First Book Sale - What Success Feels Like
by Josephine Pennicott
After writing for years, Josephine Pennicott finally sold her first novel. Well… actually, she got a three-book contract!
Here, she tells you how it happened… and what it feels like. When Writing For Success first asked me to write a short article on what success feels like, my initial response to that question was "bloody hard work!". In my office at that time, I had my first manuscript, Circle of Nine on the floor covered in the editor's post it notes for me to review. I was hard at work on Bride of the Stone, the second book in the series of the Circle of Nine. There were a few short stories that were just itching to be born kicking inside me--and did I mention my day job; my Diploma course in Aromatherapy and the anatomy exam that I was due to sit in a week and hadn't studied for?
Success is an inner smile
Okay, I am whinging. The truth of course is, that success feels so magic, so life affirming, that no matter how much the work piles up, you just have a secret little inner smile. No matter how dreary, or stressful life can get at times, I still have that little inner smile now. That sense of purpose. That for once, life is unfolding in the right direction, but it wasn't always like that for me...
The Day "The Message" Came I listened with dread to the message on the answering machine. "This is Selwa. Please call me when you get a chance." I began analyzing her every inflection, her tone, her pauses with an intensity that would have done an FBI profiler proud. Goddammit! She didn't sound happy, she didn't sound like an agent phoning her client with good news. The last couple of months had been a blur as I had waited to hear if Simon & Schuster were interested in buying the trilogy of fantasy stories that I had written.
Now with that short message, my hopes went crashing to the ground. It was all over for me before it had begun. All my niggling fears that I was going to prove to be Selwa Anthony's biggest failure rose to the surface. I spent the next ten minutes pacing the floor. Phone her! I can't! Phone her! I can't! I don't want to hear bad news! The inner dialogue continued, until even I tired of the drama. Finally I dialled her number and attempted a feeble nonchalant air, as if my books being rejected didn't matter a damn. I was an artiste!
Published? Who cares about publishing when you can simply create! "Hi Sweetie," Selwa said. (I'm paraphrasing because the emotion of the moment has diluted the memory.) "I've just returned from a meeting at Simon & Schuster, and they have made a three book offer for Circle of Nine!" Silence. Then: "Oh my god!" Tears were very near as I repeated those three words for about five minutes. Great. Selwa Anthony was on the other end of my phone giving me this momentous news, and all I could do was screech like a contestant on Changing Rooms. I could feel her smiling... explaining details to do with the contract. Fireworks were going off inside me. Feebly, I attempted a speech of thanks. Useless. There are some emotions that don't translate easily into words.
My Characters Celebrate Too…
I put the phone down and began jumping up and down like a kangaroo in a fit. Unbelievable! I could feel the characters from my book jumping beside me. (Did I mention that I need to get out more? Writing does tend to make you hermit- like, and characters tend to replace friends.) There we were, all jumping. Khartyn the Crone, Rosedark the maiden, and Emma. The four of us were holding hands and jumping up and down. "We're going to be published! We're going to be published!" we screamed at each other.
My Writer's Journey
When I was younger, my dream was to be a writer. With my glass of lemonade, I would sit before the manual typewriter that my father had bought for me, ignoring other playmates. I would lose myself in an imaginative world. My teachers at school used to joke that they should call the school magazine the 'Jo Pennicott magazine', as so many of my stories and articles were featured. One day I found how powerful words could be. I used to make up little stories in typing class to amuse the other girls.
My typing teacher confiscated a short story I had written about a coven of witches who used aborted babies as one of their ingredients . She accused me of being mentally 'not all there' to come up with such a disgusting story. When my father heard of this, he went to her house to protest her choice of words. (We lived in a small country town, and they were neighbours.) My typing teacher's husband biffed him in the nose for his defence of me. I realised then how words could inflame people's passions and change people's perceptions of you.
One of Life's Detours
Sadly, life has a frustrating habit of detouring us from our dreams, and shortly after leaving school, I trained to become a nurse, which left me very little time for creative pursuits. After ten years of nursing, mainly geriatrics and pyscho-geriatrics, I was frustrated and unhappy. Nursing had brought me many gifts, but I felt as if my inner being was starving. I was burnt out and depressed. My hands shook with eczema.
Acting? Painting? I took a couple of years off and studied acting, but although I loved the creative interaction, I still wasn't totally fufilled. I then went to art school and did my Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in painting, where I very quickly earned the sarcasm of my painting lecturers due to the fact I found myself totally incapable of doing the house style of tasteful muted abstracts. I liked colourful fantasy, folk paintings filled with weird and wonderful characters, many of which later made their way into the Circle of Nine trilogy. The Headhunters, the Crones, the Dreamers in the Shell. I had travelled to Europe, the Philippines, India, countries where the miraculous was part of the everyday. I didn't realize it at the time, but all of these experiences were to become part of my art.
