It is half past six on a February morning and it is just getting light outside. I am in my writing room, the room I call the Imaginarium.
This is where I write every morning. It is inhabited by curious objects including an old Royal typewriter and a model paddle steamer lovingly and painstakingly made by my brother. Behind me are shelves of books: those I have read, those I go to for information and two I have written.
The world is full of people like me who get up early every day to write in their pyjamas or dressing gowns, squeezing in the words before they go to work. Other people write in their lunch hours or late into the night. All that dedication and inspiration could fuel the National Grid. But where does it take us?
For short stories and flash fiction, there are hundreds of competitions which can inspire the writer. I find the discipline of competition deadlines helpful and the themes many of them suggest are inspiring. Prizes can be good too: I once won a three month supply of breakfast cereal for writing a 300 word flash fiction about a werewolf who was scared of a milkman.
Entering short story and flash fiction competitions is one thing: getting a book published is quite another. When I had finished writing my first fiction book, No Milk Today, I made a list of agents from the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook and checked what their submission criteria were. Some wanted three chapters, some didn’t. Some wanted a 100 word pitch, others wanted a covering letter. Every agency, it appeared, wanted something different. It took hours getting it all together but I persevered. Some submissions were met with a standard response advising that if I hadn’t heard anything within three months, I could presume they weren’t interested.
I think I expected bells to ring and sirens to go off after I sent off my agency submissions. Instead there was silence. I carried on with my other writing, checking my emails at least a hundred times a day. After 18 months of writing my book, of living with the characters and carrying them round in my head, the world seemed to have suddenly stopped and become silent.
Days, weeks and months passed. I think I had one personal reply from the agents I submitted to. And then one day I was reading an article in Writing Magazine about self-publishing. Could I? Should I? Wasn’t it all a rip off? Throughout my writing life there had always been warnings about vanity publishing where a writer paid vast sums to someone to publish their book and ended up with a garage full of unsold, poorly produced copies. Wasn’t self-publishing just for those who couldn’t get published? An option only second class writers were left with? There was only one way to find out.
Liz Gwinnell lives with words, cats, bees and wool in Wiltshire.
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