I am delighted to share that I was interviewed recently on the Bath Novel Award website by award founder Caroline Ambrose about signing on with Azantian Literary Agency! This is a very happy occasion for me, after quietly working on several different novels for a couple of years now without much fuss about it in public spaces. As some of you no doubt remember, I was short-listed for the Children’s Award for one of my novels, and long-listed for another, over the course of my journey searching for an agent, so to be able to circle back with good news and gratitude to the BNA community for being among my many cheerleaders along the way was wonderful.

I hope you’ll take a moment to read the full interview, if you haven’t come across it already, as we got into all kinds of fun topics! Here’s one excerpt from it as a small way of catching everyone up to how this all unfolded, as it has been a whirlwind ever since.

You’ve mentioned that you have had moments where you thought that this moment might never come. What kept you going?

I’ve had plenty of ups and downs over the years, but I had an especially difficult time around the time COVID hit in earnest and then onward through that next year or so. I couldn’t seem to finish anything I started. I stopped querying for the most part and dabbled in my novels but felt a bit directionless and unsure of how to improve.

That changed when I became a new parent in 2021. Our third child arrived in our arms at 10 days old, and suddenly we were newborn parents with basically no warning, no supplies, no plan in place. We’d adopted our older children at 4 and 2 years old, so we had no experience with newborn parenting. I gave myself permission not to write anything at all, just enjoy our baby. But the funny thing is, suddenly I found myself writing a “just for fun” novel and finishing it, almost without my fully noticing!

When I go back now and reread my journal entries from that time, I see a pattern of someone who needed a bit of indulgence and joy. It hit me that I was going to write whether I was published or not, because writing is an immersive, creative act I do simply to be happy. Once I set aside the question of “should I write,” it really came back down to, “well, if you’re going to write these novels, you might as well start querying them again.” I restarted querying in 2024 and immediately noticed a shift in energy in agent responses, with lots of full requests and conversation and engagement all the way through, so I had this heart-in-throat feeling that it might just happen this time around. And in October I signed with Thais and Jen at Azantian!