This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
A London Street. Torrential rain. A crazy lady struggling to
open her office door; arms full of bags, a broken umbrella in one hand, coffee
in the other. She spills coffee down herself, drops the umbrella, bags tumble
to the floor. The rain looks like it’s melting her away. She looks up at the
sky as pellets of rain streak her face and she yells, I’m done! You win! I give up! before marching into the building to quit
her job. As she reaches the top of the stairs her phone rings…
Of course the crazy lady above is me, and I had well and truly hit my rock-soggy bottom. I’d been living in London for a year. I’d move back from France to be with my boyfriend, who’d dumped me a few weeks after I’d arrived. Heartbroken and stuck in a city I didn’t want to be in, I decided that I wasn’t allowed to move back to France and I wasn’t allowed to look at another man until I completed my unfinished novel. Finally I got the incentive right.
I wrote every spare minute I could find. I wrote into the night, at the gym, on the tube, through the tears when I found out my ex had fallen in love. I wrote like my life depended on it, because I had been in this position before. Not only of moving to another country because of love (I know!) but because I had already had three novels rejected. In ten years this was the closest I’d been and it had started two years earlier.
I’d submitted a completed novel, a proposal for a second book and a random idea for a third to an agent. She liked nothing other than the random idea. I spent months putting together a proposal with early chapters and character breakdowns. She wanted more. Eighteen months later I finally finished the book and secured a meeting. But still I wasn’t signed. She was blunt. She said women’s fiction was highly competitive, there was a lot out there, it wasn’t necessarily what publishers wanted to buy. She felt I needed to make some changes. A two month re-write followed, squeezed in around my job and occasional sleep. Finally on my 34th birthday we sent it out to publishers. And then we waited, and we waited, for what felt like endless months. Publisher after publisher politely declined, my hope evaporating with every rejection. Fast forward to the crazy lady, the rain, the coffee burning my right hand, me yelling up at the sky. Because that day I really had given up. It didn’t matter that I thought it was my destiny to be an author. I’d given it every piece of myself and it wasn’t enough. It was too hard. So I decided to quit. There and then. Quit my job, my flat, London, move myself back to France. If my dream wasn’t going to be realised at the very least I could sit in the sun, eat pain au chocolate, maybe kiss a Frenchman before conjugating verbs and humming La Vie En Rose. It felt like a good plan B. Then the phone rang, and it was my agent, and everything changed…
“Hi Claire, can you talk? We’ve got an offer from Harlequin. They want to sign you on a two-book deal…”
Claire’s novel Love is a Thief is out now.