WHAT’S IT like getting a first novel published by Harper Collins and securing a two-book contract only months after first putting pen to paper?

Every would-be writer’s dream has become reality for Lisa Firth, who is so self-deprecating about her success she is too embarrassed to ask people she knows to buy The Honey Trap in case they find it too steamy.

At the February meeting of the Airedale Writers Circle Lisa gave a blow-by-blow account of how it happened, making it sound as easy as catching a bus.

Her background helped: a degree in English Literature, a career in the publishing world, currently graphic designer at the Dalesman.

As a spikey sixth-former who was sure she could outdo Mills and Boon (she gave up after reading a few) she always hankered after writing fiction. She self-published Tales of Old Airedale, wrote articles and short stories, and the fiction bug was kept at bay.

The bug was re-ignited when she told her boss she could have written Fifty Shades of Grey and he said go off and do it then.

This coincided with the 2015 National Novel Writing Month, which encourages writers to produce 50,000 words in a month; she wrote three times this number.

Emboldened, in January Lisa submitted her novel to an editor at Harper Impulse (publishers have responded to the digital age by accepting agentless submissions) and by March it had been accepted.

She then acquired a prestigious agent and a two-book contract (one, a romance set in a lighthouse, the next, in the Yorkshire Tour de France). She’s also caught up in the marketing whirlwind.

But then she told the dark side, the sheer graft involved. The writing demon totally consumes Lisa’s life outside the day job. It.

’s not like catching a bus; even her three hour daily commute is thinking and writing time and then there’s all the editing to contend with.

Not just grammar and punctuation, serious structural changes are thrown at her thick and fast: the villain has to be much more villainous meeting a much nastier end, a partner has to become a husband to introduce a divorce.

Fortunately Lisa is an inveterate planner; she has the back of a mirror plastered with colour-coded notes tracking the detail of events and characters, to ensure she’s changed everything in the wake of these demands.

This requires phenomenal concentration over a long period, even more impressive given that at this stage the ratio of pounds earned per hours spent is pitiful. At least the number of edits is reducing with each book.

Lisa is a successful writer because she feels most alive wielding pen or pounding keyboard, has developed her own voice, not genre-bound, and puts in the hours. We may well find we’ve shared a table with a star of romantic comedy writing in years to come.

The next meeting of the Airedale Writers Circle, a practical writing session, is at 7.30pm on March 14, at Sight Airedale.

* Have you missed any of the previous Write On articles in the Keighley News? Then simply visit keighleynews.co.uk, click on What’s On then Out & About, and they’re all there to read at your leisure, giving inspiration for your own writing.