Zoë Marriott's Blog

Hello, Dear Readers! A quick update today and the title says it all: The Moonlit Maze is now available to download on Netgalley!

My lovely publisher have made this rather gorgeous video to celebrate this moment:

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So if you're a member of the site - or want to be - now is the time to sign up or login to get a digital proof and read away. I hope that you'll really enjoy it and feel moved to say nice things, or anything really, on your reviewing platforms of choice. Reviews do make a massive difference to a book's prospects and the author's chances of getting to write more books - the only thing that's even better is pre-ordering, which is why there's a selection of pre-order links below:

Waterstones

Amazon

Foyles

Kobo

Also, if you're on Netgalley? Give me a thumbs up vote for the cover, would you? Because I think it's gorgeous and not getting the love it deserves at all!

In other news I have hit the landmark of 10,000 words total in the critical commentary of my thesis. Considering that the ideal word count is 20,000 that might sound pretty good - but at least 3,000 words of it are utter nonsense and another 7,000 are questionable. Which isn't ideal. And therefore I am exactly like every other third year PhD student: living in a constant state of low-level panic and distress. Probably a good thing that I don't drink, really.

In other news, I'm incredibly lucky and excited - and also stressed, see above - to be taking up a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at the University of Lincoln from this week! Very much hoping to bump into superstar Professor Janina Ramirez, the absolute genius behind fave book Femina there, where she is a visiting professor. Professor Ramirez, although I have never met her, is one of the people who inspired me to purse my PhD. I can hardly believe we might be sharing a campus! But mostly hoping to see shedloads of students and help them feel happier and more confident about academic writing (a battle for which I have the most personal empathy).

Wish me luck, lovelies! Download and review the book if you'd like, pre-order if you can, and for right now... sound off in the comments or on Twitter (as always, I promise to respond).

Hello, Dear Readers! It's been a while, I know - I'm currently staring down the final straight of my PhD thesis and will begin a new Fellowship with the Royal Literary Fund at the University of Lincoln in September, so it's basically a state of constant low-level panic over here (and probably will be until May next year, when I finally submit the whole shebang to the university, although I make no promises that I'll be any more mentally stable in the aftermath).

Anyway, hey, hey, do you remember last year when I told you all about finding a new agent to help me find a publisher for my first historical novel for adults?

Well, after sharing all that, it would have been a great idea to tell you when the book sold, wouldn't it? To a Big Five publisher? During London Book Fair? And about its new official title that said brilliant publisher came up with: The Moonlit Maze?

Oops.

Ahem. To be fair, it was a very busy time and... er I had lots going on? But - mea culpa, mea culpa etc. Sorry. Very sorry.

But to make it up to you, today I bring you a doozy of a post. One of epic proportions. First of all, here's the official synopsis for the book, so you finally know what it's really all about.

 

Lose yourself in the secrets of The Moonlit Maze ...

A gripping mystery and a spellbinding love story, the stunning debut adult novel from bestselling YA author Zoë Marriott tells of the power of secrets to hold you captive, and set you free...

1924. Lord and Lady Kearsley's glittering Summer Ball is in full swing when their betrothed daughter Xanthe slips out of the Orangery and into the maze for a secret encounter. By the next morning, the grand house will be in ashes and two bodies removed, but no one will ever know what happened that night in Winterthorne.

2024. Juliet Stewart discovers she has inherited a cottage in the cliff-top village of Winterthorne from a relative she never knew existed. Stumbling upon the ruins of Kearsley Castle, she learns about the fire that destroyed the family. Puzzled by the disturbing gifts appearing on her doorstep, Juliet realises that someone doesn't want her in Winterthorne. But as she becomes drawn deeper into Xanthe's story, she discovers that danger lies not only in uncovering the past, but in the present too...

Perfect for lovers of Kate Morton, Lucinda Riley and Santa Montefiore.

  

I mean, I'd read it, would you? Honestly, I'd read the heck out of it. This is a timeslip novel (my favourite genre and the one on which I am, cough cough currently undertaking my doctoral research) so it's also perfect for fans of Barbara Erskine, Susanna Kearsley, Nicola Cornick and Emilia Hart.

And then, as if that wasn't enough, I can also now share the GORGEOUS - I mean, absolutely stunning, utterly glorious - cover art for the book:

Look at this. What can I even say about it? Look at all the details. Look at the moon rising and the summer flowers! Look at how perfectly they have captured my beautiful heroine Xanthe in her period accurate yellow dress with the shadows falling acoss her as she ventures out into the moonlight. It's the essence of the book - lush, mysterious, romantic, and a little bit dark.

And perhaps the most exciting part of all from an author's point of view: the preorder link. This means it's going to be a real book, one I can hold in my own hot little hands. And so you can you, dear Readers. The book will be releasing initially as a beautiful hardcover, and in ebook. If you would like to make my day, my year, my life, you can preorder it now.

Real talk, Readers: preorders make a massive difference to the book's potential success and have a direct effect on the author's ability to continue to write books for you (as well as their being able to do pesky stuff like pay their rent and their dog's vet bills). Think of it like making an investment in the future - a future present for yourself, which will bring you joy and delight, and also an investment in the writer's future and all the lovely books to (hopefully) come. However, if you would like to support authors in another way, you can ask your local library to stock the book, too. Librarians love requests like this, and writers love librarians. Support your local library, folks!

The Moonlit Maze is also up Goodreads, so here's the link to add it there if you'd like.

Phew. This has all been a bit of a whirlwind, hasn't it? Personally, I'm for a large mug of tea before I start on editing the first chapter of my thesis. Have a lovely day out there, and let me know what you think in the comments below or on Twitter; I reply to everyone, and I always follow back.

Hello, Dear Readers - welcome back, and my apologies for the long, long, loooong blog hiatus this summer. Things have been happening, changes have been afoot, and I have a lot of news to share.

