The agent I submitted to passed on my novel. This sounds sad but it’s not! Rejection is a completely normal non-personal part of being an artist. What amazed me so much was that she responded in 3 working days! For context, they prepare you to wait 12 weeks for a response, and you shouldn’t really expect a response at all. I certainly never replied when I was reading for The Catchpole Agency, but I guess that’s not what I was employed to do. It’s the agent’s call if they respond. I feel a bit guilty now for even querying my manuscript in the first place, as querying too soon is a big no no.

James Catchpole had advised me that taking an industry-led course would be good for me, and so when I researched the 12 week course he recommended by The Golden Egg Academy ‘Write Your Successful Children’s or Young Adults Novel,’ I found it started the next day, which was perfect timing for me. I have enrolled. I still know next to nothing about it.

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Already, I’ve found The Golden Egg Academy course so helpful, and I’m only on week 2! It’s led by an editor and is designed to provide you with a toolkit for writing which you can look back on whenever you write. The course is online with occasional live webinars. The modules become live on the website every Wednesday and you can log in and look back on them forever, so it really is the foundations of writing. I like it because I am good at teaching myself, but we also have been promised a one-on-one feedback session. I’ve already restructured Alice in Wheelchairland to make all the chapters shorter and am thinking about what more I can add.

I’ve learnt that while the message is important to adults, children are more interested in the story. Whilst your story might have a specific theme, what the majority of readers will pick up on is a universal theme. I realised that whilst Alice in Wheelchairland is about a girl who is a wheelchair-user, the story is not really about disability but about social anxiety and making friends, something a lot of readers can relate to. The story begins with Alice about to start at a new school in a new area she doesn’t like very much. I’ve thought about Alice’s character development, and how the story progresses to a satisfying ending. I’d got so caught up in the concept, I’d neglected to end it with her making a friend.

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I have ended up drawing on my own life and having Alice make friends at secondary school in the way I myself made friends. I used to sit at a table with some girls for lunch, and then go to the school library to read. Over time, I stopped going to the library and stayed with the girls. They have become the people I still talk to, meet up with, go to their weddings and go on holiday with. I have friends from all over, including from primary school, but I wouldn’t have known back then that I was making lifelong friends.

Unsuspectingly, I casually said to one of those girls at secondary school that if I ever wrote a book one day I would give a character her name. At the time, I had no idea that I would actually write a book. It feels unfair now to just pick one person to name as some kind of favouritism, but I’ve honoured that childhood promise and given Alice’s fictional friend my real life friend’s name.
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(Featured Image is fanart of Finn and Jake from Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time (2010-2018) by DynamoToon, 2022. This was my favourite show when I was a teenager and I even drew some of my own fanart, but that was a long time ago and I don’t have it saved. What I love about the show is the strong theme of friendship.)