Hellcat blogging

How it's going

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 23:53:50 GMT

Lockdown: you know how it started, but how it's going? That's another story

You’re probably thinking, if you still find me interesting enough to open this blog, “She’s always banging on about writing, but where the hell is any of it?!”

Remember how I wanted to make lockdown count? I wanted to say I was able to do something with 2020 and therefore I was determined to finish another novel?

Well, finish another novel I did! In fact, I was so in love with the story and the characters that it was hard to peel me away from it towards the end.

I outlined it – something I had never done before – and that worked really well.

I made a point of setting aside time each day – 9pm-midnight – that, too, worked really well, up to 4000 words a night would appear and I’d find myself, still writing at 2am (often on a night when I had to be up for work in the morning). Luckily I’d been remote working for over a year before covid struck.

But another thing that spurred me on was that one night whilst reading an entertaining romance novel, and considering my new venture into romance was flying along, I checked to see whether the imprint was taking submissions.

My writing is, I hope, at the very least entertaining after all...

...and they were taking submissions.

But at the time there was no deadline as to when that submission window might close.

Concerned that the excess reading the editors were doing during lockdown would dry up as soon as the lockdown started to ease, and knowing what I’m like for procrastination, I opted to keep to my word, finish that novel and see if I could submit it before they chose to close their doors.

The draft was ready in time for my self-imposed deadline date of the 7th of August – as, yes ladies and gents I’m that odd. The publisher promised a 12 week reply and 12 weeks from that very day was the Friday before Halloween.

Even though this book isn’t in anyway spooky or supernatural – in the strictest sense, anyway – it seemed like a very me milestone. Time to get some reading done, relax my mind while the world kept on spinning at a new weird angle.

Now, what I hadn’t remembered, in full at least, was the agonising wait that submitting any of my writing to just about anyone has always brought me, and the inner voice that screams;

AM I ANY GOOD AT THIS SHIT?

ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?

The imprint in question is part of one of the “Big 5”, and the last time I submitted to (a different imprint within) this particular member of that club I knew that I was on the slush pile with 4560 other writers.

They too promised to get back to us within 12 weeks. Then they realised how much of a nightmare it would be to get through that level of material and it wiped out a year.

A YEAR.

(Well 51 weeks almost exactly, I still have the emails)

However, they kept us up to date. Each time they emailed to say they had whittled the pile down a bit further and a bit further and that if you had been unsuccessful you would have heard by now. The last I heard before getting my rejection was that I had made it to the top 250 and that second reads were in process. Exciting stuff, and a story I still tell anyone, including you, who’ll pay attention.

That book was awful looking back and it didn’t do so well when I cleaned it up the first time around and self-published it. I believe in the character set, so I’ve been trying to shape it up ever since in the belief that the longer I work as a professional writer in another capacity, the better my writing might be becoming.

I tell myself I won’t care when the rejection letter comes, so long as someone enjoyed it.

I also know that’s not true and I’ll wonder if I’m actually really crap at this game and want to quit. Of the three friends I offered a beta copy to, one has read it and proclaimed it to be the best thing I’ve written so far... progress is progress even if it still isn’t worthy of a bestseller list, so I’ll take that.

So here we are nearing the end of February 2021, and it’s been 6 months since I let my romance novel out of the nest.

At first the reading holiday was great, then as we spilled over the 12 week mark and I knew I should be getting on with the sequel my one reader had already requested, I locked up, even though the idea is there. The self-doubt was hitting HARD. Day-job work stress wasn’t helping. Then lockdowns 2 and 3 hit HARDER.

I wouldn’t call myself blocked for the last 3-6 months, it feels more ridiculous than that. Not knowing where to go next is more like it. There are two supernatural novels to fix, a sequel to write and to add to the torture (I mean adventure) another romance to continue now I’ve entered a competition with another of the big 5 – I've promised myself I’ll continue with it even if I don’t make the next stage.

