So… this happened: Thriller Seekers Strike Big Deals
I started this blog in July 2011 with an entry
about picking up writing again after nearly a decade of trying to achieve some
sort of music career. I was cautious, planning nothing more than an experiment.
I'd learned my lesson: dream big, burn hard. I just wanted to know if I could
write and finish a novel. Could I bring myself to submit anything I wrote?
Could I get some short stories published, or at least get some positive
feedback that might enable me to better my writing? Full disclosure: I'd also just
met my future wife, a librarian and English graduate, and perhaps this was an
attempt to impress her—the nerd version of popping a wheelie. I never thought
too much about where it would take me, it was really just an excuse to re-immerse
myself in the world of books and literature, a place I'd always found safe and
comforting. 
I was a weird child, often spending hours in front of my
bookcase just gazing at the spines of my books, perhaps hoping that somehow
their contents would just osmose into my brain if I stared hard enough. So many
of my strongest childhood memories involve books, and Stephen King's characters
practically walked me through adolescence. Ever since getting the news two
weeks ago that a real, actual publisher wanted to buy my novel, these thoughts and
memories have been looping in my head—probably because my brain has overloaded
with disbelief and is now in safe mode.
I was on my annual holiday in the Canaries with my dad when
I found out. We were in a restaurant and it was late, so my guard was down. I
knew we were on submission, but I'd asked my agent Joanna to save any bad news
for when I was home and to only text me if we had good news. I'd planned for rejection,
because after nearly six years of writing and submitting I'd learned that
about 90-95% of the time things end that way. I was texting home when I saw
Joanna's name appear at the top of the phone alerting me to her message, and
immediately I knew things were about to change. More than one publisher was
interested in the book, I found out the next week. I did get a bit emotional
then. It didn't take long to conclude the deal, although it felt like a lifetime.
Once I'd spoken to Sphere, an imprint of Little, Brown, I knew it was really
going to happen. My book was going to meet the world.
I've been sending a lot of emails and making a lot of phone
calls. There are many people I'm going to thank over the coming weeks and
months, but I wouldn't have persisted with writing if it hadn't been for my
wife. Not only did I probably start all this to try and impress her, but she
has read everything I've ever written, and patiently explained to me time and
time again where and where not to use question marks. (It's harder than it
sounds if you're from the West Midlands, where everything is a question.) I
also am incredibly lucky to have found my agent, Joanna Swainson, who believed
in this book from about 20 minutes after I sent it to her and is bloody
brilliant.
For every short story I've had published, I've also had
hundreds of rejections. And before this novel, there were others that never saw
the light of day. It was difficult often, but never more than it was fun, and
now it really feels like the apprenticeship I always told myself it was. When I
look back at that first blog, which ends with "the adventure starts
here", I think that adventure has just ended. A new one is starting, and I
am so glad that it will be with this novel. It's the novel I'd always been
trying to write, always wanted to write; the one where I found my voice. It's
about love and friendship and murder, and about our relationships with our younger
selves; it's about music and films and podcasts, about growing up in a country
village and trying to relieve the boredom. It's got some philosophy in it too,
and stuff about how great and how dangerous nostalgia can be.
But don't worry about any of that for now, what you need to know is this: some old friends, the sort most of us had growing up, are going to meet up for a reunion as adults. They're going to start talking about the strange kid they all knew, the one who joked he'd be a serial killer when he was older. How funny, ha, ha, ha, what a character he was. Only then they are going to go online, put in the details they collectively remember about what he said he'd do and where. And what they find won't be a joke; it'll make them doubt everything they thought they knew, and drag them from the safety of their present lives into their dangerous shared past.
But don't worry about any of that for now, what you need to know is this: some old friends, the sort most of us had growing up, are going to meet up for a reunion as adults. They're going to start talking about the strange kid they all knew, the one who joked he'd be a serial killer when he was older. How funny, ha, ha, ha, what a character he was. Only then they are going to go online, put in the details they collectively remember about what he said he'd do and where. And what they find won't be a joke; it'll make them doubt everything they thought they knew, and drag them from the safety of their present lives into their dangerous shared past.