The story of a new author

So, thought I’d better do a bit of an update on the November NaNoWriMo challenge of writing 50,000 words. Currently I’m at 32,000 and feeling very unlikely to meet the deadline with only one week left.

It’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) which is very exciting as, after taking October off to spend my time submitting my first novel to literary agents and publishers (as a quick update – so far unsuccessfully),  I am itching to get back to writing. My second book in The Grayson Trilogy is called Before the […]

My most useful book at the moment is the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook . It’s packed with information that covers everything to do with writing and is a great place to start researching literary agents. There are several chapters which give a great insight into the world of the literary agent. These cover everything from why you […]

Okay, so about my change of direction. Once I had finished the reworking of my manuscript I was considerably happier with it and felt much more confident. I sent it back to Helen Hart at SilverWood Books who took a quick (and complimentary!) look at it and I asked her to arrange to have it […]

A quick word about the website, as I mentioned before I had thought I might self publish ‘A Single Step’ so thought I’d set up a very simple website. I say ‘I’ as if I was actually going to be the one to do that, in fact it was the good people at Deeho who […]

Helen Hart of SilverWood Books came back to me promptly with her appraisal and recommendation that I have a structural edit done with a choice of copy edit if I preferred. A structural edit was what I knew I needed, it would take three weeks to complete.

It was at about this time that people around me (those people on the very short list of those who knew about my book!) started to ask what I was planning to do with it. I hadn’t thought this far ahead being quite happy to just write but with some encouragement I did start to […]

This was the beginning of a series of reworking and edits. My editing consisted of a reworking of many sections, deleting, rewriting, changing words for others that seemed better as I continually second guessed everything I wrote. Suddenly I was finding myself having to look up words I’d used all my life to check they […]

I’ve always had a rather, probably rose tinted, view of a writer’s life. I imagined cosy relaxed days of being able to settle down each morning in a quiet place to spend a few hours in the uninterrupted bliss of writing. That image however bore no resemblance to the frenetic life I was leading in […]

As I’ve said I’m a new author writing a first novel but it wasn’t until I started writing that I realised I should’ve paid more attention in school to grammar and punctuation. It’s not like I haven’t written anything over the intervening years since my poor English teachers tried their best to impart their knowledge into me. […]