Out of My Mind

So I've decided to give this blogging thing a go. I know millions of people have been doing it for years, but as a self-confessed hermit who only joined Twitter last year and doesn't even have a facebook account, this is a big step into the outside (or digital) world for me!

For my first blog I wanted to share my experiences as a writer until now. Brace yourselves for an edge of your seat, action packed adventure...or a slow, meandering non-event as the case may be. For all the success stories out there and writers who seem to churn out new material every month, I'm sure there are just as many stop-starters like me whose writing has remained in the closet and who dream of one day being among the published glitterati.

I started writing at the age of ten after being inspired by that great literary canon, the Sweet Valley series by Francine Pascal. Rarified my tastes in fiction is not, nor ever been, but something about a candy sweet twins high school story got my creative juices flowing. I started writing what was essentially fanfiction in a spare exercise book at school and before I knew it I had filled it. So I began on the next book.

 What I wrote was sheer nonsense, derivative and awful, but creating something had filled me with a sense of purpose I had previously lacked. I was a shy, awkward and unpopular child with only one friend at the time, and what I found in writing was not only an escape from the frustrations and disappointments of reality, but also a sense of self worth. I had a secret hobby, and no matter how people treated me, no one could touch that.

By the time I was eighteen, I had finished a novel of 90,000 words. Never being confident and having shared my writing with few people, I gingerly sent my manuscript to publishers and awaited their response.

Of course, I didn't succeed, because what I had written was total crap. With few life experiences and little knowledge of the writing craft beyond what I had absorbed from regular reading, I had crafted a sloppy, shallow parody of my favourite fiction. I'm grateful that the novel wasn't immortalised by the publishing industry, but the rejection did affect my writing.

So began the ten year journey that lead me here. I started learning my craft, studying texts on writing techniques as well as reading fiction with a more critical eye. At university I took creative writing classes, and I began redesigning my original novel. But I never finished it.

Years went by, my tastes in fiction evolved, my life took me from a small Hertfordshire town to Birmingham, from a student to a wife to a mother, and all the while I kept those characters in my head. They evolved with me, the themes at the core of the story remaining the same while all details of the fantasy world it was set in shifted and mutated.


 When I started writing that book, always intended as the first of a trilogy, I called the genre fantasy horror, modelled on tv series like Buffy and Angel. There was no such thing as urban fantasy then.

Now the market is flooded with this nifty genre that inhabits the spaces between fantasy, horror, action and  adventure. And last year, I finished my novel. Again.

Naively, I believed I could send it to agents unedited and planned to edit it within a couple of days if the agents had any interest. I failed to consider one thing, however, and that is word count. My novel totalled 190,000 words, and it wasn't until after I sent my queries to agents that I researched standard word lengths and realised that my novel was almost double the usual length for first time authors.

Aggrieved as this fact made me, indeed my queries were met with unified rejection, and I can only hope that the reason was the length of my novel. Of course, maybe the book is still just a load of crap. But it's the word count problem I cling to, so I vowed to edit the manuscript down to 110,000 words and try again.

This was last autumn. Predictably, despite hoping word count was the only issue, the rejection still hit me harder than I wanted to admit. I felt defeated, sure I would never be traditionally published, and began investigating the self publishing industry.

In indie publishing, I think I may have found my salvation. I have always kept my writing to myself, not having anyone to share it with let alone a proper 'beta reader'. But the thought of my writing never being read always bothered me, and with self publishing it seemed I had found an answer.

So I took a leap of faith and joined Twitter. I became part of the online writer community, or so I like to think. But there was one thing missing: An actual book.

Fast forward a few months and I am trying again to cut down that book, edit it into shape, and get it out there. Because I think I might have a story some people might like to read. And that's as confident as I can be on the matter for now.

So my message to anyone reading this is one of perseverance: If becoming an author if your dream, then never give up. It's bloody hard, and it can be overwhelming, but you are not alone.


Don't let all those prolific authors daunt you. There are just as many quiet writers with their secret stories, and that's ok. For me, it's time to try to get the stories out of my head and into the world.

If you liked this post, why not follow me on Twitter @H_Y_Malyk