Charlie and Louise Morrish discuss the extensive efforts the latter went to in order to be published, the networking she did prior to that, and how she’s giving back to the writing community.

Please note there is a very mild swear word at the end of this episode.

General references:
Goldfinch Books
Owner Gary is Gary Clark of The Interland series

Books mentioned by name or extensively:
Louise Morrish: Operation Moonlight
Louise Morrish: Women Of War
The Writer’s And Artists’ Yearbook

Buy the books: UK || USA

Release details: Recorded 17th July 2024; published 4th November 2024

Where to find Louise online: Website || Twitter || Instagram

Where to find Charlie online: Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Discussions

01:11 The early days of Louise’s writing and the Faber Academy course
03:54 The importance of networking with others
05:32 Struggling to get anywhere, submitting to the Penguin Random House First Novel Competition, and winning
12:27 Persevering in the face of rejection
14:30 Class, and, then, novels in the drawer
17:53 The process Louise used when submitting to all the agents and talking about shyness and gaining confidence
27:16 More on the writing groups Louise runs and ‘giving back’
31:52 About Louise’s books, Operation Moonlight, and Women Of War
37:07 Being a librarian and seeing your own books in the libraries

Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been edited for legibility and is not a 100% accurate representation of the audio. Filler words and many false sentence starts have been removed, and words have been added in square brackets for clarity.

Charlie: Hello and welcome to The Worm Hole Podcast for the first of what I hope is many bonus episodes. I have had this idea to make one-off bonus episodes for a long time and today’s guest actually prompted me to get off my behind and start doing so when she asked if we could talk about… well, the subject we’re going to talk about. My intention for these bonus episodes is to talk about specific bookish topics with authors – they won’t be too frequent – and they’ll be posted on Mondays that don’t have a regular episode scheduled. So let’s do this! I’m your host Charlie Place, and joining me today is Louise Morrish, author of Operation Moonlight and the forthcoming Women Of War which we’ll hone in on at the end. We’ll be talking today about Louise’s unusual publishing journey – it’s how she worded it to me and I think those words work well. Hello Louise!

Louise: Hello Charlie!

Charlie: It’s great to have you on. Thank you for joining me for this inaugural episode and for giving me the idea [laughs].

Louise: Oh, thank you very much for having me on your wonderful podcast. I’ve so enjoyed listening to it.

Charlie: Okay, I’m going to start on, can you tell us how you initially started to write? I believe it started in 2012.

Louise: Yes, I’ve been writing for a long time before then, to be honest. I started out as a librarian, and so I spent several years, two decades at least, shelving other people’s books, tens of thousands of other people’s books, and championing other people’s books. And all that time I was secretly writing myself and thinking to myself, why… why aren’t I on the shelf? Why aren’t I shelving myself? But I had no confidence, and I had no training in it at all, and I knew nobody in publishing, but I was writing in secret for several years. And then we got to 2012 and my children had reached the age where they were beginning to become a bit more independent, and I was getting a bit miserable because I had got nowhere with any kind of proper writing, if you like. And so my husband had the idea of allowing me to – I say allowing, but I mean financially, it was a lot of money for us – he said, ‘why don’t you do a proper course?’ And so I did the Faber Write A Novel Online course. It was a six month course and it didn’t mean that I had to go to London, it meant I could do it from home. And so in 2012, that’s what I did. And it was fantastic. And I met a lot of people, a lot of other writers at the same stage as me and some wonderful tutors. And it gave me the confidence to begin showing my writing to other people. Before then I’d kept it very secret. It’s a bit like – I liken it to taking your clothes off in public, when you show people your writing – it’s a very personal thing and you’re judged on it, and I found that enormously difficult to get over to start with. But the Faber online course was a very gentle, very constructive way of beginning to show your writing to other people. So that was in 2012.

Charlie: What were you writing before? Like what genre, stories – were they anything like what you’re writing now?

