We have received your application, your novel suggestion, your job application, your book of poetry, your whatever.
Who gets a reply like this, these days? If you have to apply, you are sunk. Head hunted, commissioned – that’s a different matter, but for that you have to already be known, well known even.
It’s the vicious circle. You can’t get known until you can present something and you can’t present until you are well known. Nothing new there!
And if you get off the roundabout it is even more difficult to get back on, because you are unreliable, a trouble maker, someone who bucks the system which was set up by the system.
Right. Where’s this going? I was an authority on brewing historical beers, 20 years ago. I got off the roundabout to do something else and now I’m a nobody. But this last month, I’m suddenly selling books – beer books on pale ale and porter brewing. Patience is a virtue. These readers will talk to other readers and they might be moved to buy as well. Suddenly I am famous again – perhaps and yet I am the same person throughout.
Delve into the past to discover where you could go next
My books haven’t changed, nor has my brewing wisdom.
YOU’RE STUCK AT home on your slow laptop with the crud that gums up the N key, and you’ve been applying and applying and no one, and that means no one at all, comes back to you about any of your applications, other than the odd automated We’ve received your application and will review it shortly. It’s like yelling in the woods when there’s no one to hear you. Like standing on a hillside with the wind blasting regardless of whether you’re there or not, blasting and bashing and not giving a shit. Like that. So, you’re sitting against the pillows on your bed—why get up? why get dressed?—and it’s such a shame that your name is Frank Nelson, because that’s three clicking Ns you have to ease the key back up from every single time you write your name. Could have been the Q. No…
Clive La Pensée, ex-science teacher, recognised writer on history of beer, novelist, expressionist, dreamer, believer in never giving up, empathiser, hopeful for a future without class, gender or racial prejudice.
It's tough and at the moment, one has to remember distance travelled, rather than where we are at.
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Clive and Eva La Pensée 