After all that the answer is I’m one giant stress ball sitting on three completed novels, two that need editorial work, one under submission. To add to my hoarding pile there are at least 50 ideas and 5 rough outlines sitting on my phone, in notepads and my hard drive. Maybe it’s the fear of failure, maybe it’s the fear of rejection before it’s happened. My dream is to write products that entertain, but I’m worried that I’m not even interesting enough to make someone sick.

Hellcat in lockdown

Sun, 05 Apr 2020 23:40:46 GMT

Time is all we need

Having already told you a little bit about how I started writing, it may not come as a complete shock that I seem to be handling the virus lockdown better than I initially expected. Even if I am missing everyone (and hugs) like crazy – the introvert (and teenager) in me, are both quite at home.

With having had some days off due to a house move that couldn’t happen, this is all starting to feel like the summer holidays in which I used to get a SHITLOAD of my earliest writing done.

I’ve never had or really wanted much of a social life and spent all my summer holidays from 1997-2005 writing as much as I could (even jotting notes on the back of cinema flyers – re: the college and university years). It feels good to get that mojo back; first starting out, creating my own worlds and it feeling amazing and a tiny bit (read: massively) badass.

In a rather pessimistic run of apocalyptic movies, E4 have even run Independence Day this week! I was obsessed with that film the first summer I started scribbling furiously on a notepad whilst sat on my bed, a tiny portable TV linked to my VHS player talking mostly to itself across the room.

The sun shining outside, music in my ears or easy-viewing (Disney, 90s movies, Red Dwarf ) on in the background and literally NOTHING else to do – aside from the day-job – means all the nostalgia feels which are stirring up some crazy creative vibes.

With the realisation that such an opportunity may never present itself again (thankfully and hopefully), I want to make the most of this time. Because time is all most of us have right now and that is more precious than we ever fully appreciate, and I feel I do a marvellous job of wasting it already.

Now, not going to lie, I had to google this next part before I did it but... I’ve outlined two new novels! Alright so I’d already started one of them, but it lost direction around 17,000 words. Ordinarily, I’m what they call a ‘Pantser’, I’ve never used many writing aids and once I start writing I kinda just roll with it until all the scenes I’d like to write have slotted together and there’s a rough beginning, middle and end.

I’m pleased to report that it seems I’d followed the guidelines accidentally with my first (18-year-old) novel – even if the writing is terrible. I’ve been re-reading that too and I’m beginning to lose hope that I can ever save it.

Being a Learning Designer of six years in real life, it dawned on me how a set outline/scope/list of topics is the must-have tool for writing a course I have little to no prior knowledge of and that as a result I might work better from a detailed brief these days. So, I did a little refresher on plot, checked out some example outlines and have drawn up a template of my own and populated it twice.

Now I’m armed with easy-to-follow guidelines for both novels and short stories with two novels ready for take-off – hell, one is even halfway down the runway and gaining speed already. I read a fantastic quote recently on the Middle Finger Project blog and feel it is an appropriate aviation-relevant battle-cry here: “Wheels up motherf*cker!”

Let’s get this baby off the ground.

As per my first blog post, I’m not going to promise to have anything ready for you to read by the time life is allowed to enter into whatever the new normal is going to look like, but for once I feel like less of a fraud whilst using my evenings to string words together rather than just cups of tea and/or biscuits.

(IF a short story pops out of all this, I MIGHT just pop it on the website – but no promises, I suck at those too!)

It's all about you (and me)

Fri, 21 Feb 2020 16:42:17 GMT

Why I’m writing this blog and why you might think it’s all about me

Why do I tell you all this crap about myself? I’m beginning to suspect my posts may come across as self-indulgent, that may be the imposter in me, it may be that I’m fearful my message will be lost.

I tell you how I came to be a writer (in case you’re interested AND) in the hopes that you will take inspiration in my randomness to know that you too can be anything you want to be. And that if you’ve ever wanted to see a book or an article with your own name on it, I will stand behind that shit 100% and answer any questions you have that I can.

