A book shop with a difference 📖📖📖📖📖

Yesterday I met with a new friend; a fellow aspiring author and a successful book reviewer and blogger – ALittleBookProblem

It was a true honour to meet someone I’ve been chatting to for a few months now – an avid reader with a book obsession and a to-be-read pile even larger than my own! She will, and already has been, a huge resource of great advice on my writing journey, because she is on one of her own 👯‍♀️

We spent an hour in and around this beautifully welcoming barge called Word-on-the-Water and TimeOut have written this article about them.

We enjoyed a coffee in the sun and listened to some lovely lazy tunes while we chatted about books and writing… and life.

We both love a good story and thankfully so does the publishing world and the agents who work within it. We meandered our way down to The Strand to attend a talk organised by the Society of Women Writers & Journalists … an organisation I admit I’d not heard about yet had been set up in 1894. The Society’s aim were and are to encourage and celebrate women writers and is still going strong today 👌🏼

I shall join the SWWJ now as a ‘friend’ as they shall be organising further talks by authors and other literary experts which will be rather apt.

Certainly we found last night’s meeting very much worth the travel. We got to meet Penny Holroyde, an agent with many years experience in the publishing world, and were treated to insightful tips for our submission process should we choose to opt for the traditional route of getting your story into print, and probably the main message I’ve come away with is that I shall need broad shoulders and a thick skin to prepare myself for the probable rejections from agents who won’t know who the hell I am. (So pleased I did that self-esteem course last year! 💃🏼)

Matsu is never far from my thoughts. I’m keeping the bonsais watered and pruned and their table top tidy. It feels wrong if a magazine is left there, so my focus is engaged.

I am actually now really excited about getting more of this manuscript down.. I’m back up to 15,000 words having cut much of the dark stuff but filtered some back, re-written so as not to overtly offend anyone alive!