Becoming An Author

A few people have asked me about how I have ended up writing a novel (Will and The Whisp, Hurn Publications, Coming 2022 – in case you didn’t know). Well, writing has always been a passion of mine but one that I liked to keep hidden.

As a child and a teenager, I would write many stories that were never finished and have long since been forgotten. I still have a folder intriguingly titled, The Legends and True Tales of Osgroll, but it is now stuffed with old newspaper clippings and instructions to magic tricks that I have lost.

When I went to Uni to study Drama, there was a small portion of scriptwriting as part of the course. I thoroughly enjoyed it and was encouraged to keep writing. This gave me a bit of belief and I picked up my pen and wrote a couple of terrible scripts that I thought at the time were masterpieces. However, my confidence in my genius abilities must have wavered a lot because I never showed anyone the scripts.

Then after Uni, I formed Tortoise in a Nutshell. As a devising team- we didn’t use scripts for our first few productions. I loved working with writers and seeing how dedicated they were to the telling of the story. But I hardly wrote. A few badly penned love letters and poems that my partner has kept – they make me recoil when I read them now. I might ask her to burn them.

But after this long stretch where writing sat at the back of the brain. I got ill. I had a series of mental health crises and I found it difficult to leave the house and to take on my usual tasks as a theatre maker. But the creative part of my brain still twitched. I needed outlets and my laptop was never far from my hands. It started with a few blogs and then I began to dream a little bit.

Soon, I had a routine for my day. The writing motivated me to get up and start the day.

I let a few family members read it. I read it. I thought it was good but needed work. As the story evolved so did my passion for telling it.

I looked up how to go about getting a book published. Traditionally, step one is securing an agent. I sent my book out into the world. Ten agents at first. Every single one of them was returned with a polite No, or simply ignored. I had read agents can get thousands of submissions a month, so I should not be disheartened, the websites advised. Plus a few more family members and a friend had read it now and gave me some great notes. I reworked some bits and pieces and submitted my manuscript to some more agents.

More rejections. But now, I had become a bit determined. Each day I would send 5 more submissions, trying to find a suitable agent and tailor the pitch to them. I got 37 rejections in total before something happened.

By chance, I noticed some of the agents I had followed on Twitter were talking about something called #PITMad. People would tweet a small pitch of their book out into the world and if agents or publishers were interested they would like your tweet. I really wasn’t sure if it was worthwhile. And I was worried that by doing it over twitter my friends might realize I had written a book. I didn’t want them to know that yet. My anxiety was getting the better of me. But as the day went on I saw more people taking part and I asked my partner, who encouraged me to go for it.

I got two agents and two publishers liking my tweet. It all then went very fast. Once I had informed other agents I had an offer in some came back with congratulations, others with counter-offers. It seemed like one offer was enough to let other agents feel confident in my book. But I stuck with Hurn, the ones who believed in me first and who I was most excited to work with. Over the space of a few days, I had a publishing contract and a timetable to create my book. I was over the moon ecstatic. The confidence boost that I got from knowing that a publisher believed that my work was enjoyable, necessary, and deserved to be put out into the world was incredible.

It has propelled me on to write more. And now I am busy writing book two with will be published in 2023.

That’s how the journey began. Who knows where it might go next…