It Puts The Blog In The Basket

On Friday 20th December 2024 my fourth book will be published. It’s the fourth and final book in the Ransomed Hearts series. No spoilers, I promise.

I have mixed feelings, on some level I didn’t want to get to this stage, because it could be the end of my journey as a self published writer. Self publishing is expensive, and right now I don’t have an income or a lot to fall back on. I got a windfall, some years ago, and decided that some of it would be spent getting my stories out into the world. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot more stories, but my deal with myself only involved these four books. I say ‘mixed feelings’ because on another level I’m proud of the books, and the reception they’ve had. People have been asking for book 4, and are invested in the characters. Those characters are my imaginary friends, the people who have populated my internal world for twenty or more years. I’m glad that I’ve told their story, and that they’re now known outside my own head.

It’s over twenty years since I started writing the short story that would become Ransomed Hearts and Hearts’ Home. It started with a scene that’s barely in the book now, which came from a dream that wouldn’t go away. A werewolf, hunting dark city backstreets, eating rats and feeling that she was in the right place. The dream expanded into my waking life and I had mild hallucinations about this woman. She didn’t have a name. It expanded, she met other werewolves, and we started to find out more about their lives. It finished at about seventy thousand words, and I realised that it had a plot, characters, a subplot and all sorts of interesting things going on. On impulse, I sent the first chapter to a small press. I hadn’t even edited it. It was literally fresh off the keyboard, and my husband was the only other person who’d read it. He’d sat up all night reading it, which was a real compliment.

To my surprise and delight, my email found one of the volunteer readers for the small press that very night, and she asked for the full story. The following morning I got a message from her saying that she’d been up all night reading it, and that she was going to take the story to the boss. Well, that was easy!

Later that week, it transpired that there was no space in the schedule for another book, but the small press did like it, and one of the editors had volunteered to work with me to improve it, to get it ready for next year’s schedule. He said it was too short, and asked for another twenty or thirty thousand words. He recommended changing the point of view to third person. And as we were working on these things, he left the industry. I hope he’s doing really well, because that advice was absolutely on the nose. Unfortunately his change in direction lost me the opportunity at the small press.

Xan wasn’t originally in the book, and neither was Joyce. They were added because I needed to enlarge the scope of the book. Ironically, they seem to be the characters that most readers want more of, perhaps because I was a slightly more experienced writer when they came into my life.

So, I wrote my book, and I couldn’t find another publisher, or an agent. I was working part time back then, and volunteering pretty much full time for a national cat rescue charity. Finding time to write or edit was difficult. And then, I developed gallstones. Gallstones made me into a writer. I was up all night, most nights, with the pain, and I wrote to distract myself from it. I rewrote the first book, I wrote it from two different perspectives, which made it grow and grow. Eventually, I conceded that it was two books, Hearts’ Home being the second one.

I carried on writing, I wrote a sequel, which is now Silverwood Rising. It carries on directly from the events of Heart’s Home. You can view Ransomed Hearts, Hearts’ Home, and Silverwood Rising as one story, spanning three books.

I was too busy and tired to look for agents or publishers, but I did go to a subsidised creative writing class at the Continental pub in Preston. It was organised by Jane Brunning, of the sadly missed Lancashire Writing Hub. Speakers included Nicholas Royle of Nightjar Press, and Zoe Lambert, now a lecturer in creative writing at Lancaster University. It was there that I met the editor Dea Parkin, the proprietor of the editing consultancy Fiction Feedback, along with her friend Victoria Walsh. Victoria is a brilliant writer, but she’s quiet at the moment, writing wise. Other writers on the course were Dana Nadeau and Alan Whelan. Alan’s tales about his travels were fascinating and funny, and I would recommend his books.

In the wake of that course, I joined a small creative writing group at the same venue, and started to go to the Word Soup spoken word events there. I watched and listened to David Hartley, Carys Bray, Emma Decent, Fat Roland, Sarah-Clare Conlon and a host of other talented writers and performers who blew my tiny mind. I never knew, I mean, I never knew that that kind of thing went on in the dark corners of pubs in north west England. It was there that I stood up and read my own fictional stuff out loud for the first time. I have a choppy academic background, of sorts, I’ve written and delivered a postgraduate course, I’ve taught undergraduates, I have never had any trouble standing up in front of a class and teaching. This was different, this was my own heart that I was holding up for inspection. It was terrifying and exhilarating and my hands trembled like a trapped dove. I was hooked.

I wrote short stories, flash fiction, poetry. I read Writers’ Review and submitted a short story, which was printed and earned me £100. To this day it’s the most lucrative thing I’ve ever written. I joined Twitter, and ‘met’ the author, broadcaster and anthologist Hannah Priest, who under her nom de plume of Hannah Kate was putting together an anthology, Wolf Girls, about female werewolves. I wrote a story for it, in the same universe as my novels, and submitted it. It was accepted. Over the next few years I wrote three more stories for Hannah’s anthologies, you can find them in Impossible Spaces, Hauntings, and Nothing.

And the world of Ransomed Hearts and Silverwood kept on growing. There are many stories set after the events of Silverwood Rising, but the story that I needed to tell you all was the tale of Frances and Anthony, of Miriam and Tomas, and of how they met and what became of them. It was a story of the 1960s and two young men who wanted their music to shine, but who had to hide. It was a love story, and a story about twins, and a story about trying to survive the hate of a ridiculous yet powerful force. So I wrote Fight for the Future and once it was finished, I knew that I wanted to publish it.

