Why is it always so hard to announce that you have won a competition (and yes, thank you, I know it should be ‘one has won’, but it already sounds pompous enough to say ‘I have won a prize’)?
As a Brit I am hard-wired to be self-deprecating. I had my first taste of this when Major Tom’s War won that prize at the SAHR Military History Fiction Awards last year. I found myself saying things like ‘oh, it was nothing really,’ when in actual fact it was a huge, life-changing deal to have someone outside my publisher and my immediate family acknowledge that the last ten years of my life had not been a complete waste of time.
I have been writing professionally for over 20 years as a hired pen. I know I am reasonably good at it, as I have been doing it for long enough. Wordsmithing for my clients where text is often approved by committee is however a very different kettle of fish from the flying-without-a-net world of creative writing.
So you know what? I am going to admit here, quite openly and honestly, that winning the Hugh Miller Writing Competition 2020 means a lot to me.
This time the prize is not for a novel but for a fictional short story, Cinder Toffee. This means I can believe that Major Tom’s War was not just a fluke or a one-off. It means my publishers Kashi House can call me a prizewinning author and I will not immediately succumb to imposter syndrome. So thank you, judges. This really does make a difference.
The Hugh Miller competition is rooted in Scottish geology, inspired by the remarkable writer, geologist and man of science Hugh Miller, born in Cromarty on the Black Isle. I am not a geologist but always have pebbles in my pockets and still walk along nose to the ground, always looking for my dream ammonite or the perfect geode to crack open.
This season I should have been joining the National Trust for Scotland’s team at Hugh Miller’s Cottage and Birthplace Museum in Cromarty as the property’s summer assistant. Then along comes coronavirus to derail the whole of humanity. This prize is also a surprise compensation for that disappointment (I hope to pop up there next year, ‘if we’re spared’, as it soon may become traditional to say once more.) So do come in and say hello.
My short story is set, in part, in a claustrophobic Edinburgh University vestibule, and, in part, in the wild, wide, open spaces of Knockan Crag, on the border between Ross and Sutherland. The photographs were taken on a day-job heritage conference in Inverness a few years ago. I returned to Knockan Crag for the first time in many years then, on an excellent field trip organised by Scottish Natural Heritage. It rained, of course, but not all the time, and the excellent fresh interpretation on site intrigued me.
Peach and Horne are two names weel-kent within geological circles. Now, I hope, they will become more widely know as a result of people reading Cinder Toffee. These two represent an extraordinary flowering of largely male expertise in the 19th century in the field of the ‘outdoor’ sciences: geology, biology and botany in particular. Their sweet tooth is entirely fictional. The rest of their story is as close as I could come to how it must have felt – within the 2000 word limit and the three days I gave myself to write it.
What did they discover at Knockan Crag? You’ll need to read the story to find out – but this recipe provides a clue!
You will find Cinder Toffee here, among the other excellent prize-winning entries (good to see Cromarty Primary pupils keeping their end up for Hugh Miller). Soon there will be an audio file of me reading it aloud too. https://www.scottishgeology.com/hughmiller/
The impact of coronavirus means that there can be no prizegiving. It would mean a lot to the gallant committee of competition organisers if my own story and the work of all the other prizewinners could be passed on by word of mouth as worth a read.
If you enjoy my writing style and would like to read Major Tom’s War, it is now available on Kindle (as a revised and expanded second edition) for under £5 and there are still hardback first editions available direct from myself (if you would like a signed copy get in touch via www.majortomswar.com) or my beloved independent publisher www.kashihouse.com.
Vee Walker writes... 