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.After all the depressing publishing news of the last few weeks, here's a story to warm the cockles of your heart and provide the wannabes among you with the inspiration necessary to keep going.
Stuart Neville, a writer from Northern Ireland, describes on his website how he got discovered by a new York literary agent, and signed up for a major book deal. [via Reading Copy].
His first novel, The Twelve, a crime thriller set in Belfast, will be published in the UK and the USA and translated into Japanese, French and Spanish. It has won praise from best-selling Irish author, John Connolly who calls it :
... not only one of the finest thriller debuts of the last ten years, but also one of the best Irish novels, in any genre, of recent times.Let's wish the author all the best.
