DEAR SANTA

SEND AN AGENT!

Out for my walk on the back road today

My mind was a blank - I had nothing to say –

The editing’s done but there’s no time to play –

Find an agent!

Immediately every excuse raised its head –

The print in the Yearbook is too small to read –

And for over-strained eyes too much screen-glare is bad –

Where’s the agent?

Procrastination’s the curse of our craft

And reading those guidelines is too much hard graft –

But to hope they’ll come looking is simply plain daft –

Get an agent!

Two books I have written are ready to go

But the Christmas deliveries are bound to be slow –

Dear Santa – along with the gifts and ‘Ho-ho!’

Send an agent!

FOTO - FINISH

No, you haven't strayed back into Day Six of the AtoZ Challenge - I am simply taking advantage of the Spanish spelling to make a headline.

FIRST the FOTO 
If you stand right underneath a jacaranda tree this is what you see - isn't it glorious?

FOLLOWED by the FINISH.
YAY!  I have reached the end of my re-write of HELTER-SKELTER which I began way back in March, when an agent said I could re-submit my novel to her when I had addressed some issues.
So I have tightened up the plot, cutting out scenes that, although I liked them, didn't move the story forward. I have written it more from my main character's point of view and cut back on the POVs of other people.
I've tracked down and eliminated repetitions, deleted people with absolutely no regard for how they might feel about it, and made the sex a bit raunchier.

I am a writer with no formal training in the craft, and the pages of advice from the agent were invaluable.
As was the help and support of the members of Talkback - the online writers' forum to which I belong. I have never met any of them in the flesh, but I feel I know them personally. A couple have even put aside their own work to comment on mine - a true act of friendship.

Today I had all 316 pages of HELTER-SKELTER printed at the Copy Centre in Los Cristianos - at €15.60 I considered it a bargain that saves over-burdening my own printer - and after a final read-through it will be time to get it professionally proof-read while I tackle the synopsis.

Then back to the agent.

"gulp"

One question remains - can I do all this with my fingers crossed?

LUKE, LABELS & LANGUAGE

LUKE FINCH is only seven when we first meet him in my novel Helter-Skelter. He is the brother of Bessie, the girl I mentioned yesterday who was scathing about Dot Smith’s kitchen.

Luke is a typical little boy, who lives half in the real world of Pinetree Farm and half in fantasy land, where he can be Charles LINDBERG flying solo across the Channel, or a racing driver breaking the world speed record. He is an Indian Scout when he tracks his sister and witnesses something that enables him to save his hero Albie from her machinations.

I was seven when my brother Luke was born. He was a doctor when he died 34 years later in a plane crash in Africa. I remember that Luke, of course, but I also remember him as a little blond boy, just like Luke Finch.

LABELS ARE LIMITING. What exactly does LITERARY mean in the writing world? We’re advised to check out an agent before submitting, and the word literary has always puzzled me.

Last year I completed a book about a young LABOURER who rescues an abused boy, and how that Strange Adoption changes both their LIVES. A professional critic called it “part psychological thriller, part a story of human growth.” If I can’t fit it into a category, how can I pitch it to an agent?

LANGUAGES. When we arrived here to live we had to learn Spanish quickly, because we were buying our apartment privately from a couple who spoke no English. If we were meeting Juan and Carmen to discuss our purchase I would write it all down in advance so I could read them my notes if we got stuck.

It was a tense time, renting in Las Galletas and knowing we’d shot our bolt financially if it all went wrong. I bought a set of flash-cards that reminded me of teaching my son to read, and we tested each other in the evenings. 

Ayuntamiento was our first long word – it means Town Hall, where we had to go for some of our paperwork - ( it also means sexual intercourse, according to my dictionary!) Many words have two or more meanings, and often only an accent differentiates between them. The OH learned the hard way to say “Feliz Año” – Happy New Year – with the ñ as in España. Without the accent, ano means arse! 

Aren't languages fascinating?

..... and for your LAST photo of the week, this is a LANTANA. They come in various colours, of which this is the most common here. When my daughter came to live in Tenerife 20 years ago, the first cutting I took home was a lantana, which flourished in my English garden, even through snow.

SUBMISSION

In the shower this morning I was thinking that I should put my list of submissions into some kind of order, and was wondering whether to sort them by date or alphabetically. Then while I was rinsing my hair, my mind wandered onto the definition of the word ‘submission’.

