Dear Reader: this blog post is an edited version of the piece I wrote and read aloud in the Northern Soul Roadshow course this spring, hosted online by the Irish Writers Centre https://irishwriterscentre.ie and created by facilitator/writer/mentor Fiona O’Rourke https://twitter.com/fionamkorourke

My writing life really began watching a televised interview of novelist Sarah Waters in 2004. I had written fiction as a child, later tried, and failed as a 20-something, but Sarah Waters really got me going in middle age. Something she said struck me to the core (to paraphrase): I want to write what I want to read, and I thought, I want to do that! I began by writing steadily on the weekends and during vacations (I never found a successful and comfortable time to write during the work week), spending 4 years working on a novel that I completed and even shopped around. I had no idea what I was doing, both with the writing and the publishing end of things.

That first novel went into a virtual drawer, where it has remained (along with a few short stories), but the next novel was in my bones, so I began writing it. It took me more than 10 years to write and publish the novel in my bones, during which time I constantly rewrote and edited, and put it through the wringer of three professional editors.

During those 14 years I became a writer, though, and even learned to call myself a writer. I never joined a writing community during that time, I never found a good fit, and it was a very lonely pursuit. I cherish the communities that I have now: I’ve found my tribe.

When I started the novel in my bones, which is set in early to mid-20^th century Belfast and northern coastal Northern Ireland, I read a lot of books about writing, books and novels by writers who grew up in Northern Ireland in the early 20^th c., books about Northern Irish flora, fauna, and historical ordinance maps of Belfast. As you can guess, some of the 10 years was taken up with the joy of research, which while essential for historical fiction, can also be a distraction from the hard graft of writing the novel, especially if too much is done up front.

Later in the process, I began going to conferences and listened to talks about various aspects of writing and publishing. Early on in this process I attended a weekend workshop where I had to pitch my novel to an audience of 100 aspiring writers and the instructor. That experience helped set me on my path because the instructor, a writer/agent herself, said that she liked the pitch and could sell the book: “Ireland is always hot! Sisters are always hot!” Of course, she turned me down later when I submitted the novel to her, but hers was just one of 33 rejections.

However, I’m getting ahead of myself…the novel in my bones, which became Heroine of Her Own Life, was based on my Belfast family and their stories, told in the Norn Iron accents I’d listened to since I could sit at my grandparents’ kitchen table. I used some of the stories in the novel based on their Belfast generation, born in the 1890s, mixing some of the actual events they endured with fictional characters, situations, and reactions to the endless roil of Irish history in early-mid 20^th century. Think about Ireland from 1914 through 1945: WWI, the Irish Civil War, the Partition of 6 of the 9 counties of Ulster to form Northern Ireland, the daily sectarian violence of the 1920s Troubles, a global depression, WWII and the Belfast Blitz in ’41, the fear of which lingered another 4 years.

Since I was writing fiction and not history, I imagined the life my characters wanted versus the life they had. Most of the characters in Heroine of Her Own Life are fictional, and I knew very few of the real people I based several of the characters on, but those few I knew well, although obviously not as the young people they were in the 1920s and ‘30s. I knew enough about them as young people to know that their lives had not been entirely a grim grind in Belfast. They’d gone to the films, the music halls, the races, learned how to dress and dance, walked up at Belfast Castle and along the Lagan, and strolled in the Botanic Gardens on Sundays. Whenever possible, their lives included the joy of a sing song and great laughs. Still, the Troubles seared their lives. One of my great aunts, the model for Heroine’s protagonist Meg Preston, witnessed a Catholic man kicked to death at the Harland and Wolff shipyard where she worked, girl and woman. He’d pretended to be Protestant to get the job in one of many industries that would not hire Catholics, was discovered, and murdered in public—that was one real event I kept in the novel.

As I wrote and rewrote, I continued to weave family stories, historical events, and my imaginings. Once you create a character, imagine and write what’s in their head, you’re writing fiction. Starting with my grandmother’s many sisters and brothers in their two-up-two down off the Sandy Row, and my grandfather and his family (and their horse in the back yard) up in the Falls, I set the stage to show what it was to like for ordinary, working people to struggle to survive and even thrive in extraordinary times, in an extraordinary place, a very beautiful place, one sometimes made ugly by division, like many other places in the world. Future historical novelists may see us the same way: living the best life we can during a plague, wars exploding and threatening to worsen, in a world of inequity and injustice for humans, animals and the environment.

After several full drafts, I met a historical novelist at a New York conference who also edited for a living, as many of them do. She became my editor and that was an expensive project, but extremely worthwhile. We went through at least 3 full drafts together, but afterward I wanted an Irish editor to look particularly at the language, so the next editor was Irish. That was not such a good experience (she was not connected to The Irish Writers’ Centre). For instance, she was horrified that I wrote a 16-year-old girl character as a sexual person, even denying that it was a possibility, but I think that may have been because the girl was lesbian. She also said, referring to the modern version of the Troubles, which does not even appear in Heroine, since it ends in 1944, “At first I thought it was about the Troubles, so my eyes rolled back.” No northern soul there.

As I continued to rewrite, edit, and cut my way to a novel—killing my darlings as I whittled to 90,000 words—I began two years (2017-2019) of attending conferences to pitch to many agents in person, 3 minutes a piece in assemblies like cattle calls, and sending the versions of submission packages required off to agents and publishers in Ireland, UK and US. I made a spreadsheet of them all, which allowed me to keep track, but also to vent. Too many submissions went into black holes, some elicited reactions like “I did not fall in love with the story/characters/writing,” and two were very positive even in rejection: one from an Irish house and another an American agent. I took heart in those, as Michelle Gallen, author of Big Girl, Small Town advised us to recently, when speaking to our Northern Soul Roadshow class. Ahead of Michelle’s advice, and without any other support, I persisted.

I never told anyone outside the family what I was doing until very late in the game. After many rejections and expensive conferences, I began to feel like an idiot, but I persevered. Did I believe in the book? It’s my only explanation for continuing as I did, but I’m not sure it’s accurate or true.

The original, helpful editor suggested that I try her new publisher, Next Chapter, and my submission, number 34 of Heroine of Her Own Life was accepted in May 2019. I was 68 years old.

Exactly two years after the book’s release, we published an audio version of the novel. Through a friend’s UK book club, I met a Belfast native who became the narrator. Olwyn Fitzgerald did a marvelous job: she loves the book, has a beautiful voice, and of course has a Norn Iron accent—which was very important to me.

I wrote the sequel, Everything Will Be All Right, also set in Belfast and the Causeway Coast, but also England, and Brooklyn, US, 1941-1969. I started and finished it during the worst of the pandemic, publishing in January 2022. A big difference in the time required to write these two books!

I just don’t have another 10 years to spend on one book so I’m 100 pages in on an unrelated novel and have begun the third book (no working title) of the Belfast family series, Finding Their Way Home.

I still don’t have an agent and my publisher is not a big house, one with a lot of large marketing tools, so much is left to me. After several marketing courses (expensive also), learning something about social media use, and designing a website and blog, I’m still not good at promotion and marketing, but to some degree I’ve accepted the publicity deficit the books endure currently, at least until I find a way to change that deficit. I think as writers we must decide what we want, and find some way to write through both the quotidian and the extremes of life. I wanted to write and publish more than anything, and right now, I’m fortunate to do both.