Guest Post
My First
Year as a Published Writer: Thoughts & Reflections on Dreams vs. Reality
by Leonora Meriel
A powerful dream
My earliest memory is telling people I wanted
to be writer.
All through my childhood I read avidly and wrote
stories, poems, even a terrible novel or two. I read literature at two
universities in Britain and Canada, and never for a moment doubted what I was
born to do.
And on October 1st 2016, my dream
came true: I published my first novel “The Woman Behind the Waterfall.” I was
38 years old.
Why had it taken me so long?
Life is never a straight line, however shiny
your dreams are. And the older you get, the less straight the line becomes. By
the time I finished university, I was living in New York, working for the
United Nations and then a law firm, married, then pregnant, and then moving to
Ukraine. For the first time in my 20 years, life was far, far more exciting
than the books I loved to read. And so I forgot entirely about writing, and
jumped wholeheartedly into the business of living a whirlwind, stimulating
life. This excitement lasted throughout my 20s, and it was only when I
celebrated my 30th birthday – the perfect opportunity for reflection
and evaluation of goals – that I remembered about the dream I was meant to be
fulfilling.
At that point, I was living in Ukraine,
speaking Russian (and Ukrainian), running a business I had founded, with two
children and a very exciting life. But it was time to start doing what I had
been born to do: write novels.
Over the next seven years, I left the business
I had founded, passing on my job of CEO to a co-founder and friend, moved in
part to Barcelona – the most creative city I know – and wrote my first novel
“The Woman Behind the Waterfall.” It was during the process of writing it that
I realized how valuable the experiences I had gained over the last 10 years
were to my writing dreams. I had gained a lifetime’s worth of adventures. Now I
had all the material I needed to spend the rest of my life developing my skills
as a writer, and fulfilling my dream.
The First Novel
“The Woman Behind the Waterfall” is a literary
fiction novel filled with magical realism. It is set in a village in Ukraine
and is about 3 generations of women, and their search for happiness. It is not
a commercial novel, it is intended to be something different, beautiful,
strange, challenging and provocative. It is meant to appeal to readers (as I
had been) who love something new and eclectic and brave and raw. Something
where you can feel the emotion of the writer and the pain of creation.
So, you can imagine, not many publishers jumped
at the chance to publish something strange, beautiful, and not-very-commercial
by a debut author.
However, I had an agent who loved the book and
valiantly tried to sell it. After a year, she hadn’t found a publisher, and I
had read enough about self-publishing to decide to release my novel into the
world myself.
The road to publishing
It was a hard journey learning about all the
different aspects of independent publishing. Cover design, structural editing,
copy edition, proofreading, typesetting, distribution channels, a launch
strategy, a sales plan, and so much more. Luckily, my skills as an entrepreneur
came in handy as I was used to having to deal with multiple issues of different
kinds and finding solutions. But it was a lot of hard work.
Launch Day
“The Woman Behind the Waterfall” was launched
in October 2016 in a London bookshop. I was surrounded by friends and family
who had shared my dream and who had come to celebrate the day it came true. My
oldest friend wrote a Facebook post entitled “Dreams can come true – now I
believe anything can happen,” and wrote about my story. It was one of the most
incredible days of my life. I truly felt that every minute of my existence had
been leading up to this moment – looking out at the group of people who had
shared my life and believed in me. I will never forget this.
The childhood dream
My childhood dream took 38 years to come true.
If I could condense those 38 years into a
nutshell, I would say there were 20 years of reading and scribbling, 10 years
of life experience, and 8 years of learning to write a novel. I would say, with
retrospect, that this is a solid formula. And now I have the next 38+ years of
writing novels that (hopefully) get better and better.
Lessons from fulfilling a lifelong dream
Here are some things I have learned about
dreams:
·
Dreams are never fulfilled in a straight line.
·
True dreams will never disappear from your
heart (even though I forgot about my dream for 10 years, when I returned to it,
it burned as fiercely as ever).
·
Dreams will rarely come true exactly as you
imagined they would. Most often, they will be better and more suited to your
particular life (when you dream as a child, you often base your dreams on what
you see other people have accomplished. You do not yet know what you are
capable of accomplishing).
·
Dreams coming true are the most incredible
feeling you will ever experience (for this feeling goes to the very depths of
your soul and your heart, which has nurtured them for year after year).
·
Dreams make you generous (the intense and deep
joy of your own dream being fulfilled makes you passionately want to help other
people with their own dreams).
Conclusion
It has been a year since the publication of
“The Woman Behind the Waterfall”. In that year, I have received wonderful
reviews, been stocked in dozens of bookshops, made friends with writers,
editors, publishers and many more people from the book world, and learned an
enormous amount about independent publishing and the publishing industry.
While fulfilling my dream was incredible, it
was also merely the first step on the path of a brand-new career – one that
will challenge and amaze me for the rest of my life. From now, I can truly say
that I am happy, and that I have done what I was born to do.
If any of you have a dream – especially if it
is a dream to create – then know that it is possible. Keep believing. Keep
working. It will come true.
About the Author
Leonora Meriel grew
up in London and studied literature at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland
and Queen’s University in Canada. She worked at the United Nations in New York,
and then for a multinational law firm.
In 2003 she moved
from New York to Kyiv, where she founded and managed Ukraine’s largest Internet
company. She studied at Kyiv Mohyla Business School and earned an MBA, which
included a study trip around China and Taiwan, and climbing to the top of
Hoverla, Ukraine’s highest peak and part of the Carpathian Mountains. She also
served as President of the International Women’s Club of Kyiv, a major local
charity.
During her years in
Ukraine, she learned to speak Ukrainian and Russian, witnessed two revolutions
and got to know an extraordinary country at a key period of its development.
In 2008, she decided
to return to her dream of being a writer, and to dedicate her career to
literature. In 2011, she completed The Woman Behind the Waterfall, set in a
village in western Ukraine. While her first novel was with a London agent,
Leonora completed her second novel The Unity Game, set in New York City and on
a distant planet.
Leonora currently
lives in Barcelona and London and has two children. She is working on her third
novel.
About the Books
The Woman Behind The Waterfall
For
seven-year old Angela, happiness is exploring the lush countryside around her
home in western Ukraine. Her wild imagination takes her into birds and flowers,
and into the waters of the river.
All that
changes when, one morning, she sees her mother crying. As she tries to find out
why, she is drawn on an extraordinary journey into the secrets of her family,
and her mother's fateful choices.
Can Angela
lead her mother back to happiness before her innocence is destroyed by the
shadows of a dark past?
Beautiful,
poetic and richly sensory, this is a tale that will haunt and lift its readers.
The Unity Game
A New York banker is descending into madness.
A being from an advanced civilization is racing to stay
alive.
A dead man must unlock the secrets of an unknown dimension
to save his loved ones.
From the visions of Socrates in ancient Athens, to the birth
of free will aboard a spaceship headed to Earth, The Unity Game tells a story
of hope and redemption in a universe more ingenious and surprising than you
ever thought possible.
Metaphysical thriller
and interstellar mystery, this is a 'complex, ambitious and thought-provoking
novel' from an exciting and original new voice in fiction.
