During Lent 1998, a teenage girl, having just left an English convent school, knelt at the grotto of St. Jerome in the Holy Land. She prayed fervently, asking that through his intercession she would one day become a writer. More two decades later I traveled from London to Surrey to meet that girlâ??now a grown woman and with five published novels to her name. It is apparent that the prayers of her younger self had indeed been answered.
It is now 10 years since Fiorella de Maria published her first novel, The Cassandra Curse. It won an award and launched her career as a novelist. She still remembers the thrill of being published for the first time. Now firmly established, she admits it is easy to forget how hard getting that first book out was. The Cassandra Curse had taken only six weeks to write but it was another four years of re-writes, agents, rejections, and edits before it was introduced to the world, and that had happened quite by accident. De Maria mentioned to someone at a dinner party that she had written a novel; he was curious, and he knew someone who was in publishing. The manuscript was sent soon after. First lesson for any aspiring writer: get out there and meet peopleâ??someone will help you.
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