"I got published!": Lisa Chaplin

We love hearing from our students no matter what they have to say, but when we hear of a student being published, we just want to shout it from the rooftops! We’re a little scared of heights, so we’ll go with a blog post instead.

Lisa says:

I sold my historical fiction The Tide Watchers to Morrow Books, a division of HarperCollins NY, in April this year. It has a summer 2015 release in the US and I’m hoping for similar timing in Australia. It’s set in early Napoleonic France, Jersey, England and Scotland. It’s ‘faction’, based on a little-known history about Napoleon’s least-known attempt to invade England in 1803, and the still-unnamed English spies that found and disabled the fleet, using a hand-cranked submarine and a drill.

I sold this book before the course I did, but I attended Kate Forsyth’s History, Mystery and Magic course in July and it was fantastic. I’d been working alone for 2 years on the book, and needed not merely interaction, but inspiration. I’m now into revisions and writing the second book. I feel Kate’s course unleashed a flood of beauty in my work I’ve had to tamp down for a long time, having been a published romance author (I used to write as Melissa James for Mills & Boon), and needing to stick to word counts. Lucky for me I have my dream editor, who doesn’t care about word count or how much the book grows, so long as it reaches its full potential.

So a massive thank you to Kate – the course was worth every cent.