I'm a huge advocate of people enjoying whatever the hell and becoming whatever the hell they want to be. I have beaten my head against that “It's not for you” brick wall and blamed myself; often for the way I look, speak, work or act. I have worked in gated industries and sexist industries, I've seen the walled-gardens we make both for each other and ourselves.

Hellcat Publishing has been something I've sat on for a long time and it took me even longer to realise why the name meant so much to me, but it's this – I am different, I embrace the different because everyone IS different and I'm going to keep using that word until it's the new 'normal'.

I’ve had the arguments with self-proclaimed “creative types” who told me I should be reading and watching stories that make me think. My answer will always be the same; Yes, I find those stories fascinating, I applaud and enjoy those too, but sometimes I just wanna laugh or cry my ass off in the name of a little escapism. And as I’ve said before, escapism was my route into writing in the first place.

It disheartens me when I see or hear someone putting down or dismissing another person’s dreams, hobbies and preferences. While working in large print – an area of the publishing industry that takes submissions of already-published works from larger publishers rather than authors or agents – I did receive an unsolicited submission in the form of a fan fiction short.

My manager told me to bin it, I think, it was a while ago, but the advice certainly wasn’t to do what I did. As a writer myself, I couldn’t bear to think of sending anything I’d written out into the void for it to be ignored. I’d have (briefly) convinced myself I wasn’t worthy of a response and thought about giving up – this never lasts long in writers with “the bug” we’ll usually do it anyway (#amIright?).

I wrote the author a letter, politely explaining why we weren’t a publishing company of that nature and encouraged her to continue writing. As I said, this was a while ago (around 10 years), and she could be a multi-million bestseller by now for all I know!

Over the years I’ve had many people ask me how to get into writing, how to do it, writers reading this, you’ve all heard “I wish I could write a book” or “I hope to write a book someday”. My answer is always “DO IT!”

The very fact that you’ve considered it, makes it a very real possibility.

There will be more of my ramblings to come on the how’s and why’s in the coming posts, for now, I leave you with a reading list I HIGHLY recommend you check out if you don’t feel you can be who you want to be or do what you want to do.

It’s a photo BECAUSE these awesome creative types and writers gave me the proverbial slap to the face that I needed. I’m still going to do things my way, the Hellcat way, however that shapes out to be this year, but these guys tell ALL of us, that that’s O’Fuckin’kay .

(NOTE: I am not affiliated with these writers in any way, I just love their infectious positivity)

Hellcat Reading

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 23:05:01 GMT

Late bloomer, slow starter... no faster now.

If I had my way, and maybe one day I might, I’d take the whole of December off and dedicate it to reading as well as the usual December frivolities (you may have guessed that the shortest day excites me a little more than Christmas Day itself does). Well, if not the whole of December, at least the week leading into the Winter Solstice (provided I can get my wrapping completed Cinders).

Having worked Christmases in bookstores (probably a story for another day) and 4.5 years in Large Print Publishing (definitely a story for another day) - it won’t surprise anyone to discover that there are hundreds of books shoved in every nook and cranny where I live.

What will probably surprise you, is that I’ve probably only read around 10% of them.

I am a hideously slow, and easily distracted, reader.

Sure, there are the odd gems that latch on and don’t let go until I’ve finished (raced through) them, but they’re kinda rare these days.

I go through patches of hardly touching a book, and I go through patches of attempting to read 8-20 at a time. (No, this doesn’t work either.)

Neither am I particularly fussy about the format; paperback, kindle, tablet, mobile app, audible, I’ll soak in the material drip by drip however I find it. Hardbacks I have been known to avoid, but that’s a comfort thing and nothing to do with what are often very beautiful editions.

What I am fussy about, is the inspiration to read. The more you tell me I should read something, the more likely I am to struggle with, or even hate it. My editorial manager at the publishing house never did wrap her head around my lack of knowledge when it came to classical literature. And until that role it had never occurred to me just how few novels had appeared on the curriculum at GCSE or A Level – and I took English Literature as a separate paper for both.