At the beginning of summer this year I finished my first draft of A SUDDEN LIGHT, the novel which makes up the creative artefact of my PhD thesis. This is my first adult novel, a novel which I've wanted to write for ten years, and a novel which is far more personal to me and my own experiences than anything I've written before. It was a big, emotional experience; when I reached the last words of the last chapter (which I had actually written over a year ago) I burst into tears. It meant and means so much to me.

I also felt a bit emotional because now - well, not right away, but soon - I was going to have to start querying agents.

I was with my former agent, Nancy, for thirteen years. I adore her. But earlier this year she broke the news that she was going to retire, and while I was very happy to wave her off on new adventures, the idea of heading into the query trenches for the first time since I got my first book contract - which was so long ago that we used to query by sending people actual stacks of paper in the post, accompanied by a stamped addressed envelope for the reply - was not fun. I didn't even have to query when I parted ways with my first agent and signed with Nancy in 2010; my publisher referred me. Lots, and lots (and lots) has changed in publishing since 2005.

What was more, I wasn't querying as an established YA author - but as a debut adult author. With effectively no track record. Starting right from scratch. So I knew this was going to be rough. And it absolutely was.

But I also learned a lot and did eventually sign with a new and utterly wonderful agent. So I'm going to share the story of that process here.

After following the basic steps - putting my manuscript aside for a month, reading and revising, asking writer friends to read the book and give me feedback, revising again, then polishing one last time - I was ready to send out a batch of ten queries at the end of June. I'd tried to pick agents who represented books that I felt would fit comfortably next to mine on a shelf - timeslip, historical, women's fiction - and I'd decided to target a selection of different sized agencies (big, medium, boutique) because that felt like good strategy and because, honestly, I had no idea which option would be best for me.

I pressed 'send' and received a slew of automated email receipts and then... I waited. I did get three full manuscript requests over the following five or six weeks. I also got a few rejections. I decided to send out two new queries for each rejection as a way to retain my sense of optimism, and so as the weeks went on, a couple more full requests and a few more rejections rolled in. But most of my queries went unanswered, I didn't get any offers and by mid-August I was starting to drive both myself and all my writer friends absolutely up the wall.

I eventually got some very kind rejections for my full manuscript that - although really devastating to read - usefully pointed to the fact that I may have made a slight (ha ha) mistake. The problem with picking agents who had lots of clients working in the area of historical women's fiction and timeslip was, logically enough, that many of them felt they couldn't take on new writers who would compete with all their existing ones. One of these agents told me that they truly loved my manuscript and said they felt 'gutted' to have to turn it down. So for my next few queries I tried to look for agents who had a more diverse client list, but I other than that (and relentlessly tweaking my covering letter) I couldn't think of anything else to do except... keep waiting.

Then the end of August rolled around and something happened. I'm not sure what - maybe people coming back into the office after their summer holidays and diving into their query piles - but over the space of a week I got three new full manuscript requests, one of which turned very quickly into a request for a meeting the following week. A meeting! We set up a zoom call. I made a list of questions to ask while simultaneously trying not to get my hopes up too high (what if this really was just a friendly chat, or maybe it would be a revise and resubmit, or they would ask me to work on something else...?).

They offered to represent me. I thanked them, told them I was thrilled - I was! - and asked for the traditional two weeks to make up my mind before coming back with my answer.

After I got off the call I did some deep-breathing exercises, and took some time to try and make sense of everything they'd said about the book, their plans, the way they worked. I rushed off to my writer's group and told them: I HAVE AN OFFER! After a round of congratulations and a nice, intense natter about the call, it was time to get back to business. Before I could do anything else, I knew I had an obligation to let the other agents who had my query or the full manuscript know, and give them the deadline for my decision too, so that they had a chance to respond. I started down the list in alphabetical order, so I was emailing a mixture of agents with the full and ones who just had the query.

Then something began to happen that I hadn't really prepared myself for. Within ten or fifteen minutes of sending out the first emails, I started to get responses. People who had the full manuscript were saying that they would put it right to the top of the pile and get back to me ASAP. People who had the query - some of whom were among the first batch I'd queried, at the end of June - were saying that they'd now read my opening chapters, loved them, and they wanted the full.

I started to feel a bit overwhelmed and took a break, but the full manuscript requests kept coming in for the rest of the day. When I went back and informed the second half of the list of agents the next morning, it started again. By the time I went to bed that Friday, I had fourteen full manuscripts out. That is a mind-boggling percentage of the total queries I sent out.

And then - even more unbelievable - on Sunday evening, an agent emailed to ask for a Zoom call the next morning.

By the end of the Monday, I had calls lined up throughout the next week. I even ended up having a last minute Zoom meeting on the morning of the day when I had set my deadline. My friends said that this was known as 'making a splash'. I started to feel that I was trapped in a malfunctioning holodeck and it was all just too good to be real. All these agents were SO AMAZING. All of them had such wonderful things to say about my book: validating, insightful, kind, comments that filled me with a dangerous amount of optimism.

Now, here's something I think it's quite important for me to say: this is supposedly the dream scenario, and yet I didn't enjoy it very much. I tried, believe me. But mainly I felt intensely anxious, sure it was all a mistake, or that I would make a mistake - make the wrong decision - or make people feel that they had wasted their time (because as a working class women, there's a very strong training from a young age that you should take what you get given and say thank you, and not imagine that you're special). At a couple of points I started to feel almost afraid. Surely this sort of attention couldn't be allowed? It was - I'll use the term again - completely overwhelming.

