Before you get published, when your dreams of being a writer are still just that, you have this fantasy of what authors’ lives are really like. My fantasy involved the following (lunatic) beliefs:

1. All writers are famous.
2. All writers sit at desks in quiet, sunlit rooms with beautiful sea or rural views.
3. All writers look exactly as they do in their profile pictures.
4. All writers have millions of fully-formed ideas for stories in their heads, just waiting to be put down on paper, and all those ideas need to become award-winning novels is to be typed up.
5. Writers are sociable, entertaining people who hang out with other writers in literary salons and other cool places.
6. As soon as you’ve been published, that means you’ll never be forgotten. You’ve made your mark on the world and your legacy will live on after your death.

Now that I really am a published author, I feel I owe it to other aspiring writers to rip the scales of delusion from their eyes. (You’ll thank for me for it one day. One day when you’ve chosen a different career.)

So, as a public service, here is what I have learned about numbers one to six above:

1. All writers are famous. No, they’re not. During a family game last Christmas, the following question arose: “Name five authors”. Not one person mentioned me.
2. Authors work in quiet rooms with beautiful views. No, they don’t. I write sandwiched between two neighbours who are obsessed with hammering the shit out of things, and my view is of a pub car park. See my next post for why the “sunlit” part is such a lie.
3. An author really looks like his or her profile picture. If you’d ever seen the state of me while I’m working, you’d know this wasn’t true.
4. Fully-formed stories live in authors’ heads, just waiting to be put down on paper. If only. This is the biggest fantasy of all.
5. Writers socialise a lot. Not most of the writers I know. Most of us are deeply anti-social, mainly due to the hammering in my case, but also because we look like hell from gaining so much weight as a result of sitting down all day. (Not to mention our tendency to reward ourselves for every new paragraph we type by stuffing our faces with chocolate.)
6. Writers are remembered by other people after death, because of the books they’ve published. See point 1. My family forgot about me while I was still alive. I rest my case.

Jim and Helen Drew, of Business Equip in Norwich, for building me such a great website, training me how to update it, and for putting up with my (often unbelievably-stupid) questions. You can find their own website here.

You know the rather clever 3-D image of my book on my homepage? Well, it has nothing to do with me, as Photoshop and I just don’t get on. The credit belongs entirely to Christopher Tuckett and Jessica Okazaki – as well as my thanks.

No-one tells you, when you’re an aspiring writer, what the editing process can be like – or if they do, you don’t listen. You’re too busy dreaming of finding an agent, and then acquiring a book deal, and after all that has finally happened, you’re far too excited to think about what comes next, apart from untold fame and fortune.

Then you’re allocated an editor and informed it’s time to begin the “structural edit”.

“Just move that event forward to the first quarter of the book,” your editor says, making it sound very simple, “and lose that character, but create another two. Then put this bit in the last third, and change the beginning completely. That’s all you really need to do.”

“Okay,” you say, and then you start to do it.

A few weeks (or months) later, when you’ve deleted scenes and moved thousands of others around – sometimes even splitting them, or shifting single sentences – you now have no idea whether you took that section about your main character’s dead aunt out, or whether you still need to write about her funeral. Have you already mentioned that the family dog was kidnapped by a burglar, or should you leave the random sentence that refers to it in the scene you’re working on today?

There are post-its all over the walls of your house, index cards all over the floor, and so many notes on the manuscript that they now exceed the word count of the book itself. But not to worry – you are still firmly in control, so a night out might be justified.

You’re back at your desk the next morning, feeling refreshed and full of enthusiasm, until…Sod it, now you’ve found the original bit about the funeral, just after you’ve written a whole new scene for that.

Oh, and you forgot to mention that the family owns a dog, before you changed the kidnapping scene. You said they had a cat – and you killed the burglar off, three weeks ago.

 

 

Here’s the poem I wrote about Aberfan that I mentioned in my last blog post, the one that Judith Porch based her powerful calligraphic piece upon…

(It was originally published under my non-writing name, on the BBC Wales website.)

 

Aberfan 4

I saw Aberfan as it happened.

Stood, that hot afternoon

In Pen-y-Wern.

Staring out across the deep, green bowl

Between us.

Tasted the black gold filling my throat

While the sun beat down

And the Heads of the Valleys shimmered.

They said I imagined it

But I did not.

I felt those small, dark-eyed children,

Just like me,

Meet their clawing, tarry deaths.

Heard their parents screaming

As they dug, and dug

Amongst the slimy black

That paid their wages and

Filled their children’s mouths.

They said I imagined it

It was morning and a

Steady rain falling.

Some years ago, I had a poem published on the BBC Wales website. It was about the Aberfan disaster, which I recall happening very clearly, despite having only been six years old when it occurred. (I lived in the same valley in Wales as Aberfan, and was the same age as many of the children who lost their lives that day.)

Last year, I was approached by a calligraphic artist named Judith Porch, who had been inspired by my poem, and who had gone on to create this wonderful artwork as a result. I thought Judith’s piece should have wider audience, and I’ll also post the poem it’s based on, as soon as I can find a copy of it….

Someone’s just sent me a link to my new book, which is now listed on the Waterstones’ website, even though I haven’t finished the damn thing yet. No pressure, then.