It’s been a long minute since I’ve posted, mostly since I’ve been hard at work writing my second book… which actually doesn’t feel like hard work, as I’m absolutely loving it.
But, I’ve a very good reason for popping my head over the parapet, because I can’t wait to share the cover of my debut novel, The Near Miss!
I can’t tell you how much I adore this cover. The first time I saw it I did an Eastenders-cliffhanger-style gasp. I had to hold on to furniture. I swooned as if I was in Bridgerton. I hope the contents can live up to how bloody gorgeous it is.
As a debut author, this was a MOMENT — one I’ll never forget. And now it’s the countdown to publication day on 10th July, which will be a whole other pinch-me parade. For now, The Near Miss is available to pre-order here.
What do you do when you sit at your desk and the blank page is looking back at you like a stubborn child? No matter how many Haribos or trips to soft play on offer, this laptop is simply not going to play ball and write you a thousand words of fiction gold. So, you need to invoke the writing gods some other way, right?
The above situation is one I’ve been in many, many times, and I’d like to talk about the various ways I’ve tried to get around it. Some successful, some… not so much.
Going for a walk. The big one. The stone-cold classic. This works, to be fair. Getting outside for some fresh air and a viewpoint beyond the window in front of my desk is probably one of the best ways to break out of a slump. Endorphins, North Yorkshire air, and the feel of a welly boot underfoot does it for me almost every time.
Lighting a candle. Another favourite, and one I think I decided to try after reading Joanne Harris’s Ten Things About Writing about using objects as a psychological prop to get into a writing headspace. She mentions a candlestick, which sounds very classy, but I find a knock-off Jo Malone candle from Aldi works just as nicely. The rule is, once it’s lit, it’s writing time, and it’s pretty effective.
Listening to writing podcasts. Sometimes when I’m sitting, staring vacantly at the screen, it’s easy to forget that I’m doing this as an actual job now. This feeling is what I like to think of as the bastard love-child of imposter syndrome and procrastination – it doesn’t really matter if I just start scrolling Twitter anyway, as it’s not real work. The best way around this for me is to listen to podcast interviews with authors, or writers just chatting about their writing life. It reminds me that no matter what the process is, there are people out there whose books started on a laptop just like mine, and all I need to do is write it. Some favourites – The Honest Authors Podcast, In Writing with Hattie Crisell, and Novel Experience with Kate Sawyer.
The Magic Writing Coat. No, really. My partner’s mum once bought me this very exotic looking cardigan. It’s grey, knee length, and has a jazzy multi-coloured aztec-style pattern. I started wearing it when I was writing during the colder months and the room was a bit chilly, but then I realised it made me feel all whimsical and writery, and evoked images of a struggling writer in a Parisian garret in December. So, that worked too.
Writing something else. Anything will do if it fills a blank screen for the time being. Blog posts (like this one), ideas or outlines for other novels, editing another manuscript that needs tending to, or writing a short story or flash fiction for a competition. I particularly like the last one, as I’m a fan of nervously refreshing an inbox to see if I’ve been shortlisted or not. See above re: procrastination.
Pomodoro technique. We can file this under things that are not so successful for me, but I’ve listed it as others swear by it. If you aren’t familiar, it’s a time-management method where you set an alarm and work in 25 minute stretches and have timed breaks. No thanks. My smartphone already has way more control over me than I’d like, so letting the countdown timer tell me what to do feels like I’m edging too close to my very own Black Mirror story.
So there we have it – some of the ways you can break out of being paralysed by an empty page. I’d love to know what other people like to do when the words aren’t flowing, whether it’s consulting your tarot cards, going for a run, or sinking into a pint of gin. We all have our ways.
Any kind of list – to-do-lists, shopping lists, lists of the fifty books you must read before you die, or a Buzzfeed list of celebrities you never knew were related. To be fair, I’ve read enough Buzzfeed articles to know the Kardashian-Jenner lineage inside out, but I would still keep scrolling.