And yes, I know that anyone who is querying right now, or soon expects to be, is probably reading this with an increasing desire to see my head explode. I'm telling you because you have to be prepared for the fact that querying messes with your mental state. I know I've been incredibly lucky, and of course I'm not complaining! I just want everyone who is in or is about to head into the query trenches to be prepared for how the whole process programmes you to expect constant rejection and disappointment. Even before any offers come in, you may well start to feel and act a bit weird, and you will struggle to understand it if/when your luck turns. It's not you. It's literally everyone. Querying is HARD.

My advice is to get your support system in place. Bribe your writing friends with chocolate and gifts if you must! You're going to be a really odd little gremlin by the time you're finished and you will need help to find perspective and keep your grip on reality. I thank the Writing Gods every day for my writing group.

So back to the Big Decision. After my last minute call on the deadline day, I had - realistically speaking - about four hours to make my choice before close-of-business. I tried very, very hard not to freak out. I walked my dog, made myself some lunch, went back to my poor beleaguered writer friends to talk over my thoughts, and slowly but surely realised that the final call hadn't changed my feelings.

Although two agents had stood out to me throughout the whole process and I had gone back and forward between them constantly in my mind, one in particular had basically captured my heart from her first email. Our Zoom call had ended up going on for a bit over two hours because we found it so easy to talk to each other. Her passion for the book was deeply humbling; she had so clearly understood and responded to what I was trying to do, and one of her editorial notes made the hairs go up on the back of my neck, it was so completely right.

So I let that choice sink in, then I emailed my chosen agent to very gratefully accept her offer of representation, and once she had responded (with another lovely email) I contacted all the others to let them know my decision.

The responses from the agents whom I had turned down were so kind that it underscored to me how lucky I was, and what a privilege it had been to be able to actively choose between them. And it was really at this point that I finally felt able to relax and take in the fact that I was agented again, and just bask in my sense of relief and joy.

I'm delighted to announce that my new agent is Kate Shaw, of The Shaw Agency. She has over twenty years of experience as an agent, and her clients include such luminaries as Holly Smale, Isabel Ashdown, Joanna Courtney, S.J. Willis, Andy Seed, Lucy Adlington and Fleur Hitchcock. Every writer is always excited about and in love with their new agent, but words can't even express how happy I am that I queried her, and that she fell in love with my book, and swept me off my feet with her expertise and enthusiasm. She is absolutely amazing.

Obviously no one can really be 100% sure what will happen when their book goes out into the big, wide publishing world, but I know without a doubt that Kate is a truly safe pair of hands when it comes to my books and career. I'm so excited to see what happens next.

Toss me your thoughts and responses on Twitter, Dear Readers! (Don't worry, you won't have to sign in to comment here - I've finally figured out to how to fix that).

Hello, Dear Readers - welcome or welcome back to An Eddying Flight.

Today I bring you some delightful linkity. Firstly, my debut scholarly article is now live in the inaugural volume of Leaf Journal, and it's free to read and download if you should wish to do so! It's titled 'Re-Imaginging Beauty' and is my analysis of various iterations of Beauty & the Beast (including one I wrote and published myself) through an intersectional Feminist lens. I'm really proud of it, and very proud to be in the first issue of such a lovely journal.

All the articles look really interesting and I've already read and enjoyed a couple myself, particularly the one by Charlotte Teeple-Salas on timeslip (what a coincidence!) so I encourage you to check it out if you're interested in writing for young people.

I talked in detail about the process of submitting and then revising this article here, and I think it should be useful to anyone who is seeking to write or adapt a paper for a peer-reviewed journal.

Next, my public lecture 'From Here to Eternity': Non-Linearity in Creative Writing, Physics, & the Romantic Sublime is coming up this very Wednesday at 7pm on MS Teams and I really hope that you will sign up and come along if you can - and free feel to ask questions afterwards! As an added incentive, I will share that I'll actually be reading a nice juicy snippet from my novel at the end, if anyone's curious about it.

I'm looking forward to the event and terrified in equal measure, as I think is fairly usual.

If you wanted to make it to either of the other lectures last Wednesday but couldn't for whatever reason, you'll want to bookmark this link, as I'm informed that recordings of the lectures will be in place there soon. I particularly recommend Rebekah's talk, Life, Legacy, Fact, Fiction, and Form: How research shapes creative practice in a novel about Gertrude Bell, not just because she is my Creative Writing colleague, but also because it is absolutely spell-binding. I loved it.

In the meantime, I am bearing down hard on the final 20k or so of my novel and am dealing with all the usual mental crises and alarums, not aided by the fact that I've developed an issue with my wrist which is preventing me from drafing in longhand. I've drafted everything in longhand my entire career, and the one time I tried a different method, the results were... fairly terrible. However, as one of my lead characters states (rather presciently) the only way out is through. Onward!

Hello, Dear Readers! Welcome back to An Eddying Flight, my beloved blog that I don't manage to update nearly as often as I should (I'm sorry!). I hope you're all still out there.

Today I bring great tidings of glad news: I'm going to be delivering my first ever public lecture next month, and you are ALL INVITED. Yes, all of you!

The Open University is celebrating the work of its wonderful and diverse body of PhD students by running a momentous programme of public lectures this year. All of the current second year doctoral candidates were invited to take part in specialised training and then write a lecture, aimed at the general public, for the series. The best thing about this is that it is FREE for anyone to tune into via MS Teams. You don't have to be a student or employee of the Open University, or a student at all - all you need is an internet connection and an inquiring mind.

They've called this programme of events (rather grandly, ahem) Next Generation. Below is the very swish and beautiful programme brochure, which gives lots of details about the lecture series and all the doctoral candidates taking part (this is a downloadable PDF).

The first series of lectures is dedicated to the Arts and Social Sciences, and will include lectures on the topics of English Literature, Creative Writing, History and Classics, every wednesday from April the 26th to May the 24th.

