And so it begins...

Life has a way of taking over and carving out its own path if you let it. There comes in point everyone's life, a point which will be at a different juncture in time for everyone, where you wonder "How did I get here?".

Be it a good place or a bad place it's not always possible to pinpoint the exact Sliding Doors moment that led us there and I don't believe it is ever one single moment but a carefully fate-crafted chain of moments.

I can trace back through a series of events which led me to here, writing this blog post, each one that leap-frogged me to the next but in the interest of saving time I will start with the most relevant.

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In January 2020 I signed up to Creative Writing - an Introduction at Arts University Bournemouth near my hometown of Poole. I'd done much writing in the past as a child and a teen but it was mostly for fun and I'd never really focussed properly on it. I had, however, enjoyed it immensely.

That's what I was looking for at the time - something to bring me joy.

Thankfully, I had made the right choice and the joy came in spades. In just ten short weeks I absorbed so much knowledge from my tutor, author and writer, Christine Aziz. She helped take my writing to a whole new level, making me realise (much to my own surprise) that the genre I enjoyed reading was not the genre I was destined to write.

Her tutelage was the jumping off point for my writing career.

Following on from that it was a no brainer for me to sign up for the follow on course - The Next Chapter - with author Louise Voss. Under her mentorship my writing group became my tribe and before I knew it I was brimming with more ideas than I knew what to do with. Ten weeks just wasn't enough so I, along with some of my classmates, arranged further private tuition with Louise.

In the months that followed I managed to write my first full length manuscript, a piece of over forty thousand words. I'd barely written more than two thousand before that point. This particular piece was by no means a masterpiece; the plot had more holes than a sieve and the characters were either two dimensional or completely unbelievable. Nevertheless, I treated it like a practice run and learnt from my mistakes.

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Act 2: My current novel

Armed with more knowledge and improving skill I set out again on the treacherous journey from conception to publication. Taking inspiration and guidance from Jessica Brody's Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, I laid out a structure and set myself a target of five hundred words a day (over the five days a week I had available to write).

Some days those five hundred words could take hours, other days a mere twenty minutes. The more I practiced, coaching myself through the many moments of overthinking and over analysing, the quicker I became.

There were, of course, days I didn't write but there were also days when I did nothing but. That included a solo 'writing retreat' to Paris where I managed to rack up several thousand bonus words in just a few days. I work so much better when I'm in a place I can't potter.

Another bonus day happened when I signed up to a day in co-writing space organised by Bournemouth Writing Festival.

I was constantly having to remind myself that not every sentence I wrote had to perfect. I was simply laying the foundations of my novel, building it brick by brick. I could easily go back later and change anything that didn't work.

By the end of 2023, having started on 1st July 2023, I had a respectable sixty thousand word first draft. That was a #bigwin moment for me.

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And that is the story so far.

Share this journey with me.

Keep coming back or follow me on Instagram to find out what happens next.