I'd prefer to blame Royal Mail, on the whole...

This round of submissions I've taken to enclosing a stamped self-addressed postcard for the agent to post to let me know my chapters have arrived. The messages I put on them are getting increasingly frivolous:

Your chapters are now with our team of readers, being passed eagerly from hand to hand was the latest.

And the worrying thing is, three out of five haven't come back.

Is this because Royal Mail has lost my submissions, or my postcards? London deliveries are now so unreliable, this could easily be the case. Or have my envelopes joined a tottering stack of similar unopened submissions, waiting till the lowliest intern has time to send the lot form rejections? I can imagine that, too.

Unpublished writers are told to do our research; personalize our query, check out the writers the agent represents, submit in the exact format the agent requires. It's a downer to feel that this doesn't mean our submissions will necessarily even be read. My feeling is that the slush pile has now become such a burden to agents that they prefer to find their authors elsewhere. I've been approached by one agent via Authonomy, and by another after submitting a short story for a contest.

No wonder people pay Cornerstones or The Literary Consultancy hundreds of pounds in the hope of being thought good enough for referral to an agent, or throng to literary festivals to pitch their novels in person, or spend £99 on a day's writing workshop at Harper Collins' headquarters. These days, unless a new writer is very lucky, he needs to find some shortcut that avoids the slush. Any ideas?

Alter egos and doppelgängers

This is a shot of my workshop balcony. Bang in the middle of that bay tree is a wood pigeon's nest, a twiggy and random affair. In the nest are two squabs, baby pigeons just out of the egg. Their mother sits tight when I water the tree, and we both pretend the other isn't there, even when our eyes meet.

Last week I heard a kerfuffle, and saw a crow after the eggs. I scared it off, twice, then hastily made the scarecrow in the picture for when I'm not there. I change my alter ego's clothes and move it about daily. So far it's worked...

My daughter remarked that it looks worryingly like me. Which got me thinking more about doppelgängers, those inexplicable and sinister harbingers of doom. (More, because the story I'm currently working on involves a young woman who is duplicated, and her inconvenient replica has to go on the run with just what she stands up in.)

In real life, people who see their doppelgänger, or someone else's, are inevitably shaken by the experience, and one can well see why. It happened to John Donne, Lincoln, and Shelley among the famous. There is something spooky about doubles - even twins, nature's clones, are a little weird - and you really, really, wouldn't want to bump into yourself; never ring your own number just in case you hear yourself answer...

If you haven't read it, take a look at Hans Christian Anderson's short story The Shadow. Now that's a strange and disturbing tale.

Sorry, just couldn't resist...

This is for all of you who, like me, have grown to like spiders (though my favourites are zebra spiders, clever, big-eyed and good at jumping). This spider will follow your pointer in a friendly way; if he's lurking out of view just click on the white space.

Rejection blues

Recently I came across this helpful hint on a parking ticket dispenser in Islington:

If inoperative you may use another machine, if one is available

Something about this reminded me of literary agents, and the things they say when they are trying to be encouraging while rejecting your novel. On this blog I generally avoid the subject of agents, especially anything critical - after all, I'd like one of my very own, so it makes no sense to snipe at them. But today I am sharing with you a few quotes from various rejections for Heart of Rock, and you'll see why I'm a little discouraged as I get on with my third wave of submissions.

I have to admit to liking your writing, however... : oh, all right, then.

I think you write brilliantly. Unfortunately I'm not convinced a publisher will buy it: this might make a lesser woman want to give up.

Books about rock stars are notoriously difficult to sell: I bet you didn't know that either.

We both found it well-written and compelling, but regret to say it is simply not the sort of thing we are looking for at the moment: *sniff*

I think you are a terrific writer and if you decide to write anything else, I would love to see it: a crumb of hope, I guess. Press on with book number 4.

You might like to try other agencies for a different response from ours: Now there's an idea. I'll just go and do that, then.

Sometime Around Midnight

I can't resist posting this song by The Airborne Toxic Event (terrible name for a band), as some of you may not know it, and some of you may like it as much as I do.

It's incidentally a demonstration of scene setting, conveying emotion, and how to do backstory with the lightest possible touch, that all writers can learn from. You can read the lyrics here.

Let it go at a raised eyebrow...

