So there I was, back in my home town, vacuuming my dad’s living room carpet and thinking how I really should ask my agent to send my manuscript for Crusher to a publisher, when the phone rang. It was my agent, and she already had, and the publisher she’d shown it to – Random House Children’s Books – wanted the book, plus sequels. I had to sit down for a bit.
It’s official now – in The Bookseller, even – but I still can’t quite believe it. When I went to meet Random House for the first time I was kind of hoping they wouldn’t find out I had written Crusher in thirty days as part of the NaNoWriMo event (see my blogs from last November.) However they very sweetly pointed out that if I hadn’t wanted people to know how quickly I’d written the book, I shouldn’t have blogged about it (see my blogs from last November – they certainly had.)
Of course, they knew it was not quite as simple as that. The nuts-and-bolts writing may have taken a month but coming up with the characters and the storyline had taken me a lot longer – far too long, in fact, on and off over years. And I only confessed it to a few of my fellow Nanites, but I had bent the rules, just a bit. When I took part in NaNoWriMo I had started writing at Chapter Two because I’d written most of Chapter One ages beforehand, then left it aside because I didn’t know what happened next.
It was thanks to NaNoWriMo’s deadline that I had to focus, think hard and figure out what the hell did happen next, and how all the supporting characters came into the story, and what became of them. I’m not the first NaNoWriMo graduate to get their work published (Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants is perhaps the best-known example) and I’m sure I won’t be the last. But when I think of how long I pissed about and stared out the window instead of writing the bloody thing…. The moral, dear reader, is the same as it always is – for Christ’s sake stop making excuses and get on with it – because, like the title says, feck-all comes to those who wait.
I am now in that privileged and terrifying position of preparing the Difficult Second Novel, and I’m not staring out the window – I’m doing this. Which frankly is no improvement… so I’ll just say, thanks to all my family and friends for their good wishes regarding Crusher, and I hope come September you find it was worth the wait.
Looking forward to reading Crusher – and probably sharing with my teenaged daughter, too.
Cruised around your screenwriting credits… impressive. Can’t wait to see Air Force One Is Down! Will that be shown in the states? It has American actors. Well, some Americans, yes? I’m pretty sure Emilie de Ravin is American. *runs to Google*
AFOD will certainly be shown in the States, because a US network put up a lot of the production money, which meant I had one of those transatlantic phone calls to New York where we haggled about tweaks to the script. The casting is amazing, brilliantly matching the characters I wrote – but I believe Emilie de Ravin is Australian, sorry!