Finally: Have. Sent. Synopsis. And. Three. Chapters. To. a. PUBLISHER...!

At last. FINAL final edit finished after daughter (finally) got The Book and was allowed to read it. Only three and half months after I "finished" it in time for her birthday in April and then wouldn't let her actually read it until I'd done a "final edit"...

Her patience is astounding, and the good news is she loves it - you might think "well, she would say that," unless you know my daughter! She had a couple of useful suggestions to make (enhancing a paragraph on the first page to make it longer and have more impact, and one or two other tweaks for clarity, but nothing major, and rewriting those small sections at her suggestion while sitting beside Skrevatn lake near Fyresdal, Norway, wasn't exactly a chore either.)



Got back from Norway at the end of August and had to hit the ground running at work, but the new resolution of keeping working hours within sensible boundaries and treating the writing as my other job is already paying off as Monday was spent identifying some of those few-and-far-between publishers who DO accept unsolicited manuscripts and actually sending the synopsis and the first three chapters off.

I'm not actually expecting to hear anything back as the poor Readers are probably desperately trying to find the matches so they can burn their way out from under the daily avalanches but at least it's now Out There in the world.

Next job? Identify a few more places to send it as the rejections/deafening silence start rolling in, and finish the fine-tuning for the overall plan (which has undergone a few shifts since writing Book One) and settle down with the inkpot for the first serious work on book two... so roll on Friday!

Short Story Published! - woo hoo!

Well, how proud am I? Published in a real book and everything! With real writers!

My short story Dragon has been published in Word Soup: Year One, an anthology of Lancashire writers selected by Jenn Ashworth, author of A Kind of Intimacy.

My fellow writers in the anthology are Tom Fletcher, author of The Leaping, Nicholas Royle, author of a number of books including Antwerp, much published Lancastrian poet and short story writer Sarah Hymas, author of Host amongst others, A J Duggan, author of Scars Beneath The Skin, Peter Wild writer, and editor of Before The Rain and other anthologies, Mollie Baxter, writer and musician published all over the place, Norman Hadley, published poet and prose writer, Socrates Adams-Florou, blogger and writer, Sandy Calico, blogger and writer, and Rachel McGladdery, Garstang poet.



For more info on the book, see the Lancashire Writing Hub.

Galvanised into activity this morning, by this step into being a Published Writer, I'm keen to press on with the seemingly never-ending "final edit" of Witherstone, so it's out into the garden with an extension lead and the laptop to type away within smelling distance of the bee hive, replete with fresh wax combs and the busy drone of my busy bees, storing nectar...

Writing it Large!

Woo! Seeing ma wee wurrds Writ Large in the side of public buildings in Preston - and later tonight in Lancaster - is really cool...



...and finally makes it sink in that I'm about to be Published! In a Real Book!!! Woo hoo!!

I've made it into the Lancashire Writing Hub's first full publication - Word Soup: Year One - alongside such cracking Lancashire talent as...

Tom Fletcher (author of The Leaping), Sarah Hymas (Lancaster Poet), Nicholas Royle (published loads of novels including Antwerp, and runs his own printing press Nightjar), Rachel McGladdery (Poet and a super shiny star*), Norman Hadley (poet, author, and designer of enormous engines by night), Socrates Adams (award-winning blogger and writer whose emails never fail to calm stressful moments with his insistence that everythingisfine), Sandy Calico (blogger and writer of short fiction and super shiny star*), Peter Wild (writer and editor and co-author of 'Before The Rain', published by Flax), Mollie Baxter (writer and co-author of 'Before The Rain' who "finds that the act of writing is best approached by stealth"), and A J Duggan (author of Scars Beneath The Skin and, he tells me, a New Novel...!), and cool "Outsiders" photo-documentary dude Garry Cook.

The final choices for the successful authors in the publication was Jenn Ashworth's - author of A Kind of Intimacy - the kind of book that makes you look at your neighbours with a leetle more caution (though I'm more unsettled by the feeling that it isn't me who lives next to Annie, it's my neighbours...)

Check out the book launch at The Continental in Preston on Tooosday 22nd June - a Word Soup special!

Published!!! RESULT!

Editing

Well, I "finished" the first full and complete good draft in time for my daughter's birthday - but I haven't let her read it yet because I'm still editing.

So she's diligently reading her other birthday presents without complaint, which I think is down to her innate kindness and understanding, rather than a happy-to-put-that-off strategy...

Work is busy, which means I'm getting little time for the editing, and I keep waking up in the early hours mumbling "the painting!" or "the window!" or "the oven!" as some hidden extra-bit-I-need-to-do-to-The-Book emerges from my subconscious. Weird this writing lark, isn't it.

So today is a Writing Day, but first I have to go and help some bees settle in at the bottom of my garden with a nice feeder sloshing with sugar-syrup, and then meet the designer Helen Ashworth for lunch - Helen designs and makes the most fabulous bags and cushions and notebooks using old letters and postcards as templates and uses old fabrics - which makes it sound as though I move in very elegant circles but really Helen and I both worked together in a library once...

... and then I'll get on with the editing.














Helen Ashworth "Vacances" purse, picture courtesy http://www.notonthehighstreet.com/rosiesarmoire

The Book is Finished!

- well, finished the first full draft anyway.

Having said that, I don't do "rough" drafts at all but work and work at each section until it's as good as I can get it before I can move on to the next bit. Then the next time I'm working on it (in those snatched moments of calm between working at my real jobs and living in a somewhat lively household), I re-read the preceding section, inevitably tweaking and editing while I do, then move on to the next...
...although my writing tends to move into my head so that I'm thinking about it while eating, sleeping, and washing up and that's often when the next bit starts to take shape - and when the not-previously-spotted mis-shapen nature of what has already been written raps me sharply on the skull too so that I have to revisit it for a rewrite.

So now the first book in the Witherstone series, called, er Witherstone surprisingly enough, is now a complete 13 chapter - 150 pages of A4 - book which only needs a top-to-toe edit to get rid of those irritating little typos and writer's tics which you can't see for toffee when they're on the screen no matter how many times you read them, but jump up from the page and blow raspberries at you as soon as they are printed on real paper.
Weirdly, each chapter seems to have ended up being roughly the same length as one another, although this wasn't intentional, so that's either good fortune, a sign of sheer writerly brilliance, or, as I suspect, an indication that I've done something terribly wrong...

The first port-of-call with the book is my harshest critic - my daughter. I wrote the book for her and managed to get it into its current "finished" state in time for her Birthday on Friday 16th, although having looked at the first couple of chapters since it's been in complete paper form, I desperately want to edit out those irritating typos first! - if she'll let me... My Writing Day is coming up on Thursday so fingers crossed she won't have finished her current read by then and I can sneak her Birthday Present off for a quick editorial first.

Having said that, I'm not sure I'll ever feel that it's really finished - I'm a real devil for picking at a piece of writing and have to tell myself that if I'm at the stage where I'm spending more than 20 minutes dithering about whether to use "said" or "whispered", I have Finished.

Probably one of the most interesting things about the book is that the germ for its inception all began with an encounter in my brother's garden shed last summer - with a hoard of spiders. When I asked my daughter to design a book cover for it though, she came up with a great picture with no spiders in it at all...