Progress report

Well, yes, there haven't been many entries recently, mostly for personal reasons, but also because I've had a bit of a crisis of faith.

I had planned to start on the next episode of the Conscience saga, but a rather unhelpful comment from an agent, about being unable to sell anything connected with WW1 somewhat took the wind out of my sails, and I was forced to drift to a halt.  I was completely lost - what to do?  I was geared up to research the next book - only lacking the petrol money to take me to the right places.  Should I do it anyway?  I pondered, and, coupled with the depression that a really bad flu/virus/chest infection brings I rather began to despair.

Somewhere around this time two thoughts occurred: firstly I suddenly had two novel plots, one modern, one historical - neither connected with the toxic WW1.   I suggested them to the rejecting agent, and she told me which she thought was more commercial.   This idea is gradually taking shape - it is inspired by Judith Murray's suggestion that I read The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry - which I predictably loathed.   However, I thought if my "good" novels were not getting far in the market, then I should try and write something unutterably middle-brow.  And possibly heart-warming.   I have the idea, but am just warming it up a bit, and hoping that a plot is maturing somewhere.

Competitions
In the meantime I have submitted TAG and TRF to two novel writing competitions, the Dundee International and the new Bath Literary Prize.  The latter only asked for 5,000 words, but I am obviously hoping they will come back for more and to that end I have been re-editing it - and have reduced it by about 6-7,000 words.... which is delightful.  I am astonished that there is so much superfluous bumf - in some cases I have been "showing AND telling" - I hope I'm not writing for the hard of thought.   They will organise a long list - I am praying to be on that at least - something to put in submission letters.

Success
What will I do when I actually get an agent, an editor, a publisher.... will I have to start a new blog full of success and vaunting?  

The Plan
If I get interest in TAG I will move onto Conscience, but in the meantime I am working on GATD and the plan is to write it in 3 months or so.  Mind you, the sight of the great flood yesterday made me think I should revive Islanders

A teenage feminist in the 1970's - for International Women's Day 2014

Lucy and Leo were perfect children of their time: their interest in the environment and her interest in feminism, coincided with the Pill (The cure for the population explosion!  The liberator of women!)  All around the media were proclaiming a great cultural change.  It was on the covers of Time and Newsweek, in colour supplement photographs, whole episodes of Panorama, Man Alive and Horizon.  They had no historic perspective for this: this was their now.  1968, hippies, the Vietnam war, the “Sexual Revolution” had been followed by environmental awareness, the oil crisis, the troubled economy.   The words oil, Nixon and pollution cropped up in every conversation.  Sometimes people mentioned (derisively of course) Women’s Lib. 

Lucy never became a feminist: she was one, probably since birth, but was piqued into consciousness by the unequal treatment of herself and her brother Peter.  It was so obvious.  The feminist emphasis on male oppression was naturally associated in her experience with her father’s traditional views on women and how they should be controlled.  When Lucy used a Christmas book token to buy The Female Eunuch in January 1972 Mike immediately demanded that she should not read it and should hand it over to him “until you are 16.”  She read it anyway: she was fascinated by the arguments about love and altruism – she looked around for a male oppressor, but her chief sources of oppression were women: her mother, her headmistress, her fanatical PE teacher, her dismissive art teacher.  When Leo came along he did not seem to interfere with her freedom (or was she just being complicit in her own oppression there?).  

 Some adolescent girls dream about marriage, but it didn’t seem to fit with the peace, love and freedom doctrine Lucy had acquired as a hippy fellow traveller: she had the loon pants, the scoopneck t-shirts, the ethnic jewellery, but these outer decorative touches meant nothing without the mental furniture, and Lucy had bought the whole shopful.  These ideas weren’t bolt-on goodies, fashionable bells and whistles borrowed from others’ mental processes. They were the product of an interior alchemy which produced surprising intellectual results. Lucy had taken the gospel-based understanding of her Catholic upbringing, combined it with the actions of Che Guevara and the Women’s Liberation Movement and her own personal need for freedom to create a philosophy that embraced Jesus’s promise of life in abundance and transmuted it into peace, love and freedom for everyone and everything, but particularly herself.  

