Real Life Fairy-Tale:
How Cecilia Dart-Thornton was Discovered on the Internet
A True Story.

“By the end of 1999 I had written three long novels: The Bitterbynde Trilogy. I had not shown them to any publisher - or indeed to anyone at all, except a close friend - because
a) I had written them purely for my own enjoyment,
b) I had no idea whether they were good enough to be published, and
c) I was loathe to expose the inner world of my imagination to public scrutiny, lest it be spoiled by harsh criticism.

“I heard about an Online Writing Workshop run by Del Rey, a US Sci-Fi/Fantasy publisher I had long admired. Emerging writers could upload work-in-progress to be critiqued* by fellow-writers.
The site was managed by real editors, who gave out Editors’ Choice Awards each month for pieces they considered worthy. It occurred to me that since real editors were running it, I could test the waters by submitting a small part of my work to the site. The added advantage, to an over-sensitive soul like myself, was that all criticism would be coming from cyberspace, thus allowing me to pretend that any severe critics were only virtual people and didn’t really exist.

“The first part of the first chapter of the first book went online late in December 1999. In January 2000, I won the Editors’ Choice Award. This seemed auspicious to me, the date being the so-called beginning of the new millennium and everyone having survived the Millennium Bug.
Greatly encouraged, I submitted more and won another award in February. Soon afterwards one of the editors emailed me privately saying, “You should not be with this workshop. Your work is publishable.” He then proceeded to give me the contact details of a literary agent in New Jersey.

“The agent signed me up straight away, to my excitement and delight. A few weeks later, Time Warner in New York had bought all of my books for a six figure advance. Not only that but they announced they were going to publish all three books in hardcover, which they’d never done before with a new author.
By this time I was figuratively pinching myself. Life seemed like a beautiful, unbelievable dream. In fact it took me about eighteen months to finally accept what had happened.

“Since then I’ve travelled the world signing books and seen my work reviewed in such august publications as the Washington Post and the Times. My novels have risen to the top of best-sellers lists and been translated into Italian, German, Dutch and Russian. Because of the Internet, I’ve gone from sitting in front of a computer monitor in a quiet room in my house, to being an international author. My life has changed beyond recognition.”

Cecilia Dart-Thornton,
Melbourne, Australia

BACK TO PREVIOUS PAGE

*Footnote: Technically ‘critique’ is not a verb, but in common usage it has been accepted as such since the eighteenth century. ‘Critique’ as a verb is not synonymous with ‘criticize’ and should not be substituted for it.