My path to getting a book deal, or, FRICK. I NOW HAVE AN AGENT AND AN EDITOR. IT'S REAL. THERE'S NO GOING BACK. DON'T BUGGER UP. ohmygod this is exciting.

It’s all in the title, really.

I’m writing this as an update and because I can’t stop thinking about it and because I’m in an incredibly strange place right now of actually obtaining the goal I’ve been fantasising about for a long time.

And I’m writing it because when I was researching agents, and then when I was on submission to editors, I was sad and desperate enough to search the net for any kind of clue on how other writers have dealt with this process. How long it took them to get picked up. If they were rejected, and how long that took. Honesty about what they thought they did wrong and what they did right.

From the day I sent out an email query to an agent, to the day that agent and I said yes to a book deal offer, took just under two months.

I am lucky. Lucky lucky lucky. Luckity luck. Ad infinitum.

But I'm not rare in that - not even slightly - and I'm sure many people have had shorter paths than me. When an agent or an editor likes something, they move fast. Like Roadrunner fast. It’s being lucky enough to find that specific agent AND editor who like your book enough to move that fast that’s the magic, unknowable formula.

So below is my path, so far, to being published. I hope it helps, if you’re reading it for that kind of reason. But know that things work very differently for everyone; some of the most successful writers in the world have a long, rocky road. Some writers get a deal in a snap, then disappear. Sorry. It’s a shitty, unhelpful, throwaway thing to say, but it’s also true…



My first book did not get an agent or a publisher.

But then again, I didn’t make as much effort as I should have and also stumbled over the requisite rookie errors…

My first book is slightly shit, to say the least. It has some good bits. There’s potential there, I think; somewhere underneath all the pretentiousness and the over-ambition, there’s a writer in there trying to get out. Sometimes I feel an urge to pull it out and have a look to see if it’s salvageable. It might well be.

I started to write that book when I was about eighteen. A combination of no particular urgency on it and laziness caused me to finish it when I was about 24, 25; but I started putting out feelers way before I had finished it. Rookie error number 1.

Working as a bookseller meant that I got to meet agents, editors and writers at events – best part of the job, hands down. At one of these evenings, I met a very well known editor, now turned agent, who got talking to me in that polite fashion you do at these things, and he just came out with it: “So, are you a writer?”

Nonplussed, I asked him why he would say that.

“A lot of people in the industry are,” was his reply. I suspect what he meant was that I had a slight whiff of ingratiation about my person.

I said yes, I was, and managed to persuade him to let me email him in the near future to ask for advice. He was very lovely to me when he didn’t have to be (knowing shit all about whether I could actually write or not) and answered my emails with patience and advice. He passed my sample chapters onto an editor at Tor, who was also very lovely when she had no call to be and told me that she thought there was some extremely good writing in there but that it wasn’t different enough from other books on their list to consider taking on. She strongly recommended I find an agent, and gave me two agencies that I should submit to.

I duly did, without even really doing any proper research on query letters first. Rookie error number 2. One ‘form rejected’ me (polite rejection without any reasons why, which I think means it got as far as one of their slush pile readers and no further) – the other never replied.

Oh, I thought.

Undiscouraged, I continued to write when I wanted to, rather than exercising any kind of regular determination. Life got in the way – I moved jobs, twice; moved cities, and spent 10 months unemployed, my waking moments devoted to applying for jobs and attending interviews. And, when I wanted to hide from the world for a while, writing.

Book 2 started to surface – the one that eventually became Fearsome Dreamer. Oh, and I went through a lot of titles before I came up with that one – some hilariously bad, some just bland. But that’s for a whole other post.

Right, I thought. You’re not going to make the same mistakes you did with the first one, you twit. You will research. You will wait. And then wait some more. You will finish the damn thing and then you will revise the damn thing until it is really, actually finished.

And THEN you will query.

I wanted to submit it to an unpublished writer competition that had just surfaced on my radar. Trouble was, the deadline was in just under two months, and I had only several chapters under my belt. Fuck it, I thought. What do I have to lose?

And then I discovered a wonderful, magical thing.

When I have a deadline, I actually write every day, like you're apparently supposed to do. I completed a first draft of the whole novel in 7 weeks, at the same time as working full time at an extremely busy job; in time for the competition deadline. I RULE, I thought. I RULE UTTERLY AND WILL CONQUER THE WRITTEN WORD.

Feeling relieved and pleased with myself, I sent off my submission.

Rookie error number 3. I sent off… my first draft.