Louise: Well, I didn’t really know about genres if I’m honest. I honestly didn’t know about genres. I know I was a librarian, but it didn’t really occur to me that I was writing in any particular genre; I was writing whatever took my interest. And from the word, ‘go’, I have to say that that is pretty much exclusively female-led stories of women who do extraordinary things, who history has forgotten. That is what I love to read first and foremost, and that was what fired me up to write my own stories. So that’s what I was writing but I didn’t really realise it, if you know what I mean. And then later on I had to start thinking, ‘is this my angle? Because if it is, this could work in my favour. And yeah, it’s something that I can do that I can see myself doing for a long, long time’.

Charlie: You say about joining the Faber writing course and you said about meeting other writers and things like that. Would you say that’s something that you would recommend to other people? Is it something that’s important do you think before you become a published writer?

Louise: Absolutely crucial, yeah, absolutely crucial. I can’t stress highly enough how important having a little network – it doesn’t have to be a big network – but a supportive network of similar people around you who are going through the same kind of things that you’re going through. So Faber was the first and I don’t keep in contact with most of the people on that course any more, but I do have a good friend, a good writer friend from that course, Julie Marr, who’s a published author herself, she’s working on her third book, and we’ve stayed in touch and she’s become an enormous support to me. We’ve supported each other, really, through the highs and the lows of this strange, strange journey. And after Faber, when my first book came out, I was invited to join an online debut author group. And we were exclusively on Twitter, I think – I think that’s how I found them, and that’s where we kept in touch. And in the run up to publishing my first book they were an absolute god send, they really were. There were some people on there who weren’t strictly debuts, they were debuting in a new genre, so they were full of information that the rest of us were tapping on. But there were some people there who were absolutely green and terrified. It was a very, very frightening – I mean wonderful experience as well, it really is wonderful – but it’s also quite terrifying as well if you haven’t done it before.

Charlie: Well, I think the question then is going to have to be continue on your story, Louise.

