Cally Taylor mentioned on her blog a while ago that she would love to do a virtual blog tour to coincide with the release of her debut novel Heaven Can Wait. We jumped at the chance to be part of that tour and we’re pleased to announce we are the first stop. You can read Cally’s blog here: Writing About Writing. Now I’ll hand over to Cally who is going to tell you all just what it was like to become a published author.
A lot of my childhood memories are hazy but one thing I do remember very clearly is learning to read; the big, bold text and brightly coloured illustrations in the Peter and Jane books I read with my parents are still clear in my mind and if I close my eyes tightly I’m instantly transported into the magical world of Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree. As a child I thought authors were magicians – how else could they create such vivid images and adventures in my head? – and I desperately wanted to be one.
When I was eight I wrote a ‘book’ called The Evil Weed about…well…an evil weed who bullied a group of flower friends. They got their revenge on him by pouring tar onto a road and getting him stuck. By the end of the story he was very repentant, wanted to be their friend and they all lived happily ever after. After I’d finished writing my story I drew ‘illustrations’ on the back of each page, hole-punched the whole lot, bound it with wool and sent it off to Penguin Publishers. I was convinced it was the best story ever and was a bit shocked when, two months letter, my first ever rejection letter dropped through my letterbox.
I had a couple of false starts with novels before I wrote “Heaven Can Wait”. I started one – a story about a man who questions what ‘sane’ is when a friend of his ends up in a psychiatric unit - when I lived in London in my twenties but ditched it after about 5,000 words (I’d never been in a psychiatric unit so had no idea what I was on about!) I started another one in my early thirties – about a young girl, sent off to boarding school after her OCD-suffering mum kills herself (I blame my Psychology degree for my obsession with mental illness!) – but abandoned that too, this time after 50,000 words.
I’ll finish a novel one day, I told myself. There’s plenty of time.
In the summer of 2006 I realised that wasn’t always true. One of my best friends from school died suddenly and unexpectedly and her death made me re-evaluate my life. Becoming a published author was my dream and if I didn’t write my novel no one else would. In early 2007 I started to write the novel that was to become “Heaven Can Wait”. I wrote nearly every night, driven to actually finish this time, and three months and three weeks later I completed the first draft. The sense of accomplishment I felt was huge. I’d done it! I’d actually written a novel!
But now what?
I had no idea if anyone would actually want to publish a supernatural romantic-comedy about a woman who dies the night before her wedding and tries to come back as a ghost (I certainly hadn’t seen anything like it on the tables in Waterstones!) so I came up with a plan - I’d send it off to a few agents and, if no one wanted it, I’d self-publish and donate the copies to charity shops so that maybe someone, somewhere, might pull it off the shelf and read it. That, I realised, was what I wanted more than anything else - to give someone else the same pleasure and escapism books had always given me.
I was extraordinarily lucky. The second agent I approached showed an interest and, about eighteen months after I finished the first draft, I signed with Madeleine Buston at the Darley Anderson Literary Agency. In October 2008 Maddie told me she’d secured a two book deal with Orion (publishers of Ian Rankin, Maeve Binchey and Kate Harrison). I couldn’t believe it! People were actually going to read my book! For weeks after I signed the contract I’d have a small heart attack whenever I received an email from my agent or editor – I kept expecting them to tell me that, actually, they’d made a mistake and I wasn’t going to be published after all.
I won’t believe it’s really happening until I can hold a copy of my book in my hands, I told myself over and over again. Not until then.
On Thursday 1st October 2009 my doorbell rang. I hurried down the stairs, expecting to find the gasman or a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses behind the front door. Instead a delivery man greeted me with a smile and handed me a huge parcel. I can’t remember ordering something this massive from Amazon I thought as I signed for it then carried it up the stairs to the living room. It was only when I realised it wasn’t an Amazon box that the penny dropped. I held my breath as I opened it and peered inside. My book! Twenty-five copies of my book…with a beautiful, beautiful cover, the title in a gorgeous, gold curly font and… my words inside.
I went onto Twitter and shared my delight with my online friends.
“I’ve wanted to be an author since I was EIGHT YEARS OLD,” I typed. “And now I am.”
And then I started to cry.
Since November 2009
The start of another month means one thing: Fiona Cassidy’s next installment about what it takes to become a published author. If you’ve missed Fiona’s previous entries you can read them here: Where It All Began and What’s The Story? and Agent Provocauthor. We now present to you the fourth article of twelve… enjoy! Our thanks, as ever, go to Fionnuala for writing this series for us!
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