Danielle de Valera

Hi, I’m not really a blogger, I’m an old manuscript assessor, assessing mostly fiction. What I’ve noticed is that a lot of the things people in the game take for granted writers starting out simply don’t know – how wide should your margins be? Should you use double spacing or single? Where’s the best place to put the page numbers? What spelling should I follow? Oh and lots more.

So I thought I might lay out a few tips for those writing their first long work (and those writing short stories, let’s not forget them), be it fiction, non fiction or memoir. Every Sunday, I’ll try to put something here that I think might be helpful.

You want more information? Okay. (Sorry about the change in POV.)

DANIELLE de Valera’s father swore she was related on her mother’s side to Eamon de Valera, the controversial Irish politician — but he told some tall tales in his time, and this could be one of them. What we do know is that she was born in Sydney, 1938, educated Brisbane and Townsville. In 1959, she obtained a B Agr Sc. from the University of Queensland, worked as a botanist for a couple of years and later, as a copy-editor for The Jacaranda Press. A freelance manuscript assessor and fiction editor since 1992, she runs the Patrick de Valera Manuscript Appraisal Agency, where she helps aspiring writers to hone their work and ultimately get published. As well as this blog, she has another, more airy-fairy one at http:www.ecademy.com/blog/danielledevalera

A published author in her own right, in August 2011 her 108,000 word fiction manuscript SOME KIND OF ROMANTIC was one of 4 shortlisted for the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival Unpublished Manuscript Award. In 2012, it was short-listed in the UK for the Impress Prize. In 2001, with former client and cowriter Lucy Forster, whose rom-com novel FINDING ELIZABETH has just been released, she won the Australia & New Zealand-wide Emma Darcy Award for Romance Manuscript of the Year 2000 with FOUND: ONE LOVER. She has also won numerous awards for her short stories, which have been published in such diverse publications as PENTHOUSE, AUREALIS and the AUSTRALIAN WOMEN’S WEEKLY, and are currently in six Australian anthologies. She is now revising her 70,000 word novel set in Mullumbimby and surrounds in 1986 — Byron Shire became the epicentre of the Australian dropout movement of the late ’70s, early ’80s, following the Nimbin Festival of 1973.

Most recent job: editing Allan Staines’  TO VANISH IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, soon to be released by Pinedale Press.

If you know someone who’s struggling with a long work, or even a short one, she can help them hone it to publication standards. If there’s no hope for it, she’ll tell them that, too, but in such a way that they won’t have to be scraped up off the floor and put together again by understanding friends and family. Her clients come from all over Australia, plus the UK and USA. You can email her at patrickdevalera@gmail.com, phone her at +61 0266803073, or text her at +61 466 013 199.

And remember: as the character Larry says in THROW MOMMA FROM THE TRAIN: ‘A writer writes, always.’