NAWG Publications

This is my little book of advice and motivation. It contains all sorts of tips. Useful, silly, inspirational. For example – When the going gets tough, stop for chocolate.

Read some of the reviews below:

The Handy Little Book for Writers can be purchased via The National Association of Writers’ Groups, HLB4W, 40 Burstall Hill, Bridlington, East Yorkshire, YO16 7GA.

Make cheques payable to NAWG. £2.99 (+ 50p p&p) 

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      (out of print)

One day I was browsing in the children’s library and saw a sports fiction series produced by Blackie & Son.  There was a book on football, one on swimming and another on tennis.  I’ve never been keen on sport.  I was always the one hiding in the school loos having a smoke while the others were charging up and down the hockey pitch.  But I loved cycling and the whole family were involved in cycle racing. We all belonged to a cycling club, thought nothing of hundred mile rides on a Sunday and competing in time-trials during the week.

I’m a believer in making your own opportunities and in a fit of madness I wrote to Blackie telling them that there was a gap in their series.  They hadn’t covered the best sport in the world - cycle racing.  And this is where it gets scary.  They phoned me and asked me to write one. ‘Oh, I’ve already started,’ I lied.

They asked how far I’d got.  They wanted 30,000 words.  I told them I’d got the first 10,000.  It was a lie and I nearly came unstuck.  ‘Can you put it in the post to us?’ they asked.  ‘Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly.  It's typed on the backs of old letters and junk mail and it's single spaced and it was in red ink and is partly handwritten...’

I wriggled my way out of it telling them I’d send them the complete thing once it was done.  Then I panicked and reached for the chocolate.

Racing Start was written in two months and it was accepted. It appeared in 1991 and is now out of print.

Unluckily for me, just as I’d got a foot in the door, Blackie was taken over or disappeared and my contacts there lost.  I went back to short stories. 

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Heinemann New Windmills, edited by David Kitchen

One day my agents asked if I had a humorous story for 10-12 year olds. They needed it yesterday.

‘Yes, of course I have,’ I lied. But I found a bit in my diary about how the dog’s dish had broken when we moved house and he nearly starved to death because he refused to eat out of anything else.  That story, Dog’s Dinner, appeared in a volume called Don’t Make me Laugh, published by Heinemann.  When I saw the contents page I nearly passed out.  Mine was the only name I didn’t recognise.  There I was along with Anne Fine, Roger McGough, Michael Rosen, Penelope Lively. All the people I would curtsey to if I met them.

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   (out of print)

I ghosted this for Patricia Fraser. She arrived at my house with all her newspaper and magazine cuttings. ‘My husband had 800 gay lovers,’ screamed the headlines.  She was a poor girl from the Welsh valleys who had married a multi-millionaire only to discover... well, lots of things actually, including a famous MP in her bed with her husband.  She had lived a very colourful life but ended up back where she started. Patricia made appearances on all the chat shows. She was on Kilroy, Esther, and the Sky channels. It was a weird experience for me to sit in a book shop watching while Tricia signed copies of her book, after I’d done all the work.

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