I never thought I would get to the point where I could call myself a writer.

But I’ve always written. I’ve kept a diary since I was eleven. At school, I wrote stories for the delectation of my peers in the playground. After school, I wrote stories and even the odd poem, but didn’t show them to anyone. I got out of the habit of sharing stuff I’d written, and this allowed me to write things that were more personal; it became a crazy spiral of writing for myself, for my own benefit, and nobody was ever going to see any of that stuff, ever. Writing became therapeutic, a way of expressing things I wouldn’t have dreamed of saying out loud.

National Novel Writing Month kind of changed all that, for me.

The idea of writing a novel – a whole, full-length book – was simultaneously crazy and exciting. I would be able to call myself a novellist, and best of all, I would never have to show anyone what I’d written. It was like being given permission to spread my wings.

I participated in Nanowrimo for four years before I ended up with something that I thought wasn’t actually that bad. It was finished, or rather it had a beginning, middle and end; it had some strong characters. It had something to say.

I thought I would have a go at editing it; but I’d never edited anything before. I went back over the same bits over and over again and got bored and frustrated and fed up with it.  One weekend I ended up having an animated discussion with my cousin Mike about it. He seemed impressed that I’d written a novel (how exciting it sounds, doesn’t it?) but couldn’t understand why I hadn’t sent it off for anyone to look at.

Sending it off hadn’t really, truthfully, crossed my mind. Publishing deals were something that happened to other people. But Mike pressed me about it. If not now, when? he said. Why not?

So, I did. It’s cutting a long story short, and maybe I will write about this in another entry, but let’s just say I had a run of incredible good fortune. The result of it all is that my novel Into the Darkest Corner is being published by Myriad Editions on 14th February 2011.

As if all this isn’t exciting enough, Myriad also want to publish my next two books!  My second book, Under a Hunter’s Moon is almost finished.

This November, I am going to write book three. So you see, this writing process matters an awful lot to me. By the end of November I will have at least 50,000 words towards Book 3, and this will end up being published too.

Welcome to November, lovely readers. Come with me on a journey to create a book. Come with me and watch a novel being born…