Nothing is wasted with Laura Pearson - JU212

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It’s episode 212 with Laura Pearson, number one best-selling author of The Last List of Mabel Beaumont and several other novels dealing with life, love and loss, including the new paperback release of a book called Missing Pieces, which I read and loved. I chatted to Laura about the joys of procrastination, or 'thinking time', as we like to call it, reading outside your genre and the journey to her current success, which has involved lots of perseverance and keeping the words and stories flowing throughout. It’s a fun conversation that I know you’ll love.

Laura is the author of multiple novels, including The Last List of Mabel Beaumont which was a Kindle number one bestseller in the UK and a top ten bestseller in the US. Laura lives in Leicestershire, England, with her husband, their two children, and a cat who likes to lie on her keyboard while she tries to write and her latest release is the paperback version of Missing Pieces, which you can find everywhere right now.

Check out Laura's website here and follow her on Twitter.

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Transcript

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Let's get joined up. I'm Wayne Kelly and this episode is sponsored by Pick Locke Publishing, the imprint behind my debut novel, Safe Hands, which tells the story of Mickey Blake, A retired safecracker pulled out of retirement for one last job, and Hazel, a desperate mother driven to kill, to protect her son from being sucked into a life of crime. It's out now to buy on Kindle and in paperback. And if you're a Kindle and Limited subscriber, you can read the book for free. That Safe Hands by W.R. Kelly. Right. That's enough advertising. Cue the theme tune. Join Uprising. Hello and welcome to the Joined Up Writing podcast, where a little procrastination can go a long way. I'm Wayne Kelly and it's episode 212 with Laura Pearson, number one bestselling author of the last list of Mabel Beaumont and several of the novels dealing with life, love and loss, including the new paperback release of a book called Missing Pieces, which I read and loved. I chatted to Laura about the joys of procrastination or thinking time, as we like to call it, reading outside your genre and the journey to her current success, which is involve lots of perseverance and keeping the words and stories flowing throughout. It's a fun conversation that I know you'll love. Before that, a very quick catch up from me. Finally, I can report that the post-production work on the audiobook version of my novel Safe Hands has been completed. It's currently going through a technical review process, but it should be out into the world by the time the next episode drops in a couple of weeks. I may even include the Prolog as a little taster for you at the end of the next show, so stay tuned. I've also been working on book two and I've come to terms with the idea that working on the novel doesn't always mean adding new words to the actual manuscript. I've been spending quality thinking time on it, making pages of notes, and I've had some big revelations about the themes, the characters and the plot of the book. It's always tempting when you're writing a story to kind of go for the most obvious option or an easy solution to resolve a problem. And I think it's much more interesting to keep digging into the motivation of your protagonist, and especially sometimes actually your antagonist, because that can give you a more unpredictable roadmap for the stories. And one of the things Laura and I talk about in today's interview is actually remembering how you wrote something as time passes because especially follower because Missing Pieces is actually a rerelease. So she originally wrote it a number of years ago now, and sometimes it's hard to remember the story in detail, let alone how you actually came about, came to actually write it. But it was only when I remembered how I got to what became the final version of Safe Hands that I relaxed a little bit about some of the trials I've been facing. Whether it's sequel, I totally forgotten that I was struggling with the end of Safe Hands for ages and it was causing me to kind of tread water in the middle of the book as I tried to work out where I was going without any spoilers for that book. There is a large vault involved in the climax of Safe Hands, and it wasn't until I worked out what was actually in that vault that the rest of the story clicked into place. Not only did it saw the ending of the book, but informed every other decision I made, and they even influenced the opening chat chapters of the novel, which it showed. And this is where I am currently with the sequel. I've written more than 50,000 words, but because I don't plan in any detail, if I didn't press pause on the writing and stop to do some actual thinking, I think I was in danger of just writing for the sake, for the sake of it. Basically. So now I've taken stock of come up with some ideas that I think will really elevate the story. And it's also give me a better perspective on some of the stuff I've written early on in the book. And now that I realize and I realize a lot of that stuff won't actually make it into this book at all because there just isn't room but should work great for book three anyway. So as we always say on here, nothing is wasted. So aside from the writing plans continue for the workshop, I'm running in Leicester on May the 11th. It's called Big Screenwriting Screenwriting Techniques to help novelists improve their books and stories, and tickets will be going on sale in the next couple of weeks. Places are limited, so to give yourself the best chance of grabbing a ticket or finding out more anyway, you should sign up to my free newsletter. Wayne Kelly writes dot com And if you do that, you'll also get a free e-book with two short crime stories, as well as a bunch of other behind the scenes writing stuff, some book recommendations and loads of other stuff. I only send you a monthly newsletter. I don't spam you or anything like that and it's on. It's free, so you've literally got nothing to lose. So that's me. But what about you? What have you been up to? What have you been reading? Maybe you want to mention a project or workshop or something else that you've been working on. Maybe want me to mention that on the show? Just drop me a line and let me know. I'd love to hear from you, and I will always reply. And you can do that by emailing Wayne at Wayne Kelly. Right? Scum or dropping me a line on the Facebook or the Twitter pages and you can do that. So anyway, let's crack on because it's time for today's interview with Laura Pearson. So Laura is the author of multiple novels, including the last list of Mabel Bowman, which we mentioned earlier, which was a Kindle number one bestseller in the UK and a top ten bestseller in the US. Laura lives in Leicestershire, England, just a few miles from me, actually, with her husband, their two children, and a cat who likes to lie on the keyboard while she tries to write. I've got one of those as well, and her latest release is the paperback version of