Friday 6 February 2015

A LETTER TO MY UNPUBLISHED SELF By Tilly Tennant

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Dear Tilly

Listen up! I know you have this grand delusion that you’re going to be a famous singer but, really, nobody wants to hear it.  You think you open your mouth and you sound like Mary Poppins. The reality is that you crack mirrors, dogs howl and small children flee.  Ditch the warbling.

Have you thought about writing books? You love reading, right? You love wordplay and humour? You love happy ever afters? Sometimes you get grumpy that the story you’re engrossed in doesn’t turn out the way you want it to? Well, hold the phone, because if you’d written it, it would have been exactly the ending you wanted to see. See?

I won’t bull you; it’s going to be tough. Possibly tougher than one of your Sunday joints. Almost certainly tougher and less financially rewarding than singing (at least, other people’s singing). You will have to hold down about fifteen jobs for a while. You will have to work late into the night and get up at the crack of dawn to start all over again the next day. You will sit in darkened rooms on the sunniest days of the year when everyone else is out leaping in fountains and eating ice-cream because you have a deadline. At times your kids will think you’ve left home when you’ve actually been holed up in the loft for three days crying over a plot that won’t work. There will be times when you want to throw the laptop from the nearest window, times when your characters will misbehave, times when it seems that nobody wants to buy the stories you’re peddling and when they do they only have bad things to say about them.  But one day, one glorious, heavenly-choirs-massing-in-the-clouds day, someone will love what you do. Enough to hand you a contract and take you under their wing to nurture what you grain of talent you have. One day, you’ll publish that book.

That’s when the adventure really begins.  And in the words of a wise old(ish) Irishman: Life is a rollercoaster, you just gotta ride it.

That’s my advice. What you choose to do with it is up to you.

Love from Tilly xxx

The Man Who Can’t be Moved bTilly Tennant
  
Fledgling journalist Ellie Newton is keen to prove herself when she lands a hard-won job at the Millrise Echo.  So when reports come in of a man camped on the corner of a local street, refusing to move until the girl who has jilted him takes him back, Ellie is on a mission to get the scoop. 
She arrives to meet Ben Kelly, a man she is instantly attracted to. But she has a job to do and an incredible story to write and has soon pledged to help him win back the girl of his dreams.  With Ellie’s help, Ben’s plight captures the hearts and imaginations of the public. And when a TV film crew appears to make a feature on the most romantic gesture the town of Millrise has ever seen, Ellie’s mission gets its happy ending...
But while Ellie has been busy fixing the lives of her wayward parents, providing shoulders for heartbroken friends to cry on, and worrying about her terminally-ill aunt, she hasn’t noticed that she has also been falling quietly in love – with the very man she has now ensured is hopelessly out of her reach
Ellie must choose between doing the right thing, and the thing that feels right. And whatever choice she makes, someone will get their heart broken.

BUY LINKS

ABOUT TILLY TENNANT

Tilly Tennant was born in Dorset, the oldest of four children, but now lives in Staffordshire with a family of her own. After years of dismal and disastrous jobs, including paper plate stacking, shop girl, newspaper promotions and waitressing (she never could carry a bowl of soup without spilling a bit), she decided to indulge her passion for the written word by embarking on a degree in English and creative writing, graduating in 2009 with first class honours. She wrote her first novel in 2007 during her first summer break at university and has not stopped writing since. She also works as a freelance fiction editor, and considers herself very lucky that this enables her to read many wonderful books before the rest of the world gets them.


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1 comment:

  1. I love this post! Thanks for being part of the tour. x

    ReplyDelete