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Jennifer McVeigh's debut novel The Fever Tree, the epic tale of a British woman embarking on a new life in nineteenth-century southern Africa, has been critically acclaimed and selected for Richard and Judy's Book Club in March. Here, she reveals her 10 Tips on How to Stay Sane as a Debut Novelist.

1. Don’t quit your job before you have a book deal. Very sensible advice that I spectacularly failed to follow. I left my job as a literary agent and stepped into the terrifying world of no salary, no professional support and no real hope of achieving what I was setting out to achieve. It was a very rocky ride.
2. Do join a writing group – they will keep you sane, help you to stay on track, and remind you that there are other people in the world crazy enough to be battling all day with words on paper.
3. Don’t divulge your plot, or writing problems for that matter, to friends at dinner – they’ll say very unhelpful things like: Isn’t that a bit predictable? How can you not know what’s going to happen at the end? And – most gruelling of all - hasn’t Wilbur Smith written a novel just like that?
4. When you’re writing sex scenes, don’t imagine your parents looking over your shoulder – a passionate kiss will quickly disintegrate into a prudish peck on the cheek.
5. Don’t obsess over the perfection of other novels. Read them, learn from them, but don’t let them cast your own into shadow. I always wanted my protagonist to be as dynamic and real as Cathy or Emma, but it wasn’t until I had reached the end of her story that I felt I really knew her.
6. Don’t let yourself imagine all the unpublished authors in the world being turned down by agents, like the millions of lost souls waiting at the gates of heaven. If you have written something good, then someone will spot it – you just need to have faith and determination.
7. Don’t be your own judge. After I had written my novel I shelved it in despair, convinced that it was worthless. It was only by some stroke of luck – a chance meeting with a literary agent – that I was convinced to send it out into the world. Thank goodness I did.
8. Don’t demonise the agents who reject you. More than likely your manuscript fell into the hands of some poor, unpaid 17 year old intern with a hangover, desperately trying to reduce the size of the slush pile. Wait a few months, and send it in again. I was offered representation by an agent who must have afterwards let my manuscript fall into the slush pile. A month later I received an earnest typed letter from the agency: “Dear Miss McVeigh, many thanks for sending in your manuscript. I’m very sorry to inform you that…”
9. Once you are published - in the interests of sanity – try not to check your Amazon sales rank more than twice (OK – that’s not realistic – perhaps 5 times) a day. If sales are good your publisher will tell you, and a shift from 3050 to 2095 is almost certainly meaningless.
10. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because you’ve got one novel behind you, the second will be easier. It won’t. Sweating over a novel is part of what makes it brilliant. Or at least that’s what I tell myself. I do have a very frustrating writer friend who keeps telling me that her second novel is a breeze…

The Fever Tree is available now in paperback (RRP £7.99). Follow author Jennifer McVeigh on Twitter and Facebook.

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Jennifer McVeigh discusses her inspiration for 'The Fever Tree'

It is a sad thing to watch a writer go off the rails. But in these Twittered, My-Faced, Spacebooked, blog-rolled times, any meltdown is bound to be tragically public.

You may remember that at the tail end of last year author Jeff VanderMeer rashly took on the challenge of reading and reviewing Penguin's three series of Great Ideas one after the other. That's sixty books in sixty days. At the time, I questioned the wisdom of this idea. But Jeff was adamant that he, and he alone, could do it. His endeavour - his hubris? - got picked up in a few places. Suddenly the world was watching. The pressure was on.

If Jeff wasn't true to his word, he was going to find more than egg on his face.

It was going so well. The first twenty books were dispatched on schedule. In those early reviews, more like mini-essays really, Jeff filleted the classics and artfully arranged their innards so that we looked at them anew. He was producing a minimum of a thousand words every day on each review, in addition to his other projects and posts.

'Every time I see “[...]” in these texts I consider it a special communication, and that there is the possibility the Penguin editors been monitoring my reading patterns and have personalized my copy to cut the text in just the right places for my attention span.'

A few posts later, he wrote, in a review of Hume's On Suicide (and other essays):

'Creators are a bunch of half-mad louts drunk with words, who gain power and strength through constructive expression of their irrationalities.'

At this point I was not yet aware that the wheels were coming off the wagon.

Then in late January I began to get the emails. Jeff needed to take a break. Not because he'd recognised the signs of mental exhaustion himself. But because he had 'other commitments'. A 'teaching gig in Australia' was mentioned. He stopped at book 36 of 60, then went off line for a while. Some posts 'from Australia' duly appeared. He was due to resume but then 'deadlines' got in the way. Two books needed 'last-minute edits'. There would be further delays. February came and went. And March. He was posting again on his blog but avoiding the subject of 60 in 60.

Then on Tuesday, this post appeared on his blog (see the not-at-all-disturbing screen-grab above).

Who knows what possessed him when he wrote it? Guilt perhaps. Shame maybe. Alcohol certainly. But also there is a kind of insane defiance at work here. The 60 days have long passed. The war is over, the battle lost. Yet he's soldiering on nevertheless.

But rather than reading the remaining 24 titles, Jeff has instead read the BLURB and FIRST PAGE of each book. Instead of writing a thousand words on each book's contemporary relevance, he has written a three line poem.

Two examples serve to illustrate his feverish state of mind:

#37 - Henry David Thoreau’s Where I Lived and What I Lived For

Hippy words
Talks to trees
Dirty yellow toenails

#56 - Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Replicate me please
Replicate me please
Why all these eyes?

Jeff claims the full service will resume next week. I have my doubts, and I'm not sure where it will all end. If at all. I'm especially worried as later this year a fourth series of Great Ideas is scheduled to be published.

But let's not tell Jeff that.

Colin Brush
Senior Creative Copywriter

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