Elizabeth Ball Discusses the Road to Her Debut Novel

We appreciate greatly the opportunity to Elizabeth Ball stop by and discuss what it means to be a writer.  How did she get started on the journey to becoming a writer?

My daydream of writing full time, in my own little studio at the bottom of the garden, has not quite materialised- yet. Small details like proper paid full time work, having a family, shopping for food, getting stuff fixed that breaks just when you think you have a spare moment (my car door handle this month, came clean off in my hand meaning I now have to climb in the passenger side, quite a squeeze in my tiny car) usually get in the way, as well as the fact that we already have a brick outhouse at the bottom of the garden, and it’s my fiancées gym. Oh and talking of which, we’re getting married in four weeks’ time, an event that despite my usual haphazard organisation has been planned down to the last bead and is taking up any spare time I might have had with appointments to choose chocolate for favours and ribbon for flowers, and to talk to the photographer about where he’s going to sit in the church straight after a meeting with the minister who says the photographer is not allowed to sit in the church.

I did have some time though, in 2012. After spending my life working I found myself, after relocating from one end of Great Britain to the other, slightly out of work for a while, settling my son into his new school and making our new house into a home. It was a year in fact, in Banff, Aberdeenshire- a place even the most uninspired will be inspired. During this time my fiancée was also working a random job which involved night shifts and so I grabbed the opportunity to write down all the stories in my head. For years I had ideas, sometimes these would be bursting to be written on paper, other times quite content to be floating around inside my head. I’ve always written, for as long as I can remember, and always had a dialogue going on in my head, whole passages being written while out on my daily run or in the car on my way to boring and inconvenient paid work. Sometimes these would get put into some form of written word until I could write them properly, on a run I’d text myself pages upon pages of ideas and then frantically scribble them down on my return back home, every traffic light that stopped me meant a quick few scribbled words lest I forget. I had always spoken about writing a book, always wanted to, until one day I heard an author say on the radio that the writer’s worst enemy is procrastination. So I stopped taking about it and wrote it, the book I had imagined for so long. There are still about ten in my head and so many short stories, but I finally wrote ‘Dodgy dates and a Dinosaur’, conceived during the early hours of the mornings of 2012, whilst my fiancée was working and my son slept. Once I started writing I found I couldn’t stop and all the years of thoughts came tumbling out onto the page. I started to submit this to publishers but now with full time work and everything else I decided just to self-publish and see what happens, 

I’m over it now anyway, on to the next. Until of course, Hollywood decide to make it into a film… maybe the screen play will be next. I find myself now flitting from one idea to the next like a moth between lights and am just waiting for the next opportunity to be still, be alone and have at least a few moments to myself.

If you would like to purchase a copy of Elizabeth's  novel Dodgy Dates and Dinosaurs.  Visit this link on Amazon.