By this time, the writing group at the Continental had folded, but Victoria Walsh had kindly introduced me to Chorley and District Writing Circle, usually known as Chorley Writers. They met in the upstairs room of the Hartwood Hall pub, on the A6 just outside Chorley. It was there that I met Dea Parkin again, along with a host of other writers including the late, great Dave Harrison. Many of the people I met there are still in my life, as friends and fellow writers. For reasons too boring to go into, I left Chorley Writers a year or so ago, and am now a founding member of Chorley Creative Writing Collective.

Chorley Writers had traditionally concentrated on writing, and on allowing new writers to share their writing. We critiqued kindly. We had guest speakers who advised on description, research, setting a scene, point of view, grammar and punctuation, and all the things a writer needs to know about. We ran events and learned about self publishing. Dave set up his own little publishing company and began to put his own Jenny Parker books out there. He really wanted to write sf and fantasy, and when he was diagnosed with cancer, he threw himself into writing the books that became the Tyrant fantasy trilogy, and also Anomaly, his sf novel. Dave’s gone now, and I miss his humour and gentleness at every writers group meeting we have. There is no doubt that he helped me to decide to self publish.

My husband, Adrian, fully encouraged me to get the books into the light of day. We agreed that I’d publish the first four books, and see how things went from there. I paid Dea Parkin’s Fiction Feedback to critique Fight for the Future and got two contradictory critiques back. The readers had very different reactions to the book, but both agreed that it was worth publishing. I took the sometimes passionate responses as a good thing, but then developed a holy terror of taking the next step.

For the next few years, I avoided the subject of publishing the books, although I did keep writing and rewriting more of the stories. It was a big step. For one thing, people would read them. That was a scary thought. What if ‘they’ didn’t like them. Even worse, what if they liked them and wanted more? I wrote a story for the Manchester Speculative Fiction Group, for their anthology ‘Revolutions 2’. It was accepted and published, and I was so happy about it that I started to think seriously about publishing again. I contacted Fiction Feedback again, and sent them Fight for the Future to be edited.

Also, around this time, I left my part time job. I’d been there for fifteen years, it had lost its shine, and to be fair, it wasn’t a job that anyone should be doing unless they were 100% committed to doing it very well indeed. I think that for those fifteen years, I did do it to the very best of my ability. I hope so. My husband was doing well in his job, and we agreed that I’d concentrate on my writing and my voluntary work. (And the housework, of course, I’d concentrate on the housework …) The truth was, there was enough of the voluntary work to expand into any free time I had at all, and I found it very hard to disentangle myself from it. The other volunteers were my friends, the work was challenging, worthwhile and interesting, and I was doing a lot of writing as part of my role. I wrote the newsletter, I did the social media, I sent out letters in reply to queries. I was the main contact with the press. I even got involved with running the craft stall. I was busy. The book didn’t get the attention it needed, and the edit sat in my inbox, glowering at me. I was too scared to take the next step, and I might have stayed too scared for the rest of my life. Despite this, I got involved with Lancashire Writers Association and What’s Your Story Chorley.

Then the pandemic arrived. It touched every life didn’t it? Some died, many lost loved ones, some were disabled for a long, long time. Adrian and I are introverts, we don’t like mingling at the best of times, so had no problems at all in avoiding other people, socially distancing in public, wearing masks and washing our hands at any given opportunity. In a household of two, we had every opportunity to avoid the virus, and we took them all. Adrian started to work at home, and I got stuck into the edits, engaged a cover designer (the amazing Ravven) and finally published Fight for the Future. It was well received by those who read it, put it that way. To date I’ve sold a couple of hundred copies, but I know that people are wary of starting to read an unfinished series, and now that the series is finished, I’m hoping that things will take off.

Then I had to tackle books 2 and 3, the first things I’d ever written, and the story that I’d rewritten from the perspective of several characters and from third and first point of view. I had half a million words. I had to get rid of some of them. The first step was to establish a cutting point to split the book into two. It was an obvious point that marked not only a major event, but a change in focus. Again, no spoilers. Making that cut was a big event, because it gave me a much shorter book to concentrate on, and when I finally got it back from the editor I was very happy with it. Ravven wasn’t available to do the cover, but the talented Jon Stubbington stepped into the gap and made two brilliant covers for books 2 and 3, keeping to the themes established for book 1. Ransomed Hearts came out eighteen months after Fight for the Future, and I set to work on Book 3. It didn’t have a title. I’ll tell you a secret, I am very last minute about titles. It’s always the last thing to happen. Until I have to actually ask a cover artist to design a cover, I usually don’t have a title. Eventually, it came to me, Hearts’ Home was a little bit twee, but it fit. This was the hardest book to get ready for publication, at a whopping 110 thousand words or more, it had multiple viewpoints, changing points of view, and a lot of story telling. It took nearly two years to bring it to publication, and by this time my readers and I were all ready for the last part of the story.

And so, Silverwood Rising. It was written, it had been written and rewritten for years. It was 150 thousand words long, and in desperate need of a good trim. I sat down and went to work, cutting out scenes, pages, paragraphs, sentences and words until it was only a little bit longer than Hearts’ Home. I sent it to Dea Parkin for the edit, and despite the anxiety about ‘being finished’, I edited and formatted it. Ravven was already booked to do the cover, and I’m delighted with it. I’m proud of my series and hope that you love it.

If it sells well enough, there will be more.