I moved to Australia because I fell in love. Seven years ago, most Irish people were coming out here to escape the recession but not me. I was, as I told my mother, on a "look, see".
Joe and I had had a whirlwind romance. He’s originally from Kildare and had been based in Australia for five years when we met at his sisters’ wedding. We had a ten-week romance including a three-week walk across the Camino de Santiago. Most people walk across Spain on a religious pilgrimage, for me it was a second date. We walked and we talked, and we popped each other’s blisters (believe me, that is not a euphemism for anything).
And after a snowy Christmas in Dublin I was snookered. I had fallen in love and a few thousand kilometres wasn’t enough of a reason for me not to follow through. If we were going to break up it would be about loading the dishwasher, or socks on the floor; the important stuff. Geography just felt like a poor excuse. And so I jumped.
I’d never been a big risk taker, but the year before I met Joe, I also did something very out of character. I had been living in London working in advertising, had an army of friends, great health and family, and a buzzing social life, but I wasn’t on course to do what I really wanted to do, and that was to write. I was miserable.
So I took my first leap of faith. I quit my job, packed my bags and moved back to Dublin, to move back in with my parents at the age of 30 and attempt to write my first novel. I don’t know which was more difficult.
In between being told not to eat or drink in the good room and having to phone in my whereabouts with military accuracy, I worked all the time on my novel. Having never had anything other than a short story in my school yearbook published, I set to work with great enthusiasm and naivety.
I had no idea just how hard it was to write; the constant self doubt and the mesmerising task of producing a beginning, middle and end with comprehensive language, full stops and a minimum number of typos was more than a little overwhelming. But with a lot of stubbornness and determination, a year later, just as I met Joe, I had managed to produce Reluctantly Charmed, my coming of age story of magical realism set in Ireland.
As I typed the words The End, I dreamed of phones ringing with movie deals, and blank cheques popping through the post box. But I quickly discovered that getting published is a hens teeth situation, and agents and publishers are not just sitting around staring into space waiting for the next witty, charming Irish debut novel.
In fact, if you can even get them to read your manuscript, as an unknown, unpublished debut writer, you will still more than likely be rejected. The process requires a skin similar to an elephant’s hind.
I started to look forward to the positive rejections, the ones that dismissed the novel yet still gave constructive feedback. I found myself rewriting characters and sub plots again and again. I was transfixed on getting published in the northern hemisphere, even though I had already moved to Australia by then. It was never supposed to be a permanent move, it was only a “look see” after all, so I wasn’t going to bother trawling through Australian publishers.
I managed to get an agent in the UK, and after countless rewrites and publishing rejections with her, she eventually told me to give up and start another book. It had been five years. I was devastated. But I had one more battle left in me, I approached an Aussie agent, who jumped at it. Within five weeks she had a bidding war taking place with three of the top publishers in Australia.
I signed a two book deal with Simon and Schuster Australia and New Zealand, and Touchstone in the US. I secured a film agent with IPG in LA, and within a year Reluctantly Charmed was the fourth best-selling Australian debut novel of 2014. All it took was a few hundred rejections, six years and a move across the world.
Why it happened for me in Australia and not Ireland I have no idea. Luck and good timing definitely came into play. But I’m not questioning it. I miss Ireland madly, but Australia, for me, has been the land of opportunity.
Ellie O'Neill's second novel The Enchanted Island, also set in Ireland, has just been released. Ellieoneill.com.au
