So, I was definitely growing up as a girl who loved reading and writing. My love of The Famous Five had taken me from wanting to be a detective when I grew up to wanting to be a librarian. My best subject at school was story writing; funnily enough, I can’t remember many of the books I was reading at that time, but I can still remember some of the stories I wrote at school. It was the only time I felt like a star, when the other children in the class wanted to hear my stories read out loud. I knew then that writing was something I could do better than most of the others.

In my teens, I also began to be interested in Fantasy. That world of wizards, heroes, kings, princesses, magic, dragons and all the other clichés, really appealed to me. But I felt like a freak, believing that I was the only one. I hadn’t realised that there was actually a massive Fantasy market out there, because the rather limited children’s literature that I was reading did not provide much. I had to satisfy my cravings with The Chronicles of Narnia, and the film Time Bandits, and a rather dreadful cartoon series called Dungeons and Dragons. (I had been introduced to The Hobbit, but being made to read it in first year of secondary school seemed to have only make me hate it – my Tolkien obsession was to come much later.) So, with an absence of books that I wanted to read, I started to write my own.

I look back on it now and can see that I wasn’t just influenced by my inspirations, but was actually directly ripping them off. My story was about a group of children magically transported to another world, very different to their own – that was Dungeons and Dragons. The geography, history and life-style of the world were completely Narnian, and the battle between good and evil came straight from Time Bandits. But I wasn’t worried about that. After all, my story was different, because it was about me and my school friends, dragged away from a school disco, into a world where an Evil sorcerer kept everyone under a spell of cruelty, and only the child of destiny could break the spell. Of course, I was the child of destiny, but I wouldn’t learn that until my friends and I had gone on our quest to find the way home. Along the way, the evil sorcerer would do his best to stop us, and one by one, terrible things happened to my friends until it was just me alone to face the evil sorcerer, and successfully break the spell.

When I started this story, it felt no different to every other story I had started, destined to be begun in a nice thick notebook and never finished. But this time, I did one thing differently – I told my friends about it. After all, they were in it, and they loved my stories. This was the best thing I could have done, because once they knew, they wanted to read it. And as they couldn’t read it until it was finished, they encouraged me to keep writing. So this time, I did. Page after page of lined A4 paper, filled with my italic hand-writing, in one long continuous narrative. I had the basic plot in my head but was making it all up as I went along. And as the page numbers grew, I realised that this one different. This was serious. This was a novel, my first novel, and I was actually now a writer, using school holidays and weekends to advance my story. It took me over a year, but with my friends expecting regular updates, I kept going, until the momentous day came when I finished it. I had written a novel and I was only fourteen years old.

My friends had waited patiently all this time and still wanted to read it, and I was eager to hand over the A4 ring folder that my manuscript was now contained in, ready for their adulation. Even if editing had been possible in those pre-computer days, I wouldn’t have done any, for I had already achieved the most impressive thing ever simply by completing it. I think this fact was enough to impress my friends too, because they all loved it. I would lend it to anyone who expressed an interest, confident that they were going to be blown away by my achievement. And because they were my friends, they didn’t say anything mean about it, so I continued to believe in my own brilliance. And why not – no-one else that I knew had written a novel at the age of fourteen. I had such expectations of greatness, with sequels and film-deals and imagined appearances on Blue Peter. But though I might have been premature in my hopes, I allow myself some pride as I look back on what is technically my first novel, because it was an impressive achievement for a child. More importantly, it taught me that I was capable of writing and completing novels, setting me on a course that brings me to where I am today, with six and a half novels under my belt and this website.

 

STOP PRESS – In planning this blog, I wanted to include a photograph of that novel, still in its A4 ring folder. But when I went to find it, confident that I knew where it was, IT WASN’T THERE! I have no idea when I last saw it, or why I may have moved it. For thirty years, it has been moved around from house to house, always safely guarded, but never read or touched. So at this moment in time, I am extremely perplexed; I know it must be in the house somewhere, but the thought of losing something so precious is very worrying. If I have to turn the house upside down to find it, I will.

 

The sun is shining, the sky is blue, it is a perfect day to launch a new venture. So this is it, the day I confess to everything I have been up, while trying not to squirm at this blatant self advertising – hey, I’m English, I’m not good at this.

