Tag: literary agent

Quercus Books

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Now then, people: I’m pleased to be writing with some extremely good news. After weeks of turmoil and torment, I am utterly delighted to announce that my first novel will be published by Quercus Books in 2014. The last month has been something of a rollercoaster, to say the least, but I’m just blown away to have landed Riptide with such an amazing publisher. It’s still sinking in, but I’m starting to believe it.

My editor, Jane Wood, is really enthusiastic about the novel, and I can’t wait to work with her on the manuscript. I’m just home from meeting with Jane and Sue, my brilliant agent with the bodacious Conville & Walsh team. It was an incredibly surreal experience to talk about release dates, discuss options for the cover art and explore where I’d like to go with my next few novels. I have three solid ideas plotted out and ready for writing; I know what I want to do with the stories, but it was very odd to expose them to publishing professionals for the first time, as I hadn’t had to vocalise or pitch them before.

So what happens next? For now, it’s business as usual: I’m working on a number of films for Cumbria Wildlife Trust, and college is about to go ballistic with end of term projects and paperwork. I’ll have the summer holidays to get my teeth stuck into another draft of Riptide, then we’ll be looking at proofs in Autumn, and publication in Spring 2014. Around all that, I’m keen to get my head down and start making progress on my second novel. The bogs and marshes idea I mentioned last month is shouting louder and louder – I think I’m going to work on that one next. It’s great to have the ideas lined up – it’ll take me years to complete them all – but now I need to carve out some defined, scheduled writing time. I don’t know where that time is going to come from, but I’ll find it. The further I take my writing, the further I want it to go.

I’ve worked hard to reach these early stages, and I feel extremely humble to have had that work embraced by such amazing people. It makes me want to strive even harder with my stories. I wouldn’t have come this far without the support from Sue, from writer friends Ali Shaw, Iain Maloney and Steven John Malcolm, and most of all from my wonderful wife Monica – and my daughter Dora, in her own way – because this is all for her. I’m fortunate and grateful to have such incredible people in my life.

It’s a sunny day in the Lake District, and I’m going to have a wee celebration – time to take the family for some cider in the park…

Decline

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On Tuesday, Sue started submitting Riptide Heart to editors. I’m excited, but the thought fills me with fear. It’s incredibly scary to think of publishers reading my work. With all the nerves, I have to keep reminding myself how far I’ve come since cooking up the idea in 2011.

It’s inevitable that there will be rejections. Rejection is inherent to writing. I reckon I’ve had no more than one acceptance for every four short story submissions. There’s a certain fatalism that comes with sending off a story. After all the graft and anguish, it’s a moment of horrible exposure to submit it for the consideration of editors. Rejections are raw, even when they feel inevitable, and that’s just for short stories. The stakes will be much higher with a novel.

Sue has asked whether I want to know who has declined Riptide Heart, and why – or whether I’d prefer not to know. I ummed and aahed about this for a wee while, before deciding that I’ll take all the feedback I can get. I think most writers would give eyeteeth for criticism from professional editors, and I’ll cherish anything constructive, no matter how raw the rejection.

Some editors have already been in touch with Sue to say they’re enjoying Riptide, which is a great start – but doesn’t translate into anything definitive. My nerves are frayed beyond measure, and I feel about two seconds behind the rest of reality, but it’s exciting stuff.

Beginnings

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When Monica was pregnant, we didn’t tell anyone the baby’s name. We had a funny idea that telling someone else might jinx it, so Dora’s name remained a secret until the moment she was born.

It sounds daft, but I feel the same way about the title of my new novel. I know what it’s going to be called, but I’m not ready to talk about it just yet. I have this strange sense that I don’t want people to know. So, for the moment, I’ll use another name. This was actually the first title I thought of, but decided was a bit of a mouthful; it’ll do for now. When I talk about the new novel, I’ll call it ‘We Are Always Reaching Out For Heaven’.

I mention this because I started writing today. I didn’t think it would happen so quickly, because I’ve been stewing on the idea for months, but this morning I divided the story into chapters and blocked out the scenes, then copied the whole plan into a new document. Each of the chapters has a summary of the action, ready to go, so I can work on whichever part of the story shouts the loudest without losing sight of the whole. This method worked nicely for me with Riptide Heart, as I seldom write in chronological order (I like to write my ending early on – it gives me a destination to work towards).

Then I simply started writing. The first line was quick, and the rest of the paragraph took me an hour, trying sentences, rephrasing them, deleting them, rewriting them…. and it evolved, slowly, feeling out the words, building a story. It’ll take a while to settle on a voice and a vocabulary that works for this story – and to keep it distinct from Riptide Heart, which is still fresh in my mind after such intense redrafts.

So there it is – the first 500 words of my new novel, down on paper. It’s an odd sensation to be in a triple figure word count after dealing with a redraft of 105,000 words, but I’m quietly excited about it. And I need something to keep my mind off Riptide Heart while agent Sue starts the nerve-shredding process of submitting the manuscript to publishers.

