Musings From the Bower 6

Musings from the Bower

Sue Brewer

　
The other day someone asked me how I began my writing career. It wasn’t an easy question to answer. The very first thing that I ever had published – and was paid for – was a letter in a magazine entitled Fur and Feather. I was about 13 at the time, and would like to say that this was the kick-start to my career. I would like to say that – but of course, it wasn’t. At 13 I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I left school. And though I loved writing, thanks to Michael Guinery, an enthusiastic teacher in my primary school in Welwyn Garden City, I didn’t see it as a career. I ended up working in a ‘special’ library (one attached to a research institution) before moving on to a college library.

It was much, much later before the writing really took off. I had become interested in breeding various types of amphibians, and submitted an article to the Aquarist magazine. Soon, I was writing regularly for them on many topics. At the same time, I decided to dabble in the fiction world, never thinking I would get a story published as it is such a cut-throat market. By a fluke, my story was included in a Woman’s Realm supplement – and suddenly, I was writing short stories for them, and other magazines as well. The thing that helped my writing more than any other, was my word processor! At first I had bashed away on an old typewriter, but the processor gave me freedom to correct and to alter my work without having to retype everything each time I made an error.

By the 1990s I also had a weekly column in a local newspaper and was writing features for various collectables, doll and teddy bear magazines, as well as writing stories and also producing ‘blurbs’ for a bookseller. I decided I would like to try my hand at writing something for children and was given the opportunity to produce a short book in verse dealing with phonetics, for a children’s reading scheme. Then my Mother asked for help – she had written an autobiography dealing with her childhood spent in a children’s home, and so we decided to publish it ourselves, knowing the market might be limited. This proved so successful that a few years later, I took the same route with my first doll book. The book was about the famous Tiny Tears doll, but was full of so much detail and general geekiness that I knew no publisher would take it on. I was amazed at how successful the book proved to be, outselling all my expectations.

Then, by a stroke of fortune, I was offered the chance to write books for a publisher on many subjects including dolls, comics, toys, autographs and games. Along the way I’ve edited a few magazines, written for others and published a magazine of my own, Doll Showcase, which has now been running for eight years. Recently, I released a selection of my short stories, first published in Woman's Realm, on Kindle under the title ‘Twisty Ends and Tangly Tales’. I’ve also written a couple of novels which I’m still plucking up courage to send to a publisher. Maybe one day, I will!