My writing journey….

please excuse the long monologue!

My writing journey started when I was a young girl. I was an avid reader and two books I loved and still love today were Anne of Green Gables and Little Women. I loved the relationships, the angst, the humour, the dramas. I loved that the heroines were feisty and slight misfits because I could relate to them. I also think it’s no co-incidence both Anne and Jo, the main characters in the books, were determined to become writers. They made writing fiction into an ultimate quest. Like Frodo in Lord of the Rings facing great odds as he tried to reach Mount Doom to destroy the ring, Anne and Jo were on an ultimate quest to become writers and in my eyes at least they were equally as heroic as Frodo.

Over the ensuing years, I kept my dream of being a writer very much to myself and did the sensible thing. I completed a Pharmacy degree at Otago University, then raced overseas (as so many Kiwis do!). I lived and worked in London for three years, exploring much of Europe in my spare time. My main place of employment was the Harley St Clinic, a fancy private hospital just off Marlyebone High St - an upmarket shopping street some of you may have been lucky enough to walk down, which has one of the most beautiful bookshops in the world – Daunt Books. I spent many a lunch break in that bookshop and I have no doubt that my dream to one day own a bookshop was kindled in Daunt Books.

Interestingly, when I left my job at Harley St Clinic, my leaving present was a beautiful red leather sleeve containing writing paper. I don’t recall ever talking to the other pharmacists about my writerly ambitions, but I must have said something!

I returned to New Zealand and worked at Wellington Hospital until I had a baby girl. When she was nine months old I decided it was time to finally pursue my writing dream and I enrolled in a distance-learning writing course at Massey University. This turned out to be the start of a long stream of writing courses, mostly through the NZ Writers College. I completed courses on short stories, then writing for children, and eventually an advanced write-a-novel course at the end of which I had written an 80,000 word psychological thriller. When I received my report my tutor wrote, ‘this deserves to be published’. I obviously didn’t think seriously about getting the novel published as I put it in my metaphorical bottom drawer and forgot about it.

A few years passed, and I had three children keeping me busy. We moved to Auckland, I worked part-time, and I wrote when I could. By this stage I guess you could say I had developed a ‘writer’s mind’. I was always subconsciously (or consciously) on the lookout for story ideas.

One day I was at our local library when a book caught my eye. It was called Shipwrecks around New Zealand, and opening the book at random I read about the Rangitane, a passenger liner attacked by German raiders during the second world war just off the coast of NZ. The passengers were taken as prisoners and what happened to them was so outrageous, it was like something out of a movie.

I remember that moment vividly, even though it was probably twelve years ago now, because I said to myself – this, this right here is the story I need to write one day. But I knew I didn’t have the skills to do such an incredible story the justice it deserved. I had to become a better writer first.

So I applied to do a Masters in Creative Writing. I was accepted and as part of my thesis I wrote a collection of linked short stories. One of those stories was eventually published in an anthology of NZ fiction.

After finishing my Masters I was keen to write something less ‘literary’, and one day I walked into my lounge and was mesmerized by the late afternoon sun bouncing off a large painting (painted by my sister) hanging on the wall. It was of a gorgeous abandoned old mud-brick cottage in Central Otago close to where my parents used to live. My sister and I would always look out for the house as we drove past and my sister had managed to capture the air of melancholy, beauty and romance I associated with the place.  As I stared at the painting I had a crystal clear image of two children seeking refuge at this abandoned cottage in the middle of nowhere. I knew they would form a special bond and the story would start and end at this cottage. I sat and wrote a novel faster than I have ever written anything before, or since, and it turned into a romantic saga spanning thirty years.

Around the time I finished the novel, I heard great things about the Romance Writers of NZ. As part of their annual conference, writers have the opportunity to pitch to agents and publishers, and I took the plunge and heart-in-mouth went to the conference and pitched to two agents from America, one American publisher, and one publisher from Australia.

Thankfully they all liked the sound of my book and asked me to send them the manuscript. Three responded saying it was too niche (as in set in NZ), but the publisher in Australia said she loved it and she would be pitching it to her team. It’s fair to say I got pretty excited. However, weeks went by without me hearing back and when I eventually sent a polite followup email, she said the team had decided not to pursue it.

Though disappointed, the interest that had been shown was enough to make me think I might just get a novel published one day, so I pulled out my psychological thriller, gave it a well-needed trim and restyle, and sent it out to agents and publishers overseas. I also sent out my romantic saga and, not one to sit around, I started to write yet another novel.

This new novel was going to be romantic again because I’d decided I loved writing about relationships, but instead of being a saga it would be more contemporary with humour as well as angst – in other words, an emotional rollercoaster!

As rejections rolled in for the two novels I had sent out, I polished off my new novel and undeterred began to submit it too. I actually only submitted to about twenty agents and publishers in total (one successful writer told me to submit to at least 100!), but I preferred writing stories to the time-consuming task of putting together submissions.

One publisher I submitted the contemporary romance to was Aria Fiction, an imprint of Head of Zeus, now owned by Bloomsbury. I had forgotten all about submitting to them when 9 months after my submission I received an email from the editor in London saying she liked the novel and could she call me for a chat. This was one month after I’d bought The Booklover Bookshop and I was neck-deep in learning how to run a small business! (That’s a whole other journey).

We had a chat, and though she said she wasn’t able to take the book as it stood, if I was prepared to make some changes, she’d love to look at it again. One of those ‘changes’ was to completely rewrite the second half of the book and remove one of the main characters, which I did. Then I resubmitted and heard nothing for six long months until she emailed me to say she loved it and was pitching it to the team. Finally, one miserable day during our second Covid lockdown in August 2020 she emailed offering me a two book contract. A year later my debut novel A Way Back to Happy was published, and my second novel A Bumpy Year followed in early 2023.

Remember the book about shipwrecks I picked up at in the library all those year ago? Well, while I was working on edits for A Way Back to Happy I also finally wrote the story I vowed I would write one day about the sinking of the Rangitane. It took more than three years as I juggled other edits and work commitments. Then, in what felt like a moment of true serendipity, the very month I decided the manuscript was good enough to start sending out to agents and publishers, I noticed that Hachette Aotearoa NZ were setting up a new imprint (Moa Press) and they were open to submissions.

The day after I submitted my novel to Hachette the publisher emailed to say she was interested, and a week later she phoned and offered me a two-book contract. It was a monumental moment in my life and I can’t wait for The Girl from London to hit the shelves in November.

So far on my haphazard writing journey I’ve written a psychological thriller, a collection of short stories, a romantic saga, two contemporary women’s fiction novels, and an historical novel. I also failed to mention that somewhere along the way I wrote a 90,000 word Young Adult fantasy novel. I’m currently working on my second historical novel due to be published late 2024.

As with most things in life, the joy of writing for me has been, and will continue to be, in the journey. I can say, hand on heart, that even if I had never become a published author, I would have continued to write. I write because I love it. It’s that simple. I’m excited to think there is so much more to come in my writing journey. If you’d like to join me for the ride, and you haven’t done so already, please sign up to my newsletter. I’d love the company.