Writing
Examples of My Written Work (In Progress)
I have been writing for as long as I can remember. My first achievement came aged 5 when I was awarded second place in the whole of the British Isles in a competition called 'Our World 2000'. My work is published in a book of the same name.
This was followed by many years of me sitting at the kitchen table writing stories as a child. Most stories would begin along the lines of "Once upon a time there was a Mummy and a Daddy and they had 50 children, called ..."
I would then annoy my family with constant demands for names, most of which I didn't like!
Luckily this didn't last too long and I began to write proper stories in the years following. I wrote a disaster story aged 11 (my first ever complete manuscript) which was fuelled by my growing interest in environmentalism, and another story two years later about wildlife conservation, which was written for children and written in verse. I sent this off for publication but was ultimately rejected (having revisited this story many years later, I can see it requires a lot of work to be publication-worthy but the idea is there, so I will be working on it over the coming months). This rejection plus the growing demands for study (my GCSEs were looming), meant I stopped writing children's literature for a number of years and instead focused on developing an academic style of writing.
I first started university in 2013 and for the following few years my only writing was academic, in the form of essays, blogs, and my dissertations. I am now studying a Ph.D and so spend a lot of my time writing my thesis, and drafts for blogs and academic journals.
In 2017 I became a mum and this soon reignited my interest in children's literature, I have spent the past few years focusing my attention on picture books and early readers as I really enjoy reading these with my daughter. I now have some manuscripts ready and am looking to get them published.
Another few areas that interest me are personal development, wellbeing, and lifestyle. I began studying towards my first qualification (neuro-linguistic programming) aged 13 and have gained a wealth of knowledge and further qualifications in these topic areas since. I have developed many ideas and as such have begun writing a couple of books that will be for adults that tie together personal development, wellbeing, and some of the themes I have learnt about during my Ph.D. I am very much in the early stages, so it will be a while before I complete the manuscripts, let alone get them published, but I do write about these topics in my blog, so be sure to subscribe.