It’s NaNoWriMo! Many of you have been spending November toiling
away to get those all-important 50,000 words of a first draft down. Brilliant!
The overwhelming majority of you, however, will find that you’ve produced only
the beginnings of something that may, one day, be developed, polished and
commercially viable enough to be published.
The fact is, that writing a debut novel and getting it published
takes time. It certainly took me not months, but years.
During my student years, I wrote a novelisation of a
medieval epic Dutch poem. I had intended it to be a fantasy masterpiece, except
it came out as utter cack and was shelved for seventeen years…
Scroll forwards, and by my late thirties, I was working
part-time as a professional fundraiser, whilst developing property. My children
were toddlers. Then, just as I was about to apply for a loan to convert a small
old mill into flats, the housing market crashed, taking my full-time property magnate
aspirations with it.
My hopes of a new career were dashed. Or were they?
Always an avid reader of children’s and crime fiction, I
started to write. I wrote the sort of story I wanted to read and that I would
like to read to my children. My first stab was at a middle grade fairy-pirate
story. I wrote it. I rewrote it. I penned a picture book and illustrated it.
Sent both out to agents and got the odd personalised response back, but no joy.
By then, I had started to think of myself as a writer, but I knew I still had a
lot to learn about the craft.
Going back to my medieval Dutch fantasy novel seemed like a
sensible thing to do. Reworking it as a historical YA novel, I pitched it to
agents. Close, but no cigar. Then, unwilling to give up, I went back to the
fairy story, rewriting it until it became good enough to get me my first agent.
She and I decided I should abandon it in favour of a new middle grade novel
that I already started. It was a detective story with a sci-fi twist.
I was going to get published! Except I wasn’t. The novel never found a home. It had lost something in the
rewrites and never got it back. But that was okay, because then, I started a
new middle grade novel! It was a story about a small red-headed boy called
Archie, who saw dead people. It was hilarious!
It was definitely
going to get published. Except it didn’t. It never even got submitted. I did, however, get a commission to pen the first six books
of HarperCollins Children’s Time-Hunters
series for 7+ year olds and those did get published. Hurray!
They were going to be HUGE. Except they weren’t.
I changed agent. Then, my second agent retired six months
later and I had to change agent again. I still
hadn’t had a bona fide debut novel published!
Always prolific and determined, in the interim, I had
written the complex, fast-paced crime thriller for adults that I had always
aspired to write. It had a working title of Blown
Away and was about a heroic student at university in Amsterdam called
Georgina McKenzie. Feeling certain that this novel was The One, I set off in
search of the right agent – someone I could click with; someone I could trust
implicitly; someone who shared my vision for George McKenzie and my future as
an author. The novel was rejected time and again. It was too long. It was too
short. It was too youthful. It was too dark. It wasn’t dark enough. I rewrote
and rewrote and rewrote. It grew to 150K words. It shrank to 100K. It was the
final edit, after two years of honing, that clinched it. I had two offers
within a week. I went to London, I met both agents. I had already decided which
would be the agent for me, by dint of his reputation preceding him and my own
gut feeling, after our email correspondence. Meeting him confirmed that.
Happy
days.
My publisher, Avon (HarperCollins’ commercial imprint)
expressed a strong interest almost immediately! Except, it took aeons to
negotiate the deal. Far longer than I had anticipated. But yes, I got the deal
and yes, I definitely was going to get published.
So, the moral of this story about my own path to publication
is that good things do come to those who wait. Blown Away became The Girl
Who Wouldn’t Die. For many weeks, it sat comfortably in the Kindle Top 100
and then, went on to win a Dead Good Reader Award. It’s follow up - The Girl Who Broke the Rules - has been
released to great acclaim and has been in the Suspense Top 50 most of the time
since it’s late August publication. Hotly anticipated, The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows comes out in March 2016. My
editor thinks it will be the biggest of the first three George McKenzie
thrillers.
