If only I’d foreseen the plethora of Susan Barretts that abound in the writing world, I’d have called myself Zuilla Plenkinthorpe when I started out in the 1960s. This morning, while tidying my tracks on the internet, I came across one more Susan Barrett to add to the list of – what might you call us? – sib-writerlings. There’s a writer about economics and accountancy and at least two novelists sharing the name, and now here comes another. This newcomer was, like me, born in Plymouth, although many decades later than me by the lovely look of her. But she had the foresight to put a J between her forename and surname.
A lack of foresight is not as bad as the mistake I made when Amazon started Author Pages. Halfway through my career (actually, I don’t know if it was halfway or not – there’s no way of telling), I signed on for the MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa. My idea was to get in touch with contemporary views of fiction. One of my tutors was an excellent writer of children’s nature books. Ah, I thought to myself; I’ve written children’s nature books, too; I can bulk out my list of publications with those titles. To my mortification, there is no way for the author to fix the order of the list of titles on an Amazon Author Page. When an interested reader clicks on my page, A Day in the Life of a Puppy pops up in pride of place – that is, if the clicker has opted for an alphabetical list. I want my novels to head the list, and my minimal children’s books forgotten. The system doesn’t allow me to delete them. Ggrrrr.
Something else I’ve learnt in the last years is, if I want to be welcomed by a publisher again, I must write a different kind of book. All this is to say that my next novel will be a tale throbbing with adjectives by Zuilla Plenkithorpe.