Today I have been working all day and achieved nothing. My lovely Light Night plans for Shelterbox have disappeared into dust. So many other charities at this time of year are vying for people's money. Oh well, I managed to get about £40 together for new LED lights for disaster areas.
I have been chasing up publishers for my latest History book, and no-one has the civility to even give me an answer. Just checked my spam filter but nothing.
When I first started writing, I could paper the walls with the amount of rejection letters I received. But sometimes I received letters (though I didn't know it at the time) were from famous writers. Marjorie Proops was one who kindly offered me advice on writing. Another was a famous publisher of the James Bond books, who told me to go out and live life, then write about it. I always thought the Bond books sketchily written by Ian Fleming, but reading his biography I now understand why.
My early contributions were to teen magazines like Jackie, when older I wrote short stories for magazines. I contributed to the BBC staff magazine Ariel, even completing a Script to Screen writing course with the BBC. My first effort, a sitcom, was made with my ideas most of my words, and called something else. Martin Jarvis, then a young man, played the husband.
My husband at the time was tall blond and stupid, and it was about the funny scrapes we got into in the first year of married life. BBC of course STAFF NO FEE. I'm glad to say after 6 episodes it was a flop, because their staff writer took the fun out of it. Along the way there were a few Women's magazine romances. I wrote my first book at the age of 16 and wrote hopefully to the publisher (and embarrasingly) that when they took it I'd like to go and live in America on the proceeds. When! ha ha ha!
Little did I know then, that although insulted by their refusal, they said I had some really good parts, and that in their opinion I would be a good writer one day.
Back to today, I am not happy with the new book cover, I've sent it back with how I hoped it would look, but we're changing all the book covers bit by bit to make them more formulaic
to agree with the sort of books we already see on the bookshelves.
I don't understand why our book covers are so challenging to my readers. Anyway, Evil in Overdown is finished and needs a front so we must get on with it.
Whoever sorts out my stuff after I've gone to the big library in the sky will find reams and reams of paper in plastic boxes, which will then turn into floppy discs, which then turns into memory sticks, then piles of notebooks of ideas and short stories, sketches and drawings, loads of recipes, a few love letters, my day books, in which I write of my chores, the weather, my achievements my failures and life in the 20th century in general.
I hope I shock the socks off whoever has the pleasure of reading some of them. My current
husband knows all my secrets, I told him everything when we got married, only fair. He just smiles and says, that's what makes you who you are, and he loves me for it.
Fingers crossed, and get on the roller coaster of life (with the sick bag), yet again.
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