What’s your biggest dream?
Ever since I was a little girl and visited Scunthorpe Library every other Saturday morning I have had the same dream. That someone like me could one day walk into the library and borrow my book. It’s hard to overstate how much I loved the library when I was little. Unless I had a book token, we couldn’t really afford to buy books. One of my most treasured presents was from my teacher Mrs Milmer when I was about eight years old. She got married and moved away and I sent her a paperweight as a gift. She wrote me a beautiful letter of encouragement that I still have and she sent me a book token. I used it to buy a notebook to start writing. She was my favourite teacher, in fact looking back I don’t think anyone ever stretched or appreciated my imagination like she did. My best friend Zoe and I would write long stories about ghosts in attics, time travelling mammoths and anthropomorphic animals – I’ve always loved an animal in human clothing, I blame Lewis Carrol and CS Lewis. My animals were not quite as upper class as those classic creatures, mine tended to wear flat caps, argue with their wives and disappear to the pub. My parents watched Emmerdale religiously. To be able to read as voraciously and widely as I did was down to teachers who realised I could go through the whole reading scheme in an afternoon and let me roam the school library for classic novels, but mainly it was my mum who made sure that reading for pleasure was part of our upbringing.
Alongside that came a love of writing, even if it was only the journals I’ve been using since I was a similar age and got a lockable diary. I have them in hat boxes under the bed and my best friend is under strict orders to burn them when I die. I am full of book ideas, scraps and fragments of potential books live on my iPad and in notebooks but for some reason I never seem to pull together a full book. I think I lack discipline, having chronic health issues doesn’t help but it isn’t the reason I haven’t managed this dream. There are self-doubts of course. Is anything I write good enough? When I look at some of the extraordinary writers I encounter through blogging I’m in awe of their talent. Blogging has also helped me realise that a finished manuscript and the book that appears on the shelf can be two very different things. What I write at my desk will be rewritten, edited and shaped to be the best it can be with the help of editors, proofreaders, agents and all the other people who help a book along the publishing process. I know now that at 52, I really do need to get on with it if my dream of seeing my book on a library shelf is to come to fruition. Wish me luck.
The Lotus Readers 