Writers' News - Publication finally comes true

	Publication finally comes true Sometimes it takes a long trip around the houses to discover the one thing you were put on this earth to do, according to Margaret Pelling, who lives in the village of Cumnor, just outside Oxford. It has taken her 50 years to get where she wanted to be: a published author. After being turned down by 50 agents she was casting about for a small publisher to whom she could submit her work when she read that member Brenda Squire’s book Landsker had been published by Starborn Books (www.starbornbooks.co.uk). Their positive response was quick and Margaret’s novel Work For Four Hands (£9.99) was published recently. The launch in the Picture Gallery at Christ Church, Oxford, where the bubbly flowed freely was all she had imagined.
	Wasted years? No. Margaret says she is not knocking the ‘whiz-kids’ who land six-figure deals before they get their A-levels, but she’s a slow learner. She had to live a lot of life before she could come up with any story worth writing.

‘Childhood had been all about making up stories,’ she explains, ‘but the books full of scribble were put aside when a new passion, the sciences, came along.’ It led to physics research in Cambridge and Oxford but there’s a world outside Oxbridge and Margaret decided to join it. She went into the Whitehall Civil Service.

She likens her time there to a run of Yes Minister episodes but with not so many laughs. Margaret began writing a novel ‘under the desk’ one day when work was slack. Straightaway she was hooked: ‘The need to write again must have been simmering,’ she says. Within a year she’d left the Civil Service on a severance deal to concentrate on writing.

That was nine years and a cabinet of rejection slips ago and Work For Four Hands is the fifth book she has written. Her current work-in-progress, Capella in Auriga, is inspired by the bright star near the zenith in winter.

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