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A writer's journey.
Jul. 6th, 2006 09:42 amThe paperback of my first novel about William Marshal - The Greatest Knight - was published on Monday. I don't know how it's doing in the shops yet so I'm still biting my nails, but it is receiving strong promotional backing with shopping mall posters throughout the south of England and with all major booksellers taking copies. Indeed, I'm biting my nails as much for William as I am myself. Over the past couple of years, as I have researched his life, he has become family.
It has been a long, long haul to get this far and there is still all to play for and all to lose. I think it was Joanna Trollope who said that it took her ten years to become an overnight success. There is so much truth in this. I decided I wanted to write historical fiction as a specific genre when I was 15. I'd been telling myself stories since earliest memories (usually about the Lone Ranger and Champion The Wonder Horse) but I was in my teens before the verbal became the written. I was 32 before I finally managed to wedge open an agent's door, so that's 17 years in the wilderness. Fifteen published novels later I am still here, but it's been a rocky road.
When I was first published at 32, I was good enough for that to happen - no false modesty, but I still had a huge amount of developing to do, both in technical terms as a writer and in how much I knew about the medieval period. Both are still very much ongoing, but I do know I've moved up a few gears since The Wild Hunt was published in 1990. I almost lost my employment as a writer in the mid 1990's when historical fiction went pear-shaped and the Maxwell publishing empire collapsed. I had to start again from scratch and it has been a long, slow build. Fortunately my publishers have stuck with me. Nominations for major UK awards and a small but perceptible increase in the core reader base with each novel helped them and me to believe that I had a future. That was finally borne out when they changed the cover design on the paperback of Shadows And Strongholds last year and it went bestseller - actually getting a decent listing in the UK charts instead of lurking along the bottom. So now The Greatest Knight has a launch pad and I am waiting to see what happens. As I said above, I am more nervous for William Marshal than I am for myself. He so deserves to be known about, and so few people are aware of his existence. However, thanks to his burial in the Temple Church in London and courtesy of the Da Vinci Code, he is in hoards of photo albums round the world, so I suppose that's some kind of fame!
Elizabeth C
It has been a long, long haul to get this far and there is still all to play for and all to lose. I think it was Joanna Trollope who said that it took her ten years to become an overnight success. There is so much truth in this. I decided I wanted to write historical fiction as a specific genre when I was 15. I'd been telling myself stories since earliest memories (usually about the Lone Ranger and Champion The Wonder Horse) but I was in my teens before the verbal became the written. I was 32 before I finally managed to wedge open an agent's door, so that's 17 years in the wilderness. Fifteen published novels later I am still here, but it's been a rocky road.
When I was first published at 32, I was good enough for that to happen - no false modesty, but I still had a huge amount of developing to do, both in technical terms as a writer and in how much I knew about the medieval period. Both are still very much ongoing, but I do know I've moved up a few gears since The Wild Hunt was published in 1990. I almost lost my employment as a writer in the mid 1990's when historical fiction went pear-shaped and the Maxwell publishing empire collapsed. I had to start again from scratch and it has been a long, slow build. Fortunately my publishers have stuck with me. Nominations for major UK awards and a small but perceptible increase in the core reader base with each novel helped them and me to believe that I had a future. That was finally borne out when they changed the cover design on the paperback of Shadows And Strongholds last year and it went bestseller - actually getting a decent listing in the UK charts instead of lurking along the bottom. So now The Greatest Knight has a launch pad and I am waiting to see what happens. As I said above, I am more nervous for William Marshal than I am for myself. He so deserves to be known about, and so few people are aware of his existence. However, thanks to his burial in the Temple Church in London and courtesy of the Da Vinci Code, he is in hoards of photo albums round the world, so I suppose that's some kind of fame!
Elizabeth C