The Psychopath: A True Story(22)

Being allowed to use the Authors’ Yurt throughout the whole of the Edinburgh Book Festival (and not just on your own event day) is a huge perk of being asked to speak. I made as much use of it as possible. One day I was there to see Ian Rankin speak and popped into the yurt beforehand for a drink. I stood at the table which was laid out with all manner of drinks – from coffee and tea, to whisky and wine, as well as a feast of croissants and sandwiches and cakes. Several people joined me and we all started to chat. One of the authors started talking about his difficulties in getting a babysitter. He talked about how he’d asked everyone he could think of and ended up getting some random Spanish woman to do it.

I laughed and said, ‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ as he looked at me quizzically. ‘I mean, we spend our whole lives telling our children to be wary of strangers and then we pay them to come into our homes.’

He looked horrified and then exclaimed he was just about to go onstage and I had now put that in his head. He was not pleased.

That was when I realised it was Ian Rankin I was speaking to.

‘Sorry,’ I said.



My event was on 19 August 2008, two years after my mother’s death and my first workshops at the Edinburgh Book Festival at the start of my writing journey. My event was sold out and I spent two hours afterwards signing books and talking to people who wanted to ask a private question or just get a photograph with me.

After that I was feeling very full of myself and went for a wander around the bookshop tent at the Festival. I picked up a couple of books I wanted to buy and went to stand in the queue. There in front of me stood a woman holding The Bigamist. I was still feeling pretty cocky and so I tapped her cheerfully on the shoulder and said, ‘That’s my book. Do you want me to sign it for you?’

She turned and looked me up and down with disdain before simply replying with a flat ‘No’.

I was mortified and wanted the ground to swallow me up – but pride rooted me to the spot and I had to stand behind her for another full five minutes until we were served. Afterwards, I realised how insane a situation that must have been for the woman. I must have looked like a complete nutter tapping her on the shoulder in a bookshop queue. The last thing you expect when buying a book is to have the author standing behind you like some kind of weird literary stalker.

I imagine that she went home and opened up the book to see my photograph and then went, ‘Oh!’





WORK AND LOVE

Now the book was out, the issue of what work I should do was starting to become clear. I knew I wanted to be available for my children before and after school as well as during the school holidays so the best answer was to work with the schools system itself.

I did an Open University course (and eventually got another degree) in English & Creative Writing. I started doing author visits to schools, and also created a programme which took classes of students (usually aged between nine and thirteen) through the process of creating characters, setting scenes and writing storylines. The programme started small but developed a good reputation over time. I absolutely love working with children as they have immense imaginations and the ability to come up with stories and endings that just wouldn’t occur to adults.

I started to get a bit frustrated though. All these wonderful stories we created were just evaporating after I left each school. Having known what it feels like to become a published author I initially thought that I would like my own three children to have the opportunity to feel like that, but then I realised I was thinking too small and wanted all children to feel like that.

So I decided to start my own publishing company, a company that specifically published the stories and books that the children came up with on the programme. Because I was initially published by a company called Mainstream Publishing, I called my own company WhiteWater Publishing, really as rather a joke.

The interactive and fun workshops extended to writing, publishing and marketing books – all showcasing the children’s amazingly creative ideas and often illustrated by the students themselves. It was a great success. The children saw their work in print and as a consequence started to look at all books in a new light. More than that though, the teachers had a showcase of the type of work the children were doing, and the parents had a keepsake of their children’s work. The school had books they could sell to raise money. It was a win/win situation for everyone involved.

I didn’t know how to publish books, I’d had no experience of this at all, but I knew I had the capacity to learn. I simply started out and learnt as I went along. How to do the design and layout of books, new software I could use, and how the industry worked. Interestingly enough, it was finding the competitive commercial printers that proved to be the most challenging. In the end though, I learnt bit by bit and within a fairly short space of time found it was not as complicated as I had initially thought.

Finally I had a means of earning money again, and a job that allowed me to work during school hours so that I was always available for my children. I didn’t make a huge income but it was at least better than being on government benefits.

Things were moving on for me. Physically, I was getting stronger and better at taekwondo and becoming more confident in my ability to defend myself. Financially, I was earning an income again as an author and publisher. Mentally, my self-esteem and self-confidence was being rebuilt through my research and ability to talk to people about a subject I was now becoming fluent in. But emotionally I was still not ready to think about another romantic relationship. The idea of having another man in my life did not appeal – even looking past the awkward aspect of having to date again and find someone who would be interested in a single mother of three young children – I did not want another person to tidy up after or wash their socks! I already had enough to do.