Melissa Lawrence

Hi everyone. I hope you are having a good summer wherever you are in the world. I wasn't expecting to discover this week that I have something in common with former royal butler Paul Burrell but it appears that I have. His book A Royal Duty published in 2003, is based on his experiences as butler to Diana, Princess of Wales who tragically died in a car crash twenty years ago this year. The book caused considerable controversy at the time because of the "revelations" it contained about Diana's private life based on personal letters that Burrell had included in his book. Nothing unusual there then, given the apparent penchant of ex-employees for spilling the royal beans. What was different about Burrell's book however was that Burrell had not only included letters written by the late princess to himself, but had also included letters written by Prince Philip to his daughter-in-law in the early 1990s. Princess Diana dancing with John Travolta at the White...

Hi everyone. Happy National Limerick Day 2017! And sincere apologies that I didn't quite manage to "up my game" in terms of blogging as I said I would do in my last post which was way back in November. But "onwards and upwards" as they say. National Limerick Day is celebrated annually on May 12th every year in recognition of the birthday of the poet, author, illustrator and artist Edward Lear who was born in 1812. His Danish father apparently ended up in debtors prison so Lear had to start earning a living at a very young age. He began as an illustrator for the London Zoological Society and then went to live on the estate of the Earl of Derby. It was there that he wrote his first book of poems A Book of Nonsense which was intended for the grandchildren of the Derbys. Edward Lear by Wilhelm Marstrand  Photo credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org Although Lear went on to write many travel books, he subsequently became most famous for his humorou...

Hi everyone. Well, I'm not sure where September and October went to but somehow it's now November and over two months since my last post. The good news is that after a lot of faffing about and spending way too much time "thinking" instead of "doing" (although you can probably blame the debilitating effects of the peri-menopause for that), I have decided that I'm definitely putting writing back at the forefront of my portfolio career. That means I'm upping my game in terms of blogging, sending stuff out and generally getting my writing act together. If I hadn't been rather comatose throughout most of October, I would definitely have blogged about National Poetry Day which was on October 6th. Actually, it was watching an inspiring programme about poetry on the BBC that aired around this time which helped to kickstart my writing again, as well as another programme on the slightly less well-known channel Notts TV which featured the very funny an...

Hi everyone. This is slightly spooky! I've been meaning to start posting on this blog again for a while now but hadn't quite managed to get round to it until today. I've just looked back to see when I last posted and it is almost exactly one year to the day. I certainly had no idea that this was the case and it does feel a bit like Groundhog Day or rather Groundhog Year as I could quite easily begin this post in exactly the same way as I did twelve months ago. "I hope you had a good Bank Holiday weekend. It was a bit of a wash-out here so I hope it was better where you are." But that would be rather lazy of me and besides, it wasn't so much a wash-out as more of a severe tropical storm with lots of thunder and lightning which was indeed very, very frightening, especially when you foolishly haven't renewed your home insurance. It was interesting looking back, as it always is, to see where I was at with my writing 12 months ago today. According to my p...

Hi everyone. I hope you had a good Bank Holiday weekend. It was a bit of a wash-out here so I hope it was better where you are. Actually, the wet weekend didn't really bother me too much. I spent most of it putting the finishing touches to a new website I've set up. This is to publicise the collection of letters I inherited from my grandmother which I'm trying to get published as a non-fiction book called 'My Dear Elsie'. Those of you who follow this blog will know that the letters have a strong link to the popular UK television series Downton Abbey . This is because they were written by my grandmother's close friend Ethel North, who was lady's maid and companion to Lady Winifred Burghclere, the elder sister of the 5th Earl of Carnarvon. As you may know, the Carnarvon family were the real-life inspiration for the fictional Crawley family in Downton Abbey and much of the series was filmed at their ancestral seat of Highclere Castle. The website, as we...

Hi everyone. The summer seems to have gone on strike, doesn't it? I'm sitting here with the central heating on as there is a definite Autumnal nip in the air, possibly because it is the early hours of the morning. Actually, it was more like a Wintery nip when I opened the front door a few minutes ago to fetch the milk in. I'm surprised there wasn't a dash of snow on my red-top. Maybe the summer is having a mid-life crisis, (if summers have lives) which is something I feel like I'm going through at the moment, especially with my writing. It's probably been going on for months but seemed to really kick in when I decided to start sorting out all my unpublished work, namely my large collection of short stories, my eight children's novels and my three collections of children's poetry. I'm not sure what made me do it although worrying about the weight of the filing cabinet on my office floor was probably a factor. I don't think it was the best ti...

Hi everyone. I hope you've had a good couple of weeks and managed to get lots of writing done. I'm pleased to say that things have improved quite a bit since my last post  Coping With Criticism  in which I described how a "mauling" of the sample copy of my proposed non-fiction book with the strong link to Downton Abbey by a literary agent, had badly affected my confidence in the material. Thanks to a surprising act of "serendipity" (obviously the Universe hasn't quite given up on the project yet), I was given the opportunity to send the proposal and sample copy to my writing colleague author Dr Sheila Glasbey who writes under the pen name of  Rosalie Warren . Rosalie is an experienced editor and qualified proof-reader as well as the published author of several novels and scientific works. She runs her own editing, proofreading and critique service which you can find out about at http://www.affordable-editing.com/ Rosalie sent her comments back al...