I wrote the novel seven years ago and after editing it with the help of Cornerstones and some feedback from Writewords, tried for nearly six years to find a publisher for it. Along the way I started the literary magazine The View From Here which has grown beyond my wildest dreams into something I'm incredibly proud of with an amazing team from all over the world.
Trying to find a publisher was an interesting and frustrating challenge and when I read in The Writers and Artists Handbook that you had to be prepared to be persistent I didn't really know at that stage the magnitude of the mountain I'd have to climb. And after a while even my stubbornness to give in started to wain and so I spent more and more time building The View From Here to what it is today.
It's been three years now since I've written anything. To be honest, I'd effectively given in that it was going to happen any time soon and hoped that in some distant future I'd be able to reawaken my dream to see the novel published. Still, running and editing a magazine thrilled me so I was happy in that.
And the pressure to self-publish, the wanting to see my novel as a book was difficult - especially in the early days when I was reading magazines for new writers littered with adverts telling me that I really should take my treasured possession to them and just make it happen. My wife helped me with that - and you know I didn't want to make it happen, to force my book into the market: I wanted a publisher to fall in love with it, for it to be in the market because someone other than just me believed in it.
Quite a few publishers were interested along the way and for a moment a couple of years ago I thought it was going to happen. But last month I finally found the dream ticket: a publisher who'd both fallen in love with the novel and wanted to publish it.
You know it's enough to make a grown man cry. My wife asked me what was wrong? Nothing I said - nothing at all - everything is good.
So after celebrating hard over Xmas I'll get to work with Cauliay on a final edit and preparing the book for market. And I'll start writing the second novel - who knows where it will all lead but for now I know that I'm stepping into my dream and get to write in the mornings and run The View From Here in the afternoons. You just can't find enough Xmas wrapping to cover all that.
Picture credit: Mr MT
