The Story of my Arts Council DYCP Grant

What a way to end the year. Let me set the scene:

It’s early December. It was freezing in my flat so I’d given up the ghost and had an early night. It was about 6PM when I found myself snuggling down into my blankets to stay warm with a nice glass of gin, my woolly hat, and a movie (Scream to be precise).

Let me tell you, this year had been hard. Two jobs had turned out to be write-offs (one redundancy, the other, what looked like unicorn of a role but turned out to be awful for my mental health). It’s been a year of trying to understand how the hell I got here.

Don’t get me wrong, as I was trying to stay warm, coaxing my cat onto the bed with cat treats, I wasn’t just thinking about the lows of 2022. I was questioning my place in the world and where, specifically, I was going to find myself in 2023.

Good news comes when you least expect it.

Ping! An email came while I was snuggled up. It was an automated email from Arts Council England regarding my DYCP application (something I’d already written off knowing how competitive it is). My internet was slow so it took about five minutes to load up the Arts Council website to see the outcome of my application and I was met with an enormous shock.

Dear Lucy Rose, […] Congratulations on your successful application.

So, here’s my exciting announcement for early 2023. Thanks to the generosity of ACE, alongside working on an exciting new literary project and taking a short residential to Edinburgh in the summer of ’23, I’ll be writing a series of blogs to explore all the exciting highs, lows, tips, tricks, and secrets I come across during my writing process.

I believe we’re all better together. Writing these blogs alongside my project means I can share some of the things I’ve learned along the way – hopefully something helpful for creatives in similar situations.

Other exciting ventures of 2023

After so much radio silence, 2023 is suddenly shaping up to be a busy year indeed. I also have some really exciting creative (literary & film) projects I’ve been keeping hush-hush about and I’m also looking forward to starting a part-time role in publishing just before spring!

Wishing everyone a lovely winter holiday and a happy new year. See you on the other side.