A number of years ago I was walking around outside Old Spitalfields market in London when I came across a plaque in a square. I stopped to read it, and something shifted in me the way that it does when I know something important has happened. The plaque read that in this place a few centuries previously, ‘wife-sellings’ took place, and the important thing that happened? A seed was planted in my bones right at the moment for a new novel.

Fast forward a global pandemic and hours, weeks and months of crafting a new novel. This was the first book set on my native soil and went back to an earlier time period than I had based a story in so far. It charts the journey of a young girl with a deep connection to nature in 1830s rural Norfolk who sets out to educate herself amongst intense rural poverty, industrialisation and rampant superstition. The wife- selling, ultimately, is a small part of the story but nevertheless, this was the starting point for me, sparking a curiosity of how and why such a horror could have taken place.

As with each new novel, I started sending it out filled with optimism; after all, I believed in this book. The rejections slowly started rolling in, as they do: this is part and parcel of a writer’s life. Some agents requested the full manuscript which always filled me with hope. I remember one agent coming back and saying I loved it, but I didn’t love it enough. And there was another publisher who told me that all three directors had to fall in love with it, and only two of the three did. Just before Christmas of 2022, I received the news that every aspiring author longs for: an agent wanted to take me on. I remember crying tears of joy, because the truth is I had been waiting for this for around 15 years. I felt like I really, truly deserved this.

But then the following year, this agent retired and that was it. It’s impossible to describe the crushing blow this was for me and at that point, I decided to put this manuscript away and work on the next book. That one took a year to write (it’s called Elemental – more of that in another blog) and once completed, I decided to give Rosie Crow a final airing before relegating it for evermore to the bottom drawer. A small publishing house asked for the full manuscript, but then I heard nothing. I waited, and waited, and waited. And just before Christmas, two years after I got an agent for this book and one year after I lost him, I heard back from the publisher with these words: I want to publish Rose Crow.

Yes. Thank you universe. Finally. Finally.

Over the weekend we celebrated my husband’s 50th birthday and at his party one of his old friends asked me why and how I could keep putting myself through this. 83 rejections for The Poet’s Wife (my first novel which consistently sells the best) and 60 for The River Days of Rosie Crow. Hours, weeks, months and years of hustling and sending my words out into the world. And those words very often being batted back at me. I don’t think I gave him a very good answer that night, but this is my answer to him now and to anyone else who also wants to know:

I can’t not write. It hasn’t been a career for me in a financial sense, because I only get pocket money from it. (According to a study carried out by the University of Glasgow in 2018, average yearly author earnings were £10,497 and no doubt have dropped since then. Just let that sink in for a moment). Yet the root of the word career comes from a French word from the 1530s, carriere, which means road or racecourse. And yes, this has been my road ever since I was a young child forming her letters in a notebook and realising how these markings on paper made me feel powerful and whole.

And I keep going because I believe I can write. Stories, surely, are not stories if we keep them to ourselves, and I have stories aplenty to tell. Sometimes they do feel like that racecourse from the origin of that word, career, in that I can’t get them out fast enough. They clamour in my head, fighting for space, calling Tell me next! No, my turn! And then there’s that amazing (and occasionally disquieting) moment when your characters start speaking to you, telling you what they think and believe and want to do. Yes, it really does happen.

So that is a much longer answer to why I don’t give up. Why I can’t give up.

Stairwell Books will publish The River Days of Rosie Crow towards the end of this brave new year. Read more about Stairwell here. My most recent novel is called Elemental – A Novel of Courage in Verse, and now I need to begin the journey once again of sending it out there, being rejected, not giving up. We’ve all heard the stories about those authors the big publishing houses fight over and vast figures being waved in front of noses followed by film, play and TV rights. But believe you me, to say this is the minority would be a vast understatement. I think I know a thing or two about perseverance, so I’ll keep going for as long as it takes for someone to believe in me and my words.

Thank you for reading this blog. Compliment it with a post I wrote ten years ago when The Poet’s Wife was finally accepted, reflecting on rejection & the curious no-man’s land of waiting to hear back.

ps The photo in the header is of Marsham Heath – Rosie Crow lives on the edge of this beautiful heathland in North Norfolk.

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