Marriage seemed to conflict with her desire for freedom and self-fulfillment.  Joni Mitchell warbling We don’t need no piece of paper from the City Hall, keeping us tied and true sounded cool and hip and non-possessive. She knew there were other ways of living – some of the girls in her class had been passing around Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa.  This was a step up from the National Geographical as a way of discovering more about human sexuality.  The book was admired for its exhilarating descriptions of different ways in which adolescents were allowed to discover sexual pleasure.  Lucy wondered about these different modes of sexual relationship: more experimental, non-exclusive, with monogamy a brief pause in a kaleidoscope of other possibilities.  Hippy tribalism and communal living were the closest the West came to Samoa; intellectually these were fascinating, and clearly feminist. Not that she wanted sociable sexuality herself, she just wanted Leo, to be his.  Her romantic yearnings made her more a surrendered wife than a sexual outlaw at that stage.

Leo is less impressed with feminist arguments than Lucy, and Lucy begrudges giving up valuable kissing time to tell him more about it, but one evening as they lie on cushions on the floor, she does her best.

“Don’t you see Leo – women’s liberation is actually everyone’s liberation.  Plenty of men are oppressed by their sex roles, just as much as women are!”

“I don’t feel oppressed by them,” he says, “I’m happy with it.”

“But – some men, I mean, might find it hard to be strong and tough and manly and go out and kill animals.  I would if I were a man.”

“But you’re not a man!”

“Oh, honestly – use your imagination – not all men want to be told they have to be fierce and competitive and aggressive – some of them might want to be caring, co-operative sort of people instead, they must feel uncomfortable being forced into a masculine stereotype.”

She’s looking at him earnestly, he doesn’t really have an answer for her, but he knows a way to end the argument, so he just says

“I suppose so, if you’re that type,” and then his hand wraps her breast, teasing her nipple, until she loses interest in discussion.

Dilemma

Since I heard that the market for WW1 novels was dead, I have felt rather deflated.  The idea of finishing The Ash Grove at this point and getting it published to take advantage of the WW1 hoo-ha has been a long-standing one, which I first conceived about 8 years ago.  Sometimes clearly, one can be too far sighted.  Perhaps if I hadn't been distracted by the Love Object and written The Romantic Feminist first, then things would have been different.  I might have finished it by 2012 and snugly moved into the correct position.

However, I have clearly had to do a great deal of learning on the job and as a result The Ash Grove is probably better than it would have been otherwise.   So.   What to do?  I still have the wretched book in 5 or 6 slushpiles at present - I plan to try about 6 more in the UK and at the same time attack the US market, and send half a dozen query letters to US agents in the next few days.  I can probably risk a rather harder sell on them... trumpet blowing being better appreciated apparently.

The dilemma is of course, whether to carry on sending TAG out - or whether to revert to TRF - and whether to write Conc. or whether to dive into TGAD (the name of the new project)....I tried turning a little bit of it into a script and presented it at Tara's script writing group - of which I am an apathetic member - I usually go along to supply critique, rather than submit work, but as one of the group last time said "Why do we never see any of your work?" I thought I'd better turn up with something...anyway, it was politely received, no real criticism - which was disappointing, I was hoping people would spot all sorts of deficiencies - but apart from someone suggesting "wicked" would be used rather than "smart" there was no real critique.

M has just told me that TAG is "an absolutely marvellous book" - which I immediately translated as "anything to stop you whingeing".  It does need some editing - so that is what I should be doing in my idle moments.  I'm sure it could happily lose 5,000 words or so.

So, I do have a plan of sorts.  I don't feel really happy or secure about it, but it seems better than doing nothing.

Growth of the new Idea

Since I last wrote I have had TAG rejected by an agent, pas grand chose, but the reason "we are finding publishers do not want WW1 novels, however beautifully written" was rather devastating.   It does not mean I will give up submitting - I plan to do several submissions tomorrow. However, it does leave rather a large question mark over the validity of writing another novel in the sequence just now.

I understand that publishers have long lead-in times and might have got their lists in line already.   However, this may be an opportunity to refine my submissions strategy... stressing that it is set in 1916 etc.  so perhaps getting them to focus on the whole centenary - presumably the commemorations will be lasting 4 years, not just this year.

 This week has been "blighted" by teaching - which has been remarkably exhausting.  I am hoping I will be more in the swing of it by next week and will start to fit writing into the schedule.

The new idea was run by the rejecting agent (she was given a choice of 2 ideas and asked which she thought might be most commercial)... I ran the plot past a 3 friends, 2 writers and a reader and it's getting a broad thumbs up, so, providing I can do a bit of research and really get on with it, I think it may be a goer.  Do I dare write about dim chavish blokes?  Why not?  I've met a few... and perhaps sharpening up and becoming a bit more responsible is part of his story... I'm actually quite excited about it - even if the plot hasn't quite worked.

