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:
1.
Stick
to what YOU want to write. Believe in yourself and don’t let one person’s
opinion bring you down or knock you off course. I didn’t… and the next three
people (all top professionals) to read my novel all had very good things to say
about it.
2.
Get
yourself known on facebook and Twitter. Not every hour of every day, or you
will never find time to write, but use them to make connections with other writers
and with potential readers. Publishers will expect it of you, it will
inevitably help promotion and sales when your book comes out, and you will
enjoy it!
3.
Join
any writing organisation that you think you will get something from – even if
it’s just meeting and sharing your work with fellow writers at a local writers’
group so you aren’t doing it all on your own. I love being a member of the
Society of Women Writers and Journalists, which was a wonderfully impressive 120 years old in 2014 – lovely lunches and afternoon teas in London, workshops,
a great little magazine, and a press card for free entry into all kinds of fantastic
places I just might want to write about – and I am about to join the SWWJ’s Council
to get involved in running things and to help guide its future. And I am staying in the RNA for at
least another year too, and will be sending them my next manuscript for
critique, despite my disappointment at the previous reaction. The meetings,
awards ceremonies and my forthcoming first visit to the annual RNA conference
are just too good to give up!
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!!!
