My manuscript is completed, my working first draft is done. And on time.

It has taken me about eighteen months to get here. My family always said that one of us should write a book, and one day, a year ago last summer, I felt ready to take on that challenge. I set about jotting down keywords of all the stories I could remember. I stuck them on an A1 board and started arranging them in order. Then I just began writing about each of them in turn.

The reason for the knitting picture is that writing has felt like just that. Each memory has been a knitted square. As I progressed, it felt like I needed to sew them together, like making a blanket. They started off as random memories, and now together, they form something new.

A fortuitous meeting with poet and author Ros Barber led to me being mentored by her. She has helped me keep on track, setting me deadlines, picking up on my dodgy grammar and most importantly helping me believe that this challenge comes to an end. At the end, I will have written a book. And I have. That hasn’t quite sunk in yet.

I feel that instead of being at the end of something, I am in fact at the beginning. I want to say that writing was the hard bit, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t easy, but it certainly got easier. I developed my writing voice, my style and I got to the point where I could just sit down at my laptop and within seconds be lost to the world of words. It has been a bit like journeying to a new land, and after having spent some considerable time there, feeling quite a home.

I have sent off my manuscript to Ros and I shall meet up with her next month to chat it through. I never wrote for this to languish in a drawer. I never really wrote it to keep it private. I am ready  to share it with the world.

So this is the start of my journey. I’m beginning at the end. The end of something, and perhaps, the start of something else.