Local writer Emma Plant recently won two Global eBook Awards for her debut novel, For the Devil Has Come With Great Wrath.
Plant, who writes under a pen name in an effort to keep her identity secret, is from Quesnel, but is currently working in Vancouver.
“My real life is completely different than my writer’s life,” says Plant. “So I try to keep the two things separate. When I [held my first public] reading, I didn’t even tell my parents or my family or friends what my pen name was, because I did not want them there. And that actually worked pretty good.”
She did not start to write until after she moved to Quesnel. The winter was long and daylight fleeting, so she decided to give herself something to do and began writing her novel from the sun room in her home along the Barkerville highway. Now that she works in Vancouver, Plant still tries to return to her Quesnel home whenever she can.
When she first started writing in September 2015, she set a goal to write 3,000 words a day. By February 2016, she had finished her novel.
Once she’d written her manuscript, she reached out to the B.C. Editors Association and found someone to edit her book. From there, she began the process of self publishing.
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Her book was released in 2016, and in January of 2018, she applied to the Global eBook Awards, an international competition for any book, self-published or otherwise, available in eBook format.
On Aug. 21, about eight months later, Plant received and email telling her she had won two awards. She won gold in the Fantasy/Alternate History category and silver in the Romance – Historical category.
“I was speechless, I could not believe it,” says Plant. “It is an international prize. Accomplished authors are in it. Real writers with publishing houses. And to know that my little novel actually surpassed most of them was a very good feeling, and gave me hope, actually, that it’s not a bad book.”
Since self-publishing, Plant has received a lot of positive feedback on her book, from both editors and reviewers alike. When she reached out to the B.C. Editors Association, she says several editors were interested in working with her and she had to pick the best one for the job.
The protagonist of her novel, a new-age fantasy, is on the run from the devil, and she may be the only one capable of preventing the apocalypse. Plant says the book is about good and evil, time travelling, and, of course, magic.
She says she has two or three more books in mind as sequels to her debut, and several more stories she would like to write as well.
But she’s waiting until she’s back in Quesnel to get writing again. “I wrote the entire first novel in my sun room,” says Plant. “So I would look up and I had the dark woods, and then the snow in the wintertime, so it was really inspiring.
“And then here in the city it’s, sort of, too loud, there’s too much light. And so I have the story in my head, but, you know, the poetry of how to describe things, it’s different. Now I can write down the facts, but it’s not the nice, colourful description that I had in my first novel.”
heather.norman@quesnelobserver.com
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