Missing Pieces, which you can find everywhere right now, and I highly recommend that book. So enjoy the chat and I'll pop back at the end to wrap things up. GigaOM writes, Okay, Laura, thanks so much for joining me on Joined up writing. I really appreciate it. So just to start off, why don't you just tell us, give us a rough idea of why you speak from and also tell us how things are going. I mean, it looks like they're going really well from the outside anyway. I am at home in Leicestershire in a village in Leicestershire. I'm in my children's playroom, which is also my office. I used to work at the dining room table and then we set up a really nice office for me in spare room and I just like being downstairs close to the door, close to the fridge, all of that. So and so I work in the playroom and as soon as the kids come home, they start piling stuff on my desk. And, you know, I have to kind of carve out this little area and things are going very well. My book that came out last August, the last list of people Beaumont is doing really well and the Kindle charts. And yeah, I just I've got another a new book coming out in April and I've written another book since then. And yeah, everything feels quiet. I feel like I'm on a busy rollercoaster in a good way. Yeah, but in a good way. Must be great. So your latest release, the one that's just about to come out, is actually it's kind of a reissue, isn't it? It's a paperback of your what was originally Udaipur debut, which is missing pieces. So tell us tell us a little bit about that. So Missing Pieces is about a family, the Saddlers, who live in Southampton, and there's a mum, dad and a daughter. And when it starts their youngest daughter, that three year old Phoebe has just died and the mum is pregnant with their third child. And the first half of the book is set in the weeks and months immediately after baby's death, which is a bit of a mystery. You don't find out how she died until the end of the book. And the second half is 25 years later, just to kind of show how that one event is still kind of affecting everybody in the family. Yeah. So, yeah, it's a kind of family drama. And, you know, it was my debut originally came out in 2018, and my new publishers have have got the rights to my three fold old. So they're putting those out in between new ones. Yeah, it's brilliant. Well, I've read Missing Pieces and I absolutely loved it as she's kind of you've referenced the the how you start at one particular point and then there's this big jump forward which caught me by surprise when I was reading it. Initially, I was like, Well, okay, yeah, but it was great. But did you was that always the intention when you were writing it or was that something that sort of came to you over the course of writing it? Did you start off very much writing in the immediate aftermath and then come up with the idea, or was it always the idea sort of cautious? And you remember I was actually writing it because I actually I wrote this in probably 2011. It wasn't published till 2018. So I think when I was like when I started it, I was definitely writing in the immediate aftermath. I'm not sure when because it's not really too much of a spoiler to say that in the second half the baby was born in the first half is is having a baby, which is why that's the huge jump to when she's in her twenties. So yeah, I think probably in the writing that came up. But one of the things I did from the outset is that each chapter is titled with How many Days After Baby's Death is. So, you know, you start from about seven days after, 12 days after and then, yeah, when you get into part two, you settle into thousands and thousands of days. And I remember talking to my copy editor the first time saying, Has somebody checked the maths? Right. Yesterday, something like that. That must have been a nightmare. Yeah. There's always something like that. There isn't time. There is, There's always your writing and when you're doing your first draft, you think, yeah, this will be fine. And then when you're doing the nitty gritty edits, God, somebody really needs to check this because I'm totally. Yeah, I mean, I'm terrible. I'm terrible with age is I'm terrible with colors of eyes, not even names. I mean, I have done it more than once where I'm sort of two thirds of the way through a first draft and someone's name changes. And I don't realize until I read her, read it back, I'm like, Who's that? yeah, you just suddenly thought that was a better name or whatever. So I thought, Well, what we should learn to do and I still have not learned to do it, is any time you write anything about somebody's physical appearance, you should just sit down. You should have a document where you have a list of all the characters names. And then like, This is what I've said about them. They've got blond hair and blue eyes. I can't change that because, yeah, I'm on terrible. I don't really have I know some people have a really clear picture of their characters and I don't really I like to leave that up to the reader. Yeah, the same, to be honest, I don't do a huge amount of description, but then you do do the odd thing of usually eyes or hair or whether that all that kind of thing. And then yeah, I completely forget that's, I mean that's where copy editors are worth their weight in gold. I would definitely I mean are you. I don't with the do you Scrivener. No I don't. And I always intend to get to grips with it and never do I just use word. Right. Well, I love I love Scrivener, but one of the things that you can do in Scrivener is you can have you kind of got this big binder. Essentially it look, Scrivener looks really, really complicated, but it's after you get like a five minute tutorial from somebody that uses it all the time, it's really, really, really easy. It's really, really straightforward. But basically you've got like a big binder down the side and in that you've got your book, which you can divide up however you want. Mean I just do it in chapters, but some people do it in scenes or whatever, and then that way you can just grab scenes or you can grab chapters and you can just when you're doing structure and edit, you can move them around, which is great. But you've also got like just kind of other folders that you can put anything in. So you could have research in there, you can have photographs, you can have character sheets. So they've got like currency. So I do tend to do the current sheets, but even with that I still forget and still just in this, I think in the throes of it, I don't want to stop and go and have a look and check it. So I just write it and we're terrible to ourselves that we were like, That's a future me problem. I can sort that out. So I just put in X's like, for example, I do that, my characters go to the cinema. I think I need to check what was at the cinema in that year at that time, and you don't want to break off and start checking that. And I also think I don't go to a writing in these days of Google like how annoying, what kind of thing have been years ago? At least we have all that information at our fingertips. But yeah, I always have to do a search for rows of Xs when I finish because if and then say, yeah, that was something I really need to. That's a good idea. The access thing I just tend to do. I use square brackets and then I write in it in capitals like I need good metaphor hair or pony porn hair or whatever. I like this note. Or even sometimes you make this better. Yeah, exactly. Or sometimes it'll just be like a really obvious word. Like the other day, I think it was bedhead or something, and I was trying to. The head of the bed or whatever, and I kept going. Banister And I'm like, It's not Banister, That's Alastair. So in the end I just put square brackets and it was like proper word for top of bed. I just go writes in because do you have a fear that that will come accidently? That version will go out on the edge? