Following a childhood dream to be a writer

Unknown artist

I always wanted to write stories. Correction. I have always written stories. I remember, aged about 7 sitting in the attic box room of our house, scribbling away in old exercise books from the school my Grandad used to teach at. They were a dark red colour with a thick paper cover that said ‘Shrewsbury Technical College’ on it, the staples holding them together were rusty, and they were full of gloriously blank ruled pages. There were boxes and boxes of them and to me, that was treasure. Gorilla Island was the first book I wrote. It was a class project when I was ten years old - we had to form teams and each take a role, such as illustrator or typist. I was the writer. It’s a story that takes quite a lot from the adventures of the Famous Five, the Goonies, and from the emotionally charged Gorillas in the Mist. Then there’s my first publicly published piece of writing. A (rather terrible) poem about world peace that I remember writing lying in the sun in the garden, again aged 10. It was published in the Young Telegraph. I was elated. Except they spelt my name wrong. My first writing to appear in an actual published book was a poem about a jaguar, called ‘The Creature’. I wrote it at school as part of a competition. And it was chosen - how exciting to be singled out! Alas, the majority of the book consists of poems from my school mates. I don’t think many other schools took part. But my poem did win a ‘Runner-up’ prize. Next up is my first paid piece of writing, aged 14. I’m not sure if it was for the poem ‘Thank you’ in ‘Single Minds’ (1994), or ‘I Remember’ in the ‘Poets in the North West’ anthology (1996). But it was rewarded with two coins (I think a 50 pence and a 2 pence) sellotaped to a piece of cardboard and sent through the post to me. Skip forward a few years to my time at university in South Wales, when I started writing (and getting paid!) here and there for the South Wales Evening Post. My trial piece was all about student bank accounts and features a great picture of my house mates that I don’t think they’ve yet forgiven me for. I also did a series of vox pops - interviewing people in their place of work. I had to take the photographs myself with, I think, a disposable camera. I wasn’t an expert and the photo editor was frequently disappointed in my blurred, shadowy efforts. But this experience with the South Wales Evening Post confirmed that I wanted to write for a living. But that’s not easy. It’s certainly not easy to make a living as an author. So out of university, I found work first as a television subtitler (lots of writing but not my own words and it gave me golfer’s elbow), then as ‘General Writer’ for a healthcare tech company (good experience but not really my area of interest), then as a writer and editor for Europeana - a link to arts and culture - hurrah! Along the way, I took time out to continue studying writing. A Masters and then a PhD. Why? Because it gave me access to experts to help me write. And that’s what I wanted to do. At the end of the PhD I had a novel that I was able to show to an independent publisher in Manchester who had already published quite a disturbing short story of mine called ‘Sweet Tilly’ in the anthology ‘Wolf Girls’. She liked it. In 2013, ‘Blood and Water’, my debut novel all about death, mothering and mermaids was published. One of my lifetime ambitions complete. It had a small print run, and I receive (very small) amounts of royalties every six months. It sells on average about one copy a week still. It might not sound much but it is a real thrill to think that every week, someone somewhere is getting to know Dora and her claustrophobic life. I wonder what they think of her. My career plan since I left university has been ‘To be a writer’. It still is. I don’t quite yet have the confidence to boldly say that that is what I am. I still want more. Today, my writing career has three strands. I have a professional job writing and editing - reports, plans, marketing material, blogs and communications material for Europeana. I run creative writing workshops and although I am not currently writing my own stuff, I am searching for that elusive bestseller idea and I hope it is going to come to me in about a year’s time when my youngest child starts school and I might, just might, have some time to sit down with a pen and a gloriously blank exercise book.