Hi, it’s me! Madeleine Marsh. Author of a self-published novella and a novel. Writer of fanfic. Currently editing my new novella.
Welcome to my place, make yourself at home.
I started writing fiction when I was five years old. I won a Young Fiction prize for a story about an alligator when I was eight and my single claim to fame is that SFX columnist Paul Cornell once printed a line from one of my Star Wars fanfics! I’ve written in many different fandoms over the years, I’ve made many friends and had a lot of fun.
My original debut story, The House at the End of the World, was written for the NaNoWriMo Challenge in November 2010, a skeleton manuscript written in thirty days. Now it’s a 70,000 word novella and all it took was over two years of re-writes, edits, beta reads, more re-writes and further edits.
My first novel, Gentleman Justice, was written as part of the 2013 NaNoWriMo Challenge and published in 2015. It’s supposed to be the prequel to ‘the one book I’ve got inside me’, and the start of a series of at least four books. One day I might be happy that I have the literary skills to finish the three others.
I’m currently editing my new novella, The Pixie Twist, written in the first eight days of the 2019 NaNoWriMo challenge. It’ll spend most of 2020 in the edit stage, and I’m aiming to have it published in October.
I owe a lot to NaNoWriMo. Without the annual challenge of writing a 50,000 novel in 30 days, I doubt I’d ever have published anything. I’d recommend it to anyone even thinking of writing something.
Even though they’re self-published, my books do go through vigorous edits over months and months, with skilled people reading them time and time again to iron out the problems and the errors. It doesn’t make the perfect but it does make them, hopefully, readable!