The Story So Far: How I Got Published

I began writing seriously in August 2006. I'd wanted to write ever since I was a kid, and was always an avid reader. I had a few goes over the years, the first time at the age of eight, then again as a teenager, and made a few more attempts over the following decade or so. But in 2006 I realised now was the time to do it for real.

So I did.

The first effort was less than spectacular, and I was disheartened. Before giving up for good, in early 2007 I decided to write a short story I'd had in my head since I was a teenager. It was a fictionalised account of the life and death of blues legend Robert Johnson, and I called it ME AND THE DEVIL BLUES, after one of his most famous songs. I posted that story to an online critique group where it got an excellent reception. One of the readers was Betsy Dornbusch, an editor at Electric Spec, and an accomplished writer. She liked the story so much she offered to buy it.

That encouragement was enough to keep me writing, and in the following weeks I churned out a series of short pieces. One of them was FOLLOWERS, a story about a former killer haunted by his victims, inspired by an image I'd woken up with one morning: a man drinking in a bar, surrounded by the ghosts of all the people he'd murdered. Again, I posted it to an online critique group where it got a lot of praise.

Over the next month or so, that story kept nagging me. I wanted to see what happened next to its protagonist. I started writing, and about ten weeks later, I had the first draft of a novel I named after the short story that inspired it. Over the previous few months I had become friends with Betsy Dornbusch and another writer named Shona Snowden. Both kindly critiqued the novel for me, and so began about six months of revisions.

2008 started well for me as a writer, and went on to become the most extraordinary year of my life. After months of rewriting, I wanted to revisit that novel's protagonist. I wrote a short story called THE LAST DANCE one Sunday afternoon around Christmas 2007. Almost on a whim, I submitted it to ThugLit, the online crime zine. To my delight, I received an email on my birthday, 25th of January, telling me the story had been accepted and would appear in the February edition.

On March 10th I was working late at my office when I received an email from literary agent Nat Sobel. He had read THE LAST DANCE in February's ThugLit, and he asked if he could take a look at the novel mentioned in my bio. He casually rattled off a few of his clients, including James Ellroy, Joseph Wambaugh and Richard Russo. After I picked myself up off the floor, I sent the novel off, fully expecting a "Thanks, but no thanks."

To my ongoing shock and delight, Nat offered to take me on just a few days later. Some months on, I have publishing deals in the USA, UK and Japan. FOLLOWERS is now titled THE TWELVE in the UK, and THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST in the USA, and has won praise from some of the biggest authors in the business.

If there's a lesson to all this, it's that there are as many paths to publication as there are published writers. Everyone who has managed to reach the summit all writers aspire to can tell a different story of how they made the ascent. For me, it started with the encouragement of a friend when I was ready to give up, and ended with a chance encounter on a crime fiction website. And that's the final lesson for anyone who writes: don't give up. Life can turn on a pinhead, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, but you never know when that twist is coming.