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But yeah, I think yeah, I just I'm just because I know that if I just stop for a second, I think because it's so hard to actually write sometimes especially. But yeah you forced yourself into the chair, You've actually, you've actually started typing and you're in the middle of a chapter and it's kind of you look, you're almost subconsciously looking for any excuse to stop, sometimes a bit like running. I think it's a bit like running, Yeah, start running. And sometimes when you first start running, when you first go out the first mile or whatever, your body's just gone. Why are you doing this? Just stop. Just stop. Just stop. Go back. Just walk. Just go back. And so on. I always used to find when I used to, when I used to run and I used to run till half marathon distance for a while on a train. But the first two, three, sometimes four miles, my body was my head. My brain was basically just going stop, stop, stop what you're doing. Stop, stop, stop. And then once I got past that, I was okay as a body. So my brain sort of accepted it like, well, you're just you're going to keep going. Now you're okay. You're not. Are you going to keep going to you go home? I think writing is like that sometimes. So any excuse to stop, like go and look at Google Thesaurus or check something or find another word for it. And I can just it can just derail the whole writing session. So I just have to that with you the same. I just have to keep going. Basically, I'm terrible for checking Twitter and so if I do leave the word document to go and check something, yeah, I'll end up checking Twitter, checking Facebook, checking my emails, checking WhatsApp, and then I've completely forgotten what I was actually doing. But I, I remember hearing Lisa Jewell saying that she never writes more than about one sentence without going off and either checking your emails or doing something else. And which would you think would make it so, you know, so disruptive. But she writes amazing books, so if it works for her, then yeah, yeah I I'm I'm not very good at I write quite fast and I write I tend to write 2000 words a day when I'm drafting. And that's like I only have the school day to work with because I have my kids before you say so, but I'm just not very good. If I get my head down, I can write a thousand words in an hour. But there's a lot of faffing about and I don't know, some of that. I think I need it because I'm thinking, Yeah, I think your brain's kind of ticking over on working on it, even when always. Even when you're asleep, isn't it? You know, you might go to sleep thinking, how am I going to sort out? And then in the morning, you know, it's kind of weird much it process, It is weird. It's like you have thought about this before, but it's like your back brain's going, Yeah, time. And that time when I wake up in the morning is usually that's the time I literally open my eyes and I'm just lying in bed for like 5 minutes or something. And that's when whatever is pops into my hand. I'm not. I know what that thing is. Now. I know how to get around that or I know what that's really about or that little bit or whatever. And I think you sort of shouldn't be afraid to take a break because sometimes you could say you take a week off. But I think it was last year, a couple of years ago, Easter, we went to Paris and the kids were off school. We went to Paris for four days and I thought, okay, I won't be working those four days. But while we were in Paris, I came up with the title of Michael Roman and an idea for the next book, and I could have been sat at my desk, you know, and not come up with those things. Yeah, but sometimes you kind of stop and then it allows your brain to. To give that stuff to you. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I definitely think you're right. Plus, I think you have to kind of it's a bit pretentious sounding birthday describe like this before it's kind of refilling the well, sometimes it's the creativity. Well, and sometimes not. You know, it's not really writer's block, but it's just more like a malaise and you just can't really be bothered with things or you don't you're not absolutely 100% committed or convinced that what you're writing is the right thing. It shouldn't be that thing that you're writing or whatever focusing on. But sometimes I'll go off and I'll watch a really good TV series or film, or I'll read a different kind of book or whatever it is. And then I'm like, well, now I'm fired up again and I'm okay. I know what I want to want to write now, and I want to do something that's a bit like that or whatever. Yeah, I think it's great to watch and read widely like outside your genre as well, because I really like it when genres kind of clash or when you think, Well, this is a love story, but it reads like a thriller, that kind of thing. And I think the more widely read, the more all those influences, they kind of all go in and they all kind of come out the other end. I think so, yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. And I think we do tend to often because we're limited with time, because we write and we read and we've got families and all the rest of it and we've all got a massive to be read pile. And I think sometimes you just tend to go back to the same sorts of things, which was good when I was because I wouldn't usually read, but when I read Missing Pieces, I wouldn't really usually read in that genre to read. But every time I've read something that's in that genre or something similar, I've always enjoyed it. It's just a sort of as often happens through the podcast and things. I'll be like, Yeah, you know, I might get a chance to read or know literary fiction or something, which again, I've always been like literary fiction. I've never picked it up off the shelf. Yeah, but, you know, in most cases I've picked it up and I'm like, this is absolutely brilliant. I wish I could write like this. And the story's amazing and I've learned so much reading it. So I just think, you know, I should that's one of my resolutions, not that I have them, but that is one of my resolutions for this year to read a bit more widely outside my genre, if I can support. Yeah, I mean, I get sent a lot of proofs because I'm, I'm involved with a big book club on Facebook called The Book Load. So I get loads of proofs and they're in all kinds of genres, but we've all got our little quirky things, haven't we? And