With that in mind, I thought there would be no better way to introduce myself than a list of random facts. A biographical pick n’ mix, if you like.
Lily Joseph is a pseudonym (it’s an amalgamation of my grandparents’ names). I decided to take a pen-name since my day job in dentistry is nothing to do with writing, although I’m not really expecting the two worlds to dramatically collide. Hang on, I’ve just had an idea for a new book…
I have two teenage children, but still haven’t made my peace with being old enough for this. In my head I’m still drinking Bacardi Breezers in a sweaty nightclub on a school night and wandering home with kebab juice on my chin.
Other than writing, I’m awful at sticking to things. When I was a kid I became partially accredited in ballroom dancing, gymnastics and the Air Training Corps. My mam always said I just waited until she’d paid for the uniform and then got bored. The same applies in adulthood. In my shed there is a very clean set of ladies’ golf clubs to testify to this.
Things I love the smell of: matches (both struck and unstruck), banana flavouring but not actual bananas, actual limes but not lime flavouring, and books.
Favourite fiction writers – a not-exhaustive list: Mhairi McFarlane, Sarah Waters, Lindsey Kelk, Philip Pullman, Diana Gabaldon and George R.R. Martin. Non-fiction: Caitlin Moran, Cheryl Strayed, Jon Ronson and David Sedaris.
I absolutely love musicals. I spent many hours in my teens wearing my mam’s beige trench coat in my room, pretending to be Eponine from Les Miserables. I’ve aged out of Eponine, past Fantine, and am now in my Madame Thenardier era, still to be heard belting out show tunes while stirring a spag bol in my kitchen.
I’m disappointingly unadventurous, but spent three months in Finland when I was at university. I travelled around Sweden, Russia and Estonia, embraced naked saunas and reindeer sausages, and developed a mild addiction to Fazer cocoa nibs chocolate. You can’t get it in England, which is probably for the best.
I’ve been photographed with two celebrities – Jim Bowen and Warrior from Gladiators. Both of the pictures are the result of my dad boldly insisting that they pose with me and neither of them look very happy about it. The memory of my dad suggesting I perch on Warrior’s knee while he was trying to enjoy his Little Chef Olympic Breakfast haunts me to this day.
I write this, safe in the knowledge that I’m not using up any golden nuggets of information that might make it into my actual author bio. It would maybe raise a few eyebrows at Bookouture HQ. But as lists go, it gives you a bit of a flavour of who I am – a fickle, foreign-chocolate-addicted, former friend-to-the-stars.
Who doesn’t love a good ‘journey to publication’ story? I definitely do – I binged these like Bridgerton episodes while I was drafting, editing and querying over the last few years. Somebody wanted to de-mystify the process? I was there with the popcorn and a pen.
So, here’s mine. Before I begin, you can assume the usual childhood love of books and writing, the house stuffed with books (much to my partner’s dismay), and a tendency to treat stationery like crack cocaine. Very more-ish.
The Near Miss (or whatever it might end up being called) is actually my third novel. When I read other authors’ stories about having a drawer full of dusty old manuscripts I used to feel a bit ill. I mean, who could stand to write a 90,000 word novel, or two, and then come back for more when they didn’t take off? I was sure there was a word for that. Delusion? I was soon to discover that starting out as a writer does involve a little bit of healthy delusion, which I’d now probably frame as learning.
I submitted book number one to three agents – two promptly but kindly turned it down, and the third never replied. I put the novel away and got on with life. I don’t think I am wrong in saying it wasn’t good enough. It was a starter novel, a 90,000 word lesson that I’m still grateful for.
Then, in late 2020 (I will let you figure out the catalyst here), I decided to write a second novel. I also decided that I was going to push a bit harder this time, and start taking writing more seriously. Based on what, I can’t tell you – I hadn’t let anyone read my writing, other than those three agents, and the result hadn’t been encouraging. All I knew was that I had to write another, and that I had to be a little more ambitious, imposter syndrome be damned (I will probably come back to this in another post one day). So, in 2021, I joined the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s New Writers’ Scheme – an amazing organisation that allows unpublished writers of romantic fiction to submit a manuscript for detailed feedback.
