It’s a definite goer, but what’s it called?

I finally have it in my hot hands. Three months after the verbal yes I have a signed contract for the next kid’s book. So in the fairground that is authoring a book, I can get off the “Will it be published” rollercoaster and run with shaky legs to the “Does my text look fat in this” Hall of Mirrors. There is where I start taking distorted looks at my text and think ‘It’s all blobby in the middle’. In the next mirror I decide my head looks enormous and start worrying whether I look like that in real life. Then it’s horribly thin and finally plain ugly without being funny.

Belinda and Mark, the editors at the ABC are standing by the Hook a Duck Book Title stall, spruiking hard for me to hook the duck with No Tomato Sauce on its bottom. They really don’t want me to pick the Attack of the Zombie Students duck. I think they have secretly removed it from the name ducks bobbing on the water. No Tomato Sauce, is relevant in that my evil school principal does hide the drugs in the tomato sauce but I’m not sure. Still I am an utterly crap title chooser, maybe I should leave it to the experts.

From there I’ll be forced onto the Book Cover Wurlitzer, where I get so many options and so many ideas that I end up spinning round and round and back where I started with a strong feeling of nausea.

Still for all my whingeing it is a fairground, it’s full of delights, bright lights and thrills and at some stage in the not too distant future I’ll actually get some money for it. Cancel the Christmas austerity measures and fatten the goose!

Talking grown up to an agent

After a month of shilly-shallying I finally phoned Selwa Anthony, the literary agent I first spoke to back in July. Part of me thought I should just put aside Crash Tactic, as the new book (the one in my head) is where I really want to be at. Another part thought, why waste an almost finished novel? So I sat down on a bench in Hyde Park and called expecting to leave a message. Selwa threw me by answering. Naturally I had to explain who I was again and what the situation was with Crash Tactic. She said it wasn’t worth sending that to her, she didn’t think she could place it, but she was interested in the new book when I told her about it. She told me to send her a few chapters when I written some. ‘I don’t need much’.

I have to say I was impressed and motivated. Clearly she’s not from the ‘I loved it, but I didn’t love it enough’ school of feedback. Big Tick. Absolutely straightforward and practical about what she could and couldn’t place. She won’t definitely take on the next book, but I left the phone call thinking ‘Great, all I have to do is impress her with a few chapters’. It seems so manageable. I’m not going to dash off any old tat, I’m going to write my best stuff yet (by a long way). It’s just down to me now to produce something really impressive and that’s exactly what I want.