The official Next Generation: Arts page gives you details and the sign-up links to all the lectures that will be available to attend live, online, every Wednesday, throughout the end of April and the whole of May. Many of the people delivering these lactures are my friends and colleagues, and all of them sound fascinating, so I will be tuning in every one!

My lecture will be at 7pm on Wednesday the 3rd of May. It's titled:

From Here to Eternity: Non-linearity in Creative Writing, Physics, and the Romantic Sublime

What's it all about? Here's the abstract:

Zoe’s talk will focus on depictions of non-linear time within contemporary ‘time slip’ novels, and question how these may be linked – especially through the work of Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite writers and artists – to a growing understanding of the fluid, non-linear properties of time as posited in modern theoretical physics.

By utilising practice-based creative research, as well as sharing some of her own creative work-in-progress, she will detail the pursuit of fresh ways to authentically represent our human experiences of time.

So basically, exactly what it says in the title - a bit of creative writing, a bit of art history, and a bit of theoretical physics, all wrapped up in my earnest attempts to show you how these things are truly and magnificently connected by our human need to understand the workings of time. No really, they are. Let me prove it to you!

After each 30 minute talk there will be 30 minutes for Q&A, so if you have comments or questions about anything you've heard (or anything at all, really) you will have the opportunity to either speak up (after turning on your mic) or ask in the chat, and we will hopefully be able to have a really exciting discussion based on your reactions to our work.

Here's the MS Teams Sign-up Link for my talk again, just to make things as easy as possible.

If you're interested in any of the topics on offer, or in attending the Open University, I urge you to attend. These lectures will be fun, accessible, and like nothing you've ever heard before - because the research we're doing is brand, spanking new and completely original. That's the point of doing a PhD!

And if there are any talks that you're dying to see but just can't make it to, live, on the day, they will be recorded and available on the Next Generation: Arts page later on (though you'll miss out on being able to ask questions and take part in the discussion).

I'm really excited about this opportunity to share my research with the world, and see so many of my talented Arts and Social Sciences colleagues do the same. Sign up now, Dear Readers, and be a part of it!

Hello, Dear Readers! Welcome back to An Eddying Flight where, today, I'll be talking about the process of getting my very first journal paper accepted for publication in a peer reviewed journal (and apologies, as always, for any weirdness caused by Wix's profound issues with formatting. I tried).

The paper in question was adapted from an essay that I wrote for my Master's Degree, in which I analysed different versions of the fairytale 'Beauty & the Beast'.

It will be published, hopefully in April, in the first volume of Leaf Journal, whose focus is practice-led and practice-based research on writing for young people.

(A massive thank you here to my lovely friend Jo for tagging me on Twitter to point me toward the announcement of the open call for papers! I might well have missed the opportunity otherwise).

Leaf asked for papers to be submitted through Scholastica, which required me to set up a (free) Scholastica account with all my details, but spared me from having to compose a traditional covering/query letter or attach a CV. I did have to write an abstract and provide keywords and the word count etc. That page looks like this:

When I sent the paper in, I was (of course) hopeful that Leaf Journal might consider publishing it. But I was mainly hoping to get some kind of constructive feedback that I could learn from. I know I bang on a lot about coming from a non-traditional background - and perhaps all students feel like this occasionally - but I really do get a bit lost sometimes when it comes to papers, articles, chapters, and how any of these are put together, especially in contrast to something I'm more familiar with, like an essay. I wanted to learn more about what kind of content precisely would make up a valuable practice-led paper in my discipline, and because the Leaf Journal website specified that they were seeking to develop early career writers and researchers, I thought there was a chance that I might get lucky and get some critique even if they rejected me.

Well, I did get lucky - luckier than I expected. They came back to me to offer me the chance to revise and resubmit, which was effectively the ideal outcome for me. I was being offered the benefit of constructive comments on how to improve and add value to my paper from two anonymous reviewers, as well as an overview from one of the managing editors, and an assurance that if I did a thorough job of carrying out the suggested revisions, they would definitely be interested in publishing the paper. This, let me tell you, is much more straightforward than the sort of on-spec hedging and umming and aahing you normally get from a commercial publisher. I was of course delighted to accept.

I've seen some fairly scary horror stories about reviewer comments from other people in academia on Twitter, so I admit that when I opened the marked-up document which the journal had sent me, I was bracing myself. But the comments from the reviewers and from the managing editor of the journal all lined up. They noted the same issues in the same places in the article, without contradicting each other or going off on any tangents that revealed more about their own pet peeves than my work (again, not always the case when working with multiple editors from commercial publishers). They also made time to point out the aspects of the paper that they felt worked well, which is a real help for me when I'm revising because it lets me know which bits I can leave well enough alone.

Generally, the reviewers felt that the paper would be strengthened by adding an analysis of another important version of the Beauty & the Beast story and some acknowledgement of further work by one of the authors I'd cited. They recommended a bit of thoughtful engagement with some other scholarship (and differing points of view) on the topic and - most of all - more detail on the creative process of writing my own version of the fairytale, which was the final one I'd analysed in the paper.

As they pointed out, talking about creative process and what it teaches you, and then linking that back to your topic, is one of the main ways that Creative Writing research differs from English Literature research. Because submissions to Leaf Journal must be anonymous I'd struggled to talk in much detail about the creative process of writing Barefoot on the Wind, my Beauty & the Beast retelling, in the version of the article I'd submitted. I had to type XXXX whenever I gave an identifying detail! But now that issue was out of the way, I needed to go into some real depth there in order to make sure my paper qualified as truly practice-led.

