Making a guest appearance

Yes, I know I haven't updated for weeks.  While my writing persona spends her days wearing impractical shoes and reclining on a chaise longue, dictating the latest page-turner to a dapper and handsome secretary clad in an immaculate tweed suit, the rest of me has to deal with day-to-day crises.  Suffice it to say that several hit at once, resulting in no time or inclination to use a computer.

Anyway, this is just a quick update before I return to the World of Worry.  The lovely Jane Wenham-Jones was kind enough to invite me to contribute to the Guest Room of her Wannabe A Writer? website.  You can read my bit here.

A rather angsty post

I am having a bit of wobble at the moment.  Technically, I should be all smiles.  Looking for Buttons is out in the world, selling fairly steadily.  I am A Published Writer, albeit a DIY one.

But.

But but but but but.

It's said that everyone has a book in them.  What if Looking for Buttons is the only one I have?

I want to write.  It's what I do, spinning yarns when I'm not knitting them.  That's the image I've always had of myself.  But when I sit down at the keyboard I can't string a coherent sentence together.  I've re-read what exists of the Difficult Second and Third Novels.  They seem to have been written by someone else.  It's like watching Bradley Wiggins win the Tour de France.  I can ride a bike but no way could I do that.  I get the same feeling as I run my eye along the bookcase.  I've lost my writing nerve and with it part of my identity.

I hope this is just a temporary blip.

This is not about me

Looking For Buttons started out as an idea: what happens if your teenage crush goes on to become a worldwide star?  How do you get over them when their face is everywhere?  I started playing around and soon I had a set of people in my head, doing things that I wrote down.  After a while, I found a beginning and got to the middle, which was actually where I started, and eventually I reached the end.  Gosh, I thought, I've written a whole book.  And then I thought about trying to get it published.  The problem with publication, however, is that people might read it.  People I know.

I'm a thirty-something woman writing about a thirty-something woman and it's my first novel, so readers may assume the book is in some way autobiographical.  It's started already.  One of my guinea pigs read an early draft.  She rang me: "Charlie [the Hollywood star] is a mixture of X and Y, isn't he?", X and Y being two gentlemen of our acquaintance at university.  Another claimed delightedly to recognise herself in yummy mummy Poppy on the grounds that she is married to a man in Poppy's husband's profession - which she wasn't when I began writing the book.

The thing is, I didn't set out to write barely disguised portraits of my social circle (actually, these days it's more of a social arc: I don't get out much).  It's fiction.  Poppy is not a sketch of my friend, she's a figment of my imagination.  And Charlie is simply Charlie (though he'd dislike being thought of as simply anything).  But now, as I prepare to send out the manuscript to another agent, I'm starting to worry.

What if people I know read it and think it's about me?  What if my friend who isn't Poppy reads the whole thing and ends up mortally offended?  What if my family read it and think this is the sort of thing I get up to?  And, most alarmingly of all, what if X or Y reads it and thinks the book is about them?

Excuse me, I have some nervous editing to do...