My debut novel, Space Hopper, is published in February 2021.

When I shared the news with friends, that I was going to have a book published, I was surprised at how many said you’ve always wanted to write a book. I have always wanted to write a book, but I didn’t realise I’d talked about it so much. When I was younger, I wrote letters and diaries, kept a travel journal and yes, I have always felt that I had a book in me, but it didn’t come out for a long time. I was 44 years old when I wrote my first novel. I recently found some old school books, from when I was about ten years old, containing a few stories and poems. I’ve re-read them and I don’t think it’s obvious that the girl who wrote those would one day be a published author. They wouldn’t fetch much on eBay.

So, although I’ve always loved writing, I didn’t leave school knowing that I could make a career out of it. I would have chosen to study creative writing, but I’m not sure I knew it existed when I was a teenager. I studied psychology and later, went on to do ergonomics. I became a senior evaluator at RNIB, and it was incredibly interesting and fun work.

While I had a job that I loved, I thought less about writing. But there came a time when I was living back in my home town, with two young children, going through a horrible divorce, with a job in a café, earning minimum wage, claiming benefits and really struggling to make ends meet. It was then that my dreams of writing resurfaced. I have vivid memories of leaning on the counter in the coffee shop, where I worked with my friend Marcella Cooper. I would say I wish I was a writer and she would say I wish I was an artist. Five years later, we had both fulfilled those dreams (you can check out her beautiful work here: https://www.marcellacooperart.com/). When we meet up now, we sit in the café opposite the one we used to work in. It’s not physically far away, and yet, where our dreams are concerned, it’s another planet.

The novel-writing started when I had an idea for a story and a friend suggested that I write it and give her a chapter a week, as an incentive to keep going. So, I did, with the “simple” ambition of getting to the end. It’s such an achievement to complete a novel. But when it was finished my ambition bloomed; I wondered if it was publishable. I paid for an editor, though I could barely afford it, and then submitted it to agents. I got a load of rejections and finally, I stopped submitting. I’d had another idea; a better one. From the start I called it SPACE HOPPER, and though that name has been through many changes, in the end it came back to its original title (although, in the USA, it’s called FAYE, FARAWAY).

I wrote Space Hopper in the splinters of time that remained after working, looking after the children, household stuff and caring for my mum, who’d had a stroke about that time. It took about five months and I had some very positive feedback from my beta readers, who at the time, I simply called, “friends that are reading my story”. When I finished it, I sent it to an editor and after some tweaking, as before, I began submitting to agents. I felt optimistic: I knew how difficult it was to get an agent, but I had such faith in my book, such confidence. However, the confidence didn’t last long. Between October and December 2018 I received rejection after rejection. I was so ground down by my 17th rejection that I gave up, just before Christmas. I put Space Hopper in a drawer and when I cried myself to sleep, I told myself that I’d been happy before, that would get over it. But at the time I felt I would never write again.

Two months later, in February 2019, I received a message from a friend (in fact she’s my ex-husband’s fiancé). She’s a great reader, and when I was submitting Space Hopper to agents, she asked to read it. Nearly half a year later, she texted to say she’d just finished a book that made her feel like Space Hopper had: another story with a mother and daughter at the centre, and a 1970s vibe; a novel called The Queen of Bloody Everything, by Joanna Nadin. Next day, I was in Waterstones, picked up the book and flipped to the back to see if the agent was mentioned in the acknowledgements. She was: Judith Murray, from Greene and Heaton, and I thought: I’ll send Space Hopper out one more time. Within a month, Judith and I had met in London and she was my agent. From there it was the stuff of dreams with my novel in a bidding auction and finally a two-book deal secured with Simon & Schuster.

It frightens me that I gave up submitting Space Hopper to agents when I did, and that such an unlikely twist of fate led me to the wonderful Judith Murray. I would advise anyone searching for an agent to really work on finding the right one. It’s not easy. But if you believe in your novel, please keep going.

I’m the most impatient person I have ever met. It’s a cruel vice to have when you want to write novels and be published, because nothing at all seems to happen quickly in this business. I have almost trained myself to be patient, and I would advise anyone wanting to be published, that there is a lot of waiting to do. I agreed a deal with Simon & Schuster on April 26th 2019, and my novel will be published on February 4th 2021. That’s 22 months, which is the gestation period of an elephant. In other words, a fully formed elephant can be created in the time it takes to get a book from publishing deal to the shelves. But the wait is worth it.