Louise: So 2012 I did the Faber online course and I thought I had a book that was ready to be sent out. And of course in retrospect I absolutely didn’t have a book that was ready to go out – I had a book that needed further editing and further thought – but I thought it was ready. And so I started to submit, and I did my homework, I went to the Writers’ And Artists’ Yearbook as we’re told to do. And over the next five years I submitted to upwards of 50 agents. I submitted to publishing houses who allowed that; there weren’t many. I went to every single festival I could possibly go to in terms of nearest to my house, and when my children were being able to be cared for that kind of thing. I went to author talks, started to be more out there with social media, in an attempt to break through what I started to see as a bit of a castle fortress. And I was on the outside of this fortress banging and banging and banging and banging on the door and not getting anywhere. Getting very polite rebuffles, and sometimes the chink of the door would open and somebody would ask for a full manuscript, but nothing ever came of any of it. And I really did begin to think by 2019 that I was wasting my time and that actually this was a very niche, very cliquey kind of world, and what was I thinking, thinking that I could go in there – I have nobody in publishing, I don’t live in London, I’m not well off or anything like that. So I thought maybe this is the universe trying to tell me to stop. But it broke my heart to think that, Charlie – I mean writing is my life. I read constantly and have uh, always read constantly and writing is just a natural progression from that and the thought of not writing… I Just, I couldn’t. So in a last ditch attempt, and it really, really was a last ditch attempt, somebody had told me about the Penguin Random House First Novel competition. And it was a strange one in that you had to post your chapter and your synopsis and a covering letter. You actually had to physically post it in an envelope. And it was free to enter. And I can remember it was in the summer of 2019 and I was just starting a new book, a new idea. I was excited about this idea. It wasn’t historical fiction, but it did have a dual timeline element of historical fiction in it. And I was quite excited about it; it was an ambitious thing. But I sent off my first chapter and I sent off a covering letter and I sent off the synopsis and then I didn’t tell anybody, I didn’t even tell my husband that I’d done this [Charlie: gosh!], because by this point I was getting quite demoralised by everybody who I ever came across saying, ‘are you not published yet? Have you not managed it yet? Oh, dear, that’s a shame, isn’t it?’ You know, ‘you’re still going, are you? Oh, okay’. And after a while, it really gets you down, that all you ever seem to say is, ‘no, no, not yet, not yet, not yet’. So I didn’t tell anybody that I’d entered this competition because I didn’t want people going, ‘have you heard? You didn’t win? Oh, dear, never mind.’ So when in October of 2019, I got a phone call after work from the man who is now my literary agent, Luigi Bonomi of LBA Books, to say that I had been shortlisted to the last six out of nearly 5,000 entries to this competition, I thought it was a hoax because I just didn’t remember entering it, really. I’d forgotten about the competition, I put it to the back of my mind. I hadn’t told anybody, so it wasn’t like it was playing on my mind at all. And he phoned and he said this and I was just absolutely stunned. I remember having to sit down when he started to tell me that, ‘no, this is really serious and you’ve got to the last six, which is pretty incredible, and we’ve got all of our fingers crossed for you and we’ll be back in touch with you in a few days when we’ve just made our final decisions. Hold tight, we’ll be back in touch with you’. And, I got off the phone to him and I thought, my life is about to change. It’s absolutely about to change. And it’s very, very rare that that happens in your life when you can see that happening [chuckles]. You can see it coming, like a landslide. I thought this is a moment. Because even if I didn’t win, I knew that I would get representation from a literary agent. Him. And that’s what I really wanted – I really wanted a literary agent. I didn’t really want the full blown winning of it because that was so terrifying – the thought of suddenly having a publishing contract and having to produce a book and having to be public and all of that, I’d pushed to the back of my mind. But having a literary agent, brilliant. The door is open, I can ease my way in, he can help me with my writing and we can slowly get my work out there. Anyway, a few days went past and he had said he’d call back in three or four days and now I realise that in publishing speak that means two weeks or more. But I didn’t at the time, I thought, ‘you said you’d ring back’. And he didn’t for several days. And then a week went past and still nothing. And two weeks went past, and I told my mum and I told my husband and my children and that was it. And so they were very disappointed for me and I was really disappointed; I thought they really could have let me know that I haven’t won here. You know, they bigged me up and then nothing, I was very disappointed. And then I was at work and I carried my phone around with me at work, which is kind of illegal in my job you can’t really do that. But I’d got my manager to allow me to carry it around at work; but that day, the day that I heard, I had decided to switch my phone off and leave it in my office and not wait any longer, to move on. But I had it on me when I went down to the loos [laughs]. I was in the loos when I got a phone call from the newspaper saying, ‘congratulations, you must be over the moon! This is an incredible win! What are you going to do with your advance? [Charlie laughs.] Are you excited?’ Blah, blah, blah. And I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know who you are, I don’t know what you’re talking about’. [They said] ‘Oh, has your agent not told you? Oh, oh, we thought your agent would have told you by now. I’m really sorry, we’ve jumped the gun. Oh dear. But congratulations, well done! You must be over the moon!'[Both laugh.] So I put the phone down on them and my agent phoned and went, ‘I’m really sorry I didn’t get you in time, they’ve got to you first, and I meant to ring you first and I’m really sorry, but congratulations, you’ve won!’ And again, I had to sit down and I just could not believe it. So, yeah, my entry into publishing was kind of long, drawn out pain and then a sudden, ‘oh, uh, no, you can come in. Here you go.’ And so my advice to anybody out there who is in the trenches, as we call it, is enter every competition that you possibly can – that you want to – but if you see them out there, don’t think that you’re not good enough. Enter – you never know who’s going to read your work. And don’t ever give up. Don’t ever, ever give up, because if you give up, you’re never going to do it. So you just can’t give up.

Charlie: You just said there, at the start of your summary, lots of stuff you did and then it was just, ‘oh, come in’. But I mean, I don’t think we can understate just how much work you put in to get there. I mean, from what you said, you were putting yourself out there all the time, you were thinking outside the box and I mean, okay, lots of people will go to different groups and things, but it sounds like the amount of time and thought you put into getting out there, I think even if you didn’t win this or anything happened with it, you would have kept going and kept going until you got there, I think. It just shows that, if you want something, and you really put the effort into it, you get it.

