97% of People Want to Write A Book? Do You?

Also - Writing Home Challengers: Show Me Your Writing!

That 97% statistic, thrown at me in cruelty towards the end of my first marriage, was the start of my career as a novelist. After at least three false starts (the first when I was nineteen), it made me angry enough to start writing another novel, and this time, I finished it.

A new subscriber (hello CJ!) kindly asked me the name of that novel so they could buy it. But that novel didn’t get published. Or the next one. Or the one after that.

I was a bit gutted after the rejection of Completed Novel 3, so I left it for a few years while I concentrated on poetry. There was arts funding in the UK at the time, and I completed several public arts projects alongside dead-end jobs and social security benefits to top up the shortfall.

But it pays to have grit.

In 2005, I asked the universe for a Big Idea. The universe complied. The fourth novel, completed in 2011 as part of a PhD (for which I was, miraculously, funded), finally booted the door down.