Achievement Unlocked!

Reader 🙂 In 2016 I started this blog, mostly for myself, to document my journey towards publication as a writer. The blog has chronicled two separate manuscripts that I’ve worked on, always getting closer to the ultimate goal. Well, there’s been a change in circumstances…

I’m now an agented writer! It has happened!

On Christmas Eve 2021 I started writing a new middle grade manuscript. The idea was to go into 2022 with routine – disciplined rather than starting with some New Years resolution destined to fail. It worked. My goal was to finish the manuscript and be ready to submit to agents by winter 2022.

In April I entered a Twitter pitch event on a whim, just to put the feelers out there for my new manuscript. You shouldn’t really enter until you have a finished story, but it felt like too good an opportunity to pass up. My writing progress month by month was pretty rapid so I felt confident that I could finish writing and redrafting within six months. I just hoped I wouldn’t annoy any potentially interested agents by doing so!

Anyway, this was my elevator pitch… and I had interest from an agent who had launched the careers of brilliant new writers!

It was game on! I now needed to get a wiggle on. By the end of July I had finished my first draft. And after a month’s rest in August, I came back to redraft and proof in September, sending to this, my first choice agent, in October.

November had already started really well for me, in an exciting new job where I hope to be a real change-maker. But November 7th will forever be a special day for me now – because after all of the rejection emails I’ve had to read for all these years, finally, I received the email I’d been longing to read.

That I’d dreamt about receiving.

An offer of representation.

And now, as incredible as it still feels to believe it, I’m on my way to seeing a lifelong ambition fulfilled. What a day it will be to hear that a publisher has acquired my story Shadow of the Orishas, and to know that it could become a very special book in a child’s memory. It has been a journey.

https://ashliterary.com/#ashleythorpe