Louise: Absolutely, yes. If I hadn’t have won this, yeah, I don’t think I would have given up. I say it was a last ditch attempt, and it’s a bit dramatic of me to say that – it felt like it at the time. But I knew I would never stop writing. So yeah, once I’d got over the disappointment of that, there would have been another competition coming up, the Bath Novel Award or the Cheshire Novel Award, something like that, and I would have gone for that and I had have gone for those in the past. I have been placed in other competitions before this one. So yeah, I guess it was only a matter of time. And all the time it took to get there I would hope to think that my writing was getting a bit better gradually and my life experience was expanding. And yes, I was getting on a bit, my aim to be published before I was 40, went by the by and then I was 45 when I won the competition, but the actual book wasn’t published until I was 48 and I’m now 50 and my next book won’t come out till I’m 51, so, you know, clock’s ticking a little bit. But if this had all happened when I was much earlier, I’m not sure I would have coped, Charlie. It’s such a strange world to be in. You have to be so thick skinned and so resilient and so tenacious and professional and there’s so many things that I think my younger self would have been completely unprepared for. So it has happened when it’s happened and I’m lucky – my children are now all grown, they’re adults, they’re off doing their own things in their own lives and my life, my career now, is just starting. That’s the way round it’s happened for me.

Charlie: Well, you saying about your circumstance in life, is it fair to say that you would consider yourself working class?

Louise: Certainly from a working class background. I was the first person in my family to go to university. My dad for most of my childhood was functionally illiterate. Both my parents didn’t get any qualifications at all; I think my mum might have got a couple of O levels. She later on went and did some things at college as an adult – I think she got a History GCSE or something later on. But they left school really early at 14, 15 years old. My husband’s family are the same – so his parents left school really early. They don’t have qualifications. So I was the first to go to uni and so no, I personally wouldn’t consider myself working class per se, but I am one generation away from that. And as I say, I had absolutely no links to the publishing world at all. For us it was quite a big deal, for any of us to get a publishing deal was quite a big deal [chuckles].

Charlie: On a subject that you covered a while back, I would like to know how many novels have you got in your drawer?

Louise: [Laughs.] So I’ve got the novel that I wrote on the Faber course which won’t ever see the light of day, but bits of that I am now mining, if you like, sections of it. And actually the main character in that is now the main character in the book that’s coming out in March. So she stayed with me. The novel that won the competition for me was originally called The Coffin Club and had a very different plot to what actually became published. And that was due to Covid, unfortunately. Covid threw a big spanner in the works. The original idea that I’d had, The Coffin Club, involved the same main character of Betty, but she was much older. She was a super-centenarian and she was actually the fifth oldest person in Britain. And she was 112, I think, when I opened a novel. And her big aim was to become the oldest person in Britain and win a very big lucrative prize that they were going to be giving to the oldest person in Britain. But to do that, she had to bump off her rivals, the super-centenarians above her. And she did that, one by one by one, using the skills that she’d learned as a secret agent in the Special Operations Executive during the war. But then as we started to edit – and as 2019 became 2020, and as you remember, in March of 2020, the world came to a halt – the first people to suffer and die in Covid were the elderly people in care homes. And my editor at Penguin said, ‘do you know what? I really don’t think we can have an elderly person bumping off other elderly people in this current climate’. And at that point, we didn’t know how long Covid would last; it was really frightening. And she said, ‘I really love this idea, but I’m not sure that it’s going to be a commercially viable one in this situation, we’re going to have to change the plot’. So we did. We changed the plot. Operation Moonlight came out of that and we had to change the title as well, because The Coffin Club we deemed at that time to be a bit too dark. So that book is in loose draft form in a drawer, and I do intend to write that at some point when I get a bit of a time.

Charlie: Yeah, no, that would be great. I mean, it’s fascinating and I read that when I was researching you, that the novel that won you the award isn’t the one that ended up being published, which obviously, in Covid times, there’s a good reason for that, but that in itself is very interesting. You said earlier about all the rejections you had from agents. Can you tell us about how you went about that and your process there and how it was, basically?

