Today's the day, today! I believe it I really do, I've had a good morning so far I've found a few competitions to enter, I'm about to trawl through what I've currently written in a novel I'm attempting to write, maybe even work on a script. Because today is the day!

The day the holiday stops for me, the day I finish being a Uni student inbetween years, the summer isn't a place for laying around and turning myself into some sort of tanning experiment although the nickname Caramel Delight seems appealing, the summer isn't about sitting in the garden drinking endlessly, it can be, I can write that somehow is somehow one word? somehow - some how? To top it all off it's raining.

Here's the thing right, I've spent 5 weeks wasting time, dodging work becasue of my lack of planning, and my knowing of going back to Uni in September, but the problem is there will be a time when I don't go back to Uni in September and the longer I sit around the worse it will get. I even wrote stand up today, although I have no idea how that would work, it's about 3 minutes long and unless an audience is entertained by incest, rent boys, and the down fall of toys 'r' us I don't think it will go down to well.

TODAY IS THE DAY.

The day I write everyday again, the day I get back into the routine, the day I discover the writewords blog that has been in the corner of my page for nearly a year, the day I have a plan, the day I decide I will make money from this somehow, not so much this blog, but maybe who knows? The day I write, from 9 til5, although today I started at 10 because I had to go and buy bacon, and sausages, and fill up my tummywum. The day Keith Hodges, becomes DYLAN MCTHOMASLEGS, I won't really become him though. It seemed like a charasmatic name all the while I was writing this and I wanted to put it in.

The problem I have is I'm writing this now, but my heads going right Keith I heard this book needs writing, or a story, set in a carnival where a woman gives you 4 darts for £2, you have to get a certain score, but this woman right Keith, KEITH you listening? Stop typing Keith and listen. The woman right, is actually Jeremy Beadle, it's a show, it's a comeback show, a comeback for the dead show.

In those famous last-ish words - This is it.

Five authors from the Snowbooks stable are on tour, answering questions from various blogs – and Strictly Writing is proud to announce that today their stop-off is here!

So, please give a warm welcome to…

Andrew Sanger, author of The J-Word.

Alastair Sim, author of The Unbelievers.

Thomas Emson, author of Skarlet.

Paula Brackston, author of The Book of Shadows.

Fiona Robyn, author of The Blue Handbag.

- Tell us about how you first got published?

Andrew: My very first published book was the first edition of the Rough Guide to France, which I was commissioned to co-author. The first solo title was my own idea, The Vegetarian Traveller. Then came my first non-travel book, a memoir of the hippy years, called Love. I published it myself on the website, Lulu.com. Then last year I completed my first piece of real fiction writing, The J-Word. I was all set to self-publish again, but decided to send it to just one publisher. After a bit of research, I chose Snowbooks. I struck lucky – they really liked The J-Word.

Alastair: A short story 'Aurora Borealis' in 'Chapman', Scotland's main literary magazine in 1989 when I was still a student. Bizarrely, it was about a middle aged person facing up to Love, God and Death, so I suppose I've matured into that literary voice.

Thomas: I'd written a rough first draft of "Maneater" in 1999. Then I left it for years. I gave up full-time work in 2006 to concentrate on my writing. I went back to the novel, re-wrote the first few thousand words. I didn't know who published horror, but then saw one of David Wellington's zombie novels at WH Smith - the publisher was Snowbooks. I sent them the first 10,000 words of "Maneater". Emma Barnes emailed back within hours to say they loved it and wanted to see the rest. A few months later, after I'd re-written the rest, they came back to say they were going to publish - a fantastic day, a dream come true.

Paula: I spent several years having my non-fiction published, including a travel book, and selling my short stories to magazines, but it was Snowbooks who published my first piece of full-length fiction, Book of Shadows. Bless them for their open submissions policy! It is really hard for new authors to get their work looked at by publishers. And agents are not always the answer – I had one for two years. She was lovely, and we had some delicious lunches, but she never placed a novel for me.

Fiona: I submitted my first novel 'Thaw' directly to Snowbooks, and then a couple of months later thought I might as well send in my other two. Anna got back to me and said 'Thaw' had been sitting in her 'to be read more carefully' folder, and that the further submissions had prompted her to look at it more closely.





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But what's this? Yesterday I get an alert about a site that's charging £31.50! True, I have to convert it from Australian Dollars but there it is - what can't speak can't lie, as my Camberwell mother-in-law used to say.

If I thought £31.50 was excessive, Amazon is even better. My book's becoming a collectable!




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How nice it is - well, it's only happened once, so I can't generalize - but how lovely to wake up today to an email saying that my first published poem is in the latest issue of Contrary Magazine. It's called Baby in A Jar (thanks to Nik for the inspiration!). It is a great boost, especially on the morning after the day when I couldn't get down to doing any writing, when I went a little stir crazy, especially by evening (thanks to my Twitter friends who came up with helpful suggestions for what I could be doing instead!) ....

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I will be signing Kill-Grief at Waterstone’s in Chesham, Bucks, this Saturday from 11am until 2pm, so if you are in the area and would like to pop in and say hello, I will be delighted to see you. For a map and further details, click here or contact me via my website.

I have been doing some publicity for this over the past couple of weeks and it has occurred to me how useful a signing can be to help raise a book’s profile in general...


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Well, did you?

Sorry. You’ve caught me on a bad day. I feel like picking a fight.

The picture I present to the world is of a fairly mild mannered mother of two, but at the moment I am a seething mass of irritation. I am a veritable cauldron of misanthropy. The man in a van [isn't it always] who cut me up at the roundabout earlier? The stroppy teenage shop assistant who ignored me because she was too busy texting? The dog owner who failed to pick up after his mutt?
Toast, all of them. At least in my mind.

The reason for all this bile is that I’m what you might call between projects. If I was an actor I could say I was resting. Basically, I have no writing work in progress. And because of this, I am B-O-R-E-D.


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‘No, Mum, you haven’t got swine flu’, says my daughter on the phone. ‘You have to be under 60 to catch it’.

Meantime my head feels as if it’s clamped in a vice, my throat’s been rasped with a cheese-grater and I’m coughing every few minutes. The slightest effort makes me feel exhausted.



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Yesterday evening I went to see The Fourpenny Circus, which, says the website, is 'a lightly staged poetry show which combines good live literature with silliness, sadness and stagecraft' - and it was really, really good. Funny in (plenty of) places, sad in others and on one or two occasions even a little rude. I enjoyed it a lot, not only for the poems, which were mostly great and at times brilliant, but for the show as well, for the movement. And when those in the show are poets

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I'm a lucky girl. I've just been to see 'The Boss' aka Bruce Springsteen in concert in Dublin. Those who read my blog already know I'm a somewhat obsessed fan. Not just of the man, you understand - he is after all nearly sixty - but his music and particularly his lyrics.

So, there I was on Saturday night in the pouring rain, as close to the mosh pit as my freezing, aging bones would allow. I listened to the man with his E Street band and remembered fondly my stint as a lyricist when I used to dream that someone famous would sing my words. It proved to be step one on a steep learning curve that is my writing journey, a journey laden with many more amazing dreams.



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This is interesting (well, it is slightly to me, anyway). World 66 is a travel site where you can create a map of all the countries you’ve visited. Weekly Geeks, which I heard about via Farm Lane Books, suggested using it to create a map of countries we’ve read about. I have based mine on what I’ve read since the beginning of 2008.

Although the furthest extent of my travel in the past year and a half has been to go Waterstone’s in Chester, I’ve read about lots of far-flung places...


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