The feedback was good! My lovely reader said that it was ready for submission to agents, so out it went. This time, I sent it out to about a dozen agents, and I don’t mind admitting that my heart sank a little as the first few rejections came trickling back. I’d been so buoyed up by the wonderful feedback from the RNA, I’d begun to hope I had it in the bag. Some months passed, and I was excited to be asked for a full manuscript by a few agents, but they ultimately passed.
Then, in the summer of 2021, I pitched the novel in a Twitter pitch event for National Northern Authors’ Day, a fantastic celebration of northern writers created by Milly Johnson and Trisha Ashley. And this is how I came to sign with Clare Coombes at Liverpool Literary Agency. She ‘liked’ my tweet, which in Twitter pitches is code for a full request, and then, after reading, offered me representation. Signing with a northern agency, through a northern Twitter event, as a northern writer, felt, in the words of my Geordie brethren, proppa belta. This means rather marvellous, for anyone outside of the North East.
We worked on edits, and then the novel went out to publishers… and it didn’t sell. Weirdly, I wasn’t as heartbroken as I thought I would be. I’d started to learn that the 90,000 word merry-go-round would still keep turning. I didn’t have to get off just because the wooden horse had fallen off the pole. I would just climb on another one. So I wrote another book.
This one took me a while. The new horse was comfortable, but the fresh paint felt slippery. I felt the weight of expectation (a publisher had shown interest in the premise through another Twitter pitch event), and the worry of being dropped if my agent didn’t like this book, or it didn’t sell. I wrote a version of it that probably reeked of fear, but Clare saw the potential in it and gently steered me to a full redraft. I wrote it again, and this time it was ready to go on submission.
Another few months later, I got ‘the call’. Clare broke the news that Bookouture wanted to sign me for a two-book deal, and I think I managed to hold a coherent conversation with her. Maybe. After two years of highs and lows, I think I was in a state of disbelief. This state continues to some extent as I’ve been welcomed into the lovely, generous Bookouture family, and had the bizarre thrill of announcing the deal to friends, family, and the ever-supportive bookish social media.
So, here we are. I’m now deep in edits for The Near Miss with my fantastic editor Nina Winters, and firming up some ideas for book two (or book four, if we’re counting the dusty manuscripts). I hope this post is helpful, or at least interesting to other author story addicts like me, and thank you for bearing with me on the above fairground imagery. The books will be much less heavy-handed, I promise.
I am absolutely THRILLED to announce that my debut novel The Near Miss (working title) will be published by Bookouture in July 2024, followed by a second novel in 2025. This is the end of one long road for me, and hopefully the beginning of another one!
The Near Miss is a romantic comedy set in the north-east of England, featuring an escapist adventure on the Amalfi coast, and a love story with a difference.
Wren and Nick have never met, but they’ve almost killed each other many times. When their paths finally cross, will love survive?
I can’t wait to share Wren and Nick’s story with you!
I’m Lily Joseph and I’m a romantic comedy author based in the North-East of England; a setting that features heavily in my writing. Sorry for the upcoming cliché, but I’ve been obsessed with books and writing since I was a child and I’m working hard on my dream to publish my first novel.
I joined the Romantic Novelists’ Association in 2021 as part of their New Writers’ Scheme, and signed with a literary agent (Clare Coombes at Liverpool Literary Agency) later that year. Since then I’ve completed two novels, and I’m hopefully on the cusp of sharing some very good news.
I also dabble in writing crime fiction and my current work-in-progress was shortlisted for the 2023 Lindisfarne Prize. Outside of my writing life I work as a dentist (trigger warning for those that aren’t a fan), and live in North Yorkshire with my partner, two teens and two cats, none of whom are interested in books whatsoever. At least the cats have an excuse.
Lily Joseph Author 