Writing hint #1.  

Words conjure images.  Just because something is correct doesn’t mean readers won’t be confused and get a somewhat different picture in their minds than you intended.

 “As her head came through the door, her eyes fell on the table.”

I wrote the first draft of Silvana rather more years ago than I care to admit.  I had daydreamed the whole story over about a fortnight - in the time between going to bed at night and falling asleep (I was single and childless at the time. . . .) During the day, I constantly thought about it and it wouldn’t let me concentrate on much else - it demanded to be written.  It was the first thing I didn’t write longhand.  Up until then I had been a ‘flow of consciousness’ sort of writer - a specific colour ballpoint pen (black) on a specific size notepad (A4) with specific line spacing (wide) and always with margins. I didn’t need that with Silvana as I knew exactly what happened and so I could go straight to the keyboard for the first time in my life.  I wrote for several hours each days for three weeks until I had the whole story down - all 34,000 words.  I could relax.

Of course, I had no idea what to do with a story that was just short of 100 pages.  I read bits out at the Wexford Writer’s Circle meetings and someone there read the whole thing and told me in a beautiful letter (that of course I still have) how much she loved it.  Beyond that, I was stumped.

So Silvana joined Minimus Goes to the Moon, The Binding, and The Bond Stone of Eishe in the filing cabinet and I returned to writing copy for local council calendars, travel brochures and car hire companies and doing the odd ‘arty’ interview for the local paper.

Little did I know then that I was only beginning a journey that would take so long to complete, or one that would be so much fun.