Hello all and thank you! I found your comments most interesting!

Bainbo, I don't think the online competition is for me, but will consider it next year if it is run again. To be honest, I think I would prefer a real audience to interact with.

Hello Paul! I don't think you will remember me. I was a storyteller at one of the same concerts as you at Whitby Folk Week 2008. It was one of Taffy Thomas's evenings, at the Yacht Club I think. I have just been listening to your Songbook CD. I really like the song with the crows in it, and sowing the seeds. What a great song! I see it's contemporary (having checked the Internet and found the writer and the lyrics for it). I hope you won't mind me having a go at that song, but not for the competition.

I found entering the Saltburn competition a few years ago really helpful (in spite of making my worst ever performance of one song). It got people talking to me and noticing me and generally broke the ice for me. And that can't be bad!! I wasn't able to enter the competition for the three years after that as Johnny Taylor gave me bookings as a storyteller for those three years. Last year my storytelling venue had been compromised by the government spending cuts (the tourist information centre had been moved into the library, restricting the performance space available) but I had really left it too late to take my songs to the standard I was looking for so I didn't enter the competition.

Anyway I thought I'd try again in 2012. To help me fight off nerves I thought I'd start off really early so the words would be embedded in me. I don't actually mind using the words for the first couple of timess, at singaround sessions, when I concentrate on the melody. I find it generally takes several live performances of a song before it becomes part of me. I have been researching for good songs and have found two that I really love and want to own.

I have been very busy for the past few years, firstly trying to bringing my storytelling up to a professional standard, then secondly learning to be a writer. I did an MA in Creative Writing at Teesside University. I'm now just starting to get my poetry published, and am getting very good feedback, so am tickled pink.

It's meant that my singing has basically just been ticking over. So now I'm catching up with it again. With the help of a large pile of CDs and the Internet I've been listening to loads of songs. And I've found some that really excite me! So if the desire to enter the competition again motivates me to put more work into my singing again then that is excellent.

When I start to learn a song I want to be sure of its melody and words, so it is part of me. More than that, I want to be inside the skin of the song. When it is at its best there are times when I connect so strongly with a song that it makes me go all goose-bumpy when I sing it. And that's what I am looking for in practising my songs - those wonderful gooose-bumpy moments.

I found your feedback so very interesting. Thank you!!!