I have it in my mind that I don't really like historical, and sometimes I'll read a historical novel and I love it. But when I'm approached about one, my first instinct is I am exactly the same with that genre. I was exactly the same in my dad for ages because my dad's like, really big into like Bernard Cornwell and all that sort of stuff. But then a few good many years ago now, he talked to me about these books that he'd read about Genghis Khan, a fiction by Khan. Iggulden And he has honestly just just read that. Just read this. Just read the first one. And he gave it. You gave it to me. And I was going on holiday at the time and I was like, okay, alright. And I started reading it on the first day of my holiday and it was absolute. I couldn't believe how good it was. And I ended up reading all of the books in that series off the back of it. This was somebody that hates historical, supposedly hates historical fiction. So when you're that person that's trying to get somebody else to read something or they please just give it a try because I'm sure you'll like it. Yeah, but everybody, like you say, has such a big pile that if you don't fancy something, yeah, it never gets well, I just pick spoiled babies. I mean, we've just got nowadays you've got such a big choice of books, film, TV, music you can listen to and watch and read anything you want to. Pretty much any time. Yeah, that's the reality of it. And I always remember when I was in my twenties and I didn't have much money and I had I've always had a lot of books, but I'd look at my bookshelf and think, I don't really fancy that award. You read that and and now I have the opposite problem where I've got literally books bursting off the shelves and loads of them that I desperately want to read. And when I see them and I also desperately want to read that book and I've yeah, I've just got more books than I've got time to read them and to try to remember how lucky I am to have that because that when you're kind of scratching around for something to read, like at the time you couldn't get a Kindle and then buy a load of books for 99 H You know, every time you wanted a book, it was, you know, £8 from Waterstones. And I think the same with music as well as is always the same with buying an album or something. You know, you buy a CD well as it was when I was growing up. Yeah. I mean and your tape or a tape. Yeah. Before that yet. So yeah, we're spoiled for definite so So when going back to so missing pieces. So do you I mean obviously it's a few years ago when it initially came out. Now tell and give me a sense of the path to publication with that book then. So you said obviously you'd started writing in 2011. How did you get from there to when it was first published? So I wrote a book which ended up being my second book, Nobody's Life, and I was writing it all through my twenties. I did an amazing creative writing when I was 23 and then I finished in 2010 when I was 30. You know, it taken me forever and I got an agent. But she needed a lot of work. And when I told her about my idea for my second book, which ended up being Ms. abusive shipping much preferred that one. So she signed me, but it was on the basis that we would work on that second book rather than the first one. So I wrote it over the next couple of years. Didn't take me long, but it still took me quite a long time. So I was working full time. Yeah, sure. And then it went out on submission, very small submission and didn't sell. And then I lost my agent because she left agent thing and that was just a real knock and around that time, 2013, I had my son, my first child, and I wrote over the next few years. But I was I was really quite knocked around. And so by that point I had two novels and neither of them had done anything. And then I got when I when I was pregnant with my daughter a couple years later, I had breast cancer and I wrote I did NaNoWriMo for the first time, write a 50,000 white novel in November, which became my third novel, I Wanted You to Know. And around that time I decided to submit missing pieces to some small publishers because at only going out to the kind of the really big guys and I hadn't known up to that point that there was this middle. I thought there was self-publishing and there was publishing with Penguin, and I didn't know that there was a kind of middle ground actually publishing. Yeah, I think a lot of people don't realize that, to be fair. Laura Yeah, I didn't know that there were publishers you could go to without having an agent. So I approached a couple of them and I go, or they were really tiny publisher. They, they took it on and they ended up taking all three. And so those were published in 2018 and 2019. But then that was the end of my sort of journey with them because they went back to only doing classic crime, which is what they've done originally. So then I had a few years in the wasteland when I was writing books and not really getting anywhere until I had my moment taken on last year. That must have been so well, well, like most writers, journeys that you listen to, it's obviously like a journey and perseverance. So you got knocked back quite a lot because it's so you sort of had a couple of like false dawns then really. So obviously you got an agent that must have felt great. When you got the agent, you're working on two books. You just think it's a matter of time. When you get an agent, you just think, Yeah, that's the big hurdle. And there's this whole new world of rejection to come. You know, this big wave is about to hit you in the face. You can't see it coming. Yes, I'm on my third agent, Elle, which I don't think people talk very much about changing agent. So there's all kinds of reasons why you might end changing agents. But yeah, things. Things just don't always work out. And so, yeah, it's only since it's only fairly recently in the last few years, speaking to more writer friends and things that our agent did and whatever that I've kind of because again, it's one of those things where doesn't really get talked about publicly because everybody's scared of an egg, understand it, but nobody wants to offend anybody or they know their agent might take this the or the previous agent might take this the wrong way, or they might not get another agent again, because they might be seen as being difficult or whatever. So it's quite interesting. But yeah, everybody always talks about it sort of behind quietly doors. Yeah. And they do though for whatever reason, you know, they'll, they'll talk about because again, I've talked about this before, but I think when somebody gets like say a two book deal or three book deal or whatever, I just always assumed that was a case of, okay, they've taken I mean, it sounds like it was a bit different for you because they'd kind of seen your two or your three books sort of. So they kind of, yeah, they would get in. But I know I've known people, they've been taken on with a book and they've got a book deal and then when they when it goes right, you know, the first book and then when they sort of present the second book, the agent or the publisher usually that they're signed to goes, No, we don't like that book. No, we