January Jones - Womentain - You Can Write a Novel and Be Successful!

Hailey Barrett up in Ashburton, a town on the Canterbury Plains in the South Island of New Zealand. Writing was something I always enjoyed at school, and looking back on my old school reports recently, it appears it was something I had a flair for from an early age. While I had some amazing teachers at high school, in my final year my English teacher managed to stifle any will I had to write, and I left school believing I couldn’t.  After high school, I moved to Christchurch and worked as a travel agent then as a personal assistant before having my three children and becoming a full time mum (read as: taxi driver for all their after school activities!), and never thought much about a writing career.  That might have been where the story ended, but in 2010 we suffered through a major earthquake (7.1 magnitude centered around 20 kilometres from my home…huge and horribly frightening – don’t get me started!). Needing a reason to stop thinking constantly about when the next “big one” might hit us, I started writing again.

My writing back then was average, to put it nicely, so in 2012, I enrolled in the Write A Novel course through the New Zealand Writers College.