GOING OUT

You wrote 22 novels and had none published, what made you return to writing after all that rejection?

I was just bloody-minded! I started writing on November 4th 1987, and between then and July 17th 1993 I wrote something every day except for three days when I was going through a divorce. I completed twenty two novels in that time, something in the region of three and a half million words, and at different times I was in discussion with a couple of agents, with one or two publishing companies, but nothing ever really got as far as I would have liked. I wrote first of all in longhand, and then I got a typewriter, and finally ended up with an Amstrad dedicated word processor that took about half an hour to warm up!

I spent those six years sending material out to British publishers, and received about five hundred complimentary, very polite "Thanks but no thanks" letters. I also have two lever arch files with something in the region of three or four hundred straightforward format rejection slips. This is just from companies that didn’t even look at the material I sent them. I understand the sheer volume of work that a handful of people have to wade through in a publishing house. People have given me figures on just how many unsolicited scripts come to the major publishing houses each week, and that figure is astounding. However, after six years of doing this I finally thought ‘enough’s enough’, and I stopped writing. I then studied music, photography, all manner of things, and didn’t go back to writing until the latter part of 2001. The thing that prompted my return to writing was 9/11. I couldn’t stop thinking about the three thousand or more people who went to work that morning and never returned home. It made me think of something my grandmother used to say: "Never lead a ‘What if…’ life." She used to say that finding your vocation in life was the secret of happiness. I thought about when I had been happiest in my life, and it was when I was writing. So I went back to it and came to the conclusion that maybe I just didn’t try hard enough. It was then that I wrote Candlemoth. I sent that to thirty-six publishers, thirty-five of whom sent it back. All except Bloomsbury, and an editor there gave it to a friend who gave it to a friend, and it wound up at Orion with my current editor, and we have now worked together through nine books. I have gone back recently and read some of my earlier work and it was a little verbose. But hell, it was good practice!