As writers we submit our manuscripts to agents and publishers and competitions, sending out work we have laboured over, sworn over, sweated blood over, to be judged by strangers. The word 'submission', like so many in the English language, has more than one meaning, some with unfortunate connotations.

I look it up in the dictionary: "Submission – the act of referring a document for consideration."
Yes, that’s what we do, I can live with that definition, thank you.
But of course my eye is drawn further down the page; "Submission – the act of being subject to another."
That is quite a different matter and I don't like that meaning at all, but when we get a rejection, that’s how it feels - someone else has the upper hand in our lives - not pleasant at all.

So, rather like probing a sore tooth, I go to the Thesaurus.:"To submit – to acquiesce, to capitulate, to throw in the sponge, to endure." It gets worse and worse and I am getting more depressed by the minute.

But hang on – this is better: "To submit – to advance, to assert, to propose." Okay - that's what I did two months ago, and although I am still waiting for an answer (with fading hopes) I shall remain positive. If that agent doesn't want my novel  I shall remain assertive and carry on submitting it, advancing it, proposing it - and the next agent will love it - or the next ,,,

RE-WRITING Helter-Skelter

Gosh, this is hard work!
I am re-writing my novel Helter-Skelter. An agent was keen enough on it to say I could re-submit if I made certain changes. My initial reaction was, as you might imagine, that I thought it was perfect as it was, but on reflection and after a good long think, I could see the agent's point of view. A good story that needs more work.
The plot is the same - the main character keeps his identity and his eventual fate remains unchanged - but I need to shift the emphasis.
In effect this means re-writing a lot of the book whilst keeping the same goal in mind. I have to strengthen the plot and squash my tendency to resolve difficulties too quickly. I dislike confrontations but they make a story more interesting, so if A falls out with B they must remain at loggerheads rather than resolving their differences too quickly.
But there are also passages - indeed, whole chapters - that hardly need changing, and that's what's so hard. Shifting from one gear to another - editing and tightening up one day, removing entire characters and swaths of extraneous waffle another day, re-writing and inserting a whole new plot-line on a third.
The agent was complimentary about my writing, as others have been, which helps to keep my spirits up, but my brain hurts!

Compliments - aren't they wonderful?

Just heard from an agent who wants to see my whole manuscript!
She said my writing is "confident, fluid, often surprising and some of it is really quite gorgeous."
Not an offer by any means, I know - been down that road before - but just for today I might be forgiven for feeling pleased with myself.

Our first strawberry - and an agent dream.

We bought the plant a month ago and stuck it in one of the square mini-beds of our garden wall. This is all the garden we've got - a wall two cement blocks high enclosing a bed eight feet by two - but we've got chillis, mint, parsley, bouganvilla, cacti and a small tree draped in a solar-powered string of lights, so we've made the most of it.
One strawberry between the two of us! It only added a taste to sponge cake topped with whipped cream, but it was delicious.
                               ****
I woke up this morning on the tail-end of a dream in which the OH called me to the phone to talk to an agent - or possibly a publisher. I didn't quite catch the name, unfortunately, though the echo when I woke sounded like "Blueberry". Was this because of our strawberry, or a premonition? If anyone recognizes the name, please tell me - one can only dream!

World Book Day?

So much for world book day - I got another refusal.
Mind you, I did tell the agent that I live in Tenerife, which is not a point in my favour.
With daily flights to England, email, Facebook and blogs, you would have thought being an expat was no barrier to acceptance, but it has been a major factor for me. I have had several comments from agents and publishers that make it clear that they can't visualize successful publicity unless I live round the corner.

Still, what with blood tests and the dentist, I've got enough to think about. I'll just get on with writing and hope someone, somewhere, will see their way to representing me!

writing abroad

So here's the thing. I'm a writer. A good one. Unpublished. This is not a contradiction in terms, or blowing my own trumpet without cause. Many of my rejections have contained a personal comment praising my work.
  A couple of years ago an agent liked one of my books enough to sign me up, and copied me in on every refusal she got from publishers. "Liz writes well but..." was one common theme, and the other? "As Liz lives abroad, publicity would pose problems."
  Last year a literary critic read another of my books and wrote that it was "an extremely readable novel". I added his quote to a submission, but the reply was -  "Peter's recommendation counts for a great deal. Unfortunately we are only considering writers based in the UK."
  We can't afford to move back to England, so what's the answer? I wish I knew.