MY PATH TO PUBLICATION
Wibke Brueggemann
The debut YA author felt as if she was being tested all along the way until a stroke of luck led to her first novel being accepted
‘Let it be said that my path to publication was a long one.
‘Let it also be said that the terrain got easier the further I tr avelled, and that once I’d crossed valley of doom, the final stretch felt so effortless that I didn’t even see the finishing line until someone had already shoved me across it.
‘I started my journey about fifteen years ago. ‘Life wasn’t great, I was doing a job I loathed more than anyone could possibly even begin to imagine, and one day I thought: If I can be good at something I hate, imagine how good I could be at something I love.
‘I’d always written, I was writing at the time, but never for anyone else, and so I enrolled in a creative writing evening class at Bournemouth Arts University, where my teacher introduced me to the YA genre, which I didn’t know existed, but naturally wrote into. I spent the next six months reading everything, and I wrote two (terrible) full manuscripts.