Did Amanda Knox's graphic stories of brutal rape ultimately lead to a conviction for murder? Well according to some newspaper reports, it helped. The stories which appeared on her MySpace account, emerging after her arrest on suspicion of murdering fellow student Meredith Kercher, were lurid and graphic.

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Emily Gale is a London-born writer of children’s books, currently living in Australia. Girl Aloud is her first book for teenagers. Emily has kindly given us a signed copy of Girls Aloud to give away to one lucky person who comments below. The winner will be chosen out of the SW hat and posted up on Friday.

Kass Kennedy, the main character in Girl Aloud, is being pushed to audition for the X Factor against her better judgement. What gave you the idea for the story, Emily?

The initial spark came from thinking about pushy parents – in particular there were a few first-round auditions on The X-Factor in which the kids were tragically lacking in X and the parents were wearing gigantic rose-coloured spectacles. Watching those clips made me want to go home with the families and find out the set-up: how you go from clapping adoringly at your toddler singing Incey Wincey Spider, to encouraging them to make utter twits of themselves on national television? I wanted to complicate matters by giving my main character a lot of oomph and absolutely no desire to be a star – we hear a lot these days that “everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame” and I was sure my character wasn’t interested in that

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Nik Perring has been asking us to draw story shapes of our Works In Progress.

Well, I had this in mind when I was writing a recent short story set in a motorway service station in Northern England. It seemed quite linear, with little drops into the past and some arches to the future, which would have made quite a nice scribble, had I tried to put it onto paper.

The afternoon was wearing on so I went for a run before the light went completely. It was unbelievably cold; the little lake was still frozen solid and my lungs were beginning to hurt from the icy air. Then I met a cat.

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I'm a sucker for an agony column, and since it's years since I've had a proper job, Jeremy Bullmore's in Saturday's Guardian has the same pleasure for me as gardening programmes do: intellectually fascinating, without the least necessity to take it (at the moment) to heart. And today's column included a problem which I found myself reading as a perfect analogy for a particular writerly situation. I hope Jeremy won't mind if I don my costume of Jerusha Cowless, agony aunt to the passionate, aspiring author, and paraphrase:

Dear Jerusha; I'm in my late 20s and currently working in a bookshop while trying to get my novels and stories published. I've spent a lot of my career with this aim, reading all the great authors and doing an MA, but now that I'm trying to find a publisher, I'm feeling as if there's no place where I and my writing fit. I have struggled to find an agent who sees fiction as I do, and no matter how much effort I put into revising my work and trying to make it so good they can't resist it, I still often find that my work is misread, or rejected outright. Over the past couple of years I've really stretched my reading and writing, and worked out what to me is important about literature. It has very recently occurred to me that a lot of my professional frustrations thus far may be down to my personal view of what's important in writing, and indeed my strong instincts about what I believe to be good and bad literature.

I have been looking to write for a living and/or do other related literary work in publications and forums which I believe in, but in the meantime it's obviously crucial for me to get that first publishing contract. Although I'm not overtly opinionated in my submission letters and networking in the writing world, I cannot change my literary nature any more than I can change the colour of my skin. Any advice as to how I might get my work to fit better, so as to get that contract, would be greatly appreciated.

From what you say,

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And if you don’t know who those characters are, stop reading now! Clearly, you aren’t well enough to be on-line as you must have been in a coma the last couple of years. Go take a pill! Go work on recovering your memory!

I am talking, of course, about the three stars of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Series. Today I am (rather bravely, I think), putting forward my case on the respected bibliophile’s site, Vulpes Libris, So, please, any of you who have loved the series as much as I have, take a look; back me up; I might need all the help I can get!

Why? Because, like so many commercially successful novelists, Meyer has been much maligned – regarding the quality of her writing, the quality of her characters, her motives for writing these stories. Even the Vatican has added its criticism. Yet, not for years, have I sped through such a serial, reading late into the night. Vampires? Werewolves? With a good dose of unrequited love? What more could a girl want? Ah yes, I know – Robert Pattinson cast as the hero when the book finally made it to film.



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Being slightly Christmas-phobic I’ve decided to leave all tinsel related topics in the capable hands of other Strictlies less inclined to panic attacks whenever the subject of Delia’s Christmas versus Nigella’s is raised. Instead, in this post I’ll mostly be focusing on two writing relating incidents that have particularly caught my attention this week.


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I started out as a short story writer. In fact, it was winning two short story competitions that established me as a ‘proper’ writer (in my own mind, if not in anyone else’s!) – and I went on to have stories published regularly in Woman’s Realm, Woman’s Weekly, Woman, etc. I was proud of this, and so were my friends and family – but I did come across a certain amount of snobbery from people who had no idea how difficult it is to achieve publication in these magazines, and who presumed I’d try to go on from there to ‘have something more serious published’. As if it were that easy!



Well, I’ve never had much ambition to have anything ‘serious’ published – whatever that means. But like lots of short story writers, having a novel published did seem like the ultimate goal. To be honest, working full-time, as I was back then, and with three teenage daughters, a dog and two cats to look after (not to mention a husband and a house), even finding the time to write a novel seemed more like a silly fantasy than a goal. I did try – several times – and abandoned the resulting pathetic attempts, most of them fortunately before submitting them anywhere. But then I had the idea for The Trouble With Ally – a kind of chick-lit novel about an older woman – a fairly new theme back in 1990 when I started writing it. I was so fired with enthusiasm, so sure this time it was going to work, that I finished it, liked it, submitted it. Don’t ask how I found the time – the job, kids, animals and husband must have all suffered neglect! Over the course of eighteen months I collected rejections, although several of the agents I tried were complimentary but didn’t take me on. I moved on to trying publishers direct and eventually, after several more rejections, got a two-book deal with Piatkus.



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On Saturday morning it started snowing. And snowing. And snowing. The world turned dark, grey and invisible. It was a day that makes little writers want to take a Thermos of tea, a large bar of Dairy Milk and hibernate in their dens until Spring.

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