Origins

Are We Still Friends? began life as a series of scenes written to explore techniques taught on my Creative Writing Masters course. They were loosely based on an important friendship I had as a teenager that blossomed into an adult flat-share but drifted apart as we both started families. Thanks to Covid, WhatsApp and grandchildren we reconnected, and I promised she could read the novel when I'd finished.

Once I felt happy that I'd adequately responded to feedback groups and a Jericho Writers' Developmental Edit, I was ready to share. By then my friend had been diagnosed with cancer but she reassured me that the prognosis was years not months. To everyone's great sadness, it was, in fact, only months later that she was hospitalised and her last days were spent in St Peters Hospice with her family around her. It was some comfort that she'd had a chance to read my novel and tell me how much she enjoyed it but I lost momentum; I'd been querying and continuing to edit but the motivation to finish and polish it was gone.

Now I feel ready to try again. I want this novel to go out into the world, flawed and imperfect as it is and always will be. However, it doesn't fit a commercial template and has no obvious appeal to a modern demographic so agents won't want to offer it to trad publishers. After some research at London Book Fair and listening to fellow writers talk about their experiences, I'm ready to explore the alternatives.