Despite having parents who both love to read, and read often, it took me a long time to grasp the habit. Much to my mum’s despair. My mum, who would read to me from the moment I was born and made sure books were as present in my childhood as toys were, has a photograph of me sitting in a basket holding an ABC book upside down – granted it was before I could walk, so I probably chewed it moments later.

When it came to learning to read, I had to have a certain level of interest in which to care. Key Stage books? Biff, Chip and Kipper? Enid Blyton? Sod ‘em. I didn’t care for them. I’ve still never read a Famous Five book. But have I read almost everything Roald Dahl has ever written? You bet.

I don’t remember wanting to read until Mr Simmons, a visiting teacher to my year 4 class, read Danny Champion of the World to us bit by bit until the book was finished. After that I read every Roald Dahl I could get my hands on. I still remember unwrapping a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for Christmas that year and devouring it.

Interestingly, I still haven’t managed to read James and the Giant Peach, I’m not sure how I missed that one. (I have a copy, I’ll get to it – one day).

Since childhood, spats of devouring pockets of the literary world in short bursts has been something I am prone to. First, I focused on authors, Roald Dahl, Jill Murphy... then the Point Horror books as a teen. College saw me tear through Tami Hoag’s crime novels and discover weird and quirky books from Tom Holt and Neil Gaiman.

Uni was when I fell into the genres that would shape my own writing once and for all: Supernatural Horror and Paranormal Romance. Bitten by Kelley Armstrong was the big one for me and soon followed Charlaine Harris, Lyndsay Sands, Katie MacAlister, Nora Roberts and Natasha Rhodes (who I still check up on on social media as she seems to have stopped writing after 3 Kayla Steele Novels and I live in hope that we’ll get a follow-up).

Throughout college and university I started sharing my favourites with my mum and we discovered a mutual love of binge-reading authors. She reads far faster than I do and has over taken me on both the Lyndsay Sands and J.D. Robb books.

My dad and I share a mutual fondness for the absurd, but we probably read at a similar pace and have never competed over finishing a novel.

I may still be slow with the pages themselves, but I wonder whether my parents ever foresaw that ensuring I always had a book nearby would influence my life quite so much. Not only do I read as often as I can, I write – and I have made a career from words. I also frequently add to their bookshelves.

In fact, now that I think about it, I’ve found a way to include books and stories in almost every job I’ve had – even if it has meant carrying one around in the back pocket of my Odeon uniform or reading on Kindle in my car on a lunch break.

Most of my “In Progress” pile sits beside my bed, the pile is currently as follows (keep in mind that it IS still December...):

Nora Roberts – This Christmas (paperback)

Hark! The Herald Angels Scream – Christopher Golden (Ed) (paperback)

Good Morning, Midnight – Jean Rhys (paperback)

The Word for Woman is Wilderness – Abi Andrews (paperback)

The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing (paperback)

Beginnings – J E Nice (paperback)

The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories – Tara Moore (Ed) (paperback)

Just for Christmas – Scarlett Bailey (paperback)

Spirits of the Season: Christmas Hauntings – British Library (paperback)

Last Christmas – Greg Wise & Emma Thompson (hardback)

A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens (Kindle)

How I got started

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 22:51:24 GMT

How I started writing, the early days:

Whilst it’s true that I used writing to hide from ‘normal’ teenage life, it is not the reason I started.

Music has always been a huge part of my life. Not only because it was my first hiding place, nothing clears my mind faster than uplifting tunes, it was (and still is) a huge passion of my dad’s. Catch him right and he’ll tell you all about his DJ years (mostly local youth club and school dances in 1970s Oxfordshire).

Though it took me some years to realise it, as a child of the 80’s, CD players don’t really pre-date me all that much. My dad, an avid record collector, moved onto CDs as soon as his budget allowed, after which our house was often filled with my parents favourite music. I once found my dad by himself in the front room listening to a Moody Blues album in the dark – one of his favourite ways to drink in an album.

