A Quote by Jon McGregor

Last week I was just someone who had had a first novel published. — © Jon McGregor
Last week I was just someone who had had a first novel published.
It had been fourteen years and I hadn't had anything published. I had 250 rejection slips. I got my first novel published and it was called Kinflicks. It turned out to be a best seller.
My first book published in France was translated and titled Exercices d'Attente in 1972. It was a collection of short works written and published in Romania. In 1973 I was ready to publish the novel Arpièges, which I had started writing in Romanian and of which I had published some fragments under the title Vain Art of the Fugue. Some years later, I finished Necessary Marriage.
I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second.
In the case of my second film The Fish Child (El Niño Pez), I had written the novel about 5 years before I made into a film. In the case of The German Doctor I had published the novel a year before I started writing the script, I even had another project to shoot. But I had this idea of the powerful cinematic language from the novel that I couldn't let go of.
I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.
When my first novel was published, I went in great excitement round bookshops in central London to see if they had stocked it.
I've had a lot of books rejected in my time. My first novel, which didn't get published, was, with hindsight, crashingly dull.
There were many times in my initial days as a writer when I had felt the need to talk to someone, to leverage on someone's experience, to learn from someone who had written and published a book.
I had a few stories and longer pieces published, but my first proper novel came in 2003, called 'Dead I Well May Be.'
I've had over a dozen and a half novels published since late 1994 when my first novel, 'Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls' came out.
In 1996, when my first novel, 'Masquerade,' was published, I knew international thrillers - or spy novels, if you prefer - had been the domain of male authors for decades.
At 18, my first short story was published - I was paid a penny a word by a science fiction magazine. I continued to write, and five years later I published my first novel, 'Sweetwater.'
Way back before the 'Alex Barnaby' series was first published, we were talking with Dark Horse then about making it into a graphic novel of some sort. We just couldn't get it together at the time; we had too many projects going on. We weren't sure how we wanted to bring it forward.
Though I didn't quite plan it that way, I had my two sons at just about the same ages my mother saw me and my sister off to college, and my first novel was published when I was 46. This 'tardiness' isn't something I'm proud of, but I'm happy to be an inspiration to others who arrive at these milestones later than most of us do.
I was first published in the newspaper put out by School of The Art Institute of Chicago, where I was a student. I wince to read that story nowadays, but I published it with an odd photo I'd found in a junk shop, and at least I still like the picture. I had a few things in the school paper, and then I got published in a small literary magazine. I hoped I would one day get published in The New Yorker, but I never allowed myself to actually believe it. Getting published is one of those things that feels just as good as you'd hoped it would.
With Hairspray, we had a great experience. I always think of the last time I saw Divine: He was in the last booth in the back of the Odeon. Now every time I go in there, I look at that table. It was a wonderful night.Hairspray had been out a week; it was a hit. If I had to pick a night that was going to be the last night.
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