The Paris Affair comes out on the 4th of July 2024. I've been looking back over the long route it took to get here. Three books preceded it. None of which got published in the way that I'd hoped.
I feel that these three books (Broken Sky, Secret Music, and The Forbidden Stars) deserve a special mention at this point. Each one was a stepping stone on the way to writing The Paris Affair. Here's what they taught me...
1. How to finish a book and the value of having a mentor
Writing my first book, Broken Sky, was a challenge. It was the first time I’d planned, researched, structured, and edited anything of this size.
Finishing the book gave me a huge sense of achievement. I sent it out to agencies. The rejections were polite and plentiful.
I was lucky, however, that the book landed on the desk of Luke Speed, a book-to-film agent working at Curtis Brown. He put it into the hands of an agent called Rebecca Ritchie. Miraculously, she thought my writing had promise and wanted to meet. She didn’t offer to represent me that day, but she generously offered to mentor me as I wrote the second book.
Broken Sky never saw the light of day, but I’m forever grateful for where it took me. Through writing it, I cleared my head of a lot of mental baggage, learned to call myself a writer, felt the achievement of having finished a manuscript, and found an ally in Becky, who continued to help me when she moved to A.M. Heath.
The second book, Secret Music, was an absolute joy to write. It was set in seventeenth-century Europe, a world away from the contemporary setting of my first book. I was happy to lose myself in researching this fascinating time.
Having Becky’s support boosted my confidence and focussed my mind. When the book was finished, I sent it to her and awaited her response with bated breath. I’ll never forget the day she emailed offering to represent me. Finally, I had a contract with an agent!
Despite Becky’s calm, level-headed advice, however, nothing fully prepared me for the agony of going out on submission. Submission is when your agent sends your manuscript to a list of editors in the hopes that one of them will love the book . The long wait for editors' responses was excruciating. A slew of rejections followed along with a couple of near-misses that were gut-wrenching.
Thankfully, a German publisher made an offer to publish Secret Music as Das Mädchen aus Amsterdam. The book hadn’t found a UK home, but it was going to be published in my husband’s home country. I learned that you have to celebrate every win, even if it’s not the one you’d expected.
3. How to write dual timelines and face failure
The Forbidden Stars, my third book, started out as a historical novel set in Italy, but successive drafts saw it develop into a dual timeline with a contemporary storyline.
It was so much fun to write. I enjoyed interweaving the two narratives and found that switching from one era to another suited my writing style.
But when I finished the book, I was wracked with nerves about going through the process of submissions again. When the rejections came in, the sense of disappointment was even more crushing than the last time. It was difficult to face the fact that this book wasn't going to be published at all. Two years worth of writing only to hear the words: ‘We love the writing but don’t have room for it on our lists at the moment’.
So how did I end up writing The Paris Affair? At first, I wasn’t sure I had it in me to go through the writing and submissions process again. I took a break and realised that, despite not achieving publication in the way that I'd hoped, I'd gained so much from researching, writing and editing The Forbidden Stars.
Inspiration struck when I remembered the recipe book that we'd found in the attic of my husband’s old house in Germany. It planted the seed for The Paris Affair and gave me the courage to start writing again.
If the first three books had been published in the UK, where would that have taken me? I'll never know. But I do know that not being published made me a stronger, more resilient and empathetic writer, and taught me to appreciate every step of the journey.
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