Elizabeth Haynes's Blog

Anniversaries have a habit of sneaking up on you, don’t they? We are on the eve of November, 2018 – which means it’s nearly NaNoWriMo time again – and therefore it’s ten years tomorrow that I started writing the draft that became Into the Darkest Corner.

I remember talking about it at work, probably on this very day ten years ago. I was working with Naomi, and Chris, and Max, an office off another office, just the four of us in a bank of desks. We were half a mile away from the kitchen and a...

Lovely friends, this morning I’m supposed to be doing my Final Final Christmas Food Shop. I even have a list, because as we all know, to go into a supermarket in the days before Christmas without a list is foolhardy.

You may be able to sense my reluctance, given that I could have had it all done by now, and it’s 11:49 and I’m still farting about on my laptop (I AM dressed though, which let’s face it is a win). I’ve just been working on a guest post for theAuthor Advice section of my friend a...

Morning!

Thank you for all your kind thoughts on my last post. I’m going to try and write more often, here, which of course means that this will be my last post for quite some time.

……

That last sentence tripped out so easily and funnily enough the sentiment that lies behind it – that my efforts, whatever they are, are absolutely bound to fail – isexactly what I wanted to write about today.

A wise woman who I’m lucky to call a friend, Nike Lawal, told me about Impostor Syndrome a couple of ye...

Hello my lovely friends, I hope you are well?

It’s been a long time since I wrote, and until quite recently, that applied to my fiction writing too. I might have mentioned that we were planning to move house, and this year we did just that – we moved from our little 1980s house in Kent to a bigger house, with an annexe for my mum and a big garden, in beautiful north Norfolk. They say that house moves are one of the most stressful things you can go through, but I’m usually pretty good at deali...

*WARNING: this post may contain anger and be a bit sweary*

Every year without fail I read a blog post, or a newspaper article, or some other opinionated piece of tripe telling the world why NaNoWriMo is a waste of space/time/energy. Usually it doesn’t happen until the end of September, but much as Halloween, the launch of Strictly, and Christmas seem to come around earlierevery year, today I saw thison the Writing About Writing Facebook feed.

(In fairness, it’s a blog post from October 2012,...

I’m heartsick, today, folks – and not because Zayn Malik has left One Direction (I’ve been there – sobbed buckets in 1985 when the BBC failed to film the third series of The Tripods. I have the diary to prove it).

No. I’m sad, and baffled, because there are people I know and respect who seem to think that Jeremy Clarkson being dropped by the BBC is a bad thing. Normally I’m pretty good at seeing other people’s point of view, I think it’s important to see both sides in an argument for the sake...

This tends to happen every time I finish a book. With Human Remains, for months afterwards people were sending me links to new items about people being found deceased in their own homes, months after their deaths. With Into the Darkest Corner… well, you can imagine. It’s not that I’m psychic, or tapping into the Zeitgeist, or even that I’m especiallyaware of the issues that are plaguing our societies.

It’s that human cruelties like these – social isolation and stalking – are far more common th...

In November 1989, I was eighteen years old and happened to be working in Germany as an au pair. It was still West Germany then, and I lived in a small town called Uetersen not far from Hamburg, nowhere near the border with the East.

Today the world commemorates twenty five years since the East finally opened its borders in Berlin, a moment that came after months of protests and demonstrations against the Communist ruling forces in Eastern Europe. Despite this momentum for change, the night of...

It’s that time of year again – season of mellow fruitfulness, or whatever it is; back to school weather. Time to write a novel.

I know it’s still September, but this year I seem to be exceptionally excited about the prospect of NaNoWrimo. I’m actually prepared. I have been filing away last year’s pep talks, I’ve even thought about writing my Christmas cards – and it’s all because, for the first time ever, I am going to PLAN.

I am normally a NaNoWriMo ‘pantser’ – that is, I write by the seat of...

The copy edit on Behind Closed Doors is DONE, my friends!

And this time it was a complete delight. Yes, there were stressful moments. There was even a brief ‘I am never writing another sodding book as long as I live’ moment. But there were also many moments of abject joy, too, in seeing the plot tangles smoothing out, realising that things can be fixed, subplots make sense, there are no loose ends left. None!

I was very fortunate this time to get Linda McQueen as my copy editor. She worked on m...