It couldn't happen to a nicer Guy...

...Saville, that is.

His book The Afrika Reich has finally found a publisher. (Thanks to Welshcake for the info!)

Let me start from the beginning.

In 2006, I took my first tentative steps at writing stories. I wasn't the most confident of writers, my personal life was to put it mildly going up the creek without so much as a paddle, a banana cake and a flask of "tea" but by all the gods and goddesses, I had a dream.

And the dream was this. I wanted to write stories that people would actually enjoy.

Alone (you can be truly alone even in coupledom as I was then) miserable and insecure, I took an almighty step and a leap of faith and placed one of my stories up on a peer-review site.

A site for sore eyes. A site where strangers can read your stories and tear them apart like feral cats do with fresh meat. Well actually people there were quite nice but if they didn't like your story, then the buzzer got pressed, the hatch opened and down you went.

Guy Saville came along and read my story. Then he wrote a 6 A4 double-sided page critique. It was full of encouragement for my writing, grammatical and spelling checks but most of all, most important of all, proper constructive criticism. As in,

this bit might work better if you perhaps would try and do this instead and here are my reasons why I'm suggesting this...

(not his actual words - but you get the gist).

You could only imagine the impact such careful and considered feedback had on me and my self-esteem.

And he didn't stop there but throughout the years has been a sort of online mentor to me and to many other writers.

He really was like the male version of the wonderful and fabulous Nicola Morgan without the blog.

And all the while struggling to get his novel published - getting rave rejections and I think at one point he threatened to flush his beloved Afrika Reich down the toilet!

So congratulations to Guy!

I noticed on his brand spanking new site that there's gonna be a blog.

Finally.

:-)