want we want another one that's more like the first one or whatever. And what other industry would you work for six months or a year or something and then submit it and then your bosses know you do it again? I know it's absolutely crazy. And if you start I mean, if we don't think about it like this because otherwise we'd just never, ever write anything. But if you started, like breaking it down to the hours that you've spent on it. Yeah. You know, Yeah. Because I'm, I'm earning really well at the moment from Beaumont, but I had years where I wasn't earning anything. So if you, if you averaged it out and yeah, I think the problem is there's not the problem. There's so many people who want to write and there's people who we're all kind of compelled to do, aren't we won't be writing regardless. And so the industry doesn't have to be very nice because they know, they know, know, not the people who will do it anyway. So yeah, that's a kind of an issue. Like, you know, whatever stage you're at, if you're having a moan, you have to kind of remind yourself that there's people who'd love to be at that stage that you're right. Yeah, yeah. All the previous you would have loved to be at the stage or but we'd like were terrible for moving the goalposts some way. After I had a few years where I wasn't published, I thought I would be happy to be published. I don't really care what happens. And then as soon as you are published, you might well be nice if it got into the top 100 and I got into the top ten. Yeah. And you start comparing yourself, you always compare yourself to other people. I mean, there's that saying comparison is the thief of joy. But it's true because you are always even friends, even, you know, it's not that you hate them and you, you know, it's not like a pure envy thing, but you do look at them and you're like, Well, why? Why is there book in that? Or why are they been you know, why have they got assigned to that or why are they doing this or whatever? There's always that. And I would like that. And, you know, I'm not doing as well as they are or whatever is why they get in that promotional campaign that I'm not getting or whatever it is. And I think that never ends. Like however successful you get, there's always going to be somebody else who's, you know, who's proof has been sent out with solid balls of gold. They just Yeah. So I think you have to just accept the you are the way you are and everybody is on their individual journey and, you know, it might look like you're high in somebody else's low and then you might reverse positions. And yeah, it is hard because the more you become part of the world, the more all the friends you have. And then you see all these things, you're imbecile, but you also see all their struggles behind the scenes. Yeah. So you see kind of the good and the bad. I think you do. And I think the other thing with it is as well, pretty much without exception, the people that I've met through the podcast and events and different best pieces and kind of regardless of success, really, even people that are on the face of it really, really successful with multiple books and all the rest of it, they've all got the same even then, they've still got the same concerns, they've still got the same worries that they're usually really supportive of other writers. Yeah, because they understand it. So. So how did that, that great big as you say those those waves of rejection hitting you over the course of the 2011 onwards? How did you get through that? What what kept you going? Well, like I said, it did stop for quite a long time after that initial submission and after losing my first agent. And part of it was because of the stage of life. I was, I had a baby and then had another baby. And so, you know, that's a busy time. And I was working. But I think I think, like I said, we're just we all we don't know how to not write. So you might not be submitting, but you're still writing and that's how you still process things. And when I was diagnosed with cancer, my first instinct was to write a blog about it, because that's just how I get, you know, sort things out in my head and work out how I feel about things. So, yeah, I think I, I was never going to completely stop writing. And then once you have something that you think, Well, I could submit this, I might as well. But it is hard is I was, you know, like this, this book of mine is doing better than any other books done. And there might be lots of people who think, I've never heard of this author before. And she's just, you know, that whole overnight success thing and behind every overnight success story, I think those ten years of hard work and rejection and that kind of thing. So yeah, I think you have to have a really thick skin. I think doing my AMA helped me to develop mistakes in terms of edits and being kind of critiqued because while it's very nice if people read your book and say nice things about it, if you're trying to draft it and make it better, that's not what you need. You need people to tell you what's not working. So I think that helped with that. And yeah, you just have to dust yourself off and keep going. And I think knowing other writers and knowing everybody's been there and I think like finding people who are at the same stage as you, whether you're, you know, writing a first draft or submission to agents or on submission to publishers, it's all about the kind of the camaraderie with other people who are in the same position. Because if you only have your family and friends to talk to about it, you drive them all mad and nobody is doing anything other than writing and fully understands how they don't, how it is, really. So you do need other writers to talk to, even if that's just online or you know, I have writer friends I talk to every day and I think I'd go mad without them. Yeah, I totally agree. Totally agree. So one of the things we mentioned before we actually came on on air was the fact that obviously with missing pieces coming out now, which is a few years old from when you originally wrote it and now you have a few books on from that talked about that might be a bit weird. It might feel a bit strange for you to be having to talk about it again and revisiting it sort of back into the world. Fresh, insane comments about it. Don't tell me about that. I actually downloaded the audiobook and listened to it a few weeks ago because I thought people are going to expect me to know things about this. Yeah, but that just for me to know what the characters are called. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're probably written eight or nine novels since then. So yeah, I listen to the audiobook and it was a really strange experience because it wasn't extreme, it wasn't as excruciating as I thought it would be. So a bit that I thought I'd definitely change that now. But you just have to accept that you can't. And it was also like I was listening to it and think, I wonder what's going to happen? And I'm thinking, I know, yeah, yeah. But there were bits that I'd forgotten about and I think I was kind of pleasantly surprised because I was thinking, it'll be terrible. And it wasn't as terrible as I thought. You, you know, nobody would have published it. It was absolutely terrible. I suppose So. Is it strange because I know people are discovering me through my new books and then might pick up my old books and they won't know necessarily. You know, readers just type me name in like, what else is this person written? They don't care when it was written or will order it down. And and I think the other thing with it is as well as I know that we talked about it before like how as a writer, when you read, it's difficult to sometimes read it as a reader and not as a writer and you tend to analyze and things. But for most people that are reading your books, they're reading it as a reader. And the thing that is going to connect them to what you what you do is use your voice, which is going to be yeah, your voice was, was obviously present in missing pieces. As much as it is present in the most recent books. That that's that's the truth of it. I think by the time you've been writing for so long, I think everybody like like a musician or anything else, I think it takes a while to find your voice. But she had been writing for years. By the time you got to missing pieces and missing pieces out into the world, you know, I think that's that's quintessential Laura Pearson. So, yeah, and I write when I write and kind of different genres and I've said to my editor before, do we need to put some books out under a different name? Because some of my books that haven't come out yet but will be coming out are sort of speculated to have a kind of either somebody traveling a time or like a sliding doors where the narrative splits into two. Yeah, but my editors always said, no, they're all they're more similar than you think they are because they're all kind of emotional family dramas at their heart. So whatever kind of bells and whistles I used to tell the story. I think that you say there is a distinctive voice and that's what people are connecting with and that and as long as you, you know, don't like, I wouldn't suddenly introduce aliens or, you know, suddenly that's a spy novel. Yeah. Yeah. Like I think people trust you. okay. This is a bit different. Okay. I know. I mean, that's what I hope for anyway, because this authors that I read that whatever they do, I think I don't care. I trust them. I know that they are. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's like to me is it's like the most desirable kind of all set to be, to have that kind of thing. I've always one of my favorite authors is Stephen King, but not because I'm a massive horror fan, because I'm not particularly, but I just think I think he's a great writer and he's I've read all the different and pieces done in lots and lots of different genres, and they all feel like Stephen King in a different way. I mean, I've read his crime novels and, you know, I've read all sorts of different things that he's done, but he never has to. I know when he signed off, he had like a different pen name and whatever because he wanted to release more books and all that kind of thing. But he's basically. did he? I didn't know that. Yeah. He had some early book it really early in the early days. Richard Bachman or Batman. I don't know how you say it, but okay. So still like novellas like thinner and stuff like that were written under under and I think Running Man as well maybe that might have been and I think it was just a case of they wanted to put more paperbacks out when he was in the seventies or whatever when he first came out. Yeah, I think I think it was to do with that. But you know, he's kind of and there are the writers like that and they can sort of almost do what they want and it's because they've earned the right to. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean if you wrote one novel and then your second novel was completely different, I think publishers get very nervous about and they they want you to write something that's the same, but different. That's different enough, but not wildly different. But yeah, once you've been doing it, as long as somebody like Stephen King's been doing it, I'm sure you can say to Ed, I've had this idea it's and they just say, just write, just write your laundry list down and we'll publish that. And we'll sell. But probably licensed to print money. Exactly. Yeah. But I think it's a great position to be in where you don't have to where you can, you know, as you say, people read it and it still feels like you. But it's it's in a different genre. It's a different it's a it's a different thing. I think that's a great position to be in, but it must feel great now. And the fact that you've been able to do what you love doing the most, which is writing and to do it, and as you said at the top of the podcast, it's like really busy and there's like a flurry of activity at the moment just because you're busy republishing other stuff, plus you've got other things coming up in the in the pipeline. I think my publisher Bolt, which are the ideal publisher for me because they'll kind of publish stuff as fast as I can write. What if I was with a publisher who would only about one book a year? I have, you know, I have some books that are written and ready to go, and I just want them out there. So I think my editor said once in a meeting with my agent, We need to catch up with Laura's brain. As I was saying. Well, like when they they signed me for five books, and then when we started talking about a second contract, we kind of pulled these other three books out and said, We've got this. And my editor thought initially they were just ideas. She was like, Yeah, great ideas. And no, I've written, written her. okay. Yeah. So I think it's great that I'm really impatient and nobody tells you that there's a huge amount of waiting. You know, you're always waiting to hear from your agent entrepreneur editor, but if you're having done holes out every few months like I am at the moment, there's always the next thing. Like, like yesterday I thought, just see whether my next book's up on that. And it was. And in the past I would have been checking that for weeks, but it hadn't occurred to me as soon as I so busy because I've been doing so many things and yeah, and I'm writing another a new first draft. So I mean my kind of 2000 one's a day. Then I'm also doing some freelance work which I, I've only been doing about a year and it's about an hour a day so that it's into the time as well that I much prefer this kind of mad whirlwind with lots going on and there is still momentum, isn't it? Because I think that's one of the difficult things, especially early on when you're trying to get things, you kind of want to get that momentum going and it's difficult. I mean, I think what I love about what you're saying is and I've got I've got another friend, if you listen to this, Dan. Dan Howarth, but he's a bit like you from the point of view that he's really, really prolific, lucky, he writes all the time and he's try and he's submitting and he's going through all the stuff that we all go through with whatever. But I keep saying to him, Yeah, but what's great is you write regardless of what's happening, he just keeps writing like, Yeah, you'll literally finish one