Hello everyone. Since childhood, writing short stories has been what Ive loved and, during my life, Ive built up a sizable collection. Many times people (good friends mostly!) suggested I try to get them published so, one day, having no real idea how to go about this, I decided to take an online publishing course run by an ex-Random house editor. I picked up loads of useful - essential - information on that course, but was dismayed to find out that an unknown writer trying to get a collection of short stories published would be a recipe for frustration and disappointment. Then one day, after stumbling upon an American writing coach in Barcelona, where I lived at the time, he encouraged me to take certain of my stories that had threads of connections and weave them together to create a novel. This seemed at first like it would be an easy project! Synchronistically, as these things often are, I was offered the opportunity to enter one of these stories - as a novel first chapter - into a competition run by the Arts Council of Great Britain, and whose first prize was a publishing contract. I was overjoyed to win, but then the real work on my book began as the publishers laid down a tight deadline, believing that my book was already finished! It turned out to be one of the trickiest, but most fascinating, writing projects, I have ever undertaken, extracting the essence, characters and bones of several stand-alone stories and creating one complete new story from them. As time went on I realized it would have been easier to write a novel from scratch! In the end, as there were so many characters dipping in and out all with their own timeline, I created a family tree and placed it at the front of the book. This was in 2008 and Living in Bright Shadows is now available not only as a paperback and Kindle e-book on Amazon, but it has also been translated into Spanish (by the wonderful Judith Payró who now lives in Brazil). as Vivir en sombras luminosas. It is currently residing on the desk of an important Mexican film producer so please keep your fingers crossed for me for that, but also keep remembering that, in the world of writing, nothing is impossible. Warm wishes. Jean
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 09:45:34 +0000
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