I can remember dancing around the coffee table in the front room with first one then two sisters, making up scenarios to act out as my favourite TV characters based on how the music felt, happy or sad, uplifting or dark. I might be She-Ra running from Hordak to an O.M.D track one moment, an airhostess flying high to the Urban Cookie Collective, the next (what I originally wanted to be when I grew up).

By the time I headed for secondary school, I had my own personal cassette player and a collection of mix tapes and singles. Though it baffled certain family members, I would listen to my cassettes at the same time as reading books. I didn’t find it distracting, more a soundtrack the author hadn’t chosen.

Getting lost in music has always been something I find incredibly easy to do, and it doesn’t matter whether I’m reading, writing, driving (I’m a car singer – helps retain focus), cooking or working.

There was an unexpected benefit from this anti-social hobby. One of my favourite mix tapes from 1995 nudged my imagination so hard that I started to formulate a story by connecting the songs together. Each time I listened to it the images would build and the ‘what next?’ would get more detailed.

It took me until 1997 (when I had moved on to building my own CD collection) to consider writing the ideas down – thinking I might one day forget them. I turned 14 that summer and by the time of my birthday I had a first draft of 100 A4 pages in my hands.

I still remember telling my dad about my creation, stood in the kitchen washing and drying the dinner dishes between us. The way that conversation went opened my eyes to what the future could be like. All the books I’d ever read had had to come from somewhere, and I’d just taken my first step into joining a world of authors – people who had the fun of making stuff up for a living!

My long-standing characters Lorna and her twin brother Kieran were born out of that summer and throughout my GCSE and A Level years I wrote them – and some characters that didn’t make it to my university years – many more adventures that will never see the light of day.

Listening to music in the dark is something I also started doing in 1997 and can highly recommend.

Ironically, as I complete this blog post, James Horner’s Titanic Suite is giving me rolls of nostalgia for that first year of my life as a writer. I love a good soundtrack, but that’s another story...

What is a hellcat anyway?

Wed, 06 Nov 2019 23:31:06 GMT

Why I call myself a hellcat:

Being “normal” was something I fought hard for as a teenager. It was a losing battle from the start.

Aside from the usual teenage acne and puppy fat (not so puppy as the years went on) I had bright red hair so frizzy it could break brushes – the 90s version of “normal” couldn’t have been further from my truth. (It also took me until I was almost 18 to understand you don’t brush curly hair – unless you’re straightening it, which was near on impossible in the mid 90s without an ironing board and great care. *I never actually tried this).

By the time I’d stopped brushing my curls, I’d also started to care less about what people thought of me. The pressures of school were gone and there was far less judgement from 16-18-year-olds than there ever had been from 11-16-year-olds (kids are arseholes).

A new educational step also came with new friends and the discovery that there were others out there like me. Other writers, other socially awkward lovelies who didn’t care for that word “normal” either.

Suddenly it was ok to be different. In fact, it was encouraged. At times it was taken too far – a story I’ll keep for later that has ruined at least one potential relationship, apparently there is only so much weird you should share on a second date...

Perhaps I took it too far at times, but by the time I headed for University in Southampton – aged 19 after an unexpected gap year – I was proud to say I did things my way. A trait I didn’t even fully appreciate until a lecturer asked my class to consider their writing style – what type of writer was I?

Having always written first and considered the niceties of the prose later, I had been writing solely for me. I didn’t have a famous writer I hoped to channel through style or substance (still don’t). So when asked what my style was, I replied ‘I just write and see what comes out’.

For that my lecturer rewarded me with the phrases ‘avant garde’ and ‘a bit of a maverick’ to use, he said, in future bios. Something I haven’t forgotten – and not just because Top Gun is one of my favourite films.

So, I’ve been doing things my way ever since. After all, trying to do just about anything someone else’s way has almost always frustrated me.

