I’ve been writing since I was a teenager and l used to eat books. Becoming a published writer was my dream and writing was a central part of my life. In my twenties I was running a monthly gathering where writers came together to share their texts. I always imagined myself doing the same and I spent most of my twenties writing a novel that would launch me on that path. When I finally submitted it, I checked my mailbox several times a day. Two months later I received an envelope with a three page consultant statement. It was rejected.

I read those pages 10 to 15 times the following week and then I put them away. How could I spend all that time working on something and all I got back was three pages? I would never be a writer, forget it. I gave up on it. I stopped writing, I lost the will. It reminded me of failure. I had young kids so I kept myself busy with domestic life. Slowly retracting from the literary scene and the event I had been running. They were all writers, I was not, I didn’t qualify. 

It took twelve years before I touched a pen again. The joy of writing seeped back into me and I started writing a short story that over a couple of years turned out to be a novel. It was now a long time since my first rejection, but I remembered it well and I had no intention of putting so much work into something that would be rejected again. So when I was halfway through writing it, I sent it off to a friend that ran a small publishing house. I asked her if it was worth continuing and she said “write it”. Still it took me a long time, the closer I got to completing it, the more I thought of the rejection. The last period was agony but I did it.

Twenty years after my rejection my first novel came out. I surprised myself and my friends by writing a well selling crime novel. Part of me would have liked my debut book to have been a weird, narrow novel that sold only forty copies and got amazing reviews. But I know my publisher is happy it isn’t a book like that.