2021
The Idea

Like Daphne du Maurier before me, I was inspired to write a psychological thriller after seeing a house on the banks of the Helford River here in Cornwall. (Unlike Daphne du Maurier, I was trying not to fall off my paddleboard.)

2022
Study Mode

Though I’d always been a writer in some form, I had no clue how to write a novel, so I spent a year in study mode (my favorite mode), learning as much as I could about the craft and listening to hundreds of hours of writing and publishing industry podcasts.

2023
The Moment of Truth

But could I actually write fiction? It was time to find out!

After a busy year of writing, during which I almost gave up on my thriller and started a Shakespeare-themed cozy crime novel (I blame Richard Osman), I was finally ready to query literary agents with my modern Cornish gothic.

Or so I thought. Within a few weeks, I got six full requests and lots of encouraging feedback, but no offers of representation.

The common advice is to keep querying, but my gut told me to stop and regroup. After all, getting an agent is only the beginning; they then have to turn around and sell your manuscript to a publisher.

My writer friends consoled me with the knowledge that most published authors have at least one “drawer novel” that has never seen the light of day.

2024
Back to the Drawing Board

But I wasn’t ready to give up on it. My Christmas gift to myself at the end of 2023 was a course with The Novelry. I was determined to fix whatever wasn’t working in my novel.

Then life got in the way, and I put off my project for several months.

By the time I was ready to return to it, AI-written novels were popping up everywhere, and I decided publishing was no longer for me. They say it’s never too late to write a novel, but I seemed to have chosen the exact worst time in human history to do so.

Several more months passed. I tried not to think about my novel, but it lingered at the edges of my consciousness like a sullen ghost. And, irritatingly, more ideas kept coming to me, for which I felt compelled to write entire synopses at three in the morning. One of them in particular started to consume more and more of my thoughts. This stupid writing thing wasn’t going to leave me alone, was it?

2025
The New Idea

I resumed my Novelry course and booked a coaching session with thriller author Clare Mackintosh, whose breakout debut, I Let You Go, sold over a million copies. I sent her both synopses and asked her which one she thought I should work on; she didn’t hesitate: the new idea.

So, in January 2025, I began writing novel #2, a psychological thriller set in a small town in Massachusetts about two women, a dead teenager, and a viral true crime podcast.

2026
The Next Chapter

19 months and 900 laptop hours later, I found out my manuscript had qualified for The Novelry’s agent submissions service, which is by invitation only.

It was something I hoped would happen, of course. Some days I felt certain it would. Most days, I knew it probably wouldn’t, but I kept going anyway, because I just wanted this novel to exist. I wanted Meg, Chrissy, and Amber to exist. And now they do. As Raymond Carver would say, everything else is gravy.

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