‘I hadn’t intended to write The Death of Mungo Blackwell for at least three more years. My agent had been shopping my indie-published middle grade readers with no success. The market just wasn’t acquiring middle grade. My agent recommended we stop, suggesting I continue to publish the series on my own. I was disappointed… but only for a moment. She proposed a new plan, a redirection in both my writing and branding.
‘A month before in a mock-pitch session at my local writers’ group, I jokingly shared the story I had one day planned to write of a man in my family who had his funeral before he died. Apparently, my agent had thought she could sell it. “I want you to write that one. Have a good draft ready in six months for the American Christian Fiction Writers’ Conference. Nobody can tell your story like you, so you’ll pitch it there. But we’ll have to do a bit of rebranding.”
‘I had waited a long time to have an agent give me some direction. So, I took hold of her leading, reworking my website and social media in an attempt to expand my market. In the meantime, I wrote; two story ideas merged into one – my story, the story of a husband and wife devastated by financial loss, and the tall tales (loosely based on that random piece of family history) about a man named Mungo Blackwell. I had always written for young readers, so writing for the adult audience was a bit intimidating… at first. As the words poured out on the paper into a tale of camper vans, macarons, a flea market, and a husband and wife who find themselves in the middle of it all, I suddenly realised a joy in writing that I had never known before, along with a realisation that if I had not been rejected with my middle grades, I might not have discovered this fulfilment.