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Josie's MA in Writing

I have completed an MA in Writing with Manchester Metropolitan Uni Writing School (an on-line course) for which I have written an adult novel in literary fiction genre. I also completed my Transmission Project for this in September 2004, and created my first e-book. See my e-books page for more details. I graduated in July 2005 and would have attended graduation if I had the money and time to travel up to Manchester. C'est la vie.

A while ago I contacted MMU to update them on my progress since completing the MA, and I was invited to submit a profile to the MMU Published Students section of their website. It's very exciting to see the profile there and is another step on the way to being a VIW (Very Important Writer).

One thing I liked about this MA was that the seminars were conducted in chat-rooms. This meant that even though it was distance learning and could have been quite isolating, I still felt like part of a community of writers. I met Naomi from Velvet Magazine through the MA and this got me involved with Velvet which I really enjoy. It was exhilirating but also extremely hard work, not least because of the novel. I began to think that I'd never complete it at all, let alone complete it within the time frame given.

I finished the novel finally about a week before the deadline. It underwent a series of title changes and is settled on The Silence And The Scars - Book One of Breaking Thru just before submitting. I was really motivated by NaNoWriMo during November but the motivation dropped in 2004 and it was only the deadline for the course that got the damn thing finished.

I sincerely believe in deadlines. And they have to be real, live deadlines set by someone important or where I'll lose something if I let them go. Bitter experience suggests that any self-imposed deadline will make that wooshing noise as it goes by.

The way I felt for some time about that book was that I'd like to bury it in the back garden. I am happy to have written Silence and will forever remember it as the novel that got me my MA. Since having a few years away from it, I decided to reread the novel and thought that it wasn’t all that bad. I submitted it to Legend Press who published my story Sunday in Seven Days. It will be published in July 2008. For more detail click here for Silence