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I am an engineer and a Maths teacher by training, but I have always been an avid reader and, when I think about it, a writer, too. It’s often assumed that engineers and mathematicians don’t do words and admittedly, as an engineering undergraduate, I rarely visited the university library. The fact is, I don’t do textbooks and I rarely go for non-fiction, but I love reading fiction of just about any genre.
At some point relatively early in my childhood, my parents decided to economise on the individual bedtime stories by reading to all three of us together as we sat around the dining table after our evening meal, a chapter a night. Mum and Dad would take it in turns to read and I remember Dad sometimes struggling to get the words out past the emotion of whatever story we were reading. The after-dinner story continued until we were well into our teens. Goodnight Mr Tom, I am David, all of the Narnia books (of course), Animal Farm. It was a tradition my wife and I picked up on with our own children for quite a few years and, like my Dad, I sometimes got too emotional to carry on and had to pass the book to my wife to continue reading.
I don’t remember doing lots of creative writing as a child, other than what we had to do for school, although I do recall spending hours creating a dramatised version of the Bible story of Ruth, typing it all out on an old typewriter, including a few musical numbers. It was never performed – probably a good thing – but I have since written lots of sketches, short plays and monologues for use in a church setting, including a fresh nativity play each year for the last nine years, for our church young people to perform. I have also dabbled in writing playscripts for radio, though not yet with any success. Although in 2019, a 15-minute play I wrote was performed as part of a scratch night in a small London theatre, and some sketches I submitted to the CBBC school-based mockumentary Class Dismissed apparently reached the second round of the selection process.
When the idea came to me for Joe with an E, it felt like a novel, not a playscript. I wasn’t sure I knew how to write one of those, but I decided to give it a go. We’d watched a drama series called Butterfly (ITV, 2018) about 11-year-old Maxine as she realises she is transgender and as her family learn to accept this and support her. I began to think, what if it was cisgender children who were the odd ones out, who felt the pressure to keep their true identity a secret? What would that story look like?
I wrote whenever I could find the time – sitting in a sports centre corridor whilst my son did gymnastics, in a tent on a wet camping holiday on Anglesey, before the rest of the family felt ready to brave the cold outside their sleeping bags. I even got a few lines down during a quiet parents’ evening, in between the appointments I had for my smaller than usual Business Studies class. Early in 2020, I thought I’d finished, because I’d completed the first draft and a few friends and family had said it was good. So I started pitching it to agents, well before it was ready.
I’ve learnt a lot about editing and being a better writer in the last few years – mostly through online writers’ forums. Some agents made positive noises but none asked for the full manuscript. I stopped pitching for a while and wrote the sequel, because to be honest, Joe with an E needed a sequel – I couldn’t say it was ‘a standalone novel with series potential’. Then late in 2022, I came across ‘Pop-up Submissions’ on YouTube, which is sadly not currently running. On 9th July 2023, my first 700 words were read, critiqued, and won the show with lots of really positive comments. In fact, mine was the highest scoring entry in all of 2023. So it had to be published somehow, didn’t it?
In the end, I found my publisher – Beaten Track Publishing – through agreeing to beta read someone else’s novel, set in and around where I live. The author, Jennifer Burkinshaw, thought my novel was good enough to pitch to her publisher and when they saw it, they said yes.
Now I’m putting into practice some of what I teach to my Business Studies students, working out how to market my book, whilst also polishing the sequel ready for publication later in the year. At some point, I’m determined to get back to that other unrelated novel I started last summer, or perhaps a third part in the Joe with an E series, or a prequel. But for now I’m enjoying being a published novelist.
Links:
Facebook: https://facebook.com/paulrandwriter
Instagram: https://instagram.com/paulrandwriter
Publisher: https://beatentrackpublishing.com/joewithane
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/49702068.Paul_Rand?from_search=true&from_srp=true