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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. […]

One of my earliest difficulties was in coming up with original character names. The main characters were fine, they just came to me by some sort of inspiration. It was all the others (and there are quite a few!) Trying to think of original character names I found tricky and frequently unsuccessful. Such as the very early […]

I am very lucky; I work for myself, at home and on a freelance basis for several different clients. It gives me a great deal of flexibility but also requires a lot of discipline and I found when I went back to work that that discipline was going to be severely tested.

2012 was a great year for me. I do realise it’s now actually well through 2013 but I’ve only just been able to pause for breath and try to catch up on everything that’s happened in the last 12 months since I came up with the idea for my first novel and started writing.