I’d like to start by saying I never dreamt of winning a prestigious prize like the Exeter Novel Prize and going on to become an author. But it wouldn’t be true. I dreamt exactly that: secretly, hopefully, and not really believing it could ever happen for a woman like me – a very ordinary army wife and mum-of-three. 
Back in 2014, it really did all feel like a bit of a fantasy. How could I possibly think I had it in me to write novels for a living? But after a couple of years of scribbling love scenes with Scooby Doo blaring in the background, and feeling the crunch of uneaten Cheesy Wotsits as I shifted position on the sofa, I had a manuscript, and I had a feeling it might be good enough to publish, so I filled in the ENP application and crossed my fingers…
Fast forward to 2015, and I had won the Exeter Novel Prize, I had an agent, and I had a two-book deal with a major publisher. Through winning the prize and getting published I was now more than just a ‘wife of’ on an army administration form or a ‘parent of’ in letters from school. My name was on the spines of real books, in bookshops and libraries – it felt like a bit of a dream. 
As any author will tell you, the publishing industry is fickle, staying published is a challenge, and the financial rewards are, shall we say, uncertain, at best. I count myself very fortunate to have had four titles traditionally published (and a fifth in the pipeline). If you’d told me back in 2014 that by 2020 I’d have four books in print and tens of thousands of readers, I’m not sure I would have believed you.
But writers are good at thinking up seemingly impossible scenarios and conjuring them into existence – it’s what we do. 
In a way, making dreams come true is just part of the job description.
 
If you’d like to know more about Clare Harvey or her books, you can find her here:
Website: clareharvey.net
Facebook: @clareharvey13
Twitter: @ClareHarveyauth 
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I was privileged to win the 2016 Exeter Story Prize for my short story, ‘Oh Cheeses’, in which a journalist/librarian befriends a poet named Arin Hart. At the time I was living in a one-room flat in Edinburgh, and was in the process of completing my PhD in creative writing with Glasgow University. The stint in that flat was one of the few times in my life that I have had a rigid writing routine, something I’ve always struggled to maintain.  
For this particular story though, I wrote five hundred words every day until the whole story was told whilst listening to John and Vangelis’s ‘I’ll Find My Way Home’ on loop. Now that song is inextricably linked with that time, and that story.
​When I felt too dry to produce 500 words, I padded out what I could produce unashamedly. When I felt tempted to carry on past that mark, I reminded myself that the next stint would be all the easier for having something already in place to grab onto at the start of next session. I aimed for a strict final word limit of 5000 words, and during the course of editing, I cut the word count almost in half. This is an exercise that I would recommend to anyone in their writing - you don’t know what a ruthless killer of your little word-darlings you can be, until you’re faced with an immovable upper limit. You may think you write concisely; this is the real test. It’s also good practice for the writerly eye.  
Another issue I have as a writer is an uneven regard for my own completed work, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. What I mean by an uneven regard is that sometimes, for no discerning reason, I’ll look at something I’ve completed, and it seems like a work of pure genius. I then send it off to something, only to later discover typos and continuity/concept errors, or problematic pacing or problems with character, etcetera. Other times the work seems contrived, stuffy, and as if it had been forced out of me, but is surprisingly well received. That was what Oh Cheeses! was like from my perspective. Still, I couldn’t find anything concrete to change about it, no matter how much I combed through it, so I sent it off, on a ‘might as well’ basis. Much to my shock, and then delight once it had really sunk in, it won.