I hadn’t even revised the damn thing.

Needless to say, I didn’t win :)

Working in publishing didn’t give me a giant advantage in landing an agent or a publisher – at least from my perspective!

• I work in marketing – we don’t get to meet agents that often. I personally knew precisely none. 

• Someone in editorial would understand a hell of a lot better than me on how to query – they see submissions all the time. I researched how to query online.

• I obviously do have friends who are also editors, but I don’t, I repeat, don’t like to talk about my writing at work. I get severe embarrassment pangs mixing those two sides of me up, and the idea of approaching anyone I actually know with my own manuscript makes me curl up. No-one I work with had any idea that I was writing. Well… now they do, of course...

• One editor friend I had screwed up courage to talk to about agents gave me some names I should consider. I ended up querying only one of her suggestions, and it’s not the one who took me on. 

• I cold queried my agent. I sent my query off to him as a total stranger. I didn’t know any of his clients, nor did I know anyone at his agency. I found him during my own research and he made my top 5 choices. In my very brief bio, I mentioned that I worked in publishing – I didn’t name the company. I haven’t got a clue whether this made him notice my query more than he would have. You’d have to ask him :)

I spent a year getting Fearsome Dreamer to a state where I really thought it was ready to go. I have an agent and an editor. And the manuscript still isn’t ready.

A year from writing those first words to several giant and hundreds of small revisions later, all of which I had done on my own, trying to spot my own mistakes. Mistakes that I had glossed over several times before. Plot holes that didn’t occur to me until months after coming up with the original idea. A point where, in the midst of revisions from my agent, and sick to death of reading my own words for the millionth time, I decided the best way to make myself feel better was to go on twitter and announce to everyone that my book was a boring piece of shit.

My editor will give me more revisions to make. I will probably be working on the book for several months yet.

Call me crazy – but this fills me with an incredible amount of excitement.

There will definitely be more ‘this is a boring piece of shit’ times. I’m an emotional person, and as anyone has ever known me would probably attest, I like to express them. Really, it’s part of the fun of having them. But there will also be, as there was with my agent’s suggestions, 'ohmygod why did I not SEE that thankyousomuchthat’sareallygoodidea' times. And really, the idea that someone loves your made up world enough to want to spend a significant amount of their time in it, making it even better, is a shockingly, gratifyingly nice one.

Good luck to everyone chasing the writing dream.

Alan Garner - standout scenes

Without going back to the books to re-read or check, I can still, after all this time, recall with a shiver of pleasure one standout scene from each of Alan Garner’s books that I’ve read.

Here’s a quick rundown, hopefully without any obvious spoilers:

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen 

 

Susan and Colin (classic children’s literature names alert!) are trapped underground in an abandoned mine system, trying desperately to escape from the svart-alfar. They are tired, terrified, and lost. The sequence includes incredibly compelling descriptions of them having to climb down a giant wall in the near dark, navigating a rotting plank over an enormous chasm, and in the final sequence – gulp – having to squeeze through a tunnel that isn’t much larger than a rabbit hole. Testimony to the power of his words… I actually find this bit difficult to even write about. I’m pretty sure, much like Alison Flood, I actually developed mild claustrophobia from reading this as a child. Seriously.

Elidor 

 

One word: planchette. Frankly, there are a lot of standout scenes in Elidor (why yes it IS one of my favourite books ever, how could you tell?); the first time they journey to Elidor; the static electricity scene; Findhorn. But for me the one section that put the wind up was planchette, and Malebron’s attempts to contact them through a means more traditionally associated with talking to the dead. A marvellous device, as it makes the entire thing incredibly sinister – despite the fact that you know you’re supposed to be on Malebron’s side. Garner is superb at this – subverting the ‘good characters’ with an underlying sense of their power, and giving them a faintly threatening shadow.

The Owl Service 

 

I might cause a stir with this assessment, but I find there is a very sexualised element to The Owl Service that is absent from the other Garner books I’ve read. The triangle between Roger, Alison and Gwyn is central to the story and the reason for the violence that threatens them at every turn. I think the standout scene is the denouement where the legend is ‘coming into being’ and the air is filled with feathers. It’s only feathers, right? Somehow, though, the notion of all these feathers in the air and all that implies about what might be coming next manages to be terrifying.

In The Owl Service I personally found a very definite, and successful, attempt to draw the teenager’s fantasy landscape, rather than the child’s.

