I’m back! Over two years on from my last post in which I explained that for a variety of reasons I felt I could no longer continue trying to get Ethel North’s amazing letters to my grandmother Elsie published in book form, I have decided to give it another go.

Maybe I just needed a break from a project that I’d been working on for over 12 years (while also going through a lot of challenging issues in my personal life) because earlier this year, after an extended sabbatical from My Dear Elsie during which I changed tack completely and wrote two joke books, I’m back on the case.

Probably due to my age and also having experienced a lot of loss in my life, not to mention doing two house clearings for other people after their passing and seeing first hand just how much we can end up leaving behind for others to sort out, I’ve been in an “It’s Now or Never” decluttering phase for a while now. So I’ve just spent the last five months doing a final edit of the book, updating anything in the end notes that has changed during my two year furlough such as Queen Elizabeth II having died and making sure that some of the “personal” information about myself that I have included is really something I am happy for others to read.

And the good thing about putting creative work on the back burner for a while is that when you come back to it, you see it with fresh eyes and in my experience, it’s almost like reading something that has been written by someone else. This makes it so much easier to be objective about editing. For example, I found with my joke books that if a joke I had written over twenty years ago still made me laugh and had a punchline I didn’t see coming, then it was much more likely to make the final cut.

It really helped that within just a few weeks of deciding to return to the book, three different people contacted me out of the blue having found this website/blog and showing considerable interest in it for their own research and projects. I’m not sure if I still believe in “meaningful coincidences” but it did seem rather strange that during my two year break, I don’t think I had any relevant requests but within two or three weeks of picking up the project again, I had three.

So what now? Well, if you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know of my many attempts over the years to get a literary agent or mainstream publisher to take on the book. This has been an incredibly stressful and frustrating process and was one of the reasons why I felt I had to give up on that route and go for self-publishing instead. I still have that latter option in mind but the cost is much too prohibitive for me at the moment. (And I still don’t do the lottery!)

Pitching the book to literary agents and mainstream publishers is definitely not on my agenda any more but I have decided to try my luck with a few independent or “indie” publishers as they are known in the trade. I really like the idea of working with a smaller publisher who really believes in the project and shows a willingness to take a chance on material that, so far anyway, has not been regarded as “commercial enough” by the big players.

Having recently read all of Ethel’s letters and postcards to my grandmother again and for the first time in quite a long while, I’m more certain than ever that they need to see the light of day. It took me back to when I first found them tucked away in a box at the back of my late mother’s wardrobe and as soon as I began to read them, I knew I had an incredible find on my hands that needed to be shared with the rest of the world. That feeling has never completely gone away but it really does have to be “now or never”. So here I go!