E.L. Williams's Blog

This month, I caught up with the very lovely G. Clatworthy, author of cosy witchy fiction, to find out more about her writing.

Hi Gemma! Let’s start at the beginning – when did you write your first book?

Hi there! I started writing during the 2020 lockdown (my first book was called The Girl Who Lost Her Listening Ears, which tells you all you need to know about lockdown!). I soon switched to urban fantasy and love mixing the magical with the mundane, especially if it involves dragons! I write co...

Today (Saturday 10 June) marks the start of Indie Author Week UK and I’ve been reflecting on my own journey.

Back in the day, if you wanted to be a writer, your only option was to pitch your book to a literary agent and cross your fingers that you’d be in the 1-2% they said yes to. If you were, the agent would then sell your book to a publisher who would do all the marketing and promotion while you sat back to watch the royalties flood in. Hurrah!

If there was a cheery, happy ever after song pla...

I read 53 books in 2022 according to Goodreads. While I love a ‘proper book’, I also love Audible as it means I can ‘read’ while doing housework, exercising, or travelling. It’s usually what I bribe myself with when I can feel my inner sloth complaining! I don’t understand the snobbery around listening to books. I’d love to spend more time in a comfy armchair with my nose in a book, but even if I had unlimited time on my hands, I’d still choose to do both. Anyway, here, in no particular order, a...

As a stationery-lover, I love new year. The lure of a crisp new page –as perfect as a fresh snowfall – is something I look forward to every year. But this year is the first where I’ve written a daily diary.

My 2021 diary is bloated with notes and to-do lists and is a hot mess of almost indecipherable scrawling. I can practically hear my old teachers saying with a sigh, ‘and you used to have such beautiful handwriting.’

For a long time, that sort of thinking held me back. I had beautiful notebook...

It’s dark. I know it’s dark, but I can no longer see that it’s dark, if that makes any sense. I try to push against whatever is holding me here, because I know with utmost certainty that I am being held.

When I first realised my confinement, I clawed at the unknown walls of my prison in mounting desperation, until the fight in me slowly died, surging in defiance with decreasing regularity and sinking to an inevitable, cowardly defeat.

I no longer feel cold though, which is, I suppose, a blessing...

Back at the start of this year, I signed up to the Goodreads Challenge. I plucked a figure of 50 books out of the air and decided to see how far I could get. For years, I found it really difficult to read while I was writing. I’d get so into the story that the author’s style would creep into my own work. Then, during editing, I’d find these big chunks of text that just didn’t sound like me. I’d have to chop them out and start over, and so I decided not to read while I was writing. It was pragmat...

It was late November by the time I finally returned home. The sky had been the colour of damp plaster, the drizzle persistent enough to need the wipers, but not committed enough to allow them to do their job well. They had screeched incessantly across the windscreen, merging in tuneless duet with the bewildered meows of our new adoptee, breaking my heart afresh and stretching three hours into what felt like an eternity.

I had worked in the garden on that last day at home. Had I known, had some p...

When I published Ethereal, one thing I heard time and time again from friends and readers was, ‘I have an idea for a novel, but I could never write one.’

This was me for, oh, about twenty years. I’ve dreamed of being a writer for as long as I can remember, but the fact was, I just didn’t have the confidence to try.

Whenever I thought about it, that annoying inner voice would pipe up. What if I couldn’t write fiction? What if I couldn’t even complete a novel? What if I finished it, ...

Deciding to spend part of my meagre marketing budget on a professional cover design was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever made. While I had a pretty clear idea in my mind of what I wanted, I knew that there was not a snowballs’ chance in hell of me realising that vision without some professional help. 

Finding that help was my next challenge, but luckily fate intervened and I was introduced to Andrew Nickson at Eclipse Studios. Once the book was safely at the printers and we could both h...

I did it. I published my novel. The First Ethereal exists in the world. It’s a thing. What lived only in my head for such a long time, is finally out there. It’s real.

The truth is, I never really believed that I would do it. In fact, for a very long time, I doubted that I could do it. Writing reports is one thing, but writing a whole bloody novel is ridiculously hard – or so it was for me anyway.

Inner critic

Even once I had a pretty robust manuscript in my hands and I’d faced down the couldqu...