The Moon of Gomrath

 

Yesterday on Twitter I was reminded of the stunning ‘release of the Wild Hunt’ scene in this book. This is the crux of Garner’s writing – the ability to turn myth and legend into durable contemporary stories that you absolutely and utterly believe are possible. That these creatures and these myths lurk just around the corner, and if, as in Weirdstone, you could only find the right door in the forest, you would gain access to their beauty and power.


Have I missed any of your favourites out, especially from the books I haven’t read?

And if you’ve never read Garner before, I hope these posts contribute in some small way to a wish for you to discover him. Because he's amazing.

Utterly favourite childhood authors part 1 - Alan Garner

ALAN GARNER

 

Oh, Alan. What your prose does to me. Sparse, spare, lyrical beauty.

No words wasted.

The ability to utterly convince me of the reality of fantasy.

Heartache, death, pain and physical discomfort.

I think I wanted, for a long time, to write just like you.

I think I still try to.


More on Alan Garner here and here.

In my next post on his books, I'm going to run down some favourite scenes and ooze delightedly over them. Fair warning.

Selected quote:-
“She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.”
The Owl Service

Top Ten Things I really, really want to learn how to do

• Archery. Yes. I want to kick ass with a bow. Currently no practical use in my life, but you never know. This is not a Hunger Games thing but a Veralidaine Sarrasri thing.

• Film editing. Because it's pure artistry.

• Kickboxing. This is what watching Van Damme from an early age does. It's not because I want to be able to hurt people. It's because I want to be able to hurt people AND look cool doing it.

• Scuba diving. My love of exploring strange new worlds tempered by my crippling fear of coming across a giant jellyfish. Sometimes I wake up screaming.

• Computering. Overarching term for being able to build, create, understand and design computers and computer software. Slight problem in that I don't think I have the brain for this.

• Foraging. I think this and the archery might have something to do with my inherent fear of apocalypsi.

• Rock climbing. Scuttling like a crab with ease up the side of a building may only have practical application in action films, but what if? For example, what if a serial killer was chasing me and my only route of escape was down the side of a cliff? Not so silly now, IS IT.

• Sword fighting. See kickboxing. Slightly less hurt, bit more cool.

• Horseriding. Slight cheat since I already technically can horse ride. But I haven't been on a horse since my teens and I want to be able to really ride a horse. Ride like a cowboy.

• Photoshop. And not just deleting eye bags. I mean, PHOTOSHOP. I mean the crazy, incredible shiz that people create with it. I mean art.

Special mention of things that are probably not achievable:-

• sorcery
• invisibility
• altering reality
• going back in time
• shapeshifting
• flying
• becoming the lead singer of an incredible rock 'n roll band

Some conclusions I have come to whilst researching literary agents

                                                 FYI - this what the best agents look like. Obvs.


Right or wrong, these are the things, in the course of my research, that I have decided so far. Feel free to tut disapprovingly at any one of them, then give me a good old fashioned disagreement spanking in the comments.

• If an agent doesn’t have a website, I avoid.
Seriously? In this day and age? With the whole, you know, minor internet thing? No way. I don’t care if they have an established reputation, nor if their name is spoken with reverent hallowed tones in the echoing hallways of publishing. It’s much more important to me that they are clued in to the here and now. This is what they are telling me by not having a website:- they don’t want to be findable because they are not looking for new clients – in which case, pointless for me; they are an elite agency that approaches authors, not the other way around – again, pointless for a newbie; they think the whole ‘online thing’ is a flash in the pan - in which case, I don’t think we’re going to get along.


• If an agent doesn’t have submission guidelines, my heart sinks a bit.
I’ve researched query letters until my eyes have bled. Not, you know… literally. I’ve crafted the pitch paragraph. I know what I’m going to say about myself. I’ve trawled the huge number of websites out there stuffed with example queries and pitches. I’ve done my time, man!

What this exhaustive browsing has also taught me is that agents are as individual as… well, humans, in fact. Some of them won’t like you addressing your query letter/email to Dear Sir, or Dear Bastard (just a thought). Some freaking hate it when you compare your books to other books. Others think if you don’t do that, you can’t even pitch your own book and you don’t know the market you’re trying to sell into, so reject you. Some prefer it if you smear your query letter in marmalade so they have something to suck while they’re reading your ms*. I’ve read so many absolutely conflicting opinions, and mostly from agents themselves, that actually trying to craft a query letter that satisfies them all would be much akin to attempting to eat my own head: pointless; time-consuming; painful.

So when an agent’s website has a handy section entitled – submission guidelines - I shed a tear of gladness and follow those guidelines. To the letter.

