​My anthology is published!  Wow!  I forgot what a rush it is to see a brand new book on Amazon!  I had planned to publish it last year, but, you know, 2020 being what it was – quite a lot of my plans turned to dust.  I never stopped working on it, though;  it just took a lot longer to happen. 
The manuscript itself was ready to go by summer last year, only the cover needed work.  I spent an intemperate amount of time working on it, really fretting and sweating over it, tearing out my (overgrown lockdown) hair.  I’d decided to go with a custom-made cover and really, really wanted to get it right.  I researched it, looked at similar books, studied anthologies, tried to find the right pictures.  I had, really, wanted my daughter to draw it for me.  Her digital art had gone through a phase which was just perfect for the style of book, but she had not only abandoned that style but had no interest, no confidence and no inclination to help.  Hence the custom-made cover.  I finally found a cover that was similar to what I wanted and I’m SO glad I did because it made me realise what a cliché my idea was!  Also, my go-to book cover designers (The Cover Collection) had closed their time slot for custom submissions by the time I was ready.  This was actually fortuitous.  I realised I wasn’t ready to publish.  I hadn’t the energy and couldn’t face the work it would involve.  By lockdown 2, I had to find other ways to get myself out of the writer’s funk (the gigantic editing job did the trick!)
New year, new ideas, and I decided to go with a premade cover.  The one I found was perfect except the bird.  I loved the bird, don’t get me wrong!  But it was a trifle too serene and looked just a weeny bit like a seagull.  I really needed a crow!  I wrote to Debbie at TCC and asked if I could have the bird changed for an extra charge.  This turned out to be no problem at all.  I had a choice of two birds and four different fonts, all of which looked fantastic.  It was great fun choosing the right one!
It’s hard to find a cover for an anthology, particularly one with a mixed-genre.  I wanted to highlight the title story and had originally imagined my heroine in her long black cloak and her long black hair, pointing imperiously at a stone tower, a crow on her shoulder and several more on a wintry tree behind her, all swathed in mist.  As this was a tall order (and needed the type of artist I can’t afford), I would have settled for a Goth-girl in a long black cloak in a forest with a crow.  And some magical sparkles to show the, well, magic.  Heh.  In time I realised that not only has this been done to death but is very YA.  NOT the right genre at all!
But at least I got my crow.  And a big spooky moon, delicious colours, some sparkles, and a weird glowy construction in the middle.  It isn’t a perfect match but the mood is right and somehow it manages to cover all bases.
Which is what you want, really!
 
Here’s the link to the ebook (the paperback comes out later this year):
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08Y5J4ZM5/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0
 
Here’s my Amazon Author Page:
https://www.amazon.com/~/e/B00AP4UY7K
 
You have TWELVE stories to read.  I hope at least ONE appeals to you!  If so, please leave a review.  My career has reach a make-break point and I need your help!
 

Who is the first agent you approach?  The best one, of course, whoever you think that may be.  In my mind, it’s the Curtis Brown agency.  So when the time came for me to start trotting my new novel around town, I headed to their website first.  They have an online form which, frankly, makes life a lot easier, both for the author and, no doubt, the agency as well.  I filled in all the required boxes, clicked send……and was told that I had already submitted that novel.
WHAT??
But I hadn’t!  It was the first time I’d submitted the novel to anyone.  Had someone stolen my title?  Yet I’d made sure I’d never mentioned it on any online platform, paranoically keeping it a secret for as long as possible.  Mystified, I sent an email to someone called “info” at Curtis Brown, then moved on and approached another agent instead, one I actually like rather just think are the best.
You should know, at this point, that while I do indeed have a landline, the sound is permanently switched off.  In fact, the only reason I have a landline is that I can’t get a good TV/broadband package without one.  And also, if you don’t want to put your mobile number on a website, you can just put your landline number instead.  When the phone does ring, a little red light flashes, something I absolutely never see.  In fact, I didn’t even know it did flash until I spotted it and thought, hmmm, I bet that’s just a nuisance call, but what-ho, I’m in the mood to be bothered, so I answered it.
Can you imagine my amazement when I discovered it was someone from Curtis Brown?  And can you imagine my sheer utter embarrassment when I discovered that I HAD submitted that novel before?  I don’t even remember doing it!  The phone call was lovely but I felt MORTIFIED.  It took a lot of hard thinking afterwards to remember that over two years ago, I decided I couldn’t stand working on the novel a moment longer, that it was finished, and that I really needed the help of an editor.  So I must have cobbled together a synopsis and the first three chapters and a cover letter and sent it off to them.
BUT WHERE ARE THEY?
I can’t anywhere on my computer find the cover letter and the synopsis I must have written.  Did I do this at work one bored afternoon?
Anyway, whatever happened, I had done something mad and stupid and now I couldn’t submit the VERY THOROUGHLY edited novel that was, hopefully, a much better prospect.  Unless I changed the title.  The title I had settled on originally was “Season of the Falling Sun”.  However, throughout the novel, I NEVER use the word “the” in front of “falling sun.”  So the title was actually incorrect anyway!  It seemed to me fate, or someone else, was trying to tell me to change the title.  So I did.  And it works.  And that’s what I used to submit my novel to Curtis Brown, which the online form accepted.
But after all this, do you think they are going to take any notice of it?  I’ve got everything going against me: 

