In my garage is a large box stashed with half-filled notebooks of novel ideas and abandoned manuscripts I penned in my twenties and thirties. I’d wanted to be an author ever since my dad came home from work with an old word processor for me to play on. I was eight years old and determined to be the next Judy Blume or Lois Lowry. It was all I wanted to be.
But life got in the way. Responsibilities and relationships and the need to pay the rent. When I left University, I took a job in executive headhunting. It felt like the sensible choice. I needed the money. It was well paid and enjoyable, and it turned out, I was good at it. I spent almost two decades recruiting senior leaders for high profile organisations around the world. It was challenging and fun, but it wasn’t writing. I still scribbled away in the sidelines, dreaming of plots, making up characters and sketching out scenes. A short story I wrote came runner-up in Elle magazine’s writing competition. But I never actually committed to writing a novel.
It wasn’t until I turned forty when during the Covid lockdown my eldest son, who was eight at the time, started penning his own first ‘novel’ that I realised I’d abandoned my dreams. He reminded me how much I love writing and spurred me on to give it a proper go. The first thing I did was apply to the Faber Academy’s Writing a Novel course (this was one of the Faber online courses devised and run by Professional Writing Academy), and I got on.
The whole experience was exactly what I needed. I signed up for momentum and accountability but what I also got was a truly supportive cohort of writers who pushed each other forwards. Beyond the incredibly helpful feedback I received from both them and my tutor, Rowan Hisayo-Buchanan, reviewing and critiquing other’s work helped me refine my own craft even more.
Taking time to think about what I loved about other people’s writing, how they developed and adapted it, was invaluable.
I finished the course with 15,000 words of my debut, a literary suspense about a hearing-impaired woman trapped in a coercive relationship 5,000 miles from home in the Belizean jungle. It’s The White Lotus meets The Paper Palace. In hindsight, I think the novel was borne out of my own sense of feeling trapped after I had been diagnosed with an autoimmune illness and also possibly, the sense of isolation imposed by lockdown. The hearing angle was weaved in later. I have hearing loss and tinnitus in both ears, and giving my protagonist, Laelia, the same condition added to the sense of disorientation she experiences.
What I also got from the course was a newfound confidence, and the belief that I could, should, would finish the damn thing. And I did. It wasn’t easy but I knew I had a unique idea and was determined to try to get it published.
As well as the Faber course, I applied to Curtis Brown’s Mentoring Scheme and landed the incredible Chloe Timms as my mentor. I also found Jill Dawson through Gold Dust, and both have been invaluable at guiding me through the highs and lows of drafting. I applied to other programmes and schemes as well, which I didn’t get onto, but rejection is part of this process. You have to learn quickly to brush yourself off and keep going. Adapt, take on board as much feedback as you can, and never give up.
I had a clear strategy to enter lots of competitions so that hopefully I’d get longlisted in one I could use in my query letter. I kept an Excel sheet and entered a dozen or so entries with my novel’s first pages and some short stories I’d written. I got a few rejections (par for the course) but ended up getting shortlisted in several, including the Killer Nashville Claymore Award and Leicester Writes Short Story Competition. Then, over the same weekend, I came Runner-up in both the Cheshire Novel Prize and the Primadonna Festival where I won the Claire Mannion Award for Literary Endeavour. I got noticed by agents, who started approaching me to ask more about my work and aspirations.
But finding an agent is like dating or buying a house.
You’ve got to have ‘the feeling’ and I didn’t have it yet. So, I held my nerve.
Using this momentum of interest, I sent my opening pages to a handful of target agents from my dream list. It was a crazy week. My full manuscript was requested six or seven times, and by the end of the week I was offered representation by three incredible agents. They were all brilliant and I would have been over the moon with any of them, but I just knew Madeleine Milburn was the one. I got ‘the feeling’ in both my head and my heart. She totally got what I wanted to do with the novel and had the same aspirations and objectives as I did. We went on submission and the novel was bought on pre-empt by HarperCollins in the US and separately by HarperFiction in the UK. It was nerve-wracking and exhilarating and wild.
I’ve learned so much during the editing process. My US and UK Editors are brilliantly collaborative, so they’ll put their heads together before they come to me with their notes and suggested ideas. I’ve restructured the middle parts of the novel pretty substantially and developed some character arcs and built out the whole second timeline (about Laelia’s father, an academic botanist studying the orchids in the Belizean jungle in the 1980s).
I’m currently working on my second novel which is set on the North Island of New Zealand. It’s about a woman with postnatal depression who goes missing and her estranged, wayward sister who flies out from London to try to find her. It’s about grief and motherhood, and grief in motherhood. I’m still applying the lessons on momentum and skillsets I honed during the Faber course, and the work ethic I learned from a very early age – the gift of tenacity my parents passed on.
On my desk is a photograph of myself from when I was little to remind me to embrace curiosity over fear. I often gaze at her while I’m writing and think how happy she would be if she could see me now doing the only thing I ever felt truly passionate about doing.
Writing is a gift, and I gave it to myself. But so many people have helped me along the way, and for that I am truly grateful.
The Night Lagoon (titled Lime Juice Money in the US/Canada) is published by HarperFiction in the UK on 3rd July.
