Skip to main content

How I Started Writing

Hi readers!


Thanks for taking a look at my first blog post! ‘So,’ I hear you cry, ‘how did you write your first book, Talking to Lobsters?’ (Buy it on Amazon here!)   That’s a great question, thanks for asking it!

Well, like a lot of new writers, it was the middle of the pandemic, early 2021, and I was pretty stressed. In addition to Corona, I’d only been out as trans for about a year, and I was in the final year of a languages degree with the Open University. 

I’ve always written songs to escape this kind stress. The songs I used to write generally had a sort of weird sci-fi vibe about them, and my favourite part of the song writing process had always been writing the lyrics, so, I thought I’d try my hand at short stories. 

I didn’t have a lot of time on my hands due to the other stuff going on in my life, so I utilised the bit of free time that everyone has in abundance... time on the loo! 

Yeah, this might be too much information, but for months, I took my iPad to the loo with me and wrote a few sentences each time. I’d make sure that I kept it with me just in case I found myself on the sofa or a train platform with a few minutes to spare too, as you never knew when you might get a couple of minutes to just get a few words down. Consequently, over the next few months, my stories started to take shape.

After I’d finished each one, I showed it to my wife, who gave me a few hints and tips on how to improve it, and then I would go back and tweak it. Without this feedback, I wouldn’t be getting the positive response I’ve had from people. 

At this stage, I still wasn’t planning on releasing a book; I thought about maybe sending some of the stories to sci-fi and fantasy magazines, but hadn’t considered an entire book. Luckily, however, once I started writing stories, I kept having ideas for more, and before long I had enough to justify putting out an entire collection. I did send a few individual stories off to magazines, but they weren’t interested. It’s fine that they weren’t interested; I mean, that happens to most inexperienced authors when they’re first starting out, and I could’ve continued to seek out more publications and plugged away until someone picked up a story, but being trans, I’m used to gatekeeping; whether it’s for healthcare, or for legal status, I’ve had a whole lot of people make me jump through a whole lot of hoops over the last couple of years, so I wanted to take control of my writing and just do it for myself. 

The next thing I knew, I was watching videos about how to format a book on the Kindle Direct Publishing site, and after a few weeks of tinkering around with the manuscript, Talking to Lobsters was born.

The feedback I’ve had has been fab, and I’m thrilled to have the book out there in the world. All I need to do now is work out how to promote the thing!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Novel or Novella: Does Size Matter?

Throughout 2017 and 2018, I worked on a translation of the French sci-fi book ‘Un Roman dans la planète Mars’ by André Laurie (A Story of the Planet Mars, available to buy on Amazon at this link here ). It is an old novella, first published in 1895, that had long ceased to be within copyright. My hope was that if I could translate a book which was out of copyright, I could then look for a specialist publisher who might be interested in putting it out. Then, I would have a genuine bona-fide published book out in the world, and I thought that this might be enough of a proven portfolio of work to allow me to convince publishers to let me translate their contemporary French works.  However, the response I got from every publisher was exactly the same: ‘The book is too short, so it’s not worth us putting it out by itself. Novellas just don’t sell very well, particularly ones as niche as this.’ I did convince one publisher to let me translate another one of Laurie’s works which could the...

Why Self-Publishing Is Awesome!

‘I’ve read ninety blog posts on whether I should self-publish or not!’  I hear you cry. OK, I hear you. There are a million blogs that basically conclude with the same thing - that it depends on what your publishing goals are and what kind of thing you’re writing as to whether you should choose traditional publishing or self-publishing. Ah! But I’m not going to tell you that because I think self-publishing is awesome and traditional publishing can get in the bin! I think I’ve mentioned in a previous post that as a trans woman, I’m used to gatekeeping, i.e. every time I go to see a healthcare professional about trans-related healthcare, I have to prove to them that I’m ‘really trans’ as if, you know, I can’t be trusted to decide who I am without an old-white-cis-man holding my hand as I do it. But when I started writing, I still effectively subjected myself to the same process by sending stories off to magazines who would then reject them. What I wanted from these magazines was for ...

Some Book Reviews I've Written!

Hi all! Below is a reposting of some book reviews I wrote for my Goodreads page. I hope they're useful! Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (5/5 stars) I've got to be honest from the get-go: Gideon the Ninth is amazing! This is the best book I've read in YEARS! The main characters are all so perfectly crafted, and you love them all, even if the titular Gideon is, in the words of author Tamsyn Muir 'a dickhead'. The writing just leaps off the page and never gets in the way of the story it's trying to tell. It's written with such sharp humour, too, that I was often caught laughing out loud on the bus. I would kill to be able to write like that! The universe that the story takes place within is incredibly original; I've only ever read stories where necromancy is featured as 'that thing you NEVER do', until, of course, somebody goes and does it, with catastrophic consequences. In the world of Gideon, however, necromancy is the only magic game in town, an...