There are just under three months to go until A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing, the novel I began over twenty years ago, will be published in the UK. I’ll be back in Britain for much of the summer and will be marking publication day with an event at Blackwell’s, Manchester on Thursday 23 July. I will be in conversation with Susan Barker, author of the highly acclaimed literary horror novel Old Soul among other brilliant books.

I still sometimes struggle to comprehend that I am in this position at all – preparing to speak at public events about a novel I’d once thought would never see the light of day. Tickets are available here. If you can make it to Manchester, I would love to see you at Blackwell’s!

As I wrote last month, I began writing A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing when I was in my early twenties and working as an English language teacher in Japan. After returning to the UK, aged 23, I initially moved back to the town where I grew up, took a part-time secretarial job that left me ample time to keep working on my novel, and began applying to university creative writing programmes.

Following an acceptance to UEA’s famous MA course, I packed the bag containing my laptop and the loose printed pages of my novel-in-progress with a great deal of nervous excitement. But my time at UEA, though wonderful in many ways, would turn out to be more emotionally difficult than I’d anticipated.

Halfway through the year, my father died. Losing him when I was still only in my mid-twenties, had a profound effect on me. Afterwards I never felt young in the same way again, and, looking back, I can see how the grief I felt transformed the way I wrote about loss in my book.

By the time I left UEA, I had a scrappy first draft. An extract published in that year’s course anthology attracted the interest of a couple of literary agents, but it didn’t lead to any formal offers of representation, much less to a publishing deal.

Still, I kept going, (mostly) firm in my belief that – although aspects of my novel still needed lots of work – I had a story worth telling. Eventually, a different agent took me on and, after revising the manuscript extensively with her, I steeled myself as it went out on mass submission to publishers. Some editors showed an interest in the book’s urban Japanese setting; my depictions of hostess bars; and the central storyline of an intense friendship between two young women, one of whom suddenly disappears. But, although I seemed to get close on a few occasions, it didn’t lead to a publishing contract.

By this stage, I had been living with A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing for a long time – around eight years in fact. Having already committed so much time and energy to the novel, it was very difficult to put it aside. Dejectedly, I did, though, to concentrate on other writing projects, including various collaborations with Emma Claire Sweeney, whose friendship – as I described in my March post – has been of the utmost importance to me.

In 2012, my mother died. I was 32, still relatively young to have lost both my parents. Again, as in the case of my dad’s passing, the long shadow cast by Mum’s death would go on to affect the ways in which I approached the theme of loss in my novel when I unexpectedly found myself returning to work on it some years into the future.

During the decade and more when A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing largely languished in a metaphorical bottom drawer, I occasionally dusted off the draft to enter it into competitions for unpublished writers. My novel had some success with the SI Leeds Literary Prize and Yeovil Literary Prize. Then in 2015, it made the shortlist for the influential Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. At that year’s prize ceremony, to which I took Emma as my guest, I was stunned to hear my name announced as the winner.

It is hard to overstate the impact of these small victories on my confidence at a time when my belief that A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing would ever be published was at an all-time low. These wins opened doors, offered unexpected opportunities and led to lasting friendships with fellow shortlistees and other people associated with the awards.

Such prizes also helped me to be taken more seriously when I was pitching proposals for my two nonfiction books, A Secret Sisterhood (cowritten with Emma Claire Sweeney) and Out of the Shadows, published in 2017 and 2021 respectively. Both were historical group biographies. I relished the research and writing of these works, but after Out of the Shadows came out I decided that I wanted to give fiction another go.

As the mother of two small children by then, my progress was slow and steady. But I had begun a new novel when, completely out of the blue, in early 2024, I received word from my agent that that an editor who’d read the manuscript of A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing some time ago was asking if it was still available.

In the years since she had begun representing me as a writer, my agent (whose commitment to this novel has been extraordinary) had continued to show my manuscript to editors from time to time. As before, some had shown an interest but nothing had ever worked out. So, although I was happy for this editor to take another look at the work, I didn’t hold out much hope.

You can imagine my amazement then when, two decades after I first began writing my novel, I found myself signing a publishing contract at last – and being faced with the somewhat daunting prospect of returning, in mid-life, to a book I originally conceived as a young woman.

The process of revising the manuscript for publication has been surprising, challenging and illuminating – and more than a little uncanny at times. There has also been pleasure in meeting the writer I once was on the page, and in the realisation that the passage of time has, in fact, enriched the story I am able to tell.

In May, I will explore what it’s like to come back to a creative work after a long break.  If you would like to make sure you receive this next monthly post, and others like it, you can sign up for my newsletter here.

A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing will be published by Manilla Press on 23 July 2026 and is available for pre-ordering now.

Tickets for my Blackwells, Manchester event with Susan Barker are available here.