I'm a veteran of dealing with constructive feedback in a professional and efficient manner, so of course my next step after checking out the reviewers comments was... to panic and freak out completely, convinced that I'd messed up by promising to resubmit the article, and that I was going to let the managing editor who had been so kind to me down. However! Because I *am* actually quite used to dealing with editorial feedback, I knew that this panic stage is fairly standard for me. So I gave myself a week to calm down, thinking about the paper and the comments whenever I could bring myself to do so, and on day seven I sat myself down and re-read the marked up manuscript. Then I made a list of what I needed to do to, in concrete terms, to fulfil the requests the reviewers had made.

This amounted to:

Read the suggested literature. Happily, I'd previously read and still owned two of the versions of the story that the reviewers mentioned. I just needed to dig those out and skim them again to refresh my memory. The other scholarship was easily accessible online. Write and insert the new analysis and acknowledgement of other works suggested. Come up with a response to the further scholarship and differing points of view. Insert that, too. Fish out all my old longhand journals and notebooks from 2014-15 when I was writing and revising Barefoot on the Wind and see what interesting stuff I could glean to share about the creative process, then rewrite that final section of the article in response. Revise the new version of the paper as a whole to smooth over the transitions between old and new material, and fix some small inconsistencies in my references.

Point 4 was obviously the most challenging one, since it involved me going into detail about choices, changes, creative false-starts and inspirations for a book that I wrote nearly a decade ago, and connecting these back to the themes of the paper. Never have I been so glad for my habit of 'thinking on the page' when I'm drafting, or for my hoarding tendencies!

After a day of flipping through my dog-eared and sometimes barely legible notes, I had found several areas that I thought might be interesting to write about, but which didn't necessarily fit with the themes of the paper. For instance, I had nearly forgotten that at one point the first half of the novel had a non-linear structure. I loved keeping certain secrets from my reader this way, but my editor declared it too confusing, so I was forced to cut and paste about 40,000 words into a more conventional first and second act structure (though this proves that I was obsessed with playing with narrative time even then).

But I hit gold when I came across scribblings that detailed my struggle to deal with supporting female characters - including Beauty's traditionally wicked sisters, and the 'evil fairy' - in a way that would reject the misogynist stereotypes and the tendency to exceptionalise Beauty which were exhibited by many tellings and retellings of Beauty & the Beast. This linked directly into the analyses I'd done of the other versions of the story in the paper.

I de-anonymised the section dealing with Barefoot on the Wind and rewrote it top-to-bottom, talking about what I'd hoped to accomplish, what decisions I'd made and why, and what I eventually learned. My objective was to offer insights that might be useful to other creative writers, and link my own decisions back to the ideas about the 'timeless' fairytale tropes and ideals I'd examined throughout the paper.

To my surprise, doing this work didn't take nearly as long as expected. I had submitted the first version of the article to Leaf in September, but in November there were some big changes in my caring responsibilities which left me with much less time to write (and feeling exhausted and swamped besides). Because of this, when Leaf sent me the invitation to revise and resubmit, I'd asked for more time to work on the paper, and the managing editors very kindly agreed, even though this would inevitably delay the paper's inclusion in the online journal. I really thought it would take me weeks and weeks to find the time to make significant progress, and that I would find it a real slog to expand the piece as much as the reviewers comments suggested (I needed to add between 2000-2500 words, almost doubling the length). But it turned out that (once I'd dealt with my standard existential crisis) things went quite quickly, and I managed to get the paper in by the original deadline in mid-February.

This is a reminder to me that although the voices of my anxiety and insecurity certainly scream loudly, they don't often have much truthful to say. I'm so glad that I shut them out long enough to grasp the opportunity to submit the paper, and that I've been able to learn such a lot through working with Leaf to improve it. Sometimes the best way to deal with a crisis in Real Life is to write your way through it.

Now, I am (clearly) a beginner at this, and so while I've related my own experiences here in the hope they will be helpful to others, this is in no way a template for how anyone else, even within my discipline, should approach things. I think I've lucked out bigtime with this publication, really. So if you're seeking publication during your PhD work: avail yourself of the advice of your supervisors and colleagues, as well as other resources available online and from your institution!

Was this post useful or interesting? Did I miss anything out? Would you like to share your experience of academic publishing? Please do share in comments, on FB or Twitter - and as always, I promise to respond.

Hello, Dear Readers. and welcome back after my - slightly longer than expected - seasonal hiatus. I hope everyone had a wonderful festive time and New Year, and that January hasn't frozen the socks off you.

Today I bring you another delightful podcast produced by the Royal Literary Fund - a compilation of best writing advice featuring yours truly among a company of other distinguished writers. I'm on there from around 1:19 but the whole podcast is inspiring and intriguing. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed rambling on for it!

As always, if you have questions or comments, please pop them below, or on Twitter or Facebook, and I will respond. Good writing and Godspeed!

Hello, Dear Readers! Welcome back to an Eddying Flight and to my reflection on my first ever PhD research trip, which took me to both Whitby and York via the perilous UK rail system.

A note on the slideshow below before I begin - I recommend that you click on the first image so that the slideshow pops out and displays in its own window. Some of the pictures won't display properly otherwise.

In organising and embarking on this trip, I was looking for concrete and authentic details of setting which I could use to bolster my memories of these two locations, locations which I had brought together to create a new setting for my PhD timeslip novel: Winterthorne. I talked a little bit about this in my last post, and will address if further below.

But, as I also touched on in last week's post about it, I this research trip was also something more than a location scouting excursion. It was a kind of personal and artistic pilgrimage, my attempt to journey into the heart of one of my characters: Xanthe, the narrator of ASL's historical timeline.

Xanthe was actually the first character from this story to appear to me. As I recall it she sparked into life unexpectedly while I was earnestly trying to write something else, forced that project to a grinding halt, and practically dictated the story's prologue to me. It's a startling scene, one of fairytale beauty and Gothic menace, and it set a fishhook in my heart. I never gave up on writing the book to which that scene, that unforgettable scene from Xanthe's PoV, belonged. And nearly a decade later, the prologue remains unchanged, almost identical to that first version.

