My love of writing
It's Valentine's month!
I’ve always loved writing, from the first time I held a fountain pen (yes that’s what I learned to write with) and watched the ink flow onto the clean page. I was making my mark, creating something. I loved to see the words form and took a delight in the words looking neat. In those days we had to use pink blotting paper to make sure the ink didn’t run, can you believe it?
Certain letters looked better than others. Ones you could loop like a J for my name or a y looked quite elegant and grown up so I enjoyed writing my name all over a page! Did you ever write boys names in your exercise books, I did. Then of course I wrote the name of my first boyfriend, Mick, with my name and a love heart. Later in Secondary School in Brighton, I remember on the beach at Brighton with my friend Julia, we wrote the names of boys in the sand with a heart and an arrow through the middle, then watched as the sea washed them away. There was something about writing that felt as if you were sharing something, sharing a feeling maybe, allowing it to come out of you and into the world around you rather than being trapped inside.
I used to love writing stories at school and because I loved writing, I wrote very long essays on any subject so in the end my teachers told me I could only write two A4 pages because it took them so long to mark my homework!
I didn’t dream of becoming a writer. In fact even though I read a lot, it didn’t occur to me that writing was actually a job you could do. Having said that, I’m not even sure it is unless you’re very famous because for most of us it’s just something we feel compelled to do but it isn’t our ‘day job’ because there just isn’t enough money in it to pay the bills.
Writing was always a part of what I did, so when I worked in Qualitative Market Research, I loved writing the research brief, notes from each focus group and then writing the report for clients. I took pride in how I explained the research results, what it meant and what I’d recommend.
I did an Open University course in Creative Writing, then Advanced Creative Writing and then Children’s Literature. From there, alongside my Market Research work, I offered my services as a Freelance Writer and I actually got paid for my writing! Wow, I couldn’t believe it!
So how did I become a published author?
As part of my Open University course we were invited to a talk on Self-publishing and Traditional publishing. The speaker on Traditional publishing was from Hodder and Stoughton. When we were invited to ask questions, I asked the speaker whether I would be able to submit a proposal because I was ‘only a ghostwriter’. She said that of course I could because if I could write for different clients, I could certainly write. At the end I joined the queue of people waiting to speak to her personally and I said I was passionate about helping mums and that I was trained in NLP which was so useful in parenting. She told me to submit a proposal to her. I did it that very night and although the first attempt was turned down, the amended version was accepted. That book was ‘Be a happier parent with NLP’. Although it was published in 2011, it is still available today and gets great reviews because the principles are just as relevant today as they were when NLP was developed in the 1960s and certainly when I wrote the book. Here is the link
Hodder published lots more of my books and continue to be my publisher but now my journey has taken another turn as I’ve decided to self publish other books that I’ve had published since, with other traditional publishers. It does feel a bit scary but I’m hoping that my love of writing, sharing what I feel passionate about and what I want to tell other parents like me will encourage me to overcome my fears and allow me to learn as I go, making mistakes I’m sure, but hopefully will soon sort themselves out.
If you’d like to join me on my journey, allow me to share my writing with you and maybe give me your feedback, especially as I embark on writing my first fiction books, please join me as a subscriber. If you can, it would be lovely if you’d become a paid subscriber and you will receive fresh content, a look at book cover ideas, character descriptions and first copies of the published books.
