Sneaking in Quietly to Say 'Hello'

Oddly enough, I never doubted that I’d be a writer. From a young age, ‘I love to write’ was a standard response when asked about my pastimes. All well and good but, well, I never actually did any writing. I bought heaps of books about writing and sometimes even read them but that was as far as it went. Hopeless.

Why didn’t I write? Now there’s a question. I suppose I thought that I could write and, if I did, I’d be good at it. But there again, if I actually wrote something, I might turn out to be rubbish. As someone surprisingly lacking in confidence, I took the easy way out. I didn’t write a word. Ever.

During a funny turn one morning, however, I signed up for a short poetry-writing course with the OU. I did ok. I then did their fiction-writing shortie: if I got a decent mark, I would take the plunge and sign up for the scary ‘big one’ in Creative Writing. If I did well in that, I would write the novel I had started as an assignment. I got a distinction. Yay! Maybe I wasn’t rubbish after all.

So, biting my nails and wondering how on earth I was going to manage this novel-writing lark, I happened upon the Novel Racers. And I’m doing it: I’m really writing. ‘Look at me, I’m writing a novel’, I think as I tap away in the dark at the crack of dawn.

I feel proud to be part of the Novel Race – not just the published among us (which are increasing rapidly, how fab!) but the others like me, pottering along and trying to type with our fingers crossed. The Novel Racers support is great; I doubt I’d have got this far without it.

So, while others have finished their first drafts or submitted to publishers, I’m still bumbling along . I shall continue my daily torture in Retail Hell, continue my neglect of the housework and keep at it. Tap tap tap. A hundred words here, a hundred words there. Watch this space!