I first started writing stories when I was a little girl. My first book ( handwritten and complete with very poor illustrations ) was called "The Magic Hedgehog." I won my first writing competition when I was seven years old for an essay on "What I want to be when I grow up". I still have it and at that time, it seems my ambition was to be a hairdresser. When I was 12 a friend and I wrote a magazine for the village we lived in. We published the "Brancepeth Monthly" for two years, writing, typing, duplicating and delivering all the copies ourselves to the 200+ residents of the village. We donated the profits to charity. I think boys and exams must have taken over after that because I was all grown up before I started writing again and by that time it had become my job. I worked as a public relations consultant, writing press releases and feature articles for newspapers and magazines and newsletters and brochures for clients. But somewhere deep down inside I always felt I would write a novel one day. I have started lots over the years but never got much further than the first chapter. They were all terrible anyway. Finally in 2002 (by which time I had a husband, three children and two cats) I decided that, if I wanted to be published in my own lifetime, I'd better get a move on, so I enrolled on a writing course. By pure good luck I had stumbled upon a course with a wonderful tutor - the accomplished poet, Gillian Allnutt. On
I entered Frankie, my first children's novel for a number of competitions, including UKA Authors Opening Pages in 2007. I got an email just before Christmas 2007 to say it had made it onto the longlist of 13 and asking me to submit the full manuscript. A couple of months later I received another email telling me it was on the shortlist (one of eight). A month later I returned from work one day to find an email congratulating me on being the winner fo the 2007 UKA Authors Opening Pages competition. Frankie would be published! I was ecstatic but so incredulous that I had to send an email to Andrea Lowne at UKA Press a week later asking her to confirm again that it was true and that I hadn't dreamt it.
I would certainly recommend any aspiring author to enter the UKA Opening Pages competition. One of the great things about it is that every entry receives in-depth feedback from a number of different readers. I found this very helpful and made many changes to Frankie based on the comments of the readers. I was able to incorporate these changes into the final manuscript that I submitted for the longlist. UKA run the same competition each year. For details see www.ukapress.com