Do what you love…

2013 has been a very good year for me. Earlier in the year I got a major honour and invented something, which in themselves were fantastic, but bubbling away in the background were more good news goings-on.

I’ve been writing for a long time. Since I was at infant school, in fact. I wrote a poem back then that was read out in front of the class and won a national prize when I was eight years old for a storyboard and presented it in London which, to an eight year old, is a far away, mysterious place. Around the same time I won a slogan competition – ‘Plant a Tree in 73, plant some more in 74’. Since then I have loved writing – partly for the inner creativity it released and partly for how the world received it.

More recently, after I finished exploring how storytelling affects how we live our lives day to day and how it weaves itself in and out of science and technology, I felt like it was time to write my own stories again. I was a little confused at first as to what form these stories would take, how much they would be about me and what I would do within them, but there was no need to worry; they followed the same path as my childhood writing, flowing from my creativity into the world.

This time the creative flow made full-length novels, and ‘the world’ turned out to be agents and publishers who I engaged with and shared my stories. And the end product is nothing ‘about’ me at all – it turned out that all the previous writing I had done had exorcised personal darlings and demons. Scary stuff at first, but over the years (yes, years) I began to gather up advice from agents, publishers and other writers who had agreed to read my work and learn how to incorporate it into my work. Eventually, I arrived at my current novel.

It’s a crime novel. I didn’t start out writing crime, but I realised over all the time I was writing that had to write crime. I tried to write women’s fiction and speculative fiction but it always had an element of crime, mystery or thriller in it. I sent it off to an agent and met with her earlier this year, and she recently agreed to sign me.

So I can finally announce that I am represented by the wonderful Camilla Wray of Darley Anderson Literary, TV and Film Agency. I’ve worked with the agency over the summer to hone my work and now the first novel in a crime series featuring Detective Sergeant Janet Pearce, is in progress.

As a result of this I’ll be transferring my musings about writing to a new blog. This post has covered all of my writing over all of my life in seven paragraphs and over on my new blog I intend to go into much more detail, including my experiences on rejections, getting an agent and writing in general. I’ll post the address in a later post when everything is up and running. I’ll still keep writing here about anything relevant and link between the two.

Whatever happens this is a new phase of my life and I intend to work hard doing what I love – writing.