96. A Mentor to walk with me

~ neilmacdon

What a great end-of-year present! I got an e-mail today telling me I’d been selected for a place on the Cinnamon Press mentorship programme.

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Photo © Static TV Tropes

This is the second accolade I’ve won for the novel I’m working on, The Tears of Boabdil.  Earlier in the month I won the Plot of Gold competition for the book’s outline.

There are about 20 places in the Cinnamon scheme, run by this independent Welsh press, offering a year’s one-to-one support, with a mentor matched to your project.  Mentors work closely with your manuscript, offering feedback, looking at revisions and advising on structure, etc, offering around 32 hours over the course of the year. I don’t yet know who my mentor will be. I expect the coming year to be exciting and challenging.

The scheme also offers slots for publication of two books by mentored students, and in general students achieve a high rate of publication, around 70% acccording to Cinnamon.

Cinnamon’s is not the only mentoring scheme available in the UK. The Word Factory apprenticeship scheme for four writers is now open for 2018. The highly-respected Cornerstones agency, which I have used and can recommend, offers mentoring at a cost of £50 an hour. There are other commercial schemes that I can’t vouch for, such as Adventures in Fiction which costs £2,125 for around 78 hours, working out at just over £27 an hour.

I’ll keep you posted on how the mentoring goes.

13 thoughts on “96. A Mentor to walk with me”

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