Lily Joseph

  I miss writing in coffee shops. I don't even like coffee that much, I just like the way that being in a coffee shop seems to focus my mind to the task. Maybe it's the ambience, maybe it's the trope of writers in coffee shops, or perhaps even inhaling the caffeine fumes, but it just works for me.  My first experience of writing in a coffee shop was when I spent some months in Helsinki as a student. I can't quite remember the name of the place - I feel like it was called Jacob's or Jimmy's or something like that - but I went there all the time. I remember it was just up a side street from the railway station square and was the kind of place with free magazines for you to read, fifteen minutes of free internet access and they had free water dispensers infused with lemon or cucumber. All of this was like a gift from the Gods to a penniless student, as you can imagine. So whenever I needed a break from my humourless German flatmate or an escape from the November co...

I love a list.  Any kind of list - to-do lists, shopping lists, Christmas lists. The last one in particular brings back memories of lying on my stomach on the living room carpet, circling things in the Argos catalogue, crossing my fingers for a Mr Frosty. I never did get one and I'm still not over it. So today, with this blog being pretty new, I thought I'd do a little list of random facts about myself as an introduction.  Lily Joseph is a pseudonym (it's an amalgamation of my grandparents' names). This is not for reasons of being shy or mysterious, it's mainly because my day job is so different to fiction writing that, if I ever became known for writing, I wouldn't want the two worlds to meet. This makes me sound like I work for MI6 or something, but sadly it's neither that glamorous nor interesting. I have two children, aged 13 and 11, and I still haven't made my peace with being old enough to have a child at secondary school. In my head I'm still ...

I recently started a new Twitter account @lilyjowriter and it got me thinking about the dreaded impostor syndrome.  I don't know whether impostor syndrome happens in varying degrees to everyone or if it just affects some of us, but I know I definitely suffer from it. I've been doing my day job for nearly twenty years - I'm good at it, I'm very experienced and I keep up with all the current developments, but even in that arena I still see myself as not being 'enough'. Not clever enough, not confident enough, not selling myself enough. The other guys are the real deal, whereas I'm just about getting away with it, only a whisper away from Leonardo di Caprio's character in Catch Me If You Can. Hovering in the background, sweating bullets and muttering 'I concur.' Now that I've started taking writing seriously, I've never felt like such a cuckoo in the nest. On Twitter, when I see established authors having breezy conversations with each other...

When life hands you a fortieth birthday, you gotta make... fortified wine? Or something along those lines.  The above statement, while clearly not the best introduction to my writing skills, is pretty much the substance of this blog. I turned forty last year, soon to turn forty-one, and have come to the realisation that I am facing the second half of my life (with a bit of luck - if I can dodge Covid, and Donald Trump doesn't decide to 'go out in a blaze of glory'). I've written for most of my life, on and off, but I've decided it's time to take it seriously, spend some actual time on it and produce some work that I'm proud of. The gold star would, of course, to be published in some shape or form. I've always felt the pull of writing. When I was a kid I used to write stories for my family, binding the chapters up with a hole punch and a bit of string, annoying everyone when I gave up after Chapter 7 and they never found out what happened to the evacuees ...