I am not an author… yet I am a writer, I suppose, because I am trying to write a book. It all started about 15 years ago, when my kids were little, and Harry Potter had become a BIG craze. My husband and I were living in Bangkok at the time, lured there by expat jobs with a global engineering consulting company. We’re both professional engineers.

“That’s what you need to do!” my husband announced one morning. “Write a book series like Harry Potter, become rich and famous and never have to work again.”

He was joking of course.

“You know,” I replied, realisation dawning, “If I were to write a story, I know exactly what I’d write about.” Up until that moment, I had never even been conscious of the story inside me.

From that moment, it captured my imagination, and in between working, looking after two young children (4 and 5) and creating a family life (assisted by a nanny, of course!), I dreamed my story. I jotted ideas and themes down in a notebook that contained my children’s scribbles and stickers. I crafted a poem section sitting beside the pool in our compound. I started typing the narrative, teasing the story into life. I mainly managed to write when I was off work recuperating from surgery (every now and then I need nasal surgery to clear scar tissue due to smashing my nose on the dashboard during a car crash in my 20’s).

Eighteen months later, we packed up our lives in Bangkok and returned to NZ, settling in Tauranga. I was half way through my book, a fantasy trilogy, targeted at intermediate aged kids. Sometime in that first year back, I finished my first draft.

Letting someone else read your manuscript for the very first time is a very, very scary thing. Crafting something out of your imagination, writing it down, and then letting someone else criticise it… well, it’s personal. I let my husband have the first go. That was bad enough.

Second time through, I added another whole storyline, and had to weave it through the entire manuscript. That took another couple of years. I printed it out for my son to read just before Christmas 2010–he had just turned 11. He read it in about a week. I remember thinking, that’s so unfair. That took me six years to write!

I had allowed a few other close friends and their children read this version, and received some feedback. On to the third draft. I realised that an entirely different skill set is required to publish a book than to write one. I needed help. I got some books out of the library and paid for an assessment of my manuscript. Draft four incorporated feedback from the assessment. When I had completed that, I thought my book was ready to publish. I started enquiring with publishers. None accepted, but one suggested I submit my book for the Tom Fitzgibbon Award, run by Storylines.

A couple of weeks before the submission deadline, my computer crashed and I lost my entire manuscript. Aargh! I did have a backup, but it was of a much older version. However, I had just printed it out, so I scanned it to PDF, then used software to convert the PDF back in to word. This sort of worked, but it wreaked havoc with my formatting and inserted numerous ‘images’ of lines where the scanner had picked up a page edge. I just made the October 2014 submission deadline for the award.

It was an anxious four month wait, but finally I heard that I was a finalist! I was invited to attend a ceremony up in Auckland where the five finalists for the Tom Fitzgibbon category found out who had won… but it wasn’t me.

I was disappointed, but nonetheless, using the fact that I had been a finalist for the award, I contacted publishers with renewed fervour. About this time I joined the Tauranga Writers’ Group. A publisher asked for my entire 65,000 word manuscript, but decided it was ‘too rough’ for publishing. Instead, she did a proper edit.

One and a half years later, I have finally worked through all her suggested edits and think it is almost ready for publishing. Whether I can convince a publisher to pick it up, or I need to self-publish, I really think that 2017 is the year!