I expect you all read last month about the Congolese man who is trying to get Tintin in the Congo banned in Belgium, where the cartoon originated. Tintin's black sidekick is seen as stupid and without qualities, Bienvenu Mbutu is quoted as saying, it makes people think that blacks have not evolved.

My immediate reaction was that if anyone's world vision is founded on a cartoon created in 1929, there is nothing to be done for him. We have had this attempt to obliterate all traces of historical political incorrectness before - for instance, in The Dam Busters, a film made in 1955, the unit's mascot dog is called Nigger, as it was in real life. When the film was shown on ITV in 1999 and 2001, the name was bleeped out. In America, the dog in the film is now Trigger.

Enid Blyton has suffered similar censorship, with the baddie golliwog excised and a black chum inserted in Noddy's adventures. I find this extreme sensitivity over the attitudes of a bygone age in just the one area, racism, a little odd. Other lapses according to modern tastes go uncriticized.

If I were as touchy about slights to women in different centuries' fiction, I'd never stop tutting. One of my favourite eyebrow-raisers is in Stella Gibbons' The Bachelor, set during WW2, and published shortly afterwards. The heroine accidently runs over a man's foot, and when he casts aspersions on her ability behind the wheel, Alicia's idea of a retort is to say, Actually, I don't drive as badly as most women. That passed for a spirited comeback in 1948, I suppose.

I think we need to accept that novels are of the time they were written, and are all the more interesting because of it. Michelle Magorian's vapid depiction of WW2 in Goodnight Mister Tom has none of the authenticity of fiction actually written at the time, in part because it incorporates modern sensibilities.

And remember, aspects of our writing are certain to be similarly disapproved of in 50/100 years' time - in ways we cannot begin to imagine.

Insignificant and significant deaths in fiction

I've just been listening for the first time to The Devil's Disciple on Radio 7, by George Bernard Shaw. The hero, Dick Dudgeon, spends a large part of the play waiting to be taken out and hanged. He's extremely laid back about this impending nasty end, discussing it calmly and joking about it, so that I would have been astonished and outraged had he not got off at the last moment - as of course he does.

And it got me thinking about death in fiction, how it can devastate the reader or leave him entirely unruffled. I've rated the following types of demise, with marks out of ten for how much we care.

• Supernumerary: the classic unknown in a red top beaming down with Captain Kirk, Spock, et al, picked off by an alien sniper to show the viewer that this planet is hostile. 0/10
  
  
• Unexpected: Joanna, heroine of the 1975 film The Stepford Wives, strangled by the robot who was to replace her. See also the death of Henry Blake in M.A.S.H.. High No! What? They can't do that! factor, 6/10
  
  
• About time too: Little Beth, always sickly, not quite killed off in Little Women, finally conked out in one of the sequels (don't know which one, don't care). 1/10
  
  
• Oh good: my daughter was briefly and worryingly infatuated with a two-volume tome of Catholic martyrs, all of whom went cheerily to their unpleasant deaths as they knew next thing they'd be in heaven, hurray! 0/10
  
  
• Box of tissues required: a perfect example is Mary Renault's The Bull from the Sea. I cry each time I read it, at the death of Hippolyta, then Hippolytus, and finally Theseus. How does she do it? 10/10

As writers, this is something we need to get right; we shouldn't trivialize death, or pretend some deaths don't matter, even in 'cosy' mysteries or violent thrillers; and when we confound the reader's expectations, it should be deliberate.

Horrible haiku

Could haiku be a joke played on the rest of the world by the inscrutable Japanese? I've sometimes wondered. Today I am putting forward the view that haiku, in the West at any rate, are not poetry.

While researching this post (see, the trouble I go to) I came across a haiku I like. Here it is:

Just friends:

he watches my gauze dress

blowing on the line

Alexis Rotella 1984

This is an exception to the generality of haiku. Wikipedia informed me that in Japan there's a lot more to them than having 5/7/5 syllables, but somehow this has got lost in transit. Over here, it's just an easy way to let schoolchildren think they are writing poetry when they are not. (The other way is free verse, i.e. a short piece of prose about nothing very much chopped up into random lines on the page.)

Proper poetry rhymes and scans, and from this derives its power and memorability. The writers of pop and rock lyrics know this. Alas, many English teachers do not.

Do tell me whether you agree with me. If you like, you can tell me in haiku form, which shouldn't take you much more than a minute. Here is mine:

Horrible haiku

What is your fascination?

