The past few years have been very up and down for me and what with bereavement and ill health, mostly it’s been more down than up.
At the beginning of this year I really felt that the dawn of a new decade was going to be a fresh start. Well, COVID certainly put paid to that for me as well as the rest of the world.
It’s strange to think how the world has changed this year – who would have thought back in January that wearing face masks would become the norm?
In many ways life for me hasn’t stopped since COVID. I’ve worked all the way through it and at first working from home was a bit of a transition – especially with everyone in the house at the same time.
But you have to try and look on the bright side and the lack of a social life has certainly benefitted my writing and I’ve tried to carve out a little bit of time each day (even if its not much) to write.
I’m a bit of a butterfly in my writing, flitting from one project to another, so this year I decided to change my tactics and focus on one project at a time.
You may recall that in February 2018 I suffered from an unexpected brain haemorrhage and ended up having surgery at The Walton Centre in Liverpool. I’m so grateful to the staff for saving my life, and I think that during this crisis the NHS staff have certainly been recognised for the fantastic job they do.
But it did take me a long time to recover and for a while I had to put my writing on hold. The whole experience was completely out of my comfort zone and I decided that I would write a memoir about it. I’ve always kept a journal so on days when I couldn’t manage anything more creative at least I had an outlet and it also helped to keep me sane.
So when NaNoWriMo came around last year I decided to go for it and by the end of the month I had completed a very rough first draft.
This year I’ve spent a lot of time editing it and managed to get to the point where I was ready to submit it to an agent. Unfortunately, when the first agent came back to me she told me that it wasn’t right for her. But on the plus side, she did say that it was well written so that gave me something to hope for.
I dusted myself off and have since sent my manuscript out to five more agents. How I selected them is another story and now while I’m waiting for them to get back tome, I’m carrying on polishing the rest, just in case I get asked to submit a full manuscript. I’m also thinking about my next project.
Wish me luck.
