By Kathleen McGurl

I was that kid in school who rejoiced when the English homework was to write a story. The rest of the class would groan, but I’d have a dozen ideas before the bell went for the end of school. I adored books and was always reading. One day, I promised myself, I’ll be a writer.

I was in my late 30s before I got round to it. By that time I was working full time in IT, and had two young children. I worked predominantly from home (waaaay before it was fashionable to do so!) and eventually came to the bitter realisation that no one would pay me to take a year off work to write a book, so I’d better just sit down and write one anyway in my spare time.

Spare time was at a bit of a premium in those days, so I quickly moved from attempting to write a novel, to focussing on short stories for the women’s magazine market. I could write one of those in an evening, edit it in another evening, and post it off to My Weekly, Take A Break, Woman’s Weekly or similar. I had some success at this, and sold about 40 stories.

Writing short stories is a brilliant training ground for writers. You can complete one and get feedback on it quickly, and it teaches you the importance of having a hooky beginning, a middle that drives the narrative forward, and a satisfying ending that ties up the story nicely. I learned a lot during that period.

However novels were what I most liked to read, and what I really wanted to write. But what would I write about? I was used to dreaming up ideas for 1,000-word short stories. I wasn’t sure I could sustain a story for 80,000 words or more, and then edit them.

In 2009 I got into genealogical research, and along the way discovered an interesting three-greats grandfather, who’d clearly been the black sheep of his family, conspicuous by his absence in the wills of his uncles. Thanks to an unusual surname I was able to discover a lot about him, and decided to write a novel based on all I’d found out. I enjoyed writing that novel, but felt constrained by the facts. It would be much more fun, I thought, to simply make it all up.

And then I thought, what if… rather than finding a metaphorical skeleton in a closet in your family tree, you find an actual skeleton buried in the garden of a house where your ancestors lived? And that, dear reader, became the premise for my novel The Emerald Comb, which later landed me a two book deal. All the best books start life as a what if!

I sent The Emerald Comb to a digital-first publisher who accepted submissions direct from authors. While waiting to hear back, I attended a Romantic Novelists Association summer party, and found myself being introduced to an editor from the publisher I’d submitted to. Well as you might imagine, I did not waste the opportunity, and pitched my book and the next one I’d started, to her. What I didn’t know at the time was that she’d already read my submission, and they’d already decided to offer me a two book deal.

That offer arrived in my in-tray two weeks later, and oh my God I squealed when I opened it! Unfortunately my husband was away on a cycling weekend so I had to celebrate alone. And then my husband was badly injured in a cycling accident the very next day. Talk about raining on my parade! Thankfully he made a full recovery. Life is full of these ups and downs, isn’t it?

That book deal led to another, and then my publisher was taken over by HarperCollins and my current imprint HQ was created. I moved with them, and HQ has now published 15 of my books, all dual timeline novels in which a historical mystery is uncovered and resolved in the present day. I’ve sold around 700,000 books across all formats, and some of my books have been published in other languages. I’ve also ghost-written a novel for a celebrity. It’s all gone way beyond what I dared to dream of, and I’ve loved (almost) every minute of this journey!

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