Manifesting

I'm a positive psychology junkie. So when I got a copy of Roxie Nafousi's Manifest: 7 Steps to Living Your Best Life, I couldn't resist a try. In August I had the lovely surprise of finding out my novella, They Shut Me Up, had been nominated for Best Novella at the British Fantasy Awards, which would take place at Fantasycon in Chester in October.

'OK,' I thought. 'Here's a GREAT opportunity to manifest.'

'Step 1. Be clear in your vision,' writes Nafousi. So I wrote down 'Best Novella' and the date of the awards weekend in Chester on a slip of paper. Then I tried Step 2, focusing my thoughts to 'remove all fear and doubt,' but that felt a little ego-centric, so I moved on to Step 3. 'Align your behaviour' it commanded, so I added 'award winning' on a slip of paper to my altar and lit some candles (to be clear, the candles were not part of any step, but they seemed appropriate).

Now my kitchen table was starting to look rather worrying.

After Step 3 the manifesting process broke down a little as the chaotic car-boot sale of my mind started getting bored and reading other books. Step 4 was 'Overcome tests from the universe,' but the universe seemed very obliging (apart from the misaligned flight route that had me booking a sucession of plane, tubes and trains to slowly process to Chester, like some kind of ancient knightly quest). I picked up again at Step 5 -'Embrace gratitude without caveats.' At this stage I was starting to riffle through the pages to skip ahead, but I did stop to project gratitude towards those who had nominated my novella. (To be honest, I think I was meant to be practising bows and graciously acknowledging applause instead, so perhaps at this point you'd like to consult the official Nafousi text). And then I lost focus due to an exciting new project landing, so my 7 Steps faded out of practice.

But my weird kitchen altar stayed, despite its resemblance to something uncovered by detectives in a brooding crime drama. From time to time I thought Best Novella and nodded, and told myself this was Peak Visualisation.

And off I went to Fantasycon for a lovely weekend of hanging out with friends, talking nonsense, listening to some interesting panels, and picking up some work.

Oh, and I didn't win Best Novella.

'So much for manifesting,' I thought, and spent the rest of the awards ceremony in a haze of badly-concealed giggles as Ali Littlewood and I plotted an imaginary sequence of wrathful, and truly terrible, bad-loser behaviour. (Unknown to me, my brain was still at work, following Step 6 - 'Turn envy into inspiration.')

On Monday, as the plane touched down on the tarmac at Shannon airport, I switched on my phone to an email with the subject line 'Congratulations - you have won Best Novella!'

What? I blinked. For one awestruck moment, I was convinced that I’d manifested so hard that I’d fractured the universe and created a different timeline.

But no. The Best Novella award was for an unpublished work 'What Happens At The End,' which I'd submitted for the Paul Cave Prize for Literature 2024. Which is a very lovely award, run by literary agent Tim Saunders and created to honour veteran publisher Paul Astley Cave-Browne-Cave.

Right weekend.

Right award title.

And Step 7? 'Trust in the universe.'

There you go. Get hold of the book. Prepare your kitchen tables. MANIFEST.

PS. Sincere apologies to Roxie Nafousi who writes very plainly that the first step in manifesting is 'Be clear in your vision.'