Melissa Lawrence

Hi everyone. OK, so I'm not going to beat myself up about how long it is since my last blog post. Suffice to say that I promised you an update on how my non-fiction book with the strong link to the hit TV series Downton Abbey is progressing and here it is. Wow. What a lot has happened in the last few weeks. My proposed book is based on a collection of letters and postcards I inherited from my maternal grandmother which were written to her between 1919 and 1933 from a close friend called Ethel North. Miss North was lady's maid and companion to Lady Winifred Burghclere, elder sister of the 5th Earl of Carnarvon (the one who discovered Tutankhamen) which is where the Downton link comes in. Anyway, in January, I started the process of putting together a proposal to send to literary agents and this has involved a great deal of typing, a great deal of research for footnotes (thank you Google!) and a great deal of background research on the Carnarvons, the Burghcleres and Ethel...

Hi everyone. Happy Valentine's Day! I hope your "significant other" remembered the card and flowers or at least offered to clean the bathroom. I think I could probably count the number of Valentine's cards that I've received during my life on the fingers of a very small hand. (Ahhhh....) I've made plenty though and I will now unashamedly plug my crafting website http://www.melissalawrencedesigns.com/  where you can find exclusive handcrafted cards, stationery and gifts for all occasions including Valentine's Day. Anyway, back to receiving Valentine's cards. One I'd completely forgotten about (maybe that's why no one sends me any!) was sent by a male friend at university. He actually sent one to all my flatmates as well so I don't think it really counts. I came across the card the other day and I was struck by the beauty of the poem he'd written inside. Knowing it was pretty unlikely that he'd penned it himself, I looked the po...

Hi everyone. You know you haven't blogged in a while when you can't remember your own blog address and have to find it via your website. Yes, I really did mean to blog regularly and yes, it really is September 2014 since I last posted anything. Oh well. The road to hell and all that as my late father would have said. So Happy Diwali, Happy Halloween, Happy Bonfire Night, Happy Christmas and Happy New Year. Delete which not applicable. I was actually shamed into starting to blog again when I came across Helen Yendall's wonderfully inspiring blog which you can read for yourself at https://blogaboutwriting.wordpress.com/  Helen writes the kind of posts I aspire to. Witty, concise, interesting , useful...Oh well, we can but try. Anyway, enough rambling. Time to bring you up to date on where I'm at with my writing. My main news is that my non-fiction book based on the letters I inherited from my grandmother and which have a strong link to Downton Abbey, is at quite an ...

Hi everyone. As I think I said in a recent crafting blog post ( http://www.melissalawrencecrafter.blogspot.co.uk/ ) it's the time of year when the Big Guns are rolled out by the television companies who assume that we are all now curled up in front of the fire with our mugs of hot chocolate, pretending we are in an episode of Gogglebox . One of the biggest guns of all, so big in fact it's probably more like a canon, is Downton Abbey which starts its fifth series on ITV1 tonight. I must admit I'm looking forward to it more than usual as I have a vested interest in this amazing drama because of a non-fiction book project I'm currently working on. I have been extremely fortunate to inherit a collection of letters which were written to my grandmother Elsie Merrall by her close friend Ethel North. Between 1919 and 1933, Ethel North was the friend and travelling companion of Lady Winifred Burghclere who was the sister of the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, the one who helped di...

Hi everyone. And I'm back, almost a year to the day since my last writing blog post. This time twelve months ago, my closest friend and "confidante" had just passed away from cancer. It was one of the lowest points of my entire life especially as it was my third major bereavement in six years and felt like the last straw of many last straws. I hadn't been in a great place with my writing for a while, as you can probably tell from that post and I had pretty much decided that after 18 years or so, writing as a "profession" was no longer for me. I had decided just to think of writing as a "hobby" and concentrate on my new career as a crafter, designer and scrapbooker instead. Well, here I am a year on and feeling much better about everything, I'm very pleased to say. Ironically, I found that once I'd taken the pressure off myself by only thinking of writing as a "hobby", I got more writing done than I had in ages! Then, once I be...

Hi everyone. Well, this is a blog post I never thought I'd write. After eighteen years as a "professional" writer, I've decided to call time on my writing career. It's been a very tough decision but I do feel it's the right one although I guess only time will tell. If you've read any of my previous posts, you'll know that I've been really struggling with my writing, particularly over the last couple of years. I've tried everything I could to get it back on track. Stopping for a while, starting again, just writing one day a week, changing direction, reading books and articles on "writer's block".... In the end, I've just been finding it too stressful and not really at all enjoyable. Also I haven't earned any money or had anything to really celebrate with my writing for so long now that the motivation isn't there to keep making myself do it on a regular basis any more. It's like Ray Bradbury says in his excellent b...

Hi everyone. July is the cruellest month or maybe that's April, I forget. But then I've never let the truth get in the way of a good introduction. Either way, July was not exactly the most productive writing month I've ever had and I didn't even set any writing goals, let alone achieve any. The unexpected and intense heatwave was the biggest factor as I don't cope well when the temperature goes over twenty degrees, let alone thirty. Even night working, which usually makes things more manageable, didn't help. It was like trying to write in a pressure cooker but one which had twenty-seven different species of moths and other creatures of the night living in it. Also, on a much more serious note, my closest friend who I've known for over forty years, found out that she only has a few weeks to live, instead of the sixteen months we originally thought. That was a massive blow and as seems to happen these days, writing went out of the window (along with all th...