• I’ve submitted it before
• I forgot I’d submitted it before
• It’s 160K words long
• I’m not anybody
• Competition is fierce

I’m thinking me and Curtis Brown weren’t meant to be.
 
But out of this fiasco, I got one thing right:  the title.  Hoorah.

It’s taken me eight years to get to the end of my Big Novel but it’s done!  At last!  Bring on the champagne!
 
I really finished it over a week ago, wrapping up the last of the Killer Edit, and producing a synopsis and cover letter while it was still fresh in my mind.  But yesterday I did the final bit of formatting.  When I write (directly onto the screen), I don’t use indents as I find them hugely off-putting, and I write in block paragraphs i.e. with a line space between each paragraph.  I’ve always written like this as it keeps things neat and tidy inside my head and on the page, but obviously the final product can’t look like this.  You certainly can’t self-publish a manuscript looking like that and no agent or publisher is going to look at something so unformatted.  So my final act was to add the indents, then go through the entire novel getting rid of those line spaces between each paragraph.  And also getting rid of the indents at the beginning of each chapter AND the chapter number (indenting afterwards throws off the centring). 
 
I know lots of people write with tabs.  This makes me shudder from head to tail!  The horror!  But there you are, we all have our different foibles.  No doubt anyone watching me write in block paragraphs is filled with the same horror!  I just don’t get why anyone would want to use tabs – if you’re self-publishing, you absolutely can’t use that manuscript and have to get rid of every single tab!  Anyway, this is utterly beside the point.  Once I’d done my formatting, I was done.  I felt it was finished.  The moment of great finality had come.  My novel had reached the end.
 
I first came up with the idea about eight years ago but didn’t start working on notes until a year or more later.  I only know I wrote the first words on the first page in February 2015 because I blogged it on my website.  The first draft was the battle from hell and took over two years.  When I say “first draft,” I really mean countless drafts.  The restarts, the rewrites, the rethinks, the restructuring.  The replotting.  The gigantic plot holes I had to fill and refill.  The rock hard shapeless stone I had to hammer and hammer and chisel and hammer some more to try and find the angel within.  It was a nightmare.
 
When that “first” draft was done, I abandoned it.  I changed my writing style and began a series of lightweight novels that weren’t allowed to go over 80K words.  I wrote short stories.  Novellas.  Flash fic.  Anything SHORT!  Well, shorter than 180K words, which is what it ended up as – it really was gigantic!  The novel also underwent several title changes.  The heroine had her name changed at least seven times.  Even her hair colour changed.  Huge chunks of world-building never made it into the novel, or if they did, were cut out again.  A huge amount of research was never used.  I can’t tell you how BIG this novel was, how MUCH work I put into it.  And what did I end up with?  A great big rock-solid heavy chunky faux-fantasy style disaster.  I ended up HATING the thing.
 
At the start of 2019 (before the pandemic really took hold), I did a massive edit, called the Red Edit.  I tore out 20K words.  I hacked and hacked and hacked.  And then I forgot I did all this and went off to have a writer’s crisis while the world locked down.  It was only when I needed a huge challenge to get me out of my deep funk that I faced the Killer Edit.  In this, what would have to be the final edit, I began to strip the novel back.  I simplified it as much as I could.  I thought I’d be able to rewrite the novel in a whole new style but honestly, I think that might have killed me right off.  I just had to the best damn editing job I’ve ever done.  I even did things like search over-used words such as THAT, AS IF, JUST and many others as it gave me another chance to rewrite badly structured sentences.  I got rid of every single instance of SO THAT, a phrase I used about a million times.  I mean, my God, truly, the writing in this novel was AWFUL.  I know what I was trying to do, though:  I know the mood I was trying to create.  But it just made a great big lumpy muddy mess instead of a dreamy gothic concoction.  My romantic ideals didn’t work.  I also, by the way, got rid of every single semi-colon.  Now, I know how to use semi-colons and I hadn’t used them incorrectly, but it was part of the simplification process.  Simple punctuation.  Simpler language.  Shorter sentences. 
 