When I officially began work on ASL I expected Xanthe to spring easily to life for

me again, but despite - or perhaps because of - heaps of historical research and the reading of dozens of novels written during the correct period (the early 1920s), I never managed to connect with her in the same way I had initially. My supervisors sensed a kind of self-consciousness about getting the tone and the details correct and suggested worrying too much about anachronism had caused me to create something rather mannered. In addition, Xanthe's timeline is written in third person; I've always felt more comfortable with first person. And it's true, as well, that finding your way back to understanding of a character who first presented herself to you when you were a decade younger would probably be a challenge for anyone.

What I've slowly come to accept, however, is that the issue may not be one of failing to understand Xanthe's character. It might be, perhaps, that I understand her a little too well. That the reason there's a filter there when I try to look at her, the reason there's resistance is that, without the filter, without that resistance, I would be forced to confront aspects of myself which, until very recently, I have not been ready to admit were there.

Like most writers, I imbue many characters with elements of my own ideology,

personality, interests or background. For example, Jude, ASL's contemporary narrator, has my working class upbringing, my history of losing a beloved parent, and a sideways version of my prickliness. There's a hundred tiny threads of me woven into the millions of tiny threads that make up the fabric of her. I'm not always consciously aware of this subtle interweaving: when writing Zhi, the main character of my book The Hand, the Eye & the Heart, I was fully aware that they were genderfluid; not until the book was finished did I realise that part of my reason for wanting to write their story was my need to work out issues with my own gender identity.

Aside from her prologue, the first scene that I wrote from Xanthe's PoV was one where she was alone in a train carriage, watching the familiar countryside fly past with mixed feelings. Sitting with one elbow on the edge of the window frame, she fidgeted repetitively: flipping through her journal, running her fingers through her hair. She scrambled up onto her knees on the seat to see the view, and talked to herself aloud. And then she felt guilty about doing these things because she was aware it wasn't 'normal' or 'grown-up' of her.

These are all things that I do. These are all things, from an incredibly long list of things, that I have tried to stop myself from doing for years and years without any success at all because - as I have finally come to realise and accept - I am autistic.

This year, I stopped protesting ('But I don't have trouble with eye contact! But I was hyper verbal as a child!') and found the courage to do as some friends of mine, women who had been diagnosed as on the spectrum in their thirties and forties, had been urging me. I talked to people online. I did research. And I took a couple of diagnostic questionnaires. Everything came back with the same answer: 'Yes, you exhibit strongly autistic traits'.

After all my struggle and resistance, I can’t explain the sense of relief this brought. The feeling of finally being permitted to drop a huge, unexamined weight from my back: the idea of 'normal' that I had been forcing myself to project, not only to the outside world, but to myself, since I was a little girl.

I've begun the process of accepting that many behaviours which I have castigated myself for, things which have made me 'weird' and 'odd' and ‘out-of-place’, are not bugs to be eliminated, but features of who I am. That they're OK, and I'm OK.

But here's the thing: hard as it has been to be a woman growing up in a time

when girls are chronically under-diagnosed with developmental neuro-divergencies like mine... how hard would it be to be a young woman growing up in a time when the term Autistic didn't even exist yet?

Not only will Xanthe have been exposed to and forced to internalise ableist ideology and language all her life - but she will never, ever experience the validation of talking openly with friends about her Autistic traits. She can’t lay claim to that label which makes it, somehow, OK to be the way she is. She'll always have to live with herself in a strange love-hate relationship with all her own 'eccentricities' - the way I've had to until this year.

From the moment I wrote that train scene and found myself recoiling from the familiarity of Xanthe’s ‘eccentricities’, I suspect my unconscious went to work trying to distance and shield me from them. And, in turn, I leaned heavily on crafting speech and behaviour for Xanthe which sounded ripped directly from the pages of a Dorothy L. Sayers novel because those things would keep everyone, even me, at a distance. Keep Xanthe safe. Shield her from scrutiny and judgement within the story by her family and social circle but, most of all, from people reading the book.

All this has been sloshing vaguely around in my head for a while. The research trip was my chance to confront it.

It worked. Not miraculously, but enough - just enough that I was able to experience that sense of a bright, vivid inner monologue running under my own thoughts when I was on the delayed train journey to Whitby. And enough that when I arrived at Whitby itself, an interesting thing occurred.

I loved Whitby. I loved the ruin of the Abbey, St Mary's Churchyard overlooking the sea, the 199 steps, the twisty steep streets, the two massive encircling arms of the harbour walls, and the various beaches. I had a lovely time there. But it was absolutely not Winterthorne, despite being the place that gave birth to Winterthorne in my imagination. And in every absence... there was Xanthe.

"Where are the woods? Where are all the trees? Everything's so bare!"

"What's that wreck on the hill? It's very picturesque but it's not the castle, is it? And - did someone build a church up there, too? Whatever for? Don't all the old dears get blown off into the sea after Sunday services?"

"This harbour is entirely the wrong shape. What in the world happened to the cliffs?"

Whenever something was right - the smells, the sound of seabirds, the narrow

roads and little shops, the shape of the headland and one of the beaches that I walked on - I could feel Jude's thrumming excitement over her new home.

Everywhere that there was a liminal space, a space where I had made a gap or invented something new or rearranged things so that Winterthorne could grow into being, Xanthe spoke up. At length (another trait she shares with me).

It was the same when I returned to York and finally, on a miserable rainy wet day, managed my visit to Clifford's Tower. While I wandered around communing with the walls, taking pictures, and thinking thoughts about the deep weight of history, Jude happily pointed out all the bits of the view that she was coming to know and love as a newcomer, and Xanthe patiently listed all the things that were definitely, clearly, wrong wrong wrong and wanted setting right straight in the book. Each of them made me take note of and perceive things in their own unique way, and by the time I finally boarded the train home on Friday, I felt... settled.

