I’ve written before about the importance of persistence and never giving up, and yet I still sometimes forget about it.

Last year I put in an enormous amount of effort into writing a story that needed to be set on the North West coast of England. Not a part of the world I knew particularly, but the setting was a requirement for submission to a planned anthology. It took me quite some time to come up with a story idea, set in Morecambe, one that I could latch onto and thought that I could do justice. A first draft appeared and a friend read it and said: “It’s very good Graeme, but it reads as if you have never been to Morecambe.”

It was a salutary reminder that you can’t learn everything about a place from Google Images. So I took myself off to Morecambe, walked the back streets, poked my head down alleyways, and the second draft was so much better. Thrilled with it I submitted the story, quietly confident of acceptance. Well, reasonably hopeful anyway – so much so that the subsequent rejection was more than a little disheartening.

But once that initial despair had died down, I didn’t give up and thanks to the wonderful people at Litro Online “A Love of Numbers” found a home. Enjoy it here if you’d like to read it and tell me what you think. Was I right to persevere?

A Love of Numbers