Louise: So, first off, I bought, I think, a copy of The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. And actually, over those five years of submitting, I had to buy at least four copies. I know that the library sometimes carries copies, but they’re sometimes a couple of years out of date. And I would go through with a fine tooth comb – any agent who represented people, historical fiction authors or contemporary fiction authors or anybody that I felt I came under. And then on somebody else’s advice, probably Claire Fuller’s, but I can’t remember, I devised a complicated spreadsheet because I had to keep a track of who I’d submitted to. And I wasn’t doing this submit to somebody and then wait and see if they come back to me, I thought, that’s ridiculous, I will be dead of elderly age by the time I get through this. So there’s no way I’m doing that. So I did agents say one a week, maybe, because it takes a lot of preparation. You have to make your covering letter really personal to that agent. You have to hone that first three chapters or first three pages or whatever it is they specifically ask for, you have to make sure there is not a single mistake on it. You have to keep a track, basically, of who you’ve sent to so that you don’t make a mistake and send it twice, because that shows that you’re not professional, that you’re not giving this the seriousness that it requires. So I did this spreadsheet and it got filled up week after week after week, and one of the columns said, ‘an outright yes or no’, and then the next column would be a, ‘maybe – part manuscript requested, full manuscript requested’, and then any notes. So sometimes on the odd occasion, I’d actually physically met this agent at a festival, say, so I was able to put a note in there of, ‘met them at Winchester Festival on this date’, so that if I then had to follow up with another email or write to them personally, I could say, ‘if you recall, we had a chat on the… you know’, and it kind of makes you a bit more, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember her’. Because what I’ve realised now is that an agent’s life is a strange one and it’s an incredibly busy one, and they are absolutely bombarded by submissions. And so your submission really has to stand out, but in the best way, not in any kind of bad way, like you’ve written in blood or you’ve put it in a glass bottle and mailed it to them or anything like that, you have to be professional, but you have to be personable as well. You have to click with them, really, by the power of your words alone, mostly, unless you’re lucky enough to meet them in face to face. And even then, before I was published, at any event, that meant I had to sell myself or try and make a connection. I’m nowhere near as bad as I was, but I have in the past really, really battled with shyness, really badly. And so just to even sit opposite an agent and try and explain my passion and what my book is about and why they should take me on was an excruciating thing for me to have to do. And I know it’s difficult for people – they see me doing author events now and sharing author panels and that’s taken years to get to that point. And going back to when I said to you about becoming a runner up in that Penguin competition rather than winning it, part of that was the thought of, ‘well, I can’t win it. I can’t be published and have myself out there. Can’t do that. I just can’t do that’. Of course you can. I went on and I’ve done it. So you can. Of course you can. But my first thought was that, ‘no, I can’t do that’. So again, we’ll come to my little writing group a Goldfinch soon, I hope. But that’s part of why I do that, in that I want to help those writers that are a step behind me or a couple of steps behind me who don’t think they can do it or are battling things like social anxiety or shyness or, something like that that can really stop you from doing what you really love to do.

Charlie: I have to agree with you; I mean, gosh, when I started this podcast, I was an anxious mess. If you want to do something, you have to push yourself to do it, and you do get better. But it is very difficult. It’s really, really hard. And then you can think over and over to yourself, ‘did I do it right? What did I…’ But it is a matter of, you have to do it. And yes, I have got that question about writing groups written down, we’ll deal with it in a bit. If you can expand, how have you gained confidence in yourself as a writer?