and he'll put it on the back burner while he waits to edit it and he starts another one and then you get it and he's like, yeah, I know. But you know, I'm not going back and I'm doing this on the other, right? Yeah, but you're right in the mix. And at some point when he eventually gets over the line and he does get picked up or whatever, however it develops, he's going to have this desk drawer that it's been up to, which it sounds like you had a similar thing. Well, hang on. I've got one that's a bit like that or whatever. And just pull out a novel. Yeah. I mean, our mutual friend Laura Noel, remember her saying when I was having, like, lots of rejections and she said, Laura, there's going to come a point where you don't have to do any work for three years because somebody is going to take on all these books and they're all already written. And another friend said to me, Don't tell them you got another three books written, just produce them every six months. That's just that's really out of this one. Loss of passion of Laura On holiday. But she said she's writing but yeah I think it's true but I think it will never, you know, nothing. It's never going to hurt you to just keep writing anyway, to just keep keep going with it. And I think a lot of the time I mean, I'm speaking from personal experience. I think you often get stuck in a particular project or get stuck on the fact that I'm submitted and I'm not getting anywhere or whatever, rather than just thinking, okay, well, just it's not going anywhere, but let's just focus on something else and just crack on and just do something, some other writing or whatever. Yeah. And you learn from any writing you do don't do. I remember years and years ago people would say to me, I think you need to get to know this character a bit better. So why don't you just write some diary entries to that character? Like not to go in the book just so you get to know the characters more. And I just then write something that's not going go, I know what you start doing that, but there is something so valuable in, you know, if you just if I just thought, I'm just going to write a story for my kids to read. And I would think of it as completely separate from my writing, but I would still learn from doing it. So I think no writing is wasted. Even if you have ten books that don't get published the 11th, but it does get published wouldn't have been written if you hadn't written those ten. So That's right. And you can probably that even if those even if you think those books unpublishable, whatever that means, there's probably still stuff in them anyway that you think, yeah, you can show you some idea, yeah yeah. Or a scene or whatever or a particular two thing to take out. I mean, I used to be in a local critique group and one of the things that I liked, aside from the critique which was great, were we used to meet weekly and we used to have basically a task every week we'd have a homework task. It was an it would be a writing prompt, something. Whoever was chairing the meeting would decide it, and it was usually a hundred, 150, maybe 200 words or something. It was a piece of flash fiction and it would be a write in from. But that's again, that's a great you know, that was a great exercise to do. It was brilliant from a point of view of economy, because you had to be you had to be exact. So it was 200 words out to be exactly 200 words to be a little story or whatever it was that was thing. But I think that was great. And I think, you know, you could just look at it as like, what was the point of this? This is 200 words. It's not going to go into my manuscript or whatever, but I always learned something doing that, or he could try stuff out as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can be really experimental. You write something if you've given a prompt, like a photograph or a word or whatever, you write something that you never would have written otherwise. I did something on Twitter a while ago where I asked people to suggest a word, and then I wrote a short story in tweets using something like 15 of the words that people had suggested and the the story that came out never, ever would have been written without those problems. But what you're saying also about writing something really short, like that, I think there's a huge amount of value in that because you learn to kind of way everywhere, don't you think? Well, yeah. Does this word is this word carrying its weight? Is does it belong here? Is there a more efficient way I can say this and then you carry that through to an overarching, even though it's much longer, then then you're more like, well, is the simple thing. It's why is this scene moving the story along or informing about character? If not, it's got to go and replace it with something that's working harder. So I think again, it's a really valuable skill to learn to kind of critique your own work and look at whether it's working hard. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, it is really, really useful. I find it with dialog as well because I love writing dialog often when I do the first edit and I often find I've been a bit long with my dialog like I'll do, you know, there'll be reams and reams of it and I'm thinking, hang on a minute, that needs to you need to just get to the point a bit quicker. It might not be exactly how somebody might speak, but you just need to get it across a little bit quicker and I think it's quite good for that. Yeah. To ever read your dialog out loud. I read all my stuff out loud. yeah. that's great, because I just can't believe the difference that it makes. I mean, that was one of the that was one of the things about the critique group that was in. It was actually you used to have to read out in the room as we used to do. So it was, it was only you could only take up to 1500 words each time, but you'd read out in the room and as you were reading it, you'd, you'd actually hear things that you'd missed when you'd edited it. You could. Yeah. Just that's the repetition there or whatever it was. But you could also do the thing with doing it with that was you could actually hear how it landed in the room. You could just tell just from the atmosphere and whether people were paying attention or whatever. I suppose it's a bit like if you're doing stand up and your hair show like just showcasing it and saying, I thought this was really funny, but nobody's laughing. Whereas this is the one that's worked really well. So I could build on that. Yeah, I think that's, you know, that kind of immediate feedback is quite rare, isn't it, when you're writing mostly, or kind of just away in a room on your own, talking to yourself, talking to your imaginary friends. And Exactly. It's great to have that. I wrote a Prolog the other day for my new novel and I sent it to three friends and they all well, I want to read the novel right now, and I was like, better write the novel. So but it was just really nice to get that. Yeah, first of all, absolutely. Early on. Yeah. So and sometimes I think you do need that. Like you say, think critique is, is massive, like getting constructive, critique is massive and I've talked about it before, but I would