Julia Green juggles a variety of vocations
Monday My meeting with the education welfare officer and a new pupil referred for home tuition goes well. I meet her older sister, 16, and baby, too. My new pupil seems keen to start work - she’s been out of school for more than a year. We discuss books she and her sister have enjoyed. By some fluke, the manuscript of my novel about a teenage mum arrives from the publisher for editing. Life, fictionI Tuesday Different hat. At college on staff development: use of secondary texts by students, assessment criteria, the latest developments in teaching creative writing. On the way home I stop at the bookshop and buy a copy of Dustbin Baby by Jacqueline Wilson for my home tuition pupil. I also check how my own novel is selling. I recognise the sales assistant from college - it’s student holidays now - and we chat about teenage fiction.
Wednesday In the morning I teach a creative writing class; this small group of women is producing a lot of exciting work. One has finally found a nanny, so hopes to get going on her novel. (This week it’s developing a theme: babies and fiction. Or mothers and writing. Or something like that.) My home pupil starts planning a picture book she’s going to write for her two-year-old niece.
Thursday Spend all day at the computer editing the manuscript of my new book, Baby Blue. The writing life. I don’t see anyone until my children come home from school.
Friday My home pupil loves Dustbin Baby. Maths and English go well and we write the start of her story. I have a quick meeting with a midwife friend (while she’s cooking supperlooking after her baby) to discuss small details for my story. After supper I settle down to finish editing. My teenage son is planning a birthday cake for me. I hear on the news about government proposals to keep us working until we’re 70. Just 23 years to go then.
Julia Green works part-time as a home tutor, lectures in creative writing at Bath Spa University College, and is the author of Blue Moon, published by Puffin. Her second novel for young adults, Baby Blue, will be published next year