14-hour Third Draft Self-doubt Blues

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At 11.45 last night, after 14 hours of damn-near nonstop work, I finally sent off the third draft of Riptide Heart. It’s taken me so long because I hit a horrible stumbling block. For the first time with this novel, I didn’t know how to develop the story, and for the last week I’ve thought of little else. The stumbling block was as follows:

  1. Character A discovers a piece of information.
  2. Character A tells Character B the piece of information.
  3. Not enough time has elapsed between point 1 and point 2 to be convincing.
  4. Point 1 can’t be moved any earlier in the narrative without gigantic structural changes.
  5. Point 2 can’t be moved any later in the narrative without gigantic structural changes.
  6. Points 1 and 2 are too integrated to be separated without gigantic structural changes.
  7. I was unwilling to make any gigantic structural changes.

I turned it inside out looking for a solution. I tried rewrites, alterations, moving entire chapters – everything. But no matter which way I turned it, I couldn’t make it gel. Nothing felt right, and nothing was working. It made me miserable.

On Monday morning, lovely agent Sue dropped me an email, asking if the manuscript was ready. It wasn’t, but even as I replied, the block dropped away completely. Out of nowhere, I knew exactly what to do.

Yesterday morning, when I started work at 9am, I went straight to point 1, and deleted it. Then I went to point 2, and deleted it. Points 3 through 7 promptly became redundant. After a miserable week of stress spent questioning the novel, questioning myself and questioning the universe, this took me about 20 minutes. I simply hadn’t considered that as an option, and I’d wracked myself hollow trying to find alternatives. With joy in my heart, I set about tidying up the loose ends. My old flow came back in a heartbeat; rather than excising point 1 altogether, a brilliant alternative started shouting from the back of my brain. I made the switch. It worked.

With the last of my structural changes complete, I started, once again, the painstaking process of passing through the novel from start to finish. There’s no short cut to this, but I do it two or three times on every draft. It’s the fine-tuning and the rephrasing – the last check for chronology, for sense, for pace.

I could barely focus by the time I sent the manuscript away. My brain now feels like toffee and I have RSI in my right little finger (which, curiously, is the only finger I don’t use at all in typing, and consequently hovers under tension over the keyboard at all times), but after a week of anxiety, self-doubt and stress over such a small issue, I’m pretty happy with it.

Next up: Sue’s response. We’re getting closer to London Book Fair all the time. If I need to do another draft, it may not be ready for the fair, and I’m so keen for Riptide Heart to be a part. That said, I’d prefer it to be right, rather than merely on time. It’s fantastic to have such a strong editorial input from Conville & Walsh – their constructive, critical feedback is what energises my redrafts. Writing feeds on community, discussion and development.

Redraft: take two

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Redraft: take two

Today’s post brought the manuscript of my second draft, including Sue’s notes. Much like the ramshackle clutter of the Conville & Walsh office, this is exactly how I imagined it should look. 307 pages of rumpled, tea-stained paper is much cooler than revisions in Word.

Quitting writing?

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I’m a writer. I’m compelled to write, and I love writing, but I nearly gave it up in 2012. The manic combination of a house renovation, an infant daughter and a stressful job scrambled my brain and body into exhaustion. I was slowly developing a second novel, but had few opportunities to write and only worked late at night with one thousand splinters in my fingers. With a brain like mush, I struggled to weigh the rewards against the mental torture and hours spent away from my wife and daughter. As driven as I am to write, I quietly considered quitting to concentrate on my family, my house and my films.

I was on the verge of abandoning the novel when my old university friend Ali Shaw got in touch. Ali is the amazing, award-winning author of magic realist novels The Girl With Glass Feet and The Man Who Rained. He is represented by Susan Armstrong of the Conville & Walsh literary agency. Sue was looking for new authors, he said – did I have anything I could send over?

I submitted a short story about a WWII fighter pilot. It’s an older story, written in 2010, but it remains one of my favourites. It was published in the second issue of Gutter magazine, and it’s fun to read aloud. I also sent a summary of my second novel, Riptide Heart. Sue called me up a few days later to ask about the novel. At that stage – October 2011, I think – it was about half-done, but Sue’s interest galvanised me into getting it finished. For the next eight months, on the rare occasions I had any sustained time to work, I crammed everything I could into my limited hours. As a result, the novel was written in frantic bursts – 1,000 words in 20 minutes, or 2,000 in an hour. On my last day of writing, I churned through 11,000 words in 14 frazzled hours. I spent another month redrafting, then sent it off.

I was proud of the story, but wasn’t expecting good news in a hurry. When Sue replied a fortnight later, I assumed it would be a rejection. It wasn’t – she loved the novel, and wanted to represent me and my work. This took some time to sink in. Even now, months later, I struggle to believe my luck.

I’ve now finished a second draft of Riptide Heart, and I’m about to start work on the third – which I hope to have completed in time for the 2013 London Book Fair. Sue has a fantastic editorial eye, and her observations have helped immeasurably in shaping my redrafts. Long conversations with writers like Ali and Iain Maloney, and my long-suffering partner Monica Metsers, have all helped too. Writing needs community as well as space. More than anything else, I’ve found I need people to read the project with some distance from the words. Working in such intense sessions means that sometimes I can’t see the wood for trees.

Regardless of what happens with Riptide Heart, this last six months has reminded me of how much I need to write. Like dreaming, writing is one of the ways I decode my world. Affirmation has helped me focus.

I’ve started this blog to record the process of working on Riptide Heart and future novels – I’m already planning the next. I’ll be posting updates about my writing, my films, the occasional book review, and links to things I think are interesting. So there.