I'm Only Here To Do Your Typing

By Barbara Arnold

If there was anything unglamorous about working for Lavisav Limited, a company that manufactured chemical toilets, it hadn’t occurred to fifteen-year-old Jo Hackett. On her first day as secretary to the Advertising Manager, nothing could quench her enthusiasm – not the smell of the garlic cough medicine the company also manufactured, nor the Victorian smoke-veiled building set in a dingy South London suburb. Not her lack of any qualification whatsoever, nor her non-existent typing skills. She was carried away on an aromatic secretarial cloud into a commercial paradise, where all her deficiencies would somehow right themselves. After all, she wasn’t just a shorthand typist, but a secretary and she was going to earn five pounds, ten shillings a week.

Fortunately, Jo Hackett’s career doesn’t stop here. This book is a humorous romp through her secretarial career, and the eccentric characters she encounters along the way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barbara Arnold
• Release date: Dec 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310274893

Barbara Arnold

"I'm going to write a book one day." How many times have you heard someone say it, as if they'll dash one off while they're on the number seven bus. I suppose I was the same, although I stayed at the boasting stage, and never got to the 'dashing one off' process.Following three years of homesickness, I began asking myself now I was in New Zealand, what was I going to do? Indeed, what did I want to do? And there it was: Write! I wanted to write.I enrolled in a creative writing class. I loved it. I had arrived. How little I knew! How simple it seemed.Some of the things I discovered are:Writing is a craft.My style is uniquely mine.I'm a novelist.Editing takes longer than writing.Writing can be lonely and I need other writers.Rejection is devastating.Acceptance is sweet.Writing has little to do with inspiration. It has to do with perseverance.Barbara holds private courses, in the North Island of New Zealand, for groups and individuals who want to learn the mechanics of writing which include idea gathering, good beginnings that capture interest, developing characters readers will want to follow through a whole story; realistic dialogue; use of good and effective language; creating conflict; showing versus telling; endings, and much more.I hope you enjoy my books as much as I enjoyed writing them.Best wishes: Barbara Arnold.

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