Melissa Lawrence

Hi everyone. As I type this post, I'm gearing myself up for the heatwave which is due to hit the UK later today. It's going to be hotter here than in Las Vegas apparently, so I'd better start cashing in my chips. I thought I'd blog today about my recent return to reading writing magazines. For various reasons, I haven't been buying writing trade magazines for a few years now, even though I used to buy and read them, and even write for them sometimes, on a fairly regular basis. Although the number of writing magazines on general sale in the UK has dwindled considerably, there are still one or two good ones on the market and one of my favourites has always been Writers' Forum . This publication has been going for quite a number of years now and I was pleased to discover when I recently purchased a print copy that it is still a useful and informative publication for beginner and more experienced writers alike. One of my favourite writing magazines To...

Hi everyone. What are you committed to in 2018? To be honest, this time last year, I thought I was going to be committed to psychiatric hospital, given how "off my head" I was feeling with the whole menopause malarkey. However, thanks to the wonders of HRT, things are a lot better this time round. My commitment for 2018 is to be a designer. I realise this might be a strange thing to say in a writing blog post as I should probably be saying that my commitment for 2018 is to be a better, richer, more productive or more frequently published writer. Actually, in a funny sort of way, I think I am saying all those things but not in the way you would expect. To cut a long story short, as my late father was fond of saying, I feel that I have been "faffing around" (to put it politely) with my designing career since I made the decision in September 2015 to change direction career-wise once again and become a designer. I thought it was lack of time, lack of confide...

Hi everyone . I’m delighted to introduce to you my writing colleague, Sheila Glasbey (aka Rosalie Warren), whose new non-fiction book ‘From ­the Heart of a Copy Editor – The 10 Most Common Mistakes and How to Fix Them’ was published today. The book is a really useful guide for writers on copy editing and Sheila has kindly agreed to talk to me about both the subject and her book. Sheila Glasbey aka Rosalie Warren Can you start by telling us what copy editing is? According to the Society for Editors and Proofreaders, the aim of copy editing is to make sure that a piece of writing is ‘accurate, easy to follow, fit for purpose and free of error, omission, inconsistency and repetition’. I like to think of it as bringing a piece of work to its very best, in line with the intentions of the writer. It involves such things as removing inconsistencies (and I’m not just talking about the eye colour of your lead character, although that’s a big one) and ambiguities, and correc...

Hi everyone. Well, it's not every day that The Mail on Sunday runs a double-page spread about the book you are writing. This is what happened to me last Sunday, and I'm still recovering from the shock. It was about three weeks ago that I received an email, completely out of the blue, from the paper's chief reporter. Apparently, he had been researching the issue of copyright on unpublished letters for something he was working on and had come across a blog post that I had  written about this very subject. https://melissalawrencewriter.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/publish-and-be-damned.html The post in question was about my own copyright issues concerning the large collection of letters and postcards I have inherited from my grandmother. These are not just any old letters and postcards. They were written to my grandmother by her close friend, Ethel North, who was lady's maid and companion to Lady Winifred Burghclere, elder sister of the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, between ...

Hi everyone . I'm not sure if it's the time of year, the time of life or the HRT I'm currently taking for the menopause but I seem to be in a clearing-out mood at the moment. I have all this energy that I've not had for years and nothing is safe any more, especially if it's been languishing in a cupboard for far longer than it probably should have done. Writing is not escaping this "new broom" feeling either and I recently dismantled the notebook containing writing exercises that I kept in my handbag. I kept it in my handbag because I used to go into town a lot, sometimes several times a week, and write in coffee shops and cafes. The notebook was very useful for helping to kick-start my writing, especially when the lure of a second cappuccino and another chocolate eclair seemed too difficult to resist. I thought it might be good if I shared a few of these exercises with you. Of course, you don't need to go into a coffee shop or cafe to try them. ...

Hi everyone. I hope you are having a good summer if it is summer in your part of the world. Today I have a big announcement to make. After years of railing against self-publishing and resisting it with every fibre of my writing being such as in this post http://melissalawrencewriter.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/why-ive-decided-not-to-self-publish.html , I have finally decided to throw my principles out of the window and give it a go after all. I am currently dusting off all eleven (yes, eleven) of my unpublished children's books which are currently sleeping peacefully in my filing cabinet, along with all the rejection letters from publishers and agents that they have accumulated over the years and starting the process of self-publishing them all. It has taken me a long time to come to this decision but in the end, my reasons for doing so are as follows: 1. It seems a bit pointless having them all shut away in the filing cabinet when they might as well be out in the world g...

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...