This is what I've always wanted and strived for, even while a part of me was resisting it: to have Xanthe and Jude’s stories work together. To have their voices weave almost into one within the narrative.

Taking on the task of representing Xanthe as an Autistic character, especially one residing in a historical period where she herself would never be able to claim or understand that label, will certainly continue to be a challenge going forward. I'm sure she and I have more battles to fight before the book is finished. However, following this trip I have hope that in the future we will be on the same side in those battles. The side which has the bravery to allow Xanthe to be real - even if also vulnerable - within the pages of ASL.

Now if only I can arrange that trip to Robin Hood's Bay one day...

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Hello, Dear Readers, and welcome back to An Eddying Flight. Today I want to start a two-part reflection on my first research trip as a doctoral student; what I went in hoping for, what I really learned, and how this will change my research and writing going forward.

Now for some details. My PhD is in Creative Writing and will take the form of an 'artefact & exegesis', which means that I'm tackling my research questions generatively, by writing a novel. This research method will allow me to explore all my topics and themes and hopefully answer those key questions through the process of creative writing itself. Very handy. However, at the same time as the novel, I'm also creating a 20k critical commentary on the work, which explicates the creative and research process and underlines what I've found out.

My book - which I will refer to as ASL, here - is a dual narrative timeslip novel. Effectively, it is the story of two stories, taking place at different points in history, and of how these impinge on each other in time. The setting of this novel is a small, rather isolated seaside town called Winterthorne, on the North coast of England. Appropriately enough, I imagined it, too, as having a dual aspect, envisioning it as a kind of amalgam of York (a city where I lived for three days a week as an RLF Fellow for two years) and of Whitby (a place I frequently visited with my family as a child). I wove my memories of the two together to create a town with a unique personality of its own, caught between the sea and the land, with stunning geography and a dense accretion of human history, the layers of which I intended to excavate through the plot of my book.

By the time that I began work on ASL, I hadn't actually been to York for a couple

of years. I hadn't visited Whitby for at least twenty. Some places I was able to call to mind immediately and vividly, others were easily invented. It's helpful that, as well as giving my invented town a new name, I had also taken some fairly huge liberties with its substance, replacing the ruin of Whitby Abbey with another ruin entirely, shrugging up the surrounding countryside into hills and drawing forests over them, shoe-horning certain locations from York into place within Whitby's seaside setting to create Winterthorne. But at certain points, during certain key scenes in my writing, I felt a kind of resistance: a sense that the setting wanted something. That my memory was either failing me or else trying to tell me there was something better, somewhere realer and more authentic, that I was missing out on.

And so, after getting approval from my supervisors and successfully applying for funding, off I went. My trip - accomplished entirely by bus and train, because I don't drive - began with a day and a night in York, then two nights in Whitby, and a further day and night back in York. I bookended the journey with my stays in York this way because the train journey to Whitby from my home in Lincolnshire is five hours, and that's if you're lucky enough to suffer no delays. I wanted to try and squeeze the most out of each day in both of my locations, and this seemed the best way to achieve it: two hours to York from home, and then three hours from York to Whitby would maximise my actual time to explore, wander, ponder, and above all write in both places.

Heading out filled with enthusiasm and the desire to move my work on substantially, I stumbled over my first hurdle: my urge to do everything, see everything, and take pictures to prove how hardworking and productive I was. In retrospect this was obviously in direct opposition to the mood of dreamy, meditative open-mindedness that I actually needed in order to write. When my train was cancelled on the first day, meaning that I had to catch another, much later one, and subsequently miss out on the trip to York's Clifford's Tower which I had already booked and paid for online (no refunds from English Heritage) I became so stressed out that I nearly cried.

Unfortunately it was much easier to tell myself that being tense and anxious was

counterproductive than it was to force myself to untense, and feel relaxed and at ease with the vagaries of life and the UK rail system. I did my best though. And it was lovely to return to York. In the short time I had before it started to get dark, I had a ramble through some of my favourite places - places I had stolen and reimagined for my book - took a few photos, and tried to get my brain to release it's stubborn sense of urgency.

But the backbrain whisper of 'hurry up! Get inspired already!' wasn't helped when I faced similar disruptions on my journey to Whitby the following day. The plus side was that this gave me a few extra hours in York, to walk the city walls and revisit the market. The minus side was that I knew before setting out for Whitby that I wasn't going to get there in time to achieve anything on my first day, other than finding and checking into my hotel, before it got dark. This meant that I was going to have to cancel my intended trip to Robin Hood's Bay (a location which had been specifically recommended to me by one of my supervisors and which I was keen to explore) on my 'second' day there, and spend that day focused just on Whitby instead.

Funnily enough, what helped me to let go of the stress and allow my creativity to unfurl a little was the train journey itself.

As I said above, the journey from York to Whitby is three hours long. It's one of those rattling, lonely services that stops at every little town along the way but hardly ever seems to pick up any passengers, that goes backwards sometimes, and sometimes stops unexpectedly at a little siding in the middle of nowhere for five minutes for no apparent reason, engines off so that you can hear magpies screeching in the hedgerows in the sudden silence. You pass by great rocky ridges, dense copper-grey mountains wreathed in mist. You flash over little secret streams, rippling black and silver under the tracks. You glimpse forgotten hollows, red with bracken and guarded by slender white trees. Dark birds spray out of coppices as blackthorns and scarlet rosehips thrash with the wind of the train's passing. At one point I saw the unexpected flash of a white horse carved into a chalk hill - a clumsy, lumpen shape, nothing like the elegant beauty of the Uffington White Horse, which I love intensely (and, thanks to Diana Wynne Jones, secretly believe is really the skeleton of a dragon).