Elementary.

Borrowing books

What is it about books that brings out the worst in otherwise honourable people?

By my twenties I'd learnt it was a bad idea to lend books to anyone except my mother, even if I'd written my name at the front. These days I try to lend only to my daughter. The blood tie, I find, protects my property - or maybe it's just that you can nag a close relative to return a book, where you can't nag a friend.

(Don't think I'm being self-righteous about this issue. There are at least three books on my shelves which are not mine. Plus a school copy of Love's Labour's Lost.)

And it's always the best books that fail to return - the ones you love so much you tell a friend about them. Then each time you see the friend, she forgets the book. Or you don't see each other for a while, and it gets forgotten. Or she's too busy to read it, and never does, and time passes and you realize she has now moved to the Isle of Wight... Or, by the time you remember to ask for it, she's totally forgotten and denies all knowledge, and says you are thinking of someone else. The anticipated pleasure of discussing a favourite novel with a fellow reader seldom materializes.

Eventually you give up, and buy another copy.

Footnote: writing this has reminded me of a book of my mother's I lent to an obnoxious girl at school, and never got back. Jules Feiffer's Passionella, a collection of witty graphic novellas. I've just tracked it down and ordered it. Three cheers for the internet!

Courage, Sacrifice and Brotherhood

I'm reading THE SOLDIER: a History of Courage, Sacrifice and Brotherhood, by Darren Moore, and I'd recommend it. It's a fascinating and thoughtful book.

It covers the experience of soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars to the present day, with many personal accounts. Every possible aspect is covered, including what makes soldiers reluctant to kill - their perception of the enemy as being like them - and what makes them want to - the death of their comrades. There is one heartbreaking photograph among the illustrations, of a soldier comforting another whose buddy has been killed, which alone is worth the price of the book.

I often feel, when reading battle scenes in fantasy novels, that it's all too obvious the authors have zero knowledge of war, fighting, or the psychology of the soldier, and their imaginings are wide of the mark. For them, this book could be the answer.

Buns for tea

It was breakfast time. Mother's face was very bright as she poured the milk and ladled out the porridge.

"I've sold another story, Chickies," she said; "the one about the King of the Mussels, so there'll be buns for tea."

I was misinformed at an impressionable age about the saleability of fiction: I picked up the idea that if you wrote well, you could sell your stories and earn a living, albeit a modest one. I risk your laughter if I tell you that I wrote my first novel, Torbrek...and the Dragon Variation under this misapprehension.

Today I name the two main books that gave me this notion (there were other novels, less memorable, amusingly catalogued under 'Careers' in my school library). All that can be said in their defence is that they're pretty ancient, and were even when I read them as a child; it probably was possible to eke out a living by your pen back then.

• Little Women. Jo March, every reader's favourite among the four sisters, hating housework and loving books, getting inky fingers from her writing and making her first sale to an editor before she was out of her teens. Also, poor soul, being expected to forgive Amy for burning the only copy of her manuscript. Darned if I would.
  
  
• The Railway Children. There are no fewer than EIGHT references to 'buns for tea' - which is how Mother celebrated with the children whenever an editor was sensible and accepted one of her stories for publication. Editors are a good deal less sensible and much harder to impress these days, alas.

Today, I guess it's not fictional heroines who promote the dream. It's JK Rowling, and the vast fortune she earned from her imagination.

Hey! That could work...

I've pretty much given up on Authonomy - the corrupt chart, the ridiculous state of the talent-spotter rankings, the loudmouths on the forum, but last week I got a comment there on Heart of Rock that I enjoyed. Teric Darken said:

I just want you to know that I have a vintage concert t-shirt of The Voices, and the very picture of Ric Kealey that you described (in chapter two) is emblazoned on the back, along with Bryan Orr and the other members!

Once I'd stopped laughing I thought, hey, that's a great idea - I could use it to promote the book! My mind ran on with researching rock promo tee shirts, where to find a charismatic stand-in for Ric for the shot, how many to print...then I remembered none of this would be necessary until I got a publishing deal.

*sigh*

I'm just off to press on with the submissions.

Paragraph posting game

For all the writers who read my blog, this is one for you.

Today I want you to post two paragraphs from your latest book in my comments section, and this is how you select them. Using your birthday, take the month chapter and the day paragraph, then the day chapter and the month paragraph.