There are chunks of this novel that still don’t work.  Yet there are parts that I am very proud of, that work for me, that are beautiful.  But the fucker still comes in at 160K words.  No agent in their right mind is going to look at it.  I have, over the years, both loved and hated this novel.  I’ve called it That Novel.  That Difficult Novel.  My magnum opus.  My prize winner. 
 
Now I’m just going to call it my finished novel.
 
Cheers.

I finished a short story!  That doesn’t sound particularly amazing but considering the year I’ve had with writing, just to say I’ve FINISHED something feels like quite an achievement.
 
I never expected to write this particular short story.  The idea was quite unbelievably grim, describing the abuse of a preadolescent, all the way into her twenties.  This is not my usual style, nor was it something I was comfortable with.  The story’s saving grace was the beauty of the setting:  a wild, windy coastline, with an eerie quicksand beach.  There was a hint of magic – the heroine (or should I say victim?) was accused frequently of inverting her witchery (hence the abuse).  But otherwise the predominant colour of the story was grey.
 
I thought I might have come up with this idea very early this year, but I’ve just checked the creation date of the Word document in which I wrote up the notes I’d made, and I can’t believe it was last year in September.  When I finished the notes, I had a pretty good idea that I would never write it.  It was too grim.  No one would want to read it.  The fact that it had a fantastically happy ending wasn’t good enough – no one would ever get that far.  And, quite frankly, I didn’t want to write it either!  It was just too miserable!
 
But with my writing going so badly this year, suddenly I was in the mood to write something relentlessly grim.  Once the year had settled into its new routine – daughter back at uni, me back work, new lockdown on the horizon – I began The Winds of Witching.  I handwrote it as this gives me the greatest pleasure.  When you handwrite, you think you are creating the most wonderful piece of writing.  You are convinced that it’s going brilliantly, that jewels are dripping out the nib of your Bic.  Handwriting is great for your confidence!  I also noticed how calm I felt after a writing session.  Every rape scene took monumental confront but when I was done, I felt almost peaceful.  Anxiety slipped away.  I felt like myself again.
 
I remember mentioning this to my hairdresser who, in her great wisdom, said that the process of writing this grim tale was one of catharsis, given the difficult year we’ve just had.  Okay, she didn’t use those exact words but that’s what she meant!
 
When I came to type up the story, however, I realised how BAD it was.  Badly written, badly conceived, badly plotted.  But I gritted my teeth and did that thing that 95% of writing is about:  I edited.  I rewrote, changed stuff, put stuff in, took it out again, and by the time I got to the final draft, I stripped it down as much as I could.  When I was done, I was satisfied.  The satisfaction was enough that I could walk away from it and feel that it was, for the moment, finished. 
 
I suspect no one will ever read it.  So what was the point?  When I get the blues (and I’m calling them the blues when it should really be called black-hole-blackness), the one word that leaps into my mind a lot is “pointless.”  Everything feels pointless.  My life, my writing, the world, the whole universe (I tend to be dramatic in my thinking when I’m down).  I was determined that this short story WOULD have some point, even if it wasn’t to be read. 
 
It was, basically, an exercise in self-discipline.  Because if I’m going to get myself to the other end of this pandemic in one piece, I have to get back on the writing train.  I can’t just hang around the rail tracks.  With this project, I pushed myself hard.  I edited that damn piece of rubbish writing until it work, finally achieving something, only a very small thing, but better than nothing.  Confronting a difficult piece of work seems to be the way to go.
 
My next project is to edit – yet again! – that monstrous novel that I have, in hilarious moments, called my Prizewinning Novel.  I’m determined to attack the thing until it too works, until the words leap off the page so freshly the ink could still be wet. 
 
I may have to gird my loins for this.  

First in a series of writing tips!  These are things I have learnt after many years of hard work.  With any luck, others will find some inspiration!