The “winner” of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award was announced on Tuesday. The recipient of this mean-spirited slap in the face was David Guterson for scenes in his novel Ed King. I haven’t read the book, but I did read an “offending” passage on the Guardian online and I have to say, it seemed to me to be a perfectly reasonable bit of writing:

“she took him by the wrist and moved the base of his hand into her pubic hair until his middle fingertip settled on the no-man’s-land between her ‘front parlour’ and ‘back door’ (those were the quaint, prudish terms of her girlhood)”.

In particular, the Literary Review’s assistant editor Jonathan Beckman seemed to object to the terms ‘front parlour’ and ‘back door’. He is quoted thus: “He says in brackets that these are quaint, prudish terms but I don’t think that is sufficient justification for using them.”

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An agent or publisher, ideally both. I’ve been down this road well trodden, and it seems to have no end. I’ve been subbing Delve since the Summer with little success. I get the standard rejections that many receive, but in amongst them I find a personal note or comment that motivates me to keep going, and keeps me true to the vision.


I have a submissions tracker that records my journey. To date, this is how it reads:
First tranche, sent in Jul 11 - 9 rejections (including 1 positive), 2 non-responses.
Second tranche, sent out at the end of Oct11 – 3 rejections (including 1 positive), 6 outstanding


Note. After the first tranche, I took the opportunity to review my initial submission, took some constructive advice and reworked my submission. I’ve had a low response rate to date on the second tranche, but I’m still hanging onto the possibility that someone will see the potential in Delve as I do.


But whilst I may exude calmness and confidence, beneath my exterior something simmers. A kind of aggravation and impatience, tempered with humility. I knew the road was long but I’d hoped to, at least, catch a glimpse of the final destination, but it twists and turns before me, the prize frustratingly out of reach. And now I feel as if I’m at a crossroads, seeing new paths materialising in front of me that I hadn’t fully considered before.

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In the comments on my post How Don't You Do It?, Glen says that she's been in writers' groups where:

they regard any form of deliberate intentionality in the first draft stage (as opposed to the later reworking stages) to be completely noxious to any eventual artistic merit. Now, this is all fine, but then these authors seem to imply that EVERYONE has to do it this way, or else you're being a fool to yourself and a burden to others (so to speak.)

I know exactly the kind of conversation Glen means - and I speak as one who's often explaining (even preaching) the merits of what you might call the NaNoWriMo or Shitty First Draft approach to writing. Various thoughts about this in no particular order.

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Lord knows, I’m not the fastest writer around.

I can sit and stare at a single paragraph for an unbelievable amount of time as I fiddle with a phrase here, a word there. I’d like to say it makes the eventual product worth all the agonising, and mostly I think it does, but every so often, I catch myself puzzling over a new phrase, a new twist on an old idiom until my brain feels as though it’s turned to porridge and is gradually leaking out through my ears.

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I finally received my first published work in the post. I've been looking out for it for a month now, barely able to contain my nerves or excitement. So when I got home from work, and found it lying on the bed, it was a bit of an anti-climax.

My poem, Hurt Me, appears on page 252 of the Poetry Rivals' Collection 2011 - Putting Pen to Paper. I wrote it in one of my darker moments, in a flood of tears, after an incident with my five year old son which left me emotionally crushed. I never thought it would amount to anything, but after positive reviews from my fellow writers and poets at Writewords, my husband suggested that I should enter it in the Poetry Rivals competition. What did I have to lose?




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As a child I loved the circus, particularly the trapeze acts and the jugglers. Now, there is clearly an art to juggling balls or batons. I’ve tried it a handful of times, but my utter lack of co-ordination always lets me down. It's tough enough to catch one ball, let alone three. But what about the art of juggling life?

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Dear Jerusha: I had a one-to-one with an agent who said she felt my main character was rather dull and not pro-active enough. She was afraid that, not being like the usual feisty heroines who buck the system, my MC might fail to grab the reader's attention, and my writing friends have said similar things. I fully appreciate what they mean but I have struggled to correct the problem. The thing is, she is meant to be a bit 'wet' for want of a better word, or at least she is to begin with. She has to overcome this and break away from her "niceness" and stand up for what she wants, and that is her journey. (She ends up refusing to marry the man she loves because she wants to do other things first.) However, the novel is set in a world where an ordinary young girl brought up by a domineering mother can't be too "feisty" to begin, without it being anachronistic. At the start she is (outwardly) passive and more fearful than her peers. And she does make decisions and do things later on although her actions put her in a worse position than before. ("Out of the frying pan into the fire" kind of thing.) How can I make a good, quiet and put-upon character more interesting to readers, especially at the beginning of the novel, before her transforming journey gets going?

If your project in writing the novel is to chart the journey of a put-upon, un-self-determining character towards action, self-determination and self-knowledge, then you've got a classic premise. At the Guildford Book Festival I found myself describing Hallie Rubenhold's novel Mistress of My Fate to her as the story of how Fanny Price becomes Fanny Hill. But you've also got a built-in problem with this project: to make us like her and want to stick with her at the beginning, while she's still un-proactive, lacking in self-knowledge, and stuck in the situation (mental or practical or both) which she's going to have to learn to get herself out of.

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I received a proof copy of my second YA novel for Piccadilly Press the other day. It’s called Cracks and comes out in May 2012.

I started to write this one well before Dark Ride my first book, was accepted, and wanted to tell you a bit about how it all came about.

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I have found myself stumbling through life for the most part as I imagine most people do. I believe experiences make you who you are, but if I strip all of that back to my childhood, I think deep down I am the same little girl who sent off a story to Ladybird Publishing about evil goblins that lurked in her garden.


It's the stuff in between, the experiences that steer you down a different path, each twist and turn taking you further away from who you really want to be that get in the way.



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It's like the difference between riding a bike and riding a horse (not that I've ever ridden a horse) A film runs the same every time regardless of the audience, but actors in a play rely on a response to bring out their best performances. I used to do amateur acting myself, so I know something about that. When I'm in the audience,the nearer to the stage I am the more obliged I feel to respond to the actors.

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