A milestone to celebrate

Submitting for my TLC free read

On the snowy morning of Sunday 5 January I quietly checked over my cover letter, chapter outline and Word and PDF versions of my Somewhere Between manuscript, compressed them to a .zip folder, and emailed them to Hana at New Writing North who will pass them on to The Literary Consultancy for the free read I was awarded back in June.

It was one of those big moments that has the potential to change everything, but that happens alone, unknown, and unacknowledged. In November I completed a fantastic TLC course on self-editing your non-fiction manuscript led by the also fantastic Xanthi Barker, who is a great advocate for celebrating milestones and achievements big and small. So I’m telling people. It was years of toil, with possbily more to come, and at the end my carefully crafted words were buffeted by annoying formatting issues that took a Saturday to thrash out, all rendered into a tiny email and sent with tired hope. So I told the Northern Writers’ Awards 2024 WhatsApp group (also asking how they were all doing and being reminded of what a fabulous bunch they are) and I typed this post, and maybe I’ll tell colleagues and friends I might see if they ask what I’ve been up to. Even if it never gets published, I crafted a manuscript I feel happy with that is 84,000 words long, and that’s an achievement worthy of taking the rest of a Sunday off to ease my aches, read a good book and do some personal care.

A lot of people have been tremendously supportive, including those of you who read and comment on my posts. It helps so much and I’m very grateful. Writing is the easy part. Crafting it to be read and putting those crafted words out into the world, not so much. So thank you.

For paid subscribers, I have copied in below my one-page chapter outline for TLC.