10. Honey, I understand now. The Lord himself has come down and I have seen the light.

 

I understand now why you have to wait six months after quitting your job before you can sign on again. It’s because it takes six months exactly before you start swimming in a sea of debt.

 

I’ve gone back to the jobcentre and signed on, I felt like you all deserved to know, I feel like I’ve let you down somehow, but oh well.

I have made a start and stop progress on my getting published plan, I could explain or I could just let you read for yourself:

 

Thank you for your submission during our open call.

I'm afraid on this occasion we are not able to offer to publish the book, but although we said we wouldn't write individually to those who didn't quite make it onto the list we were so impressed by the quality of some of the manuscripts that were really close that we wanted to encourage you to keep in touch in future, whether through open submission calls or our competitions.

Some manuscripts really grabbed our attention, but needed just slightly more editing input than we could offer as part of publication, so I also wanted to let you know about our mentoring scheme which may be of interest.

This is a year long process working with a dedicated Cinnamon mentor on your manuscript (we have a team of Creative Writing experts who work closely with Jan who also reads all the work) and at least two of the mentoring students from each year will be published by Cinnamon Press so it also includes another chance of publication as well as making your manuscript more honed and ready to submit.

I've attached details and a form, but do get in touch if you would like further details.

Thank you again for your interest in Cinnamon Press.

best wishes

Jan

 

So, this mentoring they’re offering costs £800 pounds, with no guarantee you’ll be published by the end of it. So that leaves me wondering are they genuinely saying my manuscript has potential or are they just thinking about pay day. Because right now I know I’m thinking about pay day, I could do with £800, I’d get a new pair of shoes, mine are getting really worn… and the rest of the money… oh the possibilities.