Enchanted by the scenery, I forgot to get out my camera or stare fixedly at my notebook, waiting for words to appear. Instead watched the weather change, low waves of steel grey clouds unrolling across the hills and crow dotted fields, sunlight spilling beneath them like golden syrup onto the hedgerows. Rain swept across the train - first soft and glittering, and then thunderous, grey and heavy as the sun was squeezed away. After a while the rain flew away again, flew back up into the clouds, and the clouds lifted themselves up into a thin high bowl, white as bone China with the sun shining in through it, before splintering into long tumbling shreds of mist against the late afternoon blue of the sky.

I realised I was seeing a cross section of weather. Local weather, local time. Falling into place only to change, and again again, like sets from a play put on for me because I was travelling through it, relative to it. I was witnessing half a dozen different days experienced by different people in different places; a day of rain in Rusworp, sun in Glaisdale, gloom in Lealholm. Each real and distinct for those places, but fleeting for me, who belonged to none of the places - to none of the days - attached to the names.

At this point, of course, words were magically appearing before me on my notebook pages. That crackling sense of connection to my own book had sprung to life inside me, a kind of electric current of perceptions, an inner monologue that wasn't, quite, mine - as if I'd become one of my heroines, Xanthe, on her train journey back home to Winterthorne after a period of self-imposed exile. And I felt

a great swell of excitement when I identified that feeling, because one of the biggest stumbling blocks to progressing ASL, all along - a much greater resistance than any I'd ever felt from the setting, and the main motivation for my research trip - was my connection to Xanthe. My ability to bring her worlds, the inner landscape and the outer one, vividly and authentically to life for the reader.

I had wrestled with Xanthe for months. Struggled to see past a kind of filter of 1920s pastiche that seemed to want to obscure my view of her and her experiences. This is not a problem I usually experience with viewpoint characters so it was not only frustrating but a little frightening. Why can't I get at her, I'd ask myself? What am I doing wrong, here? Why doesn't she want to let me in?

But now, unexpectedly, she had let me in. And it was my job to figure out how to keep that connection open if I possibly could.

I'll talk more about what I learned in Whitby in Part 2 of this blog...next week. In the meantime, I wish you joy, Dear Readers! Drop me a comment below or on Twitter or FB if there's anything you'd like to chat about.

Welcome back to An Eddying Flight, Dear Readers! I'm delighted, thrilled and still slightly in shock to be able to announce:

I'm one of the three winners of the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize!

My story ACHING BONES - a deeply weird, darkly Feminist little tale about histories of harm and healing - took third place from among the shortlist. Today the competition organisers posted the story on the prize website, along with some absolutely humbling feedback from the judges, which I hadnt seen before. My day, week, and month have been made. Hurrah!My friend, the author Sheena Wilkinson, quoted me on how ecstatic I was to be shortlisted in her post, Hooray for Hopeful Signs over on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure last week. And I really was. That's not just because it's wonderful to be shortlisted for and win things (although it is!) but also because I wrote this story as part of my Master's Degree course back in 2019 and I've been submitting it to competitions and journals ever since. It had a couple of nice rejections, but otherwise netted no success. I was tempted to retire it to the draw dozens of times... but I always felt there was something special there. I just loved its sinister, shiversome weirdness too much to give up on it. I felt it deserved to be read. So I sent it out one more time. And this time, lo - it worked. *Pause while I briefly leave the room to make inarticulate whooping and shrieking noises and jump up and down*

Ahem.

I was lucky enough earlier this year to attend a talk at the NAWE conference by the poet Kim Moore - whose PhD thesis is now on sale as a book of poetry entitled, brilliantly, All the Men I Never Married. She mentioned keeping a spreadsheet so that she could see where she had submitted her work, and feeling immense satisfaction when one poem that had been rejected thirteen times eventually went on to win a prize.

I've reminded myself of this story several times over the past few months as poems of mine had various near misses, but it springs to mind more vividly than ever now not only because the situations are so similar, but because it's a reminder that sometimes as a writer (or creative of any kind) all you can do is hold your nerve.

It can be wickedly tempting to decide that you were wrong about the merit of what you've created, and to retire stories or poems or manuscripts that have been rejected one too many times. It's a form of self protection. You accept the judgement of the world that there was something wrong with what you had produced. It was never any good. It was always flawed, all along. No one was ever going to like it. And in that way you cut it off from your soul, and it goes numb, and you can laugh to yourself and think, 'Dear me, why did I ever embarrass myself by believing that terrible bit of rubbish would get anywhere?'

This will certainly hurt less. But if you do it, this idea that your creative work was nothing more than a misfire will become the truth. Even though the truth was more likely that it just hadn't found the right reader yet.

In order to find the one place that will recognise and delight in the beauty or truth or simple sinister shiversomeness of your work, you have to keep believing in it yourself first, no matter how many people may tell you 'It's not quite right for us' or how much this hurts.

The real proof of this is something I haven't told anyone up until now: I had submitted ACHING BONES to the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize once before, last year. It wasn't even longlisted.

Guess what else? The first germ of an idea for ACHING BONES was born while I was using a really basic little creativity exercise, one that I utilised often during my MA in order to motivate myself to produce the required number of new words to share and workshop each week. A slightly tweaked and expanded version of this same exercise is the very thing I've been calling Pick & Mix, and sharing here on my blog. So even though I always urge you to avoid putting pressure on yourself while taking part, having a go at Pick & Mix can still yield results that will take you surprising places.

You can read ACHING BONES now on the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize website, and it will be published in the winter Oxford Flash Fiction anthology (title to be announced). I'll post about it again nearer the time. In the meanwhile if there are comments, questions or things you'd like to discuss, pop them in the comments or over on Twitter or Facebook, Dear Readers!