Keep Calm...

I said yesterday that I’d post today about where I am in my writing career, and how I got there. The quick answers to those questions are: Nowhere and Slowly.


The longer answer is a little more complicated, but I’m going to summarize.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and I started taking it seriously when I left university, nine years ago. I studied my craft, I got better, I started submitting to agents and received many rejections ranging from the usual form letter to, finally, a personal ‘I like this, but not enough. Send me what you do next,’ from the number one agent on my list.

What I did next was a novel called ‘The Fairytale Way,’ which became ‘Breaking the Spell,’ during the year I worked on it with The Agent, and finally, ‘Everyday Magic,’ at the point when we finally sent it out to editors.

A lot of them liked it. None of them liked it enough.

I was pregnant at this point, and sick every day, and more tired than I thought possible. But I took the news in good part, and headed off to work on something new, a novel called ‘Playing Make Believe,’ sending chapters over to The Agent for comment every couple of months.

Six months later, we both decided we hated it. I think the title might have been the best bit.

And now I had a small baby to deal with. One who didn’t like sleeping very much.

Still, I was determined to make the most of my maternity leave. I wrote the first draft of two more novels during the second half of 2009, one women’s fiction, like the previous books, called ‘An A to Z of Love’ and one YA paranormal called ‘Sea Fever’ that I wrote during NaNoWriMo.

I knew that ‘An A to Z of Love’ needed one hell of a revision before I could send it over to The Agent, so I signed up for Holly Lisle's How to Revise Your Novel course, which I found immensely helpful. Still, it took six months, and since my husband and I had decided that I wasn’t going back to work, I found myself with a little time on my hands.

So I wrote the first draft of another novel, ‘Dream a Little Dream,’ which I still think is possibly the best thing I’ve written to date.

I set myself a deadline – by the end of May 2010 I wanted to have both ‘An A to Z of Love’ and ‘Dream a Little Dream’ edited and over to The Agent. And I did it.

Then I sat back and waited.

And waited.

And then last Thursday I heard back from The Agent.

She hates them both.

Well, what she actually said was that she didn’t love them enough to offer to take either of them on. But in the end, that feels like the same thing.

So, now I’m waiting to hear why she doesn’t love them, if it’s fixable, and whether she thinks I should send them out to other agents, or if she wants to see whatever I write next.

But I’m not just sitting around and waiting. I’m revising ‘Sea Fever’ instead. And I’m entering competitions, like the Savvy Authors Drive 'Em Wilde contest, and I’m thinking about writing short stories, or even poetry, to stretch my writing muscles. I’m writing this blog.

I’m keeping calm, and writing on.