And Back To Writing…
It was during my last year at art school that I enrolled in an elective class with Jennifer Kremmer, who was a Vogel award winner for her novel Pegasus in the Suburbs. Those classes with Jennifer stimulated me in a way that my hours spent in the painting studio had not. I hadn't totally given up on my writing. I had written a romance novel called The Hand of Destiny, which had been rejected, but with a very encouraging letter.
After leaving art school, I was finding the act of painting physically draining. I had been involved in a serious car accident, which left me with a pin and plate in my right arm, and a back injury. I found it so much easier to sit down at a computer, and paint in words. No canvases to be strapped! No juggling turps and oils! Just me and the images that were coming into my mind.
"Write What You Like To Read"
I was reading a lot of fantasy at the time, in particular works by lyric writers such as Tanith Lee, and Storm Constantine, and I figured that it would make more sense to write in a genre that I enjoyed reading, and so I threw in all the elements that I was interested in. Mythology, fairy tales, the Supernatural, Witchcraft, fallen angels, stone circles. Circle of Nine was the result. I really loved writing Circle of Nine. It was enormous fun to invent my different worlds of Eronth, Zeglanada, and the Web-Kondoell. Working on it was a joy, and so it was a blow when the first agent I sent it off to rejected it.
Steeling myself, and reminding myself that even Harry Potter (gasp) had been rejected by agents, I sent it to another agent. This time it was returned with a note saying that the agent was no longer taking fantasy. Undeterred, I sent it to a third agent, who this time didn't bother to return it. Now I really did feel rejected. "Try again," my partner urged, but I felt that I needed a break before I could handle another possible rejection. I continued to paint on the side and do extra work, which I had begun at art school. But I was finding the extra work more and more soul deadening. The main highlight of my "career" was going to the same toilet as Kate Winslett.
The Bleakest Moment
The lowest point was on All Saints when I had to play a dead body in a climactic bomb blast to the season. I had fake blood painted all over me and through my hair, and I had to lie on the floor for hours whilst they dumped bags of dirt over me, and the actors performed over the top of me.
Being a Mole
Then I saw an ad for ten people for a game show. (There was no such term as reality TV back then.) Thinking that I could get some valuable camera experience, so I could graduate from playing dead bodies and perhaps win the promised jackpot of $200,000, I applied. It was maddening when I was cast as one of the ten, but the Producers refused to divulge exactly what the show was about. I remember being very suspicious that it could be a Japanese torture show, then an even worse thought-- Oh God, what if I have to jump out of a plane? The Producers hastily assured me that no, this show was more psychological, as so I signed up. The show was The Mole, which won the Logie in 2001 for best reality show and for those who watched it, yes I did have to jump out of a plane.
After the show had wrapped, the urge to write was stronger than ever. I enrolled in the Australian College of Journalism's crime writing course. This time I tried my hand at a different genre, for I also enjoyed reading crime and psychological thrillers. As my project for the course, I began a thriller based on my experiences on The Mole called Rat Trap.
The book was really a purge of my experiences in the bizarre world of reality television. I was dumbfounded to receive a message on my answering machine from my writing tutor saying that she had contacted a major publishing company about my work and that they were interested in meeting me for lunch. It all seemed too good to be true, and I was dreading getting my hopes dashed. The lunch went well and the publishing company requested my fantasy book as well. I had some extra good news when a short crime story I had written called Bait was shortlisted for the Scarlet Stiletto Awards. I flew to Melbourne for the award ceremony and was honoured to be the runner up.
To me it was the affirmation that I was on the right path. I was fortunate to acquire Selwa Anthony to represent me as my agent--and she has certainly lived up to her glowing reputation. She looked at both my crime and fantasy manuscripts, and wanted immediately to go with the fantasy. As usual, her instincts were correct. I did have more fun writing the fantasy. In the Speculative Fiction genre you have total freedom. You can write as lyrically as you desire, be as inventive and crazy as you like. It is also very much in line with my interests in mythology and fairytales and alternative religions...
Success--It's Wonderful
So success really does feel indescribably wonderful. Every day I give thanks that I am a part of Selwa's stable of authors and that I am being published by Simon & Schuster and have a three book contract. The best advice that I can give struggling authors out there is far from original but it is true. Persevere. Persevere. Persevere. Never give up on your dream.
Keep reading widely. Study your craft. Write daily and believe that the impossible can happen. For it can. After all, for a girl like me who spent a large part of her working day lying in dirt with bags of dust and blood being dumped upon her… there was only one place to go in life - and that was up.
© Josephine Pennicott Fantasy author of Circle of Nine, Bride of the Stone (to be published in 2002) and A Fire in the Shell (to be published in 2003.) You can visit Josephine's website at www.josephinepennicott.com
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Ann Harth
