Some of my readers will know me from my other blog The River Cottage Diaries and will know something about me and my writing but for those who don't, I've been an active blogger since I lived in France in 2005.
My dad came to visit and brought me an article from The Daily Telegraph about a new breed of women called bloggers who wrote these things called weblogs, shortened to blogs. He told me that I should start one to document the story of my life, which has been a pretty interesting one.
I started writing one about my life in France, What French Dream, which aimed to give a more realistic portrayal of expatriate life in France. It was noticed by a freelance journalist who interviewed me in France about our lives post-financial crisis. He then put my blog in front of the editor of a well-known daily newspaper (oh, alright, it was the Daily Mail), who decided to publish excerpts from it.
That led to contact from an literary agent who was interested in me writing my story. However, for one reason or another, the time wasn't right and between us we decided not to go any further with it.
A few months later, I decided to use my adventures in France as the basis for a novel, provisionally entitled La Vie en Rosé, and set about writing it. The advantage of making it fiction (or maybe faction) was that it gave me more licence to include fictional elements and even a few other events from my life. I used NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month to get it started and managed to write 50,000 words in a month. They weren't very good words really but they were there, down on paper.
When I'd edited what I'd written I posted it on Authonomy, a writer's website created by HarperCollins to encourage new writers. I thought that if I put it on there, I could see if the story had any legs - and more importantly if I really could write. Trust me, your mum telling you is lovely but you always wonder if she's really telling the truth. It was very well received and was regularly in the top 50 highest rated books of the month. With the help of some really talented people, I improved it beyond recognition and by the time I took it down last week, it was ranked at number 40 out of over 6,000 books on the site.
A couple of months ago, I was contacted by the lovely Jennifer Barclay, commissioning editor at Summersdale publishers, who uttered those immortal words to a would-be writer. 'Are you looking for a publisher?'
What happened next? You'll have to come back to find out.
