Jo O’Neill

Once a projects director, I hung up my construction helmet in 2024 to settle in England and start a new journey as a writer. What a time it’s been.

I have always written, but the odd article or poem was all that I had time for. When your job involves sitting in meetings day after day, year in year out, listening to corporate speak, getting a cricked neck watching powerpoint, you need an outlet. Mine was jotting down little poems - which served to remind me not to take any of it, or myself, too seriously. I had an idea for a novel nearly twenty years ago after discovering some transcripts of trials from the Spanish Inquisition, but all I’d managed was to dip in and out of research and write a few scenes. Unsatisfying, and it poked at me, this unwritten story, until eventually the poking grew too uncomfortable to ignore. The idea of trying something new, at beginner level started to seem more exciting than daunting, and when my Company announced yet another ‘transformation’ (the transformation to end all transformations, the definitive one that would close the gap to potential…the 6th transformation in 5 years), I took the opportunity to transform myself out of there.

There I was thinking that writing a book involved getting the words out, then sitting back and admiring them. Now I know that the first draft is a tenth of the writing, that just because I like what I have written doesn’t mean a reader will, and that there will be days that I can’t find a sentence, alternating with days when I write for fifteen hours straight. And I won’t get started on the query trenches, and the submission trenches, and how many barriers to entry there truly are. Writing is a test of resilience. It’s all about coping with rejection and ghosting, then every now and again someone connects with your work and you do a little victory dance and tell yourself you’re ok, you’ve got this. Writing has opened a new world for me, I mix with fellow writer-types, and we are each other’s biggest cheerleaders. You might find us sitting in coffee-shop or pub corners discussing plot developments as casually as if they are real life. ‘I left Antonio on the rack as I popped out for some milk’, or debating if adverbs really are that bad and why not head-hop now and again?

Now my work is ready to read, and I hope that it finds its readers. I have a fascination for character, psychology, and the parallels between the past and present - everything we experience today has been felt before, you’d think we’d have learned.