It’s a little-recognised facet of being a novelist, and one that most of us dread: copy editing.

Fortunately, publishers employ independent copy editors whose task it is to go through your deathlesss prose with a fine tooth-comb (word-comb?) as a mother might search for nits, looking for inconsistencies and typographical errors. They have to be real details people, exceptional with grammar, making sure, for example, that capital letters, hyphens and indents are in the right places, (eg Liberty prints, mini-skirt and hair-do) as well as the dreaded apostrophies (eg lover’s knot, hairdresser’s).

They are also the masters (mistresses?) of consistency: making sure you always refer to a character in the same right way (eg Miss Garthwaite / Miss G); whether you have marked the passage of time correctly (eg ‘Should this be fourteen years perhaps?’) and whether your characters’ physical characteristics are the same each time (eg ‘He had blue eyes in the first chapter.’) They’ll also question any dodgy historical references you might have overlooked (eg ‘When did Boots start developing film?’).

So far, so wonderful. But the author’s task is then to do their own fine tooth-comb job. This entails reading, and not in the way we normally read, skimming sentences for meaning, but literally reading every word, every speech mark and apostrophe, all over again, to make sure you agree with the suggestions the copy editor has made, and responding to their questions regarding consistency, time passing, historical references etc. It’s a laborious job and not one that some of us are well-suited to! If you are anything like me, you also have to resist the temptation to do a complete re-write of certain passages which, in the cold light of paper proof, and quite a few weeks after you submitted your final draft, don’t work as well as you would like.

Next stage: the proof copy – another very careful reading required, because this really is your last opportunity for making sure that it’s right!

(The Forgotten Seamstress will be published in February 2014).

One of the last things I predicted, on becoming a published author for the first time, was that I would become obsessed with sales figures and other random statistics. Now, of course, I have clocked on to the obvious truth that this is a trait common to most writers because a) sales = royalties and b) the better your sales, the greater your chances of being published next time.

Still, back then in the heady days of 2012 when The Last Telegram had just hit the streets, supermarkets, airports, bookstores and the great online world out there, I was astonished to discover that it was in the Amazon Kindle top 100, and had become one of their ‘movers and shakers’. I took to logging on several times a day just to watch it rise in the fiction charts and, even more encouragingly, in the ‘historical fiction’ chart where it reached the dizzy heights of the top ten.

But as with all things in life what goes up must come down, and after a month or two it slithered inexorably off the top 100 and into the unnumbered ‘others’. Now I have to rely on updates from my publisher to find out how the sales are going – which are pretty good, thanks to you wonderful readers out there. Of course I also click regularly onto the Amazon review site, and other book review sites, to see what people think. To date, 143 lovely people have kindly reviewed The Last Telegram, and I thank you all for taking the trouble and for your (mostly) four star ratings.

Meantime, my latest obsession is with the clicks on this website, and where they come from. So far, it has been visited by people in UK, USA, France, Germany, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Switzerland, Belgium, Sri Lanka, Italy, Poland, Kyrgyzstan, Denmark, Austria, Norway, India, Thailand, New Zealand, Netherlands, Russian Federation, Spain, Mexico, Isle of Man, South Africa, Jersey, Turkey, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Portugal, Slovenia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Greece.

Now that’s a pretty impressive list for a novel that’s only (so far) been published in English (German edition out in July). But if I am to achieve my ambition of covering the world by the end of the year I still have a long way to go, especially in South America and Africa, in the Far and Middle East, the Baltic States and the far north (Sweden, Iceland, Greenland).

So if you know anyone who lives in these places, please drop them a line with my website address to encourage them to log on and say hello. You will make a stats-obsessed author very happy!

Did you know, for example, that if you’re feeling washed out, fed up, or downright lousy, World War One is to blame? Researchers Julian Walker and Peter Doyle analysed thousands of documents from the period including letters from the front, trench newspapers, diaries, books and official records to trace how language changed during the four years of the war. The published it in a great little book called Trench Talk: Words of the First World War, which has become a kind of bible for me lately!

My favourite examples: communiques from headquarters were derisively known as ‘bumf’, short for ‘bum-fodder’, a term used for toilet paper. ‘Lousy’ of course comes from that scourge of trench soldiers, the common louse. ‘Cushy’ derives from the Hindi ‘khush’ meaning pleasure, and the phrase ‘blind spot’ came from the early pilots whose planes also had a tendency to ‘conk out’.

The brutality of life in the trenches gave rise to many euphemisms for death: such as ‘pushing up daisies’, ‘gone west’, ‘snuffed it’, and for fear, such as ‘got the wind up’ (referring to the way your stomach reacts to fear).

The trenches were a melting pot far from the ordered class structure of Edwardian England, and after the war many colourful terms previously only used in one social class or one region entered into common usage. For example ‘scrounging’ and ‘binge’ came from Lancashire, as well as words previously only used by the criminal underworld, such as ‘chum’ (for an acccomplice), ‘rumbled’ (to be found out) and ‘knocked off’, or stolen. Sacked officers were said to have become ‘ungummed’ from the French ‘degommer’ (to dismiss). This quickly developed into the phrase ‘to come unstuck’, which we still use widely today.

Finally, although we don’t hear it much these days, I was fascinated to discover that word ‘Blighty’ comes from the Hindi ‘bilati’ which simply means ‘foreign’. The term was used by Indian soldiers of their British colleagues, for whom it came to mean ‘British’ or ‘Britain’.

One of the unexpected joys of becoming a writer is meeting readers!

Real readers, clasping my book in their hands (readers of the e-book version also welcome, but they don’t give me quite the same buzz).
Over the past few months I’ve had the pleasure of talking to around 20 different book groups, large and small, about The Last Telegram. Most of them include some form of eating and drinking, too, and those meeting in restaurants are especially congenial, such as Caxton Books’ club at Frinton, where I was last night (great food served at Cafe 19), the Gourmet Book Club of Colchester and the Appetite Book Club, based at The Court House in Colchester.

I simply cannot think of a better way of spending an evening than enjoying good food and drink in the company of interested and interesting people, as readers tend to be, people with fascinating ideas and creative imaginations of their own, with a diverse range of life experiences and well-considered opinions.
People often apologise in advance, when asking a question: ‘I expect you’ve been asked this a dozen times before,’ they say. Actually, the variety and range of questions never ceases to surprise me and, although there are a few that occur more often than others, it is never a bore to answer them because in doing so, each time, I learn something different about myself and my own experience of writing.
Some questions require me to analyse more complex aspects of the creative process, which gets me thinking (always useful). And, just occasionally, I am stumped for answers. Like the reader at Cafe 19 last night who asked (as a joke, of course) what research I’d done for the lesbian sex scene which never made it into the final version of The Last Telegram! (Note to self, must think of a witty reply for next time I get asked that question.)

So, if you belong to a book club with more than 20 or so regular attendees and within half an hour’s drive of my home town of Colchester, and would like to have an ‘author’ speaker, do get in touch and I may be able to oblige. My email address is on the contacts page of this website.

Here I am signing books!

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• when did Boots the Chemist start processing film?
• what’s cool in the latest upmarket sofas?
• when did narcosis therapy start being used in the treatment of mental illness?
• when did the Prince of Wales start his affair with Wallis Simpson?
• how can I get into the mind of an aspiring interior designer?

For this last question, I’ve just been to the newsagents and bought six interior design magazines of the ‘Homes and Gardens’ kind (God, they’re heavy) and spent a happy hour or so trawling through them to find the kind of designs I think would appeal to my character. This is the result – a crazy mix of retro and floral madness!