Graduate’s novel takes its place on our shelves

Cally graduated in 1995 with a degree in Psychology, but writing has always been her first love, she tells us, “when I was eight years old I sent a ‘book’ I’d written, illustrated, and bound with wool, to Penguin Publishers and received my first ever rejection letter”. But undeterred, she’s been writing on and off ever since.

On graduation, Cally moved to London to work for a medical publishing company. She then moved to Brighton to a position as a desktop publisher and designer before moving to her current role as a Learning Technologist for the London School of Hygiene and tropical Medicine.

Throughout her career, Cally has managed to fit her writing in, working on her pieces in the evenings and weekends. In 2005 she decided to get serious about it and started to send short stories she’d written in to magazines and competitions. It was only in 2007 that she decided she wanted to write and finish a novel instead of just talking about it, “I wrote nearly every evening for three months and three weeks until the first draft of ‘Heaven Can Wait’ was complete at nearly 100,000 words”.

The sudden drive to write and complete the novel came from the death of one of Cally’s childhood friends in 2006, “it made me realise that I didn’t have all the time in the world to write a novel. If I wanted to achieve my dream of being a published author I had to stop procrastinating and get on with it”. It was this coupled with a throw away line from her then boyfriend - “If I died how long would you wait before you moved on?” that gave her the inspiration for her novel, and the lead character Lucy.

‘Heaven Can Wait’ is a supernatural romantic-comedy focusing on Lucy a girl who’s about to marry the man of her dreams but dies the night before the wedding. Unable to be parted from her man Lucy decides to become a ghost instead of going to heaven, but things are never straight forward. She ends up living in ‘Limbo’, which turns out to be a grotty student style house in North London, where she must stay while she carries out a task that will allow her to be a ghost and stay with the man of her dreams for ever.

Although the book doesn’t officially go on sale until 15th October “Heaven Can Wait” is already proving to be a great success. It has received great reviews, with Elle Symonds describing it as one of her favourites, a book that made her “literally laugh and cry all the way through”. The foreign rights for the novel have been sold to Germany, Russia, Brazil, Hungary, Spain, Taiwan and China.

Cally has a two book deal with publishers Orion and is already editing her second novel, due out in September 2010, “It’s another supernatural romantic-comedy” Cally tells us, “but this one is about guardian angels and a couple of hapless Brighton singletons.”

When I asked Cally if she felt her time at Northumbria had helped her in her writing career she told me, “I think there are some similarities between working for a degree and writing a novel. In both cases you are working towards something that will give you a tremendous amount of satisfaction and sense of achievement when you reach the end.”

Cally also credits her student days with providing her inspiration for her fiction writing, “My time at Northumbria provided me with a wealth of experiences – not least some of the rather grubby houses I shared with other students that may or may not have provided a template for the ‘house of wannabe ghosts’ in “Heaven Can Wait”!”

“Heaven Can Wait” will be published by Orion, in the UK, on 15th October 2009. You can find out more about Cally by visiting her website