Draft Complete (and other updates)

Yesterday, I reached the end of a first draft: the YA thriller that I started to develop in October last year. The 78,000 words are very much a ‘messy’ draft. While I’ve been writing, I’ve put together a list of things that need to be reworked, including aspects of plot and characterisation. I’ll be tackling these areas in the coming months, and it won’t be until that point that it will be ready to share with early readers.

With After Isla, I shared the first draft exclusively with my agent. I have yet to learn its fate, but it has been several months, and the more time passes, the more I’m steeling myself for rejection from the major publishing houses. With this new one, therefore, I’ll try a slightly different approach: gather feedback from a small group of readers, revise, and then share with my agent. I might be able to get the second draft to her at the start of 2026, and hopefully it will be a ‘tighter’ one that can go to editors at publishing houses more swiftly than After Isla.

September and October will be busy months. Alongside novel revision, I will be working for Fiction Express to publish a novella called Crash Course for their 12+ audience. I will also be back at the school doing reading intervention with small groups on Wednesdays and Thursdays. The school made my temporary contract permanent, and it makes sense to stay there while I’m developing my tutoring business. I have one tutee, but I need between five and ten to make quitting at the school a viable option (or to receive a book deal, of course!). Much like the new novel, my employment goals are very much works in progress!

In other news, my agent is now operating independently at Solas Literary Agency. My profile can be found here.

Drafting (and other updates)

Many people think that the process for publishing a book jumps from writing ‘the end’ to hitting the printers. The real process is more laborious, because first drafts are rarely the finished product. My current novel is now in its fourth draft, with different ideas being tried and tested along the way. Sometimes new ideas work, sometimes they open new opportunities, and sometimes they take the novel in a problematic direction, and they need to be unpicked. I sent the latest draft to my agent today, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it might be ready to pitch to publishers soon...

Last time I updated the blog, I mentioned I’d been busy researching and outlining for a new YA project. I also started to draft it last month (and completed the first three chapters). Now that draft 4 of the other novel is with my agent, I can return my attention to the new project. I’m hoping to get a good chunk written before I hear back from my agent – perhaps even a full draft.

The dream remains to earn enough from advances/royalties to cover my living costs while I’m developing a new novel. I’m not there yet, and sadly, I don’t have any updates in terms of getting work as a private tutor, either. I signed up to an agency that I used before, but they’re still processing my details. Today, I started a Facebook page for a bit of self-promotion. Hopefully, I can establish this before the end of this academic year, as it should be something a bit more flexible to cover my living costs in future.

Why I Don’t Give Up

Since the last blog was a bit bleak, I thought I’d counteract it with some truths this time.

How many times it took me to pass my driving test: 4

I cried in the car after every failed test. The woman who failed me on my second test went on to pass me on the fourth.

How many Cambridge colleges interviewed me before I was accepted: 2

After the first one, I entered what was called the ‘pool’. They liked me but not quite enough to offer me a place, and another college fished me out to give me a second chance.

How many attempts it took me to pass my PGCE (teaching qualification): 2

I took a year out to work as a teaching assistant before I finished the course successfully.

How many times I applied for a teaching job at the school where I eventually worked: 3

I first applied early in my PGCE and was (understandably) passed over. I applied again later, after my year as a teaching assistant, unsure whether they would give me a second chance. The third application turned my temporary contract into a permanent contract.

How many times I sent out a query to an agent before I finally got representation: 34

That’s if my records (which go back over two decades with three different novels) are accurate.

So, the fact that the main publishing houses in the UK looked and passed over the first novel I worked on with my agent is consistent with how my life has progressed so far. And hopefully there will be more success with the next novel.

I’m currently drafting proposals and opening chapters for two different novels. One is probably best described as a Young Adult Speculative Psychological Drama (same target age as the last novel, but a very different genre) and one is Adult Crime Fiction (if YA fails, the rationale is to try an entirely different market). I’m still in the early stages (4000 words with the Crime novel, 1000 with the YA novel), but hopefully I can finish a first draft of one of the two complete before the end of the year.

Drafting is always a pleasurable part of the process.

I also had a small piece of good news that I'm on another longlist this week. The judging process isn't finished, so perhaps the short story can go further...

Death of a Novel

Remember when I wrote that Garth Nix once compared sending a novel out to publishing houses as being like a merchant sending out a ship, where it could either return with great fortunes or founder?

Well, from my experience, it’s more like this…

 

Imagine you’re stranded on an island. You’re the only person there. All you have with you is a packet of cedar seeds. You know that if you can cross the strip of water, you’ll reach the mainland, where the people are. So, you plant a seed. Days turn into weeks. You toil every day to survive yourself while you create conditions for your little tree to grow. You desalinate salt water to nourish it, you check on it each day, you carefully measure its progress. All the while, you look out over the sea, dreaming of the day your little tree will carry you over the water to the people on the mainland.

Years pass and the tree grows. You sharpen a blade of rock and cut it down. You split the trunk into planks and carefully shape and plane and bow the wood into a dinghy. It’s a labour-intensive process, and you often hurt yourself in the process, but one day, finally, the little boat is ready. Its sails snap in the winds and for the first time you feel something like hope. You climb into your dinghy and the wind is strong, true, carrying you directly to the mainland. You imagine what it will be like, to connect with people after so long.

But you realise as you approach that jutting rocks bar your way. The wind of expectation is too strong and when the boat strikes, the impact severe. As your precious dinghy splinters around you, you sink into salty water. The tide carries you back to the island. Everything is as it was before. But one seed is gone from your pack, and you’re not quite as agile as you were once, when you were first stranded on the island.

 

That’s the story of Spirit Bound, a novel I’ve been working on for over a decade. I’m grateful that it broke against vast rocks like Bloomsbury, HarperCollins, and Scholastic – over twenty big publishing houses in total. I never really expected it to sail so far, even after I convinced an agent to take me on. To have feedback that shows that these editors read my work is far more than I’ve ever achieved before. But the sting of salt is real.

There are a few possibilities at this stage. I could choose to self-publish the novel. It’s not part of my current plan, but it remains a long-term possibility. Short-term, the novel will be shelved. There’s a slim possibility that in years to come, editors may be more likely to take on the risk – if I establish my name in some other way, for example. So, the short-term plan is to develop a new novel and begin the process again. I have an agent, which will save a lot of time when I have a polished novel ready.

If there’s a lesson to be learned in all this, I suppose it’s that there’s no point spending over a decade working on a single novel. I didn’t really have a choice, or I didn’t think I did. But I could have chosen a job that wasn’t so demanding (of both creativity and time) than teaching to pay the way. I could have created better conditions, day-to-day, to draft a novel over a shorter span of time.

So, the interesting thing will be how long it takes me to draft a new novel. If it takes longer than a year for me to let it set sail, I will know that I’m doing something wrong.