Brit Writers Award: into the third round

I didn’t have the best start to yesterday. Woke up feeling somewhat worse for wear for 7am spin, bailed out of 9:30am spin to teach off the bike and by the end of Balance, felt like lightly defrosted death. When I went to bed in the afternoon for a little nanna nap, I didn’t expect to wake up at 5:30pm having slept through my writing time and needing to be teaching Combat less than an hour later. Whoops. But despite this small scheduling crisis, I still checked my emails (force of habit) and was instantly perked up by the following arrival in my inbox:

From: enquiries@britwriters.co.uk
To: enquiries@britwriters.co.uk
Subject: BWA Round 2 Results
Date: Tue, 11 May 2010 17:26:17 +0100

Dear Member

On behalf of the Brit Writers team, I am absolutely delighted to inform you that you are through to Round 3 of judging for the Brit Writers’ Awards Unpublished 2010. Congratulations!!

Considering there were over 21,000 at the beginning, you have done extremely well to have made it this far – so very well done!

There is now an intensive period of judging by high profile judges, who have a very difficult job on their hands as the quality is so high. The finalists should be decided by the start of June 2010.

If you are a finalist, you will be called to arrange for you to be filmed by our event film crew. This film is for when the nominations are read out just before the winner is announced. So please sign in to your profile on the website and make sure that your telephone number and full address is correct on your account.

Once again, on behalf of us all here at Brit Writers, congratulations and best of luck in the next round.

Kindest regards

Zara Potter

Member Support

0871 237 4442
www.britwriters.co.uk

To have got through to the third round of judging in the Children’s Story category means that Silence of the Snow Dogs has been read by children who have liked it as much as the adults judges. I feel extremely happy about that.

The day improved immensely from that point, as I had 31 people in my Combat class, which I took over a few weeks ago from a terrifyingly good instructor and which had only low 20′s when I started (drops in class size on changing from good instructors is very common – all you can do as the new instructor is not take it personally and give them every reason to come back. Even if you’re a woman taking over from a particularly good looking and generally awesome guy, teaching a class full of women who are not neccssarily there only for the workout) and the spin class had doubled in size. It needs to double again, and soon, but I think my new ‘what film is this from?’ playlist went down well. Featured tracks were B21′s Darshan (Bend It Like Beckham) Prodigy’s Stand Up (Kick Ass), Ennio Morricone’s Per Qualche Dollaro in Piu (The Good, The Bad and the Ugly/Kick Ass), a classic techno remix of Mortal Kombat (your guess), The Black Pearl (Pirates of the Caribbean), Within Temptation’s Our Solemn Hour and my new favourite song Jigga Jigga, a Scooter/Enya mash-up. I would never have thought you could mix Enya with Scooter, but it turns out to be a thing of beauty on a bike (or a truly kick ass Combat track).

Getting home, I discovered that my friend Cec, an esteemed member of the Starbucks Coffee Club, who suggested we both enter into Brit Writers together, has also got through the third round with her lovely romance novel Blessed. She has worked so hard on that novel, which has a beautiful soul, and I am so proud of her. Win, win and win!

As a little aside, Brit Writers have made the following request, which I encourage people to help out with:

As you know, we’re doing a lot to make creative writing cool for young people through our schools programmes across the country. In fact we have over 300,000 children involved now from member schools. Now, a team of pupils at one of our member schools, the Grace Academy in Coventry, are (as their BWA project) trying to break a world record by capturing the largest number of written ‘life wishes’ in 100-150 words.

We’re facilitating this via our website and I would be extremely grateful if you would click on the link below and add your life wish. The whole project It will only take a couple of minutes and as they’re so close to reaching their target, you could help them smash it: http://www.britwriters.co.uk/worldrecord.html

Tags: Brit Writers Award, Fitness Instructing, Starbucks Coffee Club