I’ve long believed I have a book in me – I read enough of them!
But it’s more than that; growing up with a mother who was a writer made me believe that it was a job people did for real. I was under no illusions that it paid much – only the lucky few hit the big time. I saw how many hours it took to write short stories and books, I watched those big fat typed manuscripts leave the house in a padded envelope. I also realised most of them came back with a polite note saying “interesting, but not for us”.
There were the giddy moments when a m/s was accepted but my mother had to edit it into shape, we tiptoed round the house then. Partly to avoid disturbing her but also not to bear the brunt of her frustration if the ‘words’ were not co-operating.
I’d seen it was a hard slog and wondered how I’d handle rejection. Did I have enough ideas for a full length novel? In a few years the internet went boom. Soon we had a home computer, but my whole family needed time on it. My husband for writing e-mails and CVs, my children for homework or gaming, but once I had my own laptop I could properly browse the internet and I discovered blogs.
My initial blog was populated with book reviews. I didn’t know how to promote , so it had almost no traffic, but I cut my teeth on creating regular posts. Next I got the idea to write short stories rather than a book, a less daunting prospect. Suspecting I couldn’t commit to writing a novel and wanting feedback, I wrote something for Wattpad.
I’ll be sharing that here. After that let’s see what happens, writing for prompts has been good for me so I intend to use Twitter to make connections with other writers.
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