I Joined The People's Friend Team for an Hour!

An exciting thing happened last week. I was asked by The lovely people at The People's Friend magazine if I'd like to co-host their first ever live 'Author Q&A' as part of their Writing Hour on Twitter. 

Even though I've written over two hundred stories for this magazine, I was surprised to have been asked and very flattered. Of course I said a very quick yes. 

So what is this Writing Hour? Well, it's on a Tuesday and a Thursday morning at 11am and it's a place where readers and writers can chat about a variety of things to do with writing. Using the hashtag #PFWritingHour, the Friend team pose a series of questions which will elicit conversation amongst the hashtag readers. 

This time though, the questions would come from the readers and they would all be directed at me! (gulp).

Now, I'm not new to answering questions (I've been interviewed on people's blogs many times) but I've never done it live! It made me feel a little bit panicky. What if I was asked a difficult question and didn't know the answer? What if I sat there for an hour with no questions? What if I let myself and the lovely magazine I write for down? I certainly hoped I wouldn't.

Tuesday morning came and the first thing I did was advertise the event. I certainly didn't want to be 'Billy No Mates'. At eleven O'clock, armed with a large cup of coffee, I logged into the People's Friend Twitter account and introduced myself to the readers. I needn't have worried about no one asking me anything as immediately the questions came pouring in. I was very proud when the People's Friend profile picture came up every time I commented - I felt just like one of the team!  

The questions were from both new and established writers and all of them were great. Here are a few of them to give you a flavour:

What's the best way to deal with rejection?
Have you ever written a story that has upset someone?
How long does it take you to write a short story?
Do you have a favourite PF character of all time?

I could barely keep up with the questions and I'm ashamed to say I had to type the answers so quickly, there were one or two little typos - oops!

The whole experience was really enjoyable and, if you are on Twitter and would like to read my answers to these questions and many more, you can still catch them by typing #PFWritingHour into the search bar and scrolling down to last week's chat.

Much to my surprise, I've been asked if I'll take part in a Q&A again another week... I'd be delighted. In the meantime, here is a picture of my latest story in this week's People's Friend. It's called, 'Let Love Grow'.