I left university with a good degree in English Literature, but no sense of what I wanted to do. Over the next six years, I was treading water, just trying to earn an income. I tried journalism, but I didn"t think
I was any good, then finance, which I hated. Finally, I got a job as a rights assistant at a famous publisher.
I loved working with books, although the job that I did was dull.
I had enough savings to take a year off work, and I decided to try to satisfy a deep-down wish to write a novel. Attending a Novel Writing MA course gave me the structure I needed to write my first 55,000
words.
It takes confidence to make a new start - there"s a dark period in-between where you"re neither one
thing nor the other. You"re out for dinner and people ask what you do, and you"re too ashamed to say,
"Well, I"m writing a navel, but I"m not quite sure if I"m going to get there." My confidence dived. Believing my novel could not be published, I put it aside.
Then I met an agent(代理商)who said I should send my novel out to agents. So, I did and, to my
surprise, got some wonderful feedback. I felt a little hope that I might actually become a published writer
and, after signing with an agent, I finished the second half of the novel.
The next problem was finding a publisher. After two-and-a-half years of no income, just waiting and
wondering, a publisher offered me a book deal - that publisher turned out to be the one I once worked for.
It feels like an unbelievable stroke of luck - of fate, really. When you set out to do something different,
there"s no end in sight, so to find myself in a position where I now have my own name on a contract(合
同)of the publisher - to be a published writer - is unbelievably rewarding(有回报的).