Monk Quixote

So, my glo­ri­ous non-existent read­er­ship, I have done it. I have queried N num­ber of agents today (where N is any num­ber greater than 1 but still within the realms of taste and decency. Let’s call it three. And you can be Queen of Decency and I will be the Taste­ful Prince. Or Lieu­tenant Con­sort. Big grand chief poohbah (I still get traf­fic for that phrase, not entirely sure why)).

I have queried before — I sent a rather des­per­ate let­ter to PFD in 2001, I think. And in the cir­cum­stances (rub­bish writ­ing, sans clue) they wrote back very politely, but I haven’t had a fin­ished novel behind it. I haven’t spent weeks ago­nis­ing over revi­sions. I haven’t spent a week on the first chap­ter, re-drafting till I felt an anx­i­ety attack approach­ing and went for a run instead. I haven’t spent three days writ­ing and re-writing and re-writing and, oh you get the pic­ture, the syn­op­sis (still too long, but I am. Just. Too. Tired. Of. It. All. Now.). I haven’t spent a day ago­nis­ing over my four /five para query let­ter. I haven’t.…

…changed the title in a last-minute wob­ble. It’s back to the orig­i­nal title — Tom’s Uni­verse. The Quixote angle was dri­ving me nuts, although I sus­pect that Tom Quixote will be where it ends up (well, it would be if I could stom­ach the re-writes).

I even remem­bered to check the client list of each agent to give them a nudge as to who my writ­ing is absolutely noth­ing like. Sigh.

In some ways I’ve got the most dif­fi­cult bit of my writ­ing career out of the way now. I fin­ished the debut, edited it, tried to make it more appeal­ing and I’ve finally put it out there for rejec­tion by the pro­fes­sion­als. Because that, sta­tis­ti­cally, is what’s going to hap­pen. One agent takes on 3 clients a year. Another agency men­tioned 6000 queries a year. The maths isn’t hard. And I’m not being down on myself. I like the book. I freak­ing hate chap­ter 2. But them’s the breaks. There are some bits that are bet­ter than oth­ers. My favourite char­ac­ter, should you ever read it, is the nun. I liked her.

And while I’m not ‘free’ of Tom yet -  I still have some tin­ker­ing to do, after all — assum­ing that no agent will touch it, that means I can finally write some­thing else. I’ve been writ­ing this sod­ding book, in one man­ner or another, for eigh­teen years. And it’s not an 18 year-wait kind of book. And I’m not an 18-year-wait kind of author. I’m hop­ing to com­plete at least two more nov­els this year. The sto­ries are buzzing, the envi­ron­ment is right.

I just needed to go through the process. And I really do feel like I’ve put myself through the wringer. I’m quite lucky in some respects to write on a com­puter (that also backs up in umpteen places) or I strongly sus­pect I’d have burnt the man­u­script.  In the re-writes for the sub­mis­sion pack­age, I think I wrote 12k words for a 9k seg­ment that I already had. It felt like I was adding more and more colour — and yet it was stay­ing the same res­olutely shit brown colour, like there was noth­ing left I could do.

Just for fun, I held done the ‘Undo’ keys in Scrivener as I replayed the edit­ing I had made to the blurb yes­ter­day. 5 hours of my life replayed in 60 sec­onds as text marched around the screen for seem­ingly no pur­pose. Have you ever seen a speed-painting video? It was like one of them. Soul destroy­ing — to see so much impre­ci­sion and uncer­tainty — to know it’s me.

Any­way. It’s done now. I will never be able to query these spe­cific agents for the first time again. Not unless I invent a time machine. And if I did that, I’d prob­a­bly spent far too much time try­ing to work out what colour to paint it.

And I guess I should prob­a­bly earn some money, see­ing as if all does go to plan, I am on the road to being a poor author.

Pobre Ivan.

Thank you to every­one who helped along the way. (Yes, I know it’s just the begin­ning, but it’s the end of the begin­ning, isn’t it?)