A comercial idea

I've been praying for a commercial idea - a Harold Fry type thing - a novel of redemption and humour... but better.  Now I think I've had one - but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to carry it off... however, I've started writing it, having sworn that I was going to stick to writing Conscience this year.  The fact is though, if I can't find a market/agent for The Ash Grove I will wonder why the hell I'm writing Conscience and whether it's worth it.   One the other hand, GATD may be a bummer too - and I'll waste months writing something that I don't entirely believe in.

Last week I did nothing on Conscience - this week I am going to be mostly teaching.  We shall see how it all fits together.

Engagement

Occasionally an agent seems very much to want what you can offer, so your covering letter is a bit more personal, a little more enthusiastic than usual.  Of course this is totally wrong - people only want a professional letter.  So this afternoon I sent off a submission (3rd this week!) to a new agency - with two fairly young agents and a not very published client list.  My instinct was to leave them as a last resort - but somehow I thought one of them might have time for my ideas.  So I sent this letter which contained more warmth than was strictly professional.   And then I wondered why it all felt so odd.   It occurred to me that while I am feeling all warm and engaging - they won't even have looked at their inboxes - and they won't get to it for a couple of weeks, and by the time they respond, I will probably have forgotten that I even wrote to them.

New Agents
Carole Blake - the doyenne - writing about 15 years ago, says that "people were being made redundant by publishing houses and setting up as agents the following week".  Well why not?  A year or so ago I was only aware of the agents one can find in the directory - and the on line directory - and many of them seemed to be hopeless for my purposes. Now, having begun to follow things on the internet more attentively I have found a whole new wellspring of agents - new ones are setting up all the time - and they all seem a great deal more receptive to the sort of thing I'm writing.

Is this a good thing? It could be that more people are writing YA and Commercial fiction - too much they say - but maybe more of it is getting published because there are so many agents for it... or that there are so many agents because there are so many writers out here in the howling darkness - trying to force the doors open.  I just hope when I get an agent it will be a good one... 

Sex, lies and book publishing

This is the title of an amusing book by Rupert Heath - about the trade.  It is fairly up to date and rather more useful perhaps than Carole Blake's book From Pitch to Publication.   I encountered it while "researching" agents, i.e. I had been given the names of two agents by Tara Moore who got them from Polly Courteney - who are allegedly molto in gamba and I sent The Ash Grove to one - and will probably write a letter to the other, since the agency doesn't actually accept unsolicited MSs apparently.   But we'll see.  More submissions next week, I think 2 isn't bad for the first working week of the year.

SL&BP advises you to do multiple submissions, but not to tell the agents you're doing them, whereas other agents have said they like to know if they are part of a multiple submission, and some agents (Standen) don't want to be part of a multiple submission.  Conville & Walsh tell you to do them.   Oh dear, it's all so confusing.

http://www.kitwhitfield.com/publisherdating.html has an amusing account of what not to say in covering letters... I think I've avoided most of them over the years.   But I rather hope lousy writers will continue to write lousy covering letters, so that those of us who can write a decent letter might get to the top of the pile sooner.

One of the lies I spotted in the book was this:  at an early stage he states that agents/editors always believe that talent will out and eventually all the good books in the world will get published.   However, he says there are lots of good unpublished works out there.  Later in the book he encourages writers to persist in the face of rejections.  Of course, we are always being encouraged to persist... but what of the lament I heard on R4 a week or so ago  "Just received another rejection from an agent - after 30 years, should I bother carrying on?"   Of course one doesn't know what that means really - in fact I got my first rejection letters well over 30 years ago.  And they paralysed me for a long while... then again, I am more or less inured to that now.  I don't like rejection letters of course, but I can cope with them.  I realise they aren't "personal" and represent all sorts of factors that are nothing to do with my book or my writing (although in part that's the issue).  However, I don't know whether that lament came from someone with a whole lot of novels under his/her belt - all of which were being constantly rejected - or someone who had not been writing full-time etc.

Persistence may be the biggest lie of all - if you are not writing what the market wants.  Literary fiction is safer in a sense - the writing might transcend the market.  But if one persists in writing simply to please oneself - I know I have a hack tendency - I definitely wrote TRF originally to please myself, I re-wrote it to please Judith Murray - and the market - but she still didn't like it enough - so.  Oh dear.  I will argue myself out of writing if I persist in this argument.  Actually I won't, because it's virtually the only thing I can do.