If an agent’s website does not have a handy section so entitled – I think twice about going through the effort of submitting to them. It’s not the be all and end all, of course; there are a few other reasons that influence my decision, which brings me neatly on to…


• If I can find out about the personality of an agent, I’m more interested in them.
This doesn’t mean stalking them. It means, if they’re on social media and I’m interested in submitting to them, I’m going to start reading what they’re saying. If they say things that gel with what I’m trying to sell, well – hell yes. You have to be in sync with your agent – they are selling you and your books, and will very hopefully continue selling you and your books for your entire career. They are not there just to get you to a publisher. They are your, you know, agent.

If they’re not on social media, it’s not going to put me off – but the more accessible they are, the more confident I feel that they actually want me to submit to them. Which brings me neatly on to…


• Querying an agent very briefly on whether they are actually open to submissions is a good idea, and I shouldn’t be nervous of doing it.
No point getting all the way to this stage only to find out that they will ignore your sub because they already have a full roster. Send them a very quick email to ask if they are accepting new clients. Some agents may even say it on their website, which is really quite handy. Don’t ignore the ‘no, I’m not looking for new clients at this time’ message – they’ll ignore you, and it’ll be this whole ignoring game, which isn’t as fun as it sounds. And it doesn’t sound very fun, so imagine.


• Sending a short, polite chase email after an agent’s response time has elapsed is a good idea, and I shouldn’t be nervous of doing it.
So I’ve heard. Yeeeeah haven’t actually gotten to that bit yet :) I’ll let you know when I do.


* possibly untrue.

About Me

I am ... 

of the female persuasion.

a writer.

odd. Some might say.

My agent is Sam Copeland at RCW.

My first book is called Fearsome Dreamer and it's coming from Hot Key Books in Summer 2013.

This is the official press release! Gulp.

ORIGINS

The question I dread most when meeting new people is “Where are you from?” For some reason, possibly to do with being an idiot, I can’t just give one answer. Because it’s a bit complicated. Where are you from – you mean where do I live? Where did I used to live? Out of all the places I’ve lived, which one do I most identify with and thus would feel comfortable about choosing to answer your question? Where am I from ‘genetically’? Where was I born?

‘Idiot’, you’re thinking right now. It’s cool.

I’m both French and British (none of this ‘half’ stuff – I don’t have a half citizenship or half a passport); and I live and work in London. I was born in Paris, but grew up in Cornwall. Sometimes I feel very French. Other times exceedingly British with biscuits on top. Often the proud Cornish part of me rears its affable head. I strongly suspect the British part of me has more than a hint of Scottish. Ah, the Old Alliance, as the Boy is fond of saying.

This is all both complicated and pretty damn enjoyable.

CAREER ONE and CAREER TWO

I work in publishing [career 1], in an area that crosses over substantially with the kind of fiction I write [career 2]. I try hard to keep them separate. I don’t talk about my writing when I have my publishing hat on, and vice versa. It’s basically like I have a secret identity. Yes of course that makes me cool, why do you ask?

10 THINGS I REALLY LIKE – A RANDOM SELECTION

n.b. updated every so often with a new random selection.

• Tetris.
• Lexx.
• Never Land by The Sisters of Mercy.
• Anything almond flavoured.
• This Metallica/Britney Spears mash up. Musically, it just doesn’t get better.
• Matthew Bourne.
• Clueless.
• Small silver charms embedded with little crystal gems.
• Peep toe heels.
• Trees – any kind of.

Drop me an email. Follow me on Twitter. I do like to chat shit. I also swear. A bit.

Fearsome Dreamer: Book 1 synopsis

There is a world where gods you’ve never heard of have wound themselves into hearts, and choice has led its history down a different path.

This is a world where France made a small, downtrodden island called England part of its vast and bloated empire.

There are people here who can cross a thousand miles with their minds. There are rarer people still who can move between continents in the blink of an eye.

These people are dangerous.

And wanted. Desperately wanted.

Apprentice hedgewitch Vela Rue knows that she is destined for more. She knows being whisked off from a dull country life to a city full of mystery and intrigue is meant to be. She knows she has something her government wants, a talent so rare and precious and new that they will do anything to train her in it.

But she doesn’t know that she is being lied to. She doesn’t know that the man teaching her about her talent is in love with her, and considered by some to be the most dangerous man alive.

So she will learn. She will learn how to betray everyone around her for empty promises, how to choose the wrong man to trust, and just how real her dreams can be…