Today it is a delight to welcome my friend and fellow author Sharon Cook to the blog to explain her compulsion to write. Sharon's debut novel, Sewing Sequins on My Straight Jacket, was published to critical acclaim by SpellBound Books last summer. Thank you for your time today, Sharon. Over to you!
Thanks for the invite to your blog Val, you have already become an important part of my writing journey, it would be rude not to accept!
Last year I became a best-selling author and I’m still pinching myself. It only took a few decades, from the shy (yes, actually) primary school kid with big feet and homework books full of red teacher’s biro, to a woman who now believes she IS a writer.
Sewing Sequins on My Straight Jacket is a memoir tagged ‘how to get your nine-year old through cancer and still be able to laugh’. Spoiler alert, he’s OK, it’s one of the unasked questions people want the answer to, before they buy the book. I am happy to oblige.
Fondly called ‘sequins’, as you can never quite have enough sparkle in life, I call it my ‘accidental’ book, the first one ever completed and popped away in the metaphorical writer’s drawer, after it got a long-listing with MsLexia. I went on to write two historical novels, both got long-listed, and my writing buddy Rosina kept nagging. She told me I’d proved I could write. But still I didn’t believe anything I wrote was good enough. Despite earning a living as a journalist for some 25-years, I still believed I wasn’t good enough.
During lock-down I was selected to attend a four-day masterclass with the awesome Monique Roffey (The Mermaid of Black Conch, Costa Book of the Year 2021). She told me she thought I was a ‘storyteller’. Next time I meet her, I’m going to tell her if she hadn’t said that, I’d have given up. Life had almost battered me in to submission, and it had nothing to do with agents.
Writers are good at scraping themselves up off the floor, so I did, scurried back to my laptop. Time passed, and my first writing buddy, Elizabeth Ducie, stuck me in her car and drove me to a writers' retreat in 2023, introduced me to the glorious Val Penny, who TOLD me to pitch to indie publisher SpellBound Books Ltd. I’d met them – well, impossible to miss really, Sumaira’s bold pink ensemble contrasted with Nikki’s neon blue hair. I called them the ‘Fluffy Disrupters’.
We talked, laughed and cried together. They made my five-year old dream come true, when I signed a contract for a book I’d written to raise awareness about childhood cancer. It’s received reviews that have humbled me to the core. Friends and strangers – even my mother - now tell me I’m a writer, because I’ve made them laugh out loud, cry into multiple tissues. And I’ve made them think …
Now I know why I’m a writer, because my readers have told me what ‘sequins’ means to them. My ambition remains to write full-time, but miracles take a little longer...
Happy 2025, and to all the fabulous writers – and publishers - I’ve met so far, thank you for helping me become part of such a compelling world.
The Author
Sharon Cook is a former news journalist who now writes historical and contemporary novels. She skidded to a halt in Devon some years ago, with two young children in tow, who have since morphed into young adults They’ve had quite a few adventures, some more fulfilling than others, but have always been able to return to their seventeenth century stone cottage. One day Sharon plans to write full time, rather than working in prison libraries or running creative workshops. Collecting vintage, silversmithing and avoiding housework keep Sharon out of trouble – mostly. The rest of the time she can be found working with a blue light charity, where inspiring people and stories are never far away.
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