Kiwi, Nalini Singh is the NYT bestselling author of the Psy-Changeling and Guild Hunter paranormal romance series. She also writes contemporary romance novels.

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Transcript:

Sarah Williams:            G’day, and welcome to Write With Love. Today I’m chatting to New York Times and USA Today best selling Kiwi author, Nalini Singh. Thank for joining me today.

Nalini Singh:                 It’s nice to be here. Thank you for the invite.

Sarah Williams:            No worries, and I always love talking to the Kiwi’s. Always just so amazing people, and you are just absolutely doing amazing things. Everyone keeps on telling me, “When are you gonna talk to Nalini?” I’m like, “I’m planning on it.” So let’s get into it. Tell us your story and how you got into this amazing career that you’re having.

Nalini Singh:                 So it’s a long process. I started writing quite young. When I was … and then when I was in high school, that’s when I got super serious. And I wanted to write novels. Until then, I had been writing already, but you know, shorter pieces. In high school for some reason, I decided that I would now write novels.

Nalini Singh:                 So I just started trying to write them, and I remember sitting in the kitchen. I must have been 14, 15 or something like that, and I had hand written this whole science fiction book. It had a prince, and he had lasers coming out of his eyes. I was reading it aloud to my mum going, “What do you think? What do you think?” You know, my mum’s cooking dinner, and she’s like, “Oh, that’s very nice dear.” So she’s always been wonderful, you know.

Nalini Singh:                 I just kept going, and eventually I moved on from handwriting and actually started typing out manuscripts. I was really into romance then. I found science fiction and fantasy first, and then I found romance. I really loved them all, and I decided I would try to write a romance. I thought I can do this just like everyone. Everyone thinks they can read or write a romance. I have an excuse. I was like 16 or 17. So you know when you’re a teenager you think, of course, this is easy, and this is fun. I can do this.

Nalini Singh:                 So I did, and I’m actually really proud of myself. I wrote that romance and no need to rewrite it. I sent it off to London. I submitted it. I found out how to submit, and this was pre-internet. So there was nothing online. So I actually rang up a distributor in Auckland, New Zealand, said, “How do I send this book to this publisher?” And they’re like, “Um, we have these guideline things they give us sometimes. Do you want those?” So they sent me the guidelines. They were lovely, and I followed and sent it off.

Nalini Singh:                 Immediately got a very quick rejection. It wasn’t even on full piece of paper. It was like this tiny little piece of paper. It’s like, yeah, this book is not suitable for our line, but I didn’t even care because by then I had started writing my second book. And I was like, okay fine. They didn’t like the first one. They’ll love the second one. Here’s a spoiler. They did not love the second one either.

Nalini Singh:                 So I don’t actually know how many books I wrote before my first sell, but I would say probably say seven to 10. I think all that writing, I just kept writing.