Sandra, or Sandy, had little interest in writing when at school, in fact she always followed instructions to answer a question in less than so many words to the letter. One might say she used the instruction ‘lees than’ as an excuse to write as little as possible. A notable essay answer to the question:
In your own words describe ‘David Copperfield’ (by Charles Dickens) in less than 2,000 words.
Her answer was “Boring”.
Well, it was less than 2,000 words and it was ‘in her own word(s)’.
Her essay was marked ‘FAIL’ and ‘See me’ in red ink.
Sandy’s second attempt improved the wordcount by 100,000% but was less memorable.
As Sandy matured, she developed a taste for romantic fiction and detective stories. Writing was never a priority, until a long confinement gave her the time to put ‘pen to paper’, or more correctly, ‘fingers to keyboard’.
The manuscript lay in a dusty corner of her laptop’s hard drive for several years. In reality, it must have been dragged with the rest of her junk, from one computer upgrade to the next. Then, as fate would have it, while attending a teacher training course, she was asked to create a chapter of her own writing over the weekend. Being a great champion of ‘conservation of effort’, or to the less enlightened ‘lazy’, Sandy metaphorically ‘dusted off’ her novel, copied and pasted the first two chapters into the file for submission and sat back for an idle weekend.
Sandy was not surprised when she received a note from the lecturer saying, ‘Please see me’. Sandy was half expecting that result, what she was not expecting was the praise she received.
“Could the novel be completed to the same ‘first draft’ standard?”
Sandy came clean and produced the remainder of the draft. The tutor was quietly pleased and suggested that Sandy investigate getting the support of a literary agent, but Sandy was too busy, (or lazy) to do anything about it.
Along came 2020 and Covid and Sandy, now house bound, was thinking about dusting off her ‘quill’, when she received a surprise email from her old tutor – would she consider working with Blatheron (in truth the name hadn’t been arrived at then). The answer was ‘YES’ and the first novel was converted to (dot) docx and forwarded, the rest is history, well not quite yet, but maybe one day it will be history and I will re-edit this Bio.