The Accidental Author

Chapter 3 - One for the road - one word at a time

My life truly resembles a map. The biggest thrill is coming to a cross roads, closing my eyes and putting a pin in the map to decide the direction to go in. I know this sounds haphazard, fraught with danger, unnecessary risk and generally irresponsible. However, I realised some years ago that you have to follow your heart and make the most of any opportunities. The future is uncertain both in length and direction. Therefore when opportunity knocks, I open the door, and not only have a peek inside, but go in for a good rummage around!

My writing journey continued; the biggest bonus, apart from it being extremely exciting and unpredictable, was being continually inspired to write, seek and learn something new about my new career pathway, and I loved it.

With six chapters of my romance novel in first draft format, and my 'One for the road' journal filled with thoughts and experiences of how to write every day, my inner strength, determination and perseverance prevailed. If it had been New Year's Eve I would have been saying 'my resolution is to achieve all my goals, love life and go for it, while gritting my teeth about the things that currently annoy and frustrate me.' The subject of my current frustration being an assignment on writing screenplays, which was very much outside my comfort zone. I was determined to finish it, partly to be able to move on, but also to prove to I could do it. Eventually I did it, but not without a great deal of procrastination.

I received a distinction for my screenplay assignment which amazed but inspired me and I commenced the penultimate assignment of my creative writing diploma with renewed confidence. By July 2012 I had received confirmation that I had passed with distinction both my Diploma in Magazine Journalism and my Diploma in Creative Writing. With this huge boost to my self-belief and the knowledge that I could actually write something worthy of reading I decided to focus on one project and work it through to completion.

I believe in dreaming big, working hard to ensure success and having fun. My daily mantra was, 'You have to conceive it, and believe it, to ensure you achieve it.' This remained posted to my dream board as daily inspiration and as I ticked off my achievements these words gained momentum.

I have always prided myself on demonstrating a positive attitude and approach to life embracing it with all of its imperfections. My determination to be successful in my writing career escalated as I found myself thinking and working on a new project despite being time poor. This was the start of writing Glass Half Full: Our Australian Adventure. Throughout our time in Australia, on and off I have always kept a journal. Often the pages would be filled with to-do lists consisting of reminders including shifts to be worked, bills to be paid, school functions to attend, etc. However, alongside these entries were notes and memorabilia from places we visited, experiences we had and more importantly it contained a record of the emotional turmoil I experienced at different stages of our Australian adventure. Never in my wildest dream did I consider that these random notes and entries would become the foundations of a motivating travel memoir inspiring others to follow their dreams, wherever or whatever they may be.

The idea behind my Glass Half Full project was simple. With our family spread across the world I want to document our journey so everyone would feel part of it. In reality I doubted they would be interested, but I worked on the notes and compiled photographs until one day for no good reason I filed it. The reasons are still not clear, suddenly it became a project unworthy of so much of my time when I had many other writing projects to pursue. Therefore, the idea of completing my Australian project was over, or so I thought. At around the same time Nigel sowed the seed of an idea that was to transform my future. He tells me about an old school friend who had written a book and loaded it onto a website which was a forum for readers and authors. Her book in first draft format was spotted by a literary agent and subsequently published. The mere mention of agents and publishing contracts was like saying there is a sack of gold at the end of the rainbow to me. A fairytale unlikely to come true, but worth investigating just in case. I decided to take a look at this site.

The name of the site was Authonomy. So what is Authonomy and how does it work? The website describes it like this: "Authonomy is a unique online community that connects readers, writers and publishing professionals. It was conceived and managed by editors at HarperCollins Publishers." When I entered the Authonomy website I saw that I was already registered. I had registered in 2011 when we first moved to Tasmania as part of my research for one of my creative writing assignments and I hadn't been back since. I took a look around and discovered samples of books that I now owned on my Kindle and that were self-published on Amazon. Still the penny did not drop that maybe the idea of self publishing my own work was not out of the question, the reason being that I still had tunnel vision about the fact that I would write a book, find a publisher and secure a deal. How naive that sounds now, as I am so far removed from that mindset in my writing and book marketing strategies.

It was around this time that our lives started to change and the impact on my writing career would be massive, although at this stage I had no concept of how or why. In September 2012 we arrived in France having decided to move back to Europe to pursue another bucket list item - that of renovating a French cottage and also to be nearer to our children in the UK. The journey fuelled my note taking, but my real goal was to get settled in France and complete my romance novel ready to submit to publishers like Mills and Boon and Penguin books. Shortly after our arrival I received an email from what I now know to be a vanity publisher saying they were looking for submissions of travel memoirs. I dismissed it initially because I wasn't writing one of those. However, when we began unpacking our belongings from Australia, which arrived early, I found my Australian journals and the work I had completed on Glass Half Full. Then the seemingly crazy idea occurred to me: Could I make a travel memoir out of these rambling journals, notes and photographs? The vanity publisher wanted the first three chapters as the initial submission, so with nothing to pay to submit, I formatted them as they described and emailed them.

After having read many times on forums that many publishers do not acknowledge or respond to submissions I put the idea of the travel memoir to one side and in my writing time on location in a renovation project I continued to work on my romance novel. Imagine my surprise when, less than a month later, I received an email to say they would like to review the whole manuscript. At this stage I was still unaware that this was a vanity publisher. Fortunately because I had started to make a network of Authonomy friends on Facebook I discussed the offer to send the manuscript in on the Authonomy blog and in a Facebook group. I quickly learned that there would be costs attached and as we had no spare money for my writing I quickly dismissed the opportunity to submit the whole manuscript. However, just talking about the travel memoir project with my peers and knowing that I had three chapters formatted and ready to go inspired me to develop my travel memoir further. The more I read and reviewed other peoples work on Authonomy the more confidence I had in my own work. In Spring 2013 I loaded the first five chapters of Glass Half Full on Authonomy and waited anxiously for feedback from my new found peer group.