say the biggest jump in my writing was when I joined a critique group however many years ago. It was just that first session. I learned more in that than I'd probably learned in the previous sort of ten years of writing on my own in isolation or whatever. Wow. And I love I I'm not I'm in the same. I hate it. It's nice to have like a little boost and someone say that they enjoyed it or whatever. But I do think it you really me I love that critique constructive things and I love I mean I actually really like editing. I know a lot of people like editing, but I really like editing because I can see it getting better, can sort of feel it getting tighter and everything. And I like, yeah, I'm, I'm starting to like editing more for years and years. I just wouldn't know what to do or how to tackle it. And I would just go through fixing typos and things and thinking, you know, I need to be doing big edits. I don't know what to do. Yeah, somebody on my my publisher, we have a Facebook group, the 650 authors that my publisher has. And somebody asked yesterday about how people people's process before their work goes to the roadshow. And it was so varied. Some people write six drafts before they send it to their editor. Some people write one draft and just send it off. And I'm quite lucky that my editor is happy to see a first draft and because sometimes I just don't know what needs doing. I need somebody to tell me what it's doing. Yeah, but yeah, I'm kind of coming around to edits. I think when I'm writing a first draft and I can see that the word count is going up by roughly 2000 words every day. When you're editing your word count might go down, but you're still made progress. Yeah, but it's not as easy to see that. So I think that's maybe what I struggle with that for weeks and weeks. Yes, I know I'm editing a medicine, but you can't say all 30,000 words and 40,000. 50,001. Yeah, Yeah. I like. Sorry. Go on. Everybody likes different stages, don't they, Of the process. Yeah. It's interesting to talk to people and see what stage they like. Some people hate writing a first draft. I really like it. I feel like the world, the world's my oyster and I haven't yet ruined this. I did. Yeah, I know what you mean. It's like fresh snow before you actually. Yeah. To walk in it and spoil it and it gets so by the end it's like all gray and slushy. Doesn't even look like snow. By the time you've seen that meme of, like, my idea of a construct. And then I got a painting of a whole mustachioed strawberry. It's like that. Yeah, that that piece of that piece of artwork that's that was the touched up and they did the face and it was really. yeah. So it's like that. Well I better not take too much more of your time so as we kind of I mean I normally do the book that saved your life, but we've run out of time. We won't do that today. But but just as we kind of move towards wrapping things up, what would you say has been kind of the best piece of creative advice that you've been given along the way? I think it's really basic. I think just getting to the end, just like not so the draft. I'm writing down 15,000 words and and at the beginning I was writing it in past tense, and then at some point it changed to present tense. And I find that I just like I was trying to make the decision about which it should be written in. But my brain just makes the decision as I'm writing it. It just slips into the one it wants to be. Yeah. So I haven't come back and changed the early chapters into, you know, I just again, future me could deal with that. Just keep going for me that works. Just keep going to the end and then you'll have something to work with. I've heard somebody describe it as like getting all your sand to make a sandcastle. When you write in the first draft structure, just getting all the sand, then you can kind of build something hopefully good out of it. So yeah, it's not groundbreaking, but and I know it's not what works for some people. Some people go back and tweak and then rewrite the first chapter and, you know, but I just have to like keep looking forward because otherwise I think I just get distracted and give up and start something else. But like, the more the more novels I write, it doesn't get easier in the sense that, you know, you hear people saying you have to learn to write the novel that you're writing, and each one is different. But what is easier is that I know I can do it now. So when I have that kind of 30,000 words, it's so awful and I can't do this, and I know that I can. So just keep going. Just keep going. Yeah, I really like the sand metformin. I heard that one before. That's good. That's good. I remember when I heard I always have these stories that I don't know where I saw them, so I usually misquote people. So I don't bother. Yeah, somebody deserves credit for the sand, but it's not me. I'll just take it. It's fine. We'll just remind people. Obviously, you've got so many books out in a minute, but obviously the one that's about to come out as a record, this it just remind them what it is and where they can find it. So Missing pieces is coming out mid-February and it's available on Amazon. It's available as an e-book, audio, but paperback hardback or all formats. But you can also order it through independent bookshops or Waterstones. And then in April, I have the days Charlie Woodhouse Wake Up, which is my next new book coming out. So I'm excited for people to read that one. Yeah, absolutely. And hopefully will get you back on bit later on in the year and that'll be great. And we're talking about doing an in-person thing as well because Laura and I live quite close. So the longer some stage. Yeah. And do that and just tell people where they can find you online as well. Laura I'm always on Twitter and I'm at Laura P author. I'm also at Laura appeals on Instagram and Threads. I have a Facebook page, but Twitter is where like 99% of the time, if you just search for me, I will actually be there. And so I'm a terrible Twitter procrastinator. I even call Twitter, but I know I call it that now. I'm not called an X, I refuse. Absolutely refuse. Well, that's great. Well, I'll put all of those links in the show notes. But for now, Laura, thanks for coming on. Joined up writer. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. It's been lovely. Take a break. Good. There you go. Thanks again to Laura and Al for all of the links in the show notes over it. Joined up writing Echo Dot UK. That's it for this week. Other than me reminding you to make sure you subscribe Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Overcast, YouTube or wherever else you get your podcasts from. And then you can have the podcast downloaded automatically each time. Also, remember to leave us a nice rating and review. If you haven't, why not? You've been listening to it for ages. Why don't you just been on there and spent 2 minutes to leave a review? What's wrong with you anyway? Yeah, if you do that, that will help other people to find the show or just recommend it to one or ten of your friends. That would be amazing. Other than that, thanks for listening. This week I'm Wayne Kelly. Happy writing. Stay safe and I'll see you next time.