Don’t get me wrong, I was still in love with the books I’d already written. They all have their place in my heart, but I knew that it was time to draw all my experience together and write a story that would decide its own space.

I wrote Hivebound, and I’m over the moon that it will be published next year by Lake Union Publishers.

I make it sound like it happened so quickly and easily, but it didn’t. I’d already finished another novel that I know now was my try-out for Hivebound. Sadly, my lovely agent at the time didn’t think they could sell it.

So I went on submission with it to agents in November 2024. Some agents requested full manuscripts, and then it was Christmas. I was both excited and scared, because I hadn’t envisaged being right back at the finding-an-agent stage again.

Then, on January 13th 2025, my friend Anstey told me an editor she knew of had gone into agenting and was building a list. She passed her email address to me and I subbed my novel that day.

I love writing and my dream is that people ‘get it’. Although I have a PhD in narrative psychology, I have never had a writing lesson or taken a writing exam. I just love storytelling and worry that

Danielle Marshall did get it. She contacted me the next day and we had a call. It was beyond my wildest dreams that I would have a New York agent at a New York agency, but Danielle introduced me to Jane Rotrosen Agency.

Over the next months we chatted and ironed out the details and I told her I would write another novel for her to submit to publishers, one that I had been imagining since 2017, but had never fitted into my previous book deals.

I wrote Hivebound and held my breath - would she ‘get it’? Would she love it? Again, she did, and in January we went on US submission with it. It had strong interest and eventually I signed with Lake Union in a ‘very nice deal’.

I met my editors, and they ‘get it’ too. Lots of people measure wealth by money, but I feel rich when I think about the team I am working with - strong women who are not afraid to work with my subtext.

To say I am over the moon is an understatement. The deal was for two books, and while Hivebound is in edits, I am writing the second book.

Two years ago I thought I was walking in a very different direction, into a place where I would write an out-of-my-lane book that no one would publish. But it turned out very different to that!

So that is my news, and I’ll keep you updated here about my writing, news about Hivebound and publishing news - please subscribe for beta reads, review copies and much more.

Months later I am still pinching myself that I get to write the kind of books I love and that all the pieces have fallen into place. It might sound like a combination of right time, right place and luck, but behind that was fifteen years of hard work to get to this point.

But it was worth it for this feeling.

Keep going…