A little good news this week…

If you didn’t know already, I’m Scottish (that’s not my news, BTW) and part of our national identity is self-deprecation and a loathing for boasting in any form. My English, Welsh and Irish chums would agree.

Blowing your own trumpet—just not Scottish stroke British. Let’s leave that to the Y… other nations*. Anyhoos, I awoke early on Saturday and checked my emails. There, nestling among the usual suspects—you’ve been picked for a Nectar/YouGov survey! Not-to-be-missed offer on wine/miracle skin cream/trainers/cat collars/anything you’ve ever bought online—was a message congratulating me on being longlisted for the #Wattys2018.

The #Wattys are annual awards on Wattpad, a reading and writing platform used by millions of people all over the world. There are 65 million writers on it (including established authors such as Margaret Atwood and Paulo Coelho). The popular folks publish stories that clock up millions of reads, its landed publishing deals for many and the platform even has its own studios.

I signed up originally because I wrote a book I’d aimed at the YA market, and Wattpad has a mainly teenage audience. I’ve lingered on the edges there ever since. My chapters get read by… ooh, three or four people, my all-time best 45 for one chapter.

Still, it’s good discipline. I use it to spur myself on. My Wattpad followers await their update! (All two of them.) Must write another chapter instead of giving up on this piece of rubbish. And it forces you to concentrate on chapters as individual things. When you write a book as whole, it’s tempting to write certain chapters carelessly—the joining chapters that are just there to add points or move the plot from A to B. When you upload chapter by chapter to a site, it’s important every chapter is as exciting and interesting as it can be.

My all-time most popular piece of writing with the most reads per chapter is a book I gave up on—Unnatural Appetites, billed as plus-size vampire erotica. Niche, huh? Hats off to other erotica writers. Seriously, how do you do it? I got bored. I don’t want to write about people’s bits—their heads interest me far more.

Back to the Wattys2018 long list. There was my little book with its meagre readership. Have a guess how many others are on that list… seven hundred plus. I patted myself on the back briefly and embarked on a ‘lower the expectations’ lecture:

Well, Emma! This is nice, isn’t it? Years of being on Wattpad and getting nowhere. Here is a little success. Little, mind! You know, you and the other seven hundred or so writers. If you’re to benefit from this, it’s the short list that counts. And we’re going to plant this thought firmly – EMMA, THOU ART NOT GOING TO MAKE THE SHORT LIST. Message received and understood?

A little pride punched its way through, however. That long list redefines any definition of the term, but there were 151,767 entrants to that competition. Arguably, the Wattys is the world’s biggest writing competition.

Go me?

Please add your own boasts to the comments. I’m serious. I’ll feel 100 percent better about myself if I’m not blowing the trumpet solo.

*Shoot. I fear the self-deprecation hides a raging superiority complex.