PINTEREST
BLOGLOVIN
GOODREADS
Published by Century/Penguin (28 December 2017)
Available to buy in ebook and hardback | Paperback (23 August 2018)
356 pages
This is one book that I am really excited to read. I have a beautiful hardback, signed numbered limited edition from Goldsboro Books as part of their 2018 Book of the Month Club to which I’ve recently taken out membership. I hope to get to it soon but in the meantime I’m delighted to be joining the blog tour for The Innocent Wife with a guest post by author, Amy Lloyd. My thanks to Anne Cater for the invitation to take part in the tour.
Advice for Aspiring Writers
by Amy Lloyd
1. Get on with it.
Seriously, just do it. Nothing feels worse than not writing that book you have in your head, I promise. You will torture yourself for what you haven’t written but you can forgive yourself for writing absolute garbage. Besides, garbage can be fixed later! Just set yourself small manageable goals. If it’s absolute agony and all you can manage is 500 words that day then let yourself off the hook after you hit that word count.
A lot of the time sitting down and starting is the hardest bit and you’ll find that at 500 words it feels pretty good to be writing. Just be realistic with your bare-minimum goals and you won’t scare yourself off.
2. Walk.
Plots don’t pop into your head fully-formed, they take time and effort and as you write your novel you’ll come up against a huge plot hole or realise something doesn’t work and you’ll need to puzzle it out.
Walking really helps me work out these problems and gets my brain working. If I sit there staring at the computer the pressure is too much and I will waste time having a full on meltdown.
If nothing else, walking should make you feel better and help you to unwind and stop you from spiralling to the point where you want to give up.
Get some air, listen to some music, and remember to have something you can make notes on if you do manage to work it out.
3. Have fun.
Enjoy writing your first draft. It should feel good! Anything you want to happen can happen. First drafts are where you can experiment the most and there’s no pressure to get it perfect.
You get so much freedom on your first draft and you should make the most of it instead of worrying about whether it’s great or not. You will edit it until you’re sick of looking at it. Embrace the fact that, at this stage, it can be rubbish and that doesn’t even matter! The important thing is to finish it. Then you can start torturing yourself trying to make it good.
4. Be interested in everything.
The more stuff you’re interested in, the more material you have to write about. Who knew that my fondness for true crime books about serial killers would lead to a legitimate career path?
Inspiration will come from everywhere; you just have to be open and interested in order to recognise it.
5. Ugh.
There will be times when it feels so crappy that none of this will help. It happens to all of us and writers are very open and honest about it. I find it helps to follow lots of writers on Twitter and Facebook because it can be very reassuring to know I’m not the only one.
In the darkest times it will still feel lonely and impossible but I promise it doesn’t last forever, even if it seems like it will! One day the fog will lift and you’ll start to enjoy it again and it’s worth it because when it’s going well it’s the greatest feeling in the world.
| About the Book |
HOW DO YOU CONFRONT YOUR HUSBAND WHEN YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW THE TRUTH?
Gripping psychological suspense from a brilliant new voice in crime fiction
Twenty years ago, Dennis Danson was arrested and imprisoned for the brutal murder of a young girl in Florida’s Red River County. Now he’s the subject of a true-crime documentary that’s whipping up a frenzy online to uncover the truth and free a man who has been wrongly convicted.
A thousand miles away in England, Samantha is obsessed with Dennis’s case. She exchanges letters with him, and is quickly won over by his apparent charm and kindness to her. Soon she has left her old life behind to marry him and campaign for his release.
But when the campaign is successful and Dennis is freed, Sam begins to discover new details that suggest he may not be quite so innocent after all …
| About the Author |
Amy Lloyd studied English and Creative Writing at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She won the Daily Mail First Novel competition for The Innocent Wife in 2016. She lives in Cardiff, Wales, with her partner and two cats.
Author Links:
Twitter | Amazon UK | Amazon.com | Goodreads