BUT, I can’t help being pleased with myself. So, like a shopkeeper with a new shop, I’m going to put out the bunting, hang the posters and offer my wares. Welcome to the website of M J Schofield, Author, where you will find:

Four books for sale on Amazon

Free Printable stories for Advent Calendars

A link to share my Advent Story idea on Pinterest

Links to the Facebook page, Twitter account and gmail address of MJ Schofield Author

The least embarrassing photograph of me that I could find

My first few blogs, and a promise of more.

 

Come on in, have a browse, everyone is welcome. I’ll just stand over here in the corner, grinning like an idiot. A year ago, I knew I where I wanted to take my writing and I had a plan on how to do it. And today, I have achieved it. I’ve no idea what will happen next, but for now, I’m just going to bask in my achievements.

I’ve said on my profile page that I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was seven, which sounds like the kind of thing all writers say, but I can say exactly how I first knew that, with sound, historical facts to prove it.

From a young age, I loved books. I can remember making up my own stories to the pictures in my Ladybird Fairy Tales before I could read the words. I remember getting gold stars for my story writing in school. I remember being fascinated by a book my mum was reading, a Catherine Cookson novel with the intriguing title Slinky Jane. I even got my first typewriter for Christmas when I was six. But I don’t count these vague, anecdotal memories. The real turning point came when I was seven, when I discovered Enid Blyton.

I can date it exactly, because in 1980, just after my seventh birthday, my family moved house. The previous owners of our new house had been a family with teenage sons – I remember viewing the room that was to be mine, which was decorated with a life sized skeleton. Knowing that young children were moving in, this family left behind a box of books which those teenage sons no longer wanted. There were a lot of Enid Blyton books, including a nearly full set of the Famous Five books, in well-read 1970s paperbacks. Being the precocious child that I was, I immediately began to read them. I remember being a bit confused during the first book I read – I knew that the Famous Five comprised of two boys and two girls, but I hadn’t understood that George was not a boy, and had somehow decided that Julian was a girl called Gillian! But I persevered, and read another (number eight, incidentally, Five get into Trouble. I never read them in order!), and that time, every fell into place. And I was hooked. I read my way through them all, delighting in the stories and also in my own ability to read these big, proper books so quickly. But more importantly, I read them with a growing consciousness of the process of creation behind the stories, an awareness of the author at work, an understanding that it had been someone’s job the write these books. And I knew then that I wanted to do that too. Part of me wanted to be one of the Famous Five, but another part of me wanted to be Enid Blyton.

And so I began. From that age on, I was forever scribbling stories, mostly Enid Blyton style adventures featuring myself and my school friends, often with illustrations too. I wish I still had some of those notebooks, but they are lost forever. But that desire to publish my own books, with my name on the cover, was never lost. I might have grown out my Famous Five obsession, but I never grew out of wanting to be a writer. Thank you, Enid Blyton. And thank you to the family that left that box of books.

Well, when I wrote my first (ever) blog, I was lost and confused. Now I have a website! Not only that, but I set it up all by myself. Thank you WordPress. I may be a Luddite, but I can follow instructions, and thanks to the ten-day tutorial course, I have a website that looks a lot like I imagined it would look. It’s not finished – it still needs a few more photographs, and there will be some more content to add in the future, but I am so pleased with myself.

Adding more content means doing the work that I have been putting off while I have been creating the website. I have a list, starting with two really big editing projects. The aim is to get two new items on KDP by the summer. But all this is old work, and I’m aware that I haven’t written any new fiction for a while. I know all the editing and marketing is work, and just as vital, but I can’t help feeling that it’s getting in the way of the writing. I really want to have something new on the go before September, when my other “new project” begins – nothing to do with writing and a big distraction in the shape of a career change. I feel it will be easier to keep going at something already begun than begin something new in what could be limited free time. There are one or two ideas bubbling below the surface, and I tell myself that I am waiting for one of them to grab me. I’m quite sure something will – it’s always worked in the past – but time ticks on. I can’t believe it is April already. Still, launching my website is a big tick on the list of things I wanted to achieve this year. Well done me.