Category: On Writing
Writing as a Woman War Veteran
I’ve heard that it takes twenty years before a veteran can write about war. It took me twenty-five. This year marks the twenty-five anniversary of the first Persian Gulf War, Desert Storm. I was one of the 40,000 women who deployed, an enlisted soldier in the Army. At the time, I’d also already been writing […]
Writer in Prison
It was my first day in prison and I had a big to-do list: Put your belt kit and key pouch on. Empty your pockets and purse of money, ID, anything that might hold an address or personal details, because information can be used against you Bring nothing inside that can be used as a […]
Letter to My Pre-publication Self
It’s now 8 months since the book was first published, so I decided to invent time travel (patent pending) to give you a preview of what will happen and what you will learn during this crazy, baffling, exciting, scary time. You can thank me later. 1. Writing the book is not job done. It’s just […]
Short Story: The Keepers
Short story about friendship between lighthouse keepers by Melissa Bailey, whose novel Beyond the Sea came out earlier this year. Ten miles from shore, perched on the low black rock, the lighthouse was a hazy smudge of white in the gloaming. Isolated, indistinct, hovering somewhere between sea and sky, an as-yet unlit beacon of hope […]
Being a Writing Coach
The way I approach being a writing coach owes a debt to the genial baseball coaches you find on American sitcoms. My favourite was, of course, the eponymous ‘Coach’ on Cheers, which I watched at an impressionable age. Caring, warm, and very pragmatic, you could imagine Coach sympathising with the troubled-yet-talented player, all the while […]
Food Is My Heathcliff
It starts, as all good things should, with a pudding. In my grandmother’s kitchen, my dear Nain (which is what we call our grandmothers here in North Wales) is telling me about her own grandmother. There is a common thread which runs through our family- we love our grandmas. Nain is the keeper of my […]
How We Change As Writers
Last week I was trying to downsize one of my overflowing bookshelves when I came across a copy of my first novel, The Big House. The book was published in 2003 by Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, U.K. I held my first book in my hands and felt that nostalgia we feel when […]
When The Going Gets Tough
I always wanted to write. But I never quite believed that I could write my own book. Let alone publish it. My husband Marc is a firm believer that anything is possible if you’re willing to work hard enough for what you want. We had our first child in 2007 and it was the biggest […]
Here, There and Nowhere
As an American author, living in Britain, writing a novel about Florida, I am accustomed to existing in a semi-chronic state of dislocation. I have a mid-Atlantic accent which sounds to Brits like I’m right off the boat from Appalachia, but to Americans is pure Downton. Although 35 years of living in the UK have […]
The Inspiration behind Burnt Paper Sky
It took me many years to get around to writing my novel. Years of dabbling with one idea or another, and never really taking my ambition seriously. Years of letting life get in the way. So by the time I wrote that first sentence, I was in my early forties, I’d lived quite a lot, […]
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