To herald the paperback publication of Is This Love? I am pleased to welcome author, Sue Moorcroft onto the blog. Sue has written a lovely letter to her younger self.
Dear Sue,
You're sixteen. It's your first day at secretarial college and you've got the horrible feeling that you've made a mistake. You shouldn't be here (even if your parents have bought you some cool new college clothes and you can hang around town every lunch hour, now).
You wanted to be a journalist but you hated school. When the careers teacher told you that you'd need years and years more in education to realise that dream, you shrugged and gave the idea up. A secretarial course would only take a year and it wasn't available at the comprehensive school you hated, ergo you could leave. Result.
That wasn't very mature, was it? Where's your push? Where is your ability to make things happen?
Today you've been told by someone else on your course that two of her erstwhile school friends have joined the local newspaper as cub reporters. They're sixteen, just like you. The paper is going to put them through their qualifications with on-the-job training and day release. Your heart has sunk to your boots with the sickening certainty that you could have done that.
Why have you decided that the opportunity has gone forever? Why brood bitterly that it's just one more example of the kids at the grammar school being treated differently to those at the comprehensive? You should write straight to that paper and ask if they'll consider you for next year. You should explain the situation and promise that, meanwhile, you'll get typing and shorthand qualifications. I repeat: where's your push?
A long way in the future, it turns out. Past secretarial college, past the years in the bank, past the children being young. There! That's when your push will begin to show, when you take a writing course and start sending your short stories out to magazines. Writing story after story, sending them out to magazine after magazine. Until, finally, thirty stories in, a national newsstand magazine finally buys! Yeah! Only another eighty-six published short stories and a serial later, and you'll sell a novel, or rather your agent will. Another forty or fifty short stories, four serials, regular monthly columns and seven novels on, you'll be writing this letter.
All because you found your push ...
Love,
Sue 2013 xxx :-)
Is This Love? is available to buy right now. To read my review, please click here.
To find out more about Sue Moorcroft:
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