This weekend, I submitted my novel to The Times/Chicken House Competition. This is an annual competition run by Chicken House, a children’s publisher, for unagented manuscripts, and the winner will get a book deal. I know that I’m one of hundreds who’ve submitted a novel to it, so I don’t expect to win, but what I am interested in is the feedback offered to those who make the shortlist. Or just any engagement at all. I’ll have to withdraw it from the competition if I get any agent interest, but I thought that I might as well.

I learnt about the competition from The Golden Egg Academy course I’m doing, which has links to Chicken House. The head publisher from Chicken House, Barry Cunningham, was a guest speaker on this week’s webinar and talked about the current market. On Saturday, I’m going to The Golden Egg Academy meet up with my teacher, editor Imogen Cooper. I’m excited because she told us about the meet up in central London for club and course members quite last minute, so I’m the only one from the course who can go!

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The thing Barry Cunningham said that sticks in my mind is that once when he was young he asked Roald Dahl about the importance of humour in stories, and Roald Dahl said “laughter is delayed fear.”

I think this is kind of true. Based on my own experience of laughing at basically everything. Slapstick comedy makes you laugh because for a split second you think that they have hurt themselves, but they haven’t, so you laugh in relief. You laugh nervously in the face of horror. You laugh when you are in pain (at least I do anyway. I’ve never laughed so much in one go than when I had a full body wax once). You laugh in mortification when you do something stupid. You laugh in disgust and despair.

It’s also kind of not true. Laughter is also joy. It is delight. It is simply when you find something funny. It doesn’t need a reason. Fun outweighs fear. I’m sure anyone who has seen a child laughing will agree with me. I don’t think children are always giggling because they are secretly afraid. I think they’re secretly having fun.

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We all need to find secret ways of having fun. I certainly need to find other ways to entertain and distract myself from thinking about how Alice in Wheelchairland is doing. This could take months – or it might not! That uncertainty certainly makes me want to laugh and shrug. What can you do.

I’m going to start dreaming up more of my story Martin and The Flood which I wrote in my creative writing class for Wimbledon Bookfest. I want it to be a novel. But I don’t want to catch myself secretly dreaming of success. I want to dream of fun.
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(Featured Image is Alice and the Cheshire Cat, illustration from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll done by John Tennial, 1865)