Example: my birthday's February 26th, so I picked Chapter 2, paragraph 26, and Chapter 26, paragraph 2 from Heart of Rock. If your chapter is too short, as mine was, run on to the next.

And NO CHEATING! If the paragraph is two words, so be it. If it's a dud passage, now is your opportunity to rewrite it.

Here are my two:

1. I considered the implications of this. I had spent the morning alone with a man the police believed guilty of murder. He hadn’t seemed like a murderer to me, but then murderers, when not actually murdering people, probably did act as normally as anyone else. Feeling hunger, needing a pee, befriending stray dogs.

2. I laid my wrecking bar against the wall. There wasn’t anything about the way he held the weapon that suggested he didn’t know how to use it. It was beautiful, gleaming walnut and engraved steel, the toy of a rich man who indulged himself in country pursuits, golf, fishing, pheasant shooting. No doubt he had a licence for it, and a locked cabinet to keep it in, all above board and within the law. I could see the long polished barrels, because they were aimed at Ric, not me. Bullets or shot, I had no idea, but felt sure at that range whatever it was would make a nasty hole.

(These extracts make my novel sound much more crime-thrillerish than it actually is.)

Yours?

Close the book and try the next...

When browsing in a book shop, what makes you shove the book back, with undue force, whence it came? I've made a list:

• Any book starting in the mind of a crazed psychopath as he watches his next, invariably young and female, victim. I have no desire to find out what happens next. I know I won't like it.
  
  
• Misery memoirs. I read for pleasure.
  
  
• Fiction written in the present tense. Just annoying.
  
  
• Anything in which vampires or werewolves form a council. Although these councils might at least collect the bins on time, unlike the one in my area. (Thank you for that one, Steve Jensen.)
  
  
• Any novel which starts with a description of ‘the boy’, ‘the man’ or ‘the woman’, as in ‘The boy, his feet scarring the pristine sand, wandered along the deserted stretch of shore’. For Pete’s sake, tell us his name! You’re going to have to eventually, why not straight away?
  
  
• Books about circuses, which are curiously devoid of any real circus acts, leading me to suspect the writer has never been to a circus in his life.
  
  
• Novels with a young, affluent, able-bodied male narrator, who does nothing but whinge in a supposedly amusing fashion about a) having to go to work and b) not getting enough sex. I am meant to sympathize, and I do not. Not even a little bit.
  
  
• Fantasy involving elves, or anything colourably similar, such as leprechauns or fairies. Or faeries, faes, pixies and what I have just seen described as other wee folk. No, no!

What about yours?

Moving on to the next book

I suspect it's the same for all writers - you've written the last chapter, revised the novel, got advice from trusted beta readers, tweaked and polished, until it's the best you can do. It's finished; now is the time to move on to the next book. But you don't want to. You want to stick around with those characters you have grown to love - even the nasty ones. They're closer to you than anyone real, and you can't bear to let them go.

Of course, you can side-step the issue by writing the sequel - but if you haven't yet sold the first novel, this is a Seriously Bad Idea. You could waste a year writing a book whose fate is inextricably tied to the first book, and may sink with it. It's time for something completely different. Which is what I started doing today.

I got the germ of the idea for Untitled on the long cold walks between home and workshop I've been doing since I fractured my humerus, and can't ride my bike. I brooded about how my broken bone had diverted, I hope briefly, the course of my life; I noticed all the useful stuff Londoners throw out; and I trespassed inside an unfinished, abandoned and vandalized block of flats on my way home.

I've been typing notes for a couple of weeks, but today I began writing a scene a few chapters in where my heroine meets a man who will play a large part in the plot, and I think the transition has been made. I'm beginning to find my new characters as absorbing as the ones I've regretfully left behind in Heart of Rock.

Woohoo.

Blood on the forum (and I'm not talking Julius Caesar)

Ah, another end of the month on Authonomy, and it's one of those musical chairs months when six people are in contention for the top five places and a gold star. And it's sometimes vitriolic on the forum.

I remember in the early days of the site, during a particularly bad month, a Harper Collins spokesman came on the site expressing wonder at the fury and mayhem. 'We're not offering a holiday in the sun,' he said, 'just an editor's critique.'