Louise: So when I got the first publishing deal, when I won that competition and we got a publishing deal with Penguin. I was given an editor who is one of the best editors in the absolute business. For the first time I had a professional publishing person looking at my work. And I can’t tell you how terrifying that is. But luckily she was also the loveliest person I’d ever come across, I think. And she very quickly understood that there was a diamond in the rough, if you like, and that she was going to have to help me get the diamond out. And so she very, very gently and carefully and patiently edited that book with me. It took a long time because, as I say, Covid put a big spanner in the works, the publishing world was in a bit of chaos. Nobody knew what was happening. Schedules were changed. Books weren’t being launched when they should have been launched. It was a horrible time. It was almost good in a way for me because it meant that I had time. And it took two and a half years of further editing with her, if you can believe it, backwards and forwards with her. She likes to work old style on red pen, on paper, so I would get big parcels of my manuscript back through the post with her red pen all over it and sometimes drips of soup [Charlie laughs] and little comments, saying things like, ‘oops!’ So you ask about how I got confident in my writing – it was like doing an intensive editing course over a period of two and a half years, without having to pay for it, because I’d won the competition, and with the best in the business. So when I came out of that, I felt like, ‘yeah, do you know what? I think I do know what it takes now to write a book’. And I’m not saying that my book was in any way perfect, because it isn’t, and it’s not literary in a way that perhaps I wanted it to be – it’s commercial because that’s what they wanted, the imprint that I was with, they wanted commercial fiction. And so she taught me how to write a commercial fiction book. But my confidence in terms of having actually produced a book that Penguin want to sell, that other people will buy, strangers will buy, is just an astonishing piece of experience that has given me confidence then to go on. And on the back of that, my local bookshop, it’s not so new now, but Goldfinch, had opened. And on the back of being published with Penguin, we’ve entered into a wonderful relationship where I run all of their writing stuff – not their poetry, Ellora Sutton does their poetry events because I’m not a poet and she’s a poet and she’s brilliant. She does the poetry. But all the other writing courses that they run, the book clubs and the writing club, and that has built my confidence too. So I do have things that I can pass on to people. I help beginners – I’m not an expert by any means – but I can help beginners to reach that first step.

Charlie: I hate to use the word ‘lucky’ because you have put so much work into this, but you have been lucky – I hate using that word – in what you’ve done. You’ve had so much come to you. The main thing that I’m getting from what you’re saying today is that if you put all the work in, you need to be willing to put the work in, but it does pay dividends. I mean, I know you saying about hosting events and things – I believe you spoke to Alison Weir at an event…

Louise: I shared the billing with Alison Weir, yeah, at the Farnam Literary Festival. She was doing a talk on her new Tudor book. I interviewed Laura Bates. She came to Goldfinch and I chaired an event with her. She was amazing. AJ Pierce and Claire Fuller and BA Paris and so many authors that have come through Goldfinch and will continue to come through Goldfinch and are happy to talk to me. And I feel with each one, I feel a little bit more confident, a little bit more that, ‘no, it’s right that I should be sitting up here talking to you’. I feel I’ve done my apprenticeship. I’m not at the stage that they’re at, I’m not. But I’m still able to hold my head up and say, ‘no, I’m happy. I’m happy here’. Loads has happened. Good stuff for me. And I do put some of that down to luck, I think you’re absolutely right. But you also make your own luck, I believe?

Charlie: That’s a very good way of putting it. Yes.

Louise: Yeah. And I find that people are happy to help you if you help them or you help others. Yeah. It’s a very nurturing environment, the writing environment, which needs to be. because it’s also a ruthless business, which I don’t think this podcast is quite the place to start talking about that, but it is a tricky place to get to and it’s a tricky place to stay in. And so you need people around you that you can rely on or trust or just help you, really.

Charlie: We are expanding on what you said in terms of your writing groups, you have introduced Goldfinch Books. Can you tell us more about your writing groups and more about this giving back?

Louise: Well, yes, I’d love to. So Goldfinch Books in Alton is an independent bookshop, but it’s much more than that. They do loads of different events. They’re very musical as well, so they have music events, they have poetry events, they have art events. And I run their Charm writing group. And it’s just gone to twice a month now, on a Thursday, in the evening. And it’s free, and you can just turn up, and what happens there is we hang about in the shop for a couple of hours and we chat and network and share our work if we want to – we don’t have to, don’t have to share anything, but if we do, we can read a page or chapter out to a gathering and we can receive constructive, kind feedback. So it’s completely inclusive. So we have people from all different walks of life, fully accessible. And you don’t have to come every time, you can come whenever you want. It was just really important to me and to Gary, who owns the shop, to try and create our own little community of writers. He writes, he’s published, he’s got five novels published. He wanted to meet lots of other writers too. And so together we just formed this and we’ve got I think probably a core of about 30 writers, but with more joining every month. And not all 30 of course turn up each time, so it’s not like a mad, chaotic, introvert’s nightmare. It’s a very gentle, nurturing environment where I can talk to people individually and then we gather and I get people’s news in the month. I can pair people off – I do a bit of matchmaking between people who I know are writing the same genre, say, or have similar interests or tastes in literature. Wide range of ages as well – we’ve got people in their late teens, early 20s, right up to people in their 70s. So that’s my Charm writing group. I also run writing courses at Goldfinch. So I do a six week beginner course, and that’s very, very lovely and relaxed. And it’s small group, again meeting the shop, and I take them through six weeks of getting them from first idea through to submitting to an agent. But the biggest thing is that friendships are forged. So in my course before last, the group formed their own WhatsApp writers group and are now friends outside of the course. They got friendships from it, which is most of the reason why we do it, getting people together. Gary and I have got big plans to run a much longer, much more in depth course, which would involve somebody actually physically writing a whole book during the course. But we’re still in the planning stages for that and that probably won’t start for a few months yet, but we’re very excited about that. Yeah, so those are the sort of writing things that I do. And of course I’m interviewing authors quite regularly as well. So author events, which are usually free now, you can just rock up to the shop and come and listen to us chat. Yeah.

Charlie: Have you had any success stories from any of your groups in terms of getting publishing or…?

Louise: Well, we have one lady called Lesley who has been such a support, and she comes to loads of stuff. She comes to almost all the author events that we do. She’s supported us with the Charm writers group. She’s a step behind me, and I can remember being like her in that I was trying everything. And she’s a really interesting woman. And she’s written a novel. And just recently, just in the last few weeks, she has secured an agent. And there’s another chap, Francesco, who also writes. Writes a lot. And he’s, again, exactly the same as I was, a step behind me. And he’s on the same rung of the ladder with Lesley in that he has now got an agent as well, and they’re editing his novel to be published at some point. So, yeah, we’ve definitely had some success, and I’m sure there’s loads that I don’t know about. I know that there’s competition places, there’s competition winners. Yeah.

Charlie: Listeners, if you are at all interested, it sounds like this is the place to be. Go seek Louise Morrish and Goldfinch Books out, definitely. I think we’re gonna have to come back to you, Louise. You’ve told us about The Coffin Club, what was Operation Moonlight in the different guise. Tell us about Operation Moonlight and then also tell us about what’s next, Women Of War.

Louise: So Operation Moonlight is a dual-timeline novel. It’s set in 1944, during the war, and also in the present day. And it follows one woman called Betty. And when we meet her in the first chapter, she’s about to turn 100. She lives with her carer called Tally. Betty is very reclusive, and Tally is not reclusive at all, and she wants to get Betty out of the house. And she wants Betty to join the Century Society, which is this local social club for super-centenarians and centenarians. But Betty won’t have any of it, she doesn’t want to go. And so Tally does a bit of digging about and finds a suitcase in Betty’s cellar. And in that suitcase are letters from the war and a gun. And once that has been found – Betty’s secrets, because she’s got a very interesting past, let’s say, quite a dark past, a tragic past that she doesn’t want to relive and she doesn’t want to reminisce about – but when Tally finds the gun in the cellar, her secrets cannot remain hidden any longer. So we spent most of the novel in 1944 with Betty going through her recruitment and training into the SOE, the Special Operations Executive, as a female secret agent. And when I was researching the book, I was absolutely fascinated by this. I had never heard of the Special Operations Executive, didn’t realise that there were female secret agents doing this kind of stuff. And the training they did was exactly the same as the men, so they were doing paramilitary training, parachute training, silent killing, weapons training, wireless coding, Morse code. It was absolutely incredible what they did. And nobody knows about it now, very few people know about it. There are, of course, some secret agents whose names have remained in the public domain and so they should – Virginia Hall, Noor Inayat Khan, Odette Sansom Violette Szabo – but for most of the 39 female secret agents, their lives have just disappeared into obscurity. So that’s Operation Moonlight. So that’s set in the Second World War. The next two books are set in the First World War. Women Of War is a story set in the First World War and it’s inspired by two real women again, Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson, whose mother, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, was the first woman in Britain to qualify as a doctor. Louisa was a doctor and a surgeon as well, in her own right. And when the First World War broke out in 1914, she went with her partner and colleague Dr Flora Murray, and they offered their medical expertise to the War Office in the hope that the War Office would take them on and let them do military surgery and help save the lives of their wounded men, and the War Office took one look at them and said, ‘you’re women, you can’t do this. You need to go home and stay safe’. And Louisa and Flora were absolutely incensed about this and went home and decided they were not going to stay home and stay safe, that they could do this, they could help, they could do surgery, they were qualified doctors, after all. And so they approached the French Red Cross instead, who snapped them up immediately and said, ‘oh, yes, please’. And then they went on to form their own fully female-only run military hospitals in Paris, then near Boulogne. And then they came back and did exactly the same thing in London by which point the War Office had finally sat up and realised that they could do military surgery and were actually flipping good at what they were doing. Then everything was rosy, if you like, because they were finally accepted. So that book, Women Of War is inspired by Dr Louisa Anderson and also another woman unrelated, called Dorothy Lawrence, who is the woman who inspired the main character in the book that I wrote way back in 2012 with Faber. So Dorothy Lawrence was a young woman, she was only 19 when war broke out. And she was poor, she was adopted, and all she wanted to do was write and be a journalist. And because of her background and her situation, and the fact that she was a woman, she was denied that, she couldn’t be a journalist. And so when war broke out, she did an incredible stunt. She found a bike and she cycled on her own to Paris, and she befriended some Royal Engineers who lent her a uniform, and she dressed as a soldier and put condifluid on her face to make it look like she had stubble. And somehow or other managed to enlist with the Royal Engineers, and she fought for 10 days at the front and then she was injured and she was injured in the leg. Then when they tried to help her, it was discovered that she was a woman. And at that point, Dorothy Lawrence’s life takes a very dark turn and her actual life is very sad, the rest of her life. So in my novel Women Of War, Dr Louisa is not a character – I’ve made up another character who is her, if you like – and the other character is based on Dorothy. But I give this other character a much, much happier ending because, yeah, the real ending is just too tragic!

Charlie: Listeners, we have actually, Louise and I, have already arranged that this is going to be one of two interviews. She’s going to come back once Women Of War is published and we’re going to talk about that in detail. So I’m going to cycle us around to I think the very start of what you said you were shelving other people’s books in your library. Are you happy now, seeing your own? Are you able to shelve your own?

Louise: It is the best feeling in the world to walk into a library and see your book on the returns shelf, you know?

Charlie: Yep.

Louise: Not on the actual shelf under ‘M’, but on the returns shelf. That means someone’s actually borrowed it, whether they’ve read it or not, whether they’ve enjoyed it or not, that’s beside the point. Your book has gone out of that library and it’s come back. And it’s just the best feeling in the world. When I started to see that happening and people would send me photographs of books that they’d seen out in the wild, it was just surreal, absolutely surreal. A real lifelong dream come true, Charlie, a lifelong dream come true.

Charlie: Well, Louise, you are one heck of an inspiring person. I’m trying not to swear on here… bloody inspiring person. There you go; I’ve done it. Yeah. Louise, thank you for coming on the show.

Louise: Been such a pleasure, Charlie, thank you so much for having me, and I’m really looking forward to coming back at some point in the near future and chatting to you about the next book.

[Recorded later] Charlie: I do hope you enjoyed this episode. Do join me next time. And if you have a moment to spare, please do leave a rating and/or review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Podcast Addict. Thank you. The Worm Hole Podcast Bonus Episode 1 was recorded on 17th July and published on 4th November 2024. Music and production by Charlie Place.

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