This week we are welcoming one of my favourite authors, P...

This week we are welcoming one of my favourite authors, Paula Weston. Her Rephraim Sequence really captured my imagination and I have fallen in love with the characters in 'Shadows' and I am enjoying 'Haze' just as much, if not more.
Her personal story is such an interesting and inspirational one, so over to you Paula...


Paula Weston
Tears, red wine and letting go (aka my journey to being published)

Every published author has a story about his or her road to publication. I’m still not sure if my story is an inspiration or a deterrent, but here it is…
 I’m the author of the YA urban fantasy series, The Rephaim. The series was first signed by Text Publishing in my home country of Australia in 2011 and has since been picked up in the UK, US, and Canada.
At a glance, it all seems to have happened rather quickly. In reality, the journey to get to this point was a tad longer: it was 16 years from my first rejection letter to that contract with Text.
Over that decade and a half, I wrote six full-length manuscripts, two plays (which had performance seasons) and was short-listed in a national short story writing competition. For most of those years, I was submitting to publishers myself, riding that torturous rollercoaster known by its more civilised name: the submission process.
When I first started submitting my work in the mid-90s, it was all done by post. Responses could take months. The advent of email made the process quicker, but it turned out that a rejection email is just as soul destroying as a rejection letter.
 All writers familiar with the submission process know there are degrees of rejection: rejection based on a query letter, rejection based on sample chapters and – the big one – rejection based on a full manuscript. And the closer you get to the possibility of an offer, the harder it is to fall short.
 I must say, though, that my rejections steadily became more complimentary. I was being invited to send full manuscripts, and a couple of editors even gave me feedback. In several instances, they offered to read any future work I produced. All very encouraging. But I was still unpublished.
I’d already accepted that regardless of whether or not my work made it into print, I would always write. Because by then, my pattern was well established (familiar to many writers):
Have a great idea for a novel.Commit a year or so to writing, editing and honing that novel.
Commit six months to a year submitting to publishers and agents while continuing to edit and tweak.
Exhaust all options.
Fall in a heap. Doubt myself. Think about taking a break from writing.
Have a great idea (about two weeks after falling in a heap).
Starting writing again…
And then in 2008, a high profile agent in Australia decided to take me on. It felt like winning the lottery. My agent (Lyn Tranter) signed me on the basis of the fantasy series I was writing at the time and I’d already had some initial interest from a publisher. I thought it was only a matter of time before I finally had that elusive deal.  Two years later, I was still unsigned. We had come close on two occasions, but both opportunities ended the same: no offer of a deal. It helped having an agent because I wasn’t dealing with the frustration and disappointment alone, and Lyn believed in me. But it still didn’t stop the thoughts that always crept in at rejection time (around the same time as my second glass of red): Was I kidding myself about getting published? Through all this, I was working full-time while also building a freelance business. I was frequently exhausted. Maybe I needed to let go of the dream?
Ironically, it was the last rejection that led to me writing Shadows, the first book in the Rephaim series. (Because of course I didn’t let go of the dream.) I’ve always loved urban fantasy and paranormal stories, but it never crossed my mind to write one – particularly because I was so focused on more traditional fantasy. But I’d had an idea bouncing around in my head, which I’d kept shoving aside because I was working on the other series.  After an especially crushing rejection – and subsequent soul searching – I decided to play around with that urban fantasy idea. For fun. I wasn’t worried about getting published. I wasn’t worried about what anyone would think. I just let go and wrote for the hell of it. Perhaps not surprisingly, the characters flowed and scenes poured out. (It was only in hindsight that I understood just how much sub-conscious self-censorship had been going on with my earlier work.) Long story short, I wrote 50 pages that first weekend. When I reached 90 pages a few weeks later, I thought I’d better tell Lyn what I was up to. She liked those early pages, told me to go for it, and a year later I had a new manuscript that I loved and an outline for a four-book series. A few months after that (thanks to Lyn), I had an offer from Text Publishing. Needless to say, I was ecstatic!After all those years and all the frustration and disappointment it seemed to ‘just happen’. Text initially bought the rights to the first two books in the series. By the time Shadows was released, the publisher had also signed on for books 3 and 4 and on-sold the series to Orion/Indigo in the UK and Tundra Books in the US/Canada.This chapter of my journey doesn’t end with me showered with life-changing advances and instant commercial success. I’m now simply another writer in the marketplace hoping to find readers and build a long-term career as a published author. But, like so many writers before me - including those with the courage to self-publish - I’m grateful to have that opportunity. If I could go back in time and give myself advice, it would be simple:Write because you love it. Write what you want to write. Learn from rejection. It’s going to make you a better writer.And don’t give up – because you never know what ideas and opportunities are just around the corner. www.paula-weston.com

Thank you so much Paula...

See you all next week,

Jay