With a fascination for the odd, the strange, and the downright weird, I decided to run with my kooky side and one day, shortly after that class, I doodled a cat with horns, devil wings and a tail – seem familiar?

Even into adulthood it’s taken me a long time to embrace the different, and understand that doing things your way isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, often, it’s an amazing thing.

I still pick up books and opt to watch films that are perhaps to some a bit weird. The odder the better. The further outside the box something is, the more likely I’ll be curious to know more. I watch horror films with a fascination for the initial writing process, reminding myself that someone had to dream that scene up in the first place.

My inner rebel gives a little whoop when another writer or artist sticks two fingers up to normal so I too will continue to write, create and do things my way and that’s what makes me a Hellcat, writing, reading and publishing.

Missing my deadline

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 00:40:06 GMT

Where it all began and how time flies:

When I first started writing, as an awkward, overweight and spotty teen, I did so because I had an awful lot of time on my hands. I have never fit in with the norm and therefore didn’t have a huge amount of friends, wasn’t exactly popular and could be found watching Red Dwarf videos (actual VHS) on a Friday night rather than sitting in a park sharing a nasty-as bottle of cheap cider someone would have coerced their older sibling to buy for them.

No one ever told me to be more social (well, maybe my dad, once) or disapproved of my sitting around in the living room plugged into my walkman at every waking hour, my nose buried in a notepad – if it was mentioned at all it was because it was too loud and the concern was more for my hearing.

I look back and realise that I missed a lot of what was going on around me and I’m surprised no one asked me to unplug and be part of the room.

Fast forward twenty-two years and I’m stunned that there were ever that many free hours in a day. Those days, as they say, are definitely gone.

Hour after hour I used to be able to churn out page after page of handwritten prose, probably in the region of 4-5000 words a day. I have manuscripts sitting in boxes to this day ranging from 98 A4 pages long (my very first attempt, May 1997) to 1000 pages (written during my GCSE year aged 15).

I wrote that way until I headed to University where I upgraded to a laptop and wrote the very first version of what was to become the first novel I would later self-publish.

(The antisocial side of me continued through University and I wrote two full-length novels in the three years – but only two, I tried).

By the time full-time work was the reality, so too were adult relationships. I get on very well with my parents and suddenly plugging into a personal music player at every waking moment felt rude. Moving out of home didn’t help this much, in a post credit-crunch society I have often lived in house shares. Again, awkward.

Make no mistake, everyone knows I’m a writer, well-meaning friends, flatmates and family often ask how the writing is going. But my friends these days aren’t teenagers, and they invite me to be social no matter how odd my sense of humour is or if I’m already in PJs for the night at 6pm.

Add to that an unhealthy (I used to think this was healthy) dose of ‘I need a real job/career too because writing rarely pays’ and I’ve increasingly chosen real life over the imaginary friends I’d love to share with the rest of the world.

The stress of trying to build a worth-while career at the expense of a creative outlet is something I’m sure we have all experienced at some point.

Now, if you’re a writer like me, you’ll be tutting at me and shaking your head. One does not simply shut out the characters who ask for their story to be told.

Yes, I have more ideas than I may ever have the time to write down in my lifetime.

So what am I doing about it? Not a lot, so far, but I’m hoping to get better, hence this blog – and this too, is late.

It's highly embarrassing to miss the first self-set deadline. All of the above has lead to a bad time-management habit. I’m also guilty of over-estimating my ability to bend technology to my will.

Having been a Learning Designer for almost six years at this point and often at the mercy of authoring tools (if you know, you know), a little web-builder should have been the last of my woes. Get the text written, I thought, then plonking it in the site builder will be quick... Um, not quite.

Having screamed at the web builder in frustration twice, I ran out of time to complete this post on Friday and here I sit late on a Sunday night, re-writing.

With everything I’ve said in mind, I know a lot of writers carve out writing time, but I seem thoroughly incapable of this. The ideas will keep coming though, so I’ll keep trying.