She barely left her house during this time. It would be into the evening before she got her words in. She would do anything: put in a load of laundry, watch a ton of TV. It was a punishing schedule for somebody who is a self-proclaimed procrastinator. She worked out that in order to write the ninety thousand words, she would have to write two thousand words per day, five days a week. Stacey didn’t get paid during this time, using her savings, and she was unable to afford to do anything else. She took two months off, and wrote the first draft in a total of seven weeks. She started writing “The Familiars” in the year 2016, and kept getting stuck on the first three chapters of it, so she asked her work if she was able to take an unpaid sabbatical. It isn’t a personal rejection, but a practical one. Working at The Bookseller made her see firsthand that it was a business decision, basically. She thought she would just pen something else.

She wasn’t all that downhearted about this, though. So she did, however the book was not accepted by the agents she sent it off to. While Stacey worked at the industry bible The Bookseller, she got immersed in the publishing world and it made her want to give writing a novel a serious go. She decided to do journalism, and learned how to produce a radio show and shorthand. She figured she would go, do something vocational, and hopefully just a get a job out of it by the end. Her parents, nor anybody else in her family, went to university, so it was a big choice for her. When the chance arose for her to go to college came up, she thought long and hard about it. At some point she believed that all writers were dead, because she would go to the library and would think every book was an old one. Members of her family were hairdressers, shopkeepers, or nurses. Stacey had never met any writers, since that is not what the people where she grew up did for a living. She had no idea being a writer was a job, despite writing stories from such a young age. She would get home from school, go right up to her bedroom, at teatime she would still have her shoes and blazer on, and be sitting on her bed reading. She has written for the Independent, Psychologies, and Fabulous magazine, where she works as Deputy Sub Editor.

Stacey was media editor at The Bookseller and books editor at .uk. She studied journalism at the University of Central Lancashire and when she was 21 years old, she moved to London. She has always been fascinated by the Pendle witches, which she learned about from a young age. Stacey Halls was born in the year 1989 and grew up in Rossendale, Lancashire.

The familiars a novel