But of course it's NOT just that; each top fiver secretly hopes in his innermost heart that his book will be the first to wow an HC editor so much that he'll be offered a contract. Even though it's never happened. To date, eighty-eight writers have won a gold star on Authonomy, and not one of them has been offered a publishing deal. The handful of books HC has published from the site were picked up while they were much lower in the charts.

So why do people bother? Why do they spend hours each day for up to a year reading or pretending to read others' books and writing gushing comments; why do they do the spamming and the the swap-shelving, the touting for support on the forum (because that's what it takes these days)? I really don't know. I do know that some truly excellent reads get nowhere near the top of the charts, as their authors have too much sense to get involved in the frightful struggle.

And I'm quite certain that Harper Collins needs to adjust the system, to make it fairer and a lot less like a dance marathon.

Avatar

The daughter took me to see Avatar yesterday. For those of you who have just emerged, blinking, from an enclosed monastic order, Avatar is James Cameron's latest movie, which has broken all box office records in America.

And I can see why; it's hugely entertaining escapism, the beguiling alien world of Pandora is brilliantly imagined, and the special effects are awesome. The story, simple though it is, kept me on the edge of my seat. Way better than Titanic, which I didn't warm to at all, and nearly as good as Terminator 2, one of my favourite films.

Only one cavil - the ore that has excited the greed of the Earthmen is called unobtanium. This is such a joke name, I can only think Cameron used it to be getting on with in early drafts, and it stuck.


Official Avatar Movie

Fantastic news!

The best news of the past week is that Guy Saville has found a publisher for his exciting novel, The Afrika Reich.

Set in an alternative 1952, when a victorious Nazi Germany occupies much of Africa, The Afrika Reich tells the story of ex-assassin Burton Cole who attempts to foil the plans of messianic racist Walter Hochburg. You can read the first chapter here.

Two publishers got into a bidding war over it, the winner being Hodder & Stoughton, who plan to publish The Afrika Reich in hardback in February 2011. Guy has signed a contract for a two-book deal, got the sort of advance that's becoming an endangered species in these hard times, and had a champagne lunch in Mayfair with his editor (a scenario that surely features in the dreams of every unpublished writer).

Everyone who is acquainted with Guy will be pleased. It couldn't have happened to a nicer chap, or a more deserving book. It's good news for all the people who will soon be able to buy it and enjoy the read, too.

Postscript: A few years ago, I used to visit a website called New Authors, and you will think me horrid when I admit I went there to laugh heartlessly at the frightfulness of much of what was on offer. I'd just finished my first novel, Torbrek...and the Dragon Variation, and this site confirmed my belief that my book was pretty hot.

Then I joined YouWriteOn, and the first book I was assigned was Guy Saville's All That Happened With Alice. I realized that maybe there was scope for improvement in my writing after all...

This is one offer I CAN refuse...

Do you think this as out of order as I do?

Harper Collins has got together with UKTV to run a competition for crime writers:

Submit a short crime story between 2000 and 5000 words that starts with the following first line: “In my experience, those who beg for mercy seldom deserve it.”

So far, interesting. I read on, until I got to this paragraph:

Where you submit your entry to this site...by such submission you grant UKTV and HarperCollins Publishers Limited each a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive, worldwide, sub-licensable right and license to use, reproduce and publish, distribute and make available to the public your entry in any media, now known or later developed, for the full term of any rights that may exist in such content.

If you do not wish to grant such rights to UKTV and HarperCollins, you should not submit your content to the site.

My jaw dropped. So, even if you don't win, by virtue of entering it into this competition, you have lost control of your short story. And if they want to, Harper Collins or UKTV can publish your story, turn it into a film, make it the basis for a TV series, use your ideas or characters, all without paying you a penny. You no longer have any rights in it at all. Further on it says:

For the avoidance of doubt, subject to the licence granted above to UKTV and HarperCollins Limited, you shall retain ownership of the copyright in your entry.

Not quite sure what good that would do you. I'm going to pass.

Chaucer, channelled by Bill Bailey

I studied Chaucer at school. My year got a duff one, The Canon's Yeoman's Tale. Never heard of it? I'm not surprised. If I say it's about alchemy, I make it sound way more interesting than it is. My daughter fared much better with The Franklin's Tale, a haunting story about love and fidelity.

But the good thing about having read Chaucer is that you get to appreciate this sketch by Bill Bailey: