Wishes can come true...
The day I found out my first novel was going to be published was a very special and some would say 'magical' day.
This is taken from an entry in my blog
Saturday, 5 September 2009
This is the entry I’ve been dying to write since I started blogging. Yes I’ve finally done it - I’m going to be a published author!
My novel From Notting Hill with Love...actually. will be published by Sphere in winter 2010 and I’m thrilled to bits!
Now if you’re the sort of person that doesn’t believe in fate, the universe and all things mystic then stop reading now, because I’m about to tell you all about the rather weird things that happened on the run up to me finding out this wonderful news, & even what happened on that fateful day itself...
You remember how everyone was talking about the Perseid meteor showers last August and going out into their gardens at night to watch for them? Well unfortunately my family saw nothing in our garden. However, in the week afterwards and just before my momentous news, me, my husband and my two children all saw lots of shooting stars over our garden at night. And amongst all the other things we’d all wished for individually, getting my book published was the one thing we all wanted more than anything...
On the day when the news came through, I wasn’t really expecting to hear anything. My novel had been to an acquisitions meeting the previous afternoon at the publishing house and I had been warned it would probably be a few days until I had any news. As you can imagine I couldn’t really settle down to do anything because this was playing on my mind all the time, I'd lived with this book for almost three years, and this was the closest I'd ever come to getting it published, so I thought I’d put a DVD on to pass some time. Now I was probably punishing myself with this choice – especially if the news from the publisher had been bad, but I choose Notting Hill. Notting Hill is such an important part of my novel (you’ll see why when you read it – wow I can actually say that now!) that for a while it would give me mixed emotions when I watched it. Desperation, when I wondered if anyone would ever love my novel as much as I did, would then turn into a determined hope, when I just knew that one day someone would.
Anyway, on this particular day the film was just ending and was in the final scene - the press conference when Hugh Grant asks Julia Roberts the question about staying in England, and my phone rang...
I swear I’m not making this up when I tell you it was my agent, Hannah, and as she told me the good news (just as well it was good or I may never have been able to watch that movie again!) and she was talking, and I was trying to take it all in, pinching myself that this wasn’t all a dream, I could hear the strains of ‘She’ by Elvis Costello playing in the lounge as the final credits began to roll up the screen on the TV. It could have been a scene from my book it was all so perfectly timed!
So next time you see a shooting star be careful what you a wish for, because you just never know if it might come true...
Me with my husband, Jim before we went out to celebrate
& with my children Rosie & Tom
