I’m
back!
After
a year of blogging together as a team, the ‘Write Minds’ ladies are going their
separate ways. No, we haven’t fallen out. Far from it! We have become very firm
friends and, as fellow members of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, will
continue to meet, chat and support each other as often as ever, both in person
and through our many social networking links.
In
fact, sharing a blog with four other aspiring romantic novelists for a whole
year has been a very useful experience, giving us the chance to set ourselves writing
goals, explore shared themes, promote our own successes and interview some
fantastic published writers, as well as finding our way around all the behind-the-scenes
admin that managing a blog entails …but our writing careers are all taking off
in new and different directions now, and it’s time to spread our wings and fly.
So,
after a long silence, I’m finally back here on my own blog - and fully
intending to update it regularly with all my news - and probably quite a bit of
other writers’ news too!
So,
let’s start with my short stories. Fifteen sold and published in women’s
magazines during 2014. Not a huge amount, mainly because the novel writing has
taken up a lot of my time lately, but I still love writing short fiction and
can’t see a time when that is likely to stop. I hit my milestone fiftieth story
for The People’s Friend in the summer, I still appear regularly in the monthly Woman’s
Weekly Fiction Specials, and I will have a story in the My Weekly Annual 2016,
which seems a very long way off right now! I always look forward to seeing what
the lovely illustrators have made of my characters and settings when my stories
move from my own imagination into print, and am rarely disappointed.
But
what about my foray into novel writing? As a member of the RNA’s New Writers’
Scheme I was able to send my 100,000 word manuscript off for a full (anonymous)
critique this year. Oh dear! Their reader, whoever she was, clearly hated everything (and
I do mean everything) about it, which was very disheartening, but I am made of
sterner stuff than to burst into tears and give up, so I asked for it to be
seen by someone else, who turned out to be much more on my wavelength and
offered plenty of praise and some useful suggestions as to how I could knock it
into better shape. And while I was waiting for that second opinion, a published
novelist friend offered to read it for me too, and she loved it! The trouble is
that everyone who reads it has such different views about what works, what
doesn’t and what I should change that I found the whole experience really
confusing - so I sent it off to a couple of agents completely unaltered just to
test the water.
One
knuckle-biting near miss (from a very well-known literary agency) later, and
with a lot of good things said about my writing and my book, I am now anxiously
waiting for the response from a second agent who I met at a ‘Get Published Day’
event, before even thinking of sending it anywhere else. Fingers, toes and
everything else are permanently crossed at the moment, and while I wait I have
of course made a start on the next novel, a much more conventional ‘one man one
woman happy ending’ romance which I am sure will be more to the RNA’s taste.
So,
before signing off for 2014, here are my writing tips (all highly pertinent to
my recent experiences) for anyone hoping to embark on a major writing project or push, or
considering a change of writing direction in the year ahead:
Wishing
you all a Happy Christmas and a successful New Year.
Viv Brown
Oh,
did I forget to say I got married this year too?!
I
will still be writing as Vivien Hampshire, but I am now officially Mrs Brown –
without her boys!!!
MY
AMAZON AUTHOR PAGE:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vivien-Hampshire/e/B004NO9ANM/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0
AMAZON
LINKS TO MY PUBLISHED BOOKS:
How
to Crack Cryptic Crosswords
http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Crack-Cryptic-Crosswords-Answers/dp/1845285085/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1354898163&sr=8-2Losing Lucy
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B006WP6VUU/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_tmb
