Introducing the (RE)Sisters YA Anthology (and some of my writing...)

The first two months of the year are usually ones of laziness, boredom, regret and hiding under the duvet. But not in 2016! Oh no. Not for me anyway. Ok, maybe just a little bit. But my traditional post -Christmas blues have been warmed up somewhat by some exciting news...

Last year I submitted a short story to the wonderful For Books Sake when they announced they would be putting together a YA anthology and lo and behold it got selected! With the release date for (RE)Sisters now on the horizon (8th February people), I thought I'd share a bit about how my story came about as well as a sneaky extract.

It all started with a prompt. My writing buddy Jo and I selected three music videos for each other with the idea of creating a few paragraphs inspired by each one, and my story, Operation M, began life as a response to the video for 'People Help the People' by Birdy. For this particular prompt, I quickly found I couldn't stop until I eventually ended up with something that had the potential to become a fully formed short story which doesn't happen too often with me. I suppose the moral is that you never really know where you're going to find your next dollop of inspiration. Oh, and try out writing prompts because they really work - you might not come out with a story at the end of it all, but they're great practice and a good laugh which is just as important in the whole scheme of things I think.

I don’t expect it was how they’d planned it. Maybe they didn’t have a plan at all. Maybe they were just going to wait and wait and eventually forget that I hadn’t left the house in several years, or that I was even there at all. I’d tried to explain to Dr Carroll that the triggers, the clues, they weren’t working. But he said I needed to have patience and that eventually I might be able to remember the name of our first dog (Barry, apparently) or what my favourite subject at school was, or what my cousin Christine looks like, or that our neighbour used to have a budgie called Brilliant Bill who I liked to talk to when I was six (according to my sister Caitlin, Mrs Briggs was very disappointed that this wasn’t one of the very first things that came back to me after I woke up). I hadn’t forgotten everything. I could remember what it felt like when Mother was in hospital giving birth to my brother Alastair (like standing on the edge of a ravine). But I couldn’t remember the name of Alastair’s boarding school, or why he’s scared of cats. And I knew almost immediately that I didn’t particularly like the company of Caitlin, but I still couldn’t remember her middle name, no matter how many times I’d been told it before she’d slammed yet another door in my face. 

So what about this anthology then? Well, it's called (RE)Sisters and it's a celebration of women and girls in all our diverse glory. To find out more (and to pre-order), have a look here, and if you end up reading my story in full, you might find out how what that extract has in common with the video below...

1K a Day - My First Draft Journey

This is the first writing post I've done in quite a while and for once, one of the main reasons for my lack of blog posts isn't to do with stress or workload, or any of the other slightly depressing reasons I usually give, but because I've actually been doing some actual writing! Of a book! It's all very exciting. Well, for me it is.

I very much conform to the rule that writing shouldn't have rules, because everybody is different, everybody works in a different way. However, in the past I've found it very useful to read about how writers write, because in order for me to discover what way works best for me, I need to give different methods a go. In fact, I've gone through several years of trying a number of different ways to get that first draft written.

And most of the time I have failed.

But this is all part of the process, something I have to remind myself of on a daily basis.

This isn't the first draft I've ever started by the way. The first one I completed nearly five years ago and mainly came about through the process of spewing out a ridiculous amount of words with only a half-formed idea in my head. I'm not saying this might not work for some, but on that occasion it left me with something completely unreadable that I couldn't even begin to start editing. A year or two later I managed to get halfway through another draft based on the same idea. This was a bit more successful, but then a problem arose that I wasn't really sure how to approach - I fell out of love with my story. I suppose I had a choice, whether to battle on through or to abandon it and I chose the latter. I'm still not really sure whether this was the correct decision, but that WIP is still there, waiting for the day when I shall hopefully develop warm feelings towards it again.


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After that I left a new idea to stew in my head. Some might call this procrastination (probably because it is procrastination), but I still maintain that letting it stew was the best possible thing I could have done. Every time I started to jot down notes on a piece of paper, I instinctively knew I wasn't ready and that with every word I wrote, I lost just a little bit more faith in the whole thing. So in order to feel like I was actually working towards something, I put my research hat on.

And this brings me up to the almost-present. I'm attempting to write historical YA and I was recently faced with yet another decision - when to stop researching and start writing. After consulting with my writing partner Jo, whose advice was something along the lines of 'just get on with it' (said in a much nicer way because she's a very nice person), I realised the time had come to begin another first draft.

In the past I've tried not planning, planning a bit, spending one day a week writing, getting up at 5 in the morning to write and writing in the evening, all with varying degrees of success. I used to be able to do plenty after I'd put the kids to bed, but these days my brain shuts down at 7.30 pm on the dot. I spent a while wondering why this was the case until I realised it was probably just came down to the fact that I'm now OLD and I for the time being I would just have to accept that evenings weren't my most productive period of the day.

Unless being productive means binge-watching Parks and Recreation, in which I case I'm the Queen of Productivity.

My brain now works best in short, sharp bursts, and it's peak performance time is when I've come home from dropping the kids off at school and I've had a least two black coffees. So this is when I write my 1000 words every morning, before I do any other work. I very rarely go over 1k because it then starts to feel like a chore.

And you know what? It's actually working for once. Not only am I getting words down, but I'm enjoying writing again. This book may not be 'The One', but right at this moment, writing it is making me very happy indeed and that's all I can really ask for.


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But be sure to return at a later date when I write a post entitled 'THE SECOND DRAFT FROM HELL'.



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