing one word after the next and stretching out one idea after another - keep enjoying the sheer fun of making bonkers stuff up. And if, among the inevitable aggregation of further rejections, some acceptances come glittering through, make sure you enjoy and celebrate them too.
It’s much too difficult to type with crossed-fingers, but even so I wish you every luck.