Contact has been made

The agent called!

You wait for ages and then two come at once...I finally got an email back from the ABC about the manuscript of my next children’s book, the Lab Rats  sequel, Lab Rat Liberation (submitted early March) and I was reading through that when the phone rang and it was the agent! She called but seemed to have no idea why she was calling.

I explained the situation and she sounded suitably pessimistic, but thought we should have a talk after I’d had the feedback from the editor in July to see where we could take thing from there. Obviously she was confident enough to let me have her phone number. The conversation was very much focussed on placing this book rather than representing me as a writer, but it was only a preliminary chat, I can hardly expect the full representing philosophy in five minutes. She thought she might have met me a few years ago at some lavish Hachette ‘Harlequin’ theme party. She didn’t, I never got invited to that one. I did get taken to see the State of Origin one year. The seats were great but it was generally agreed to have been the dullest match in Origin history. She wasn’t at that.

Lab Rat Termination?

The ABC feedback was more challenging. The editor there while loving Lab Rats 1, really doesn’t like Lab Rats 2. While he would be happy to work on it with me, he thinks the better option would be to work on something else. As much as I was surprised about his feedback (other views I got had been v positive) there have been so many delays and set back on this, it feels a bit terminal. My poor little Lab Rats, I do love them.  The day after this email I got another message from a mother in UK saying her children were now ‘playing lab rats’. What a joy!

I guess I’ll just add this onto the pile of things to think about while I’m away. Actually I won’t be thinking about them at all, I’ll be absorbed in other things and hoping clarity will simply emerge without trying.

A new name for Crash Tactic

Ploughing the manuscript of Crash Tactic and everyday is a different story. Yesterday it was all utter drivel. Today it wasn’t too bad. At the weekend someone read out a few lines over my shoulder and it sounded like such hackneyed rubbish I completely rewrote those lines. It’s always like that and the more you go over it, the crapper it sounds.

In this edit a possible new title is emerging, It could also be called Die for the Deal. Without knowing anything about the contents which is better?  Die for the Deal or Crash Tactic 

Let me know by posting a comment.

Emerging from the Slough of Despond

In Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the hero Christian get trapped in a deep bog of misery, guilt and sin from which he must emerge. If you can strip the religion out it’s so accurate - despondency is a bog that you have to wade through. Clearly I have been in that slough but I’m emerging now and all it took was one coffee with a good friend. Isn’t it glorious that a Christian novel from the 17th century can capture an atheist writer’s feelings in the 21st?

It makes me feel egotistical and somewhat insecure that all it required to help me emerge was someone  saying: ‘you are a really good writer, but your best work is ahead of you and I’m convinced when you really let go you’ll blow the world apart.’ He described it as a straining dam: ‘your true creative strength is pent up, the dam’s springing leaks and cracks, your work shows flashes of it where it’s got out here and there, but when the dam finally bursts - look out world.’

The tricky part is that it’s my tendency to overthink that’s holding it all back. What did I naturally do when he told me this? Start thinking furiously about ways in which to stop thinking so much in my writing.

He also told me that one of the editors at his publishing house (he’s a state sales manager) had agreed to look at the text of my novel, Crash Tactic in July to give me some feedback. This is a generous commitment of time and has fired me with the excitement of a deadline. I thrive on deadlines. As I’m overseas in July I’ve got to get through Crash Tactic and do another round of changes by the end of the month. 

Panic, glorious motivating panic!

Crash Tactic revisited

Having not looked at it for over six months I printed off Crash Tactic and went over it at the weekend marking things that needed changing. There was so much! On one level it was embarrassing to think I’d let people read it in the state it was, but what was great was that I could see how much better it could be. Structurally it’s sound and from about page 60 where the hero gets kidnapped during a terrorist attack on the World Financial Planners conference it goes like the clappers. The opening fifty pages are a bit ‘treacly’. There isn’t the lightness (I’m talking language, sentences rather than ideas and plot) so the mark up pencil has worked overtime. It’s an action comedy adventure but reading through it struck me that in parts I’ve been sidetracked by the comedy. I’m so used to making it front and centre - the whole purpose of the novel. Maybe it’s too forced. It can flow from the situations and characters without explicit ‘quipping’ all the time.

The comedy safety net

Maybe I’m too in love with comedy. Perhaps that’s my dam - not so much being funny but feeling the need to entertain, being terrified that what I write isn’t entertaining - perhaps I need to trust that what I write is interesting and entertaining without having to force it. Am I using comedy as a safety net? I'm scared of writing something that’s not busily entertaining. It’s been said that a writing novel is like standing naked in a room and asking people to comment on your body. If that’s true, it could be that comedy is my underpants.

Mmm I’d say there was plenty for me to think about there, but I’m trying not to think.

Meanwhile still no call from the agent but I’m not worried, I’m back where I love being, right in the middle of my text.