Epiphany

I've entered a novel writing competition just now. I've entered plenty before, and to be honest it always ends the same way. However this time I really thought it would be different. This time I actually thought I had a really good chance of getting on the long-list. As it turns out I was wrong. This led me to wonder if I've been doing it wrong from the start. I mean the people who are running the competition have Twitter; they were putting all their favourite lines from the submissions on their twitter feed. It didn't really bother me that I didn't see my own lines on the twitter feed, but at the same time I was really hoping, like everybody else, that I would see something I'd written on there. And then comes 12th July, which is their announcement today for the number of submissions who’ve made it onto their long-list. I'm not going to lie, I was really hopeful. But as it turns out yet again I was to be soul-crushingly disappointed, and I did not make it.

To say that I was devastated might be overstating it, but as it sank in that it was yet another rejection, yet another time when someone had read what I had written and decided it wasn't good enough, I felt the clouds close over the top of my head, as they so often do.

One of the hardest things I have done in my life, and believe me there have been many hard things in my life, is to congratulate everybody who made it onto the long-list whilst simultaneously pretending that I wasn’t trying not to cry. It’s odd; I don’t think I actually had an emotional response that caused me to cry. It wasn’t like I was frustrated or angry or sad. I think I was just resigned to the fact that this is how it’s always going to be. On the plus side this means that I’m an also-ran, so I am helping other people to win competitions. You cannot come first if you're the only one in the competition, after all. But at some point it would be nice not to be an also-ran, although I honestly don't know what I would do if I won something.

After I’d send a tweet to congratulate everybody on getting onto the long-list, I had an epiphany. Just because you don’t win or you’re not picked does not mean that your writing is not good. Just because you don't win all you’re not picked does not mean that the work you've done, all the words that you’ve strung together, are in any way substandard or lacking. The creative arts and novel writing in particular is very subjective. We all know this; a friend at work can recommend their favourite TV show for example. They might go on and on about how amazing the writing is, how good the actors are, or how fantastic the finale is. And then you sit down to watch it and after 30 minutes decide that it's the worst pile of camel shit you've ever had to struggle through.

There are also the people who, say, give a movie a rotten tomatoes rating of 10%. And out of curiosity you end up watching this movie, and find that you really really enjoy it. I guess my point is that it’s the most hit and miss industry I can think of. Sometimes it feels like you're trying to get into the club of really good writers and therefore if you can't get in you must be crap. Sometimes it feels like the amount of rejections you've had must have already been an indication of how bad your writing is, and therefore you should stop.

This is where the epiphany comes in.

I'm sure I don't need to remind anybody that 50 Shades of Grey is an international phenomenon with books, and movies, and tie-ins, and all kinds of crap. What it also is, is complete and utter shit. If you have a tumbler account you may know what I mean. People were sharing the worst paragraphs or phrases that they came across in the books. To begin with for me it was pretty funny. Some of the descriptions and some of the grammar was so bloody awful all you could do was laugh. Afterwards of course you think this just isn't fair. There is no justice in the universe if this complete and utter pile of badly plotted, pretentious, hastily slapdash re-written personal fan-fiction can get published, and yet people who sit down and write original works with the funniest lines and the best presentation get passed over again and again and again.

That's when I realised nobody should ever give up trying to get published if they believe the reason they’re not getting published is that they’re not any good. That is a lie. The reason you're not getting published is not because you’re crap. The reason you're not getting published is because everyone else is getting published. There are many reasons why other people get published over you. Some agents and some publishing houses need books that are “the next Harry Potter”, or the next 50 Shades of Grey. Therefore anything original that you have written is outside of their wheelhouse and they don't care. And that's okay, you know, because people have to focus on what they need and what they think they want. People are always asking me: Did you send it to the right agent? Well, Sherlock, I bother to read what the agent or publishing house wants before I decide whether to send my submission or not. First of all you have to start with an agency that wants fiction an not non-fiction. Then you narrow it down to people who want quirky or sci-fi. Then you narrow it down further to people who want first-time writers or female writers or character driven material. You see where I'm going with this.

Having sent my novel to many different agents I can say that it's always nice to get a response. It may be that they say something about the novel that may be helpful to you, for example “it was great and I enjoyed it but there was no sense of urgency”. That's when you just rewrite it and put more urgency in it. To be fair nearly 50% of the agents I have sent it to have had the time to get back to me with a response. If I don't get a response at all, I believe it's because the sheer number of submissions they must get, and have to read through, must make it nearly impossible to reply to every single one of us who send something in. And I'm okay with that.

The biggest thing I can take away from my epiphany today: maybe my work isn't shit. Maybe that's not the reason why I'm not getting published.

That, I have to say, is the most encouraging thing anyone could ever say about my writing.

I think that's it for today. I have drinking and partying and other things to do this weekend.

Peach and lube everyone. Soopytwist.

Image by Larisa Koshkina from Pixabay

Fucking done

Everyone knows someone who is a complete sack of arse; a fucker, a complete and utter bastard, someone who is only ‘famous’ on social media for being controversial, or a twat. There have been a few around me before and you just give them enough rope and they’re gone soon enough.

But then there’s this shit-for-brains. They’ve been banned from a messages board. The thing is, is makes them holier-than-holier-than-thou as a result, like suddenly everything they’ve been saying has been validated. Apparently, being banned from a board makes you too cool for school in their books, and they’re right happy about it.

And then they crash another board to gloat about how, because they’re so ‘incendiary’ and ‘polarising’ and just plain all-around awesome, they’re getting a load of their arse-gravy otherwise known as posts and tweets etc. published. As in, in a book. That will be published. And sold. For money.


That. Is. Where. I. Am. Done.

So fucking done.

Some of us having been trying FOR THE PAST 5 YEARS to get an agent and get published. Some of us have actually written a real, physical novel using their little creative brains that has been bled, sweated, and cried over for at least the last 7 years. Some of us have been turned down by no less than 45 different agents, and 5 different publishers direct. Some of us just keep banging our heads against walls and getting nowhere.


But this unclefucker? This steaming pile of camel shit laced with strychnine and topped off with conceited, self-important baboon gonads where their brain should be? They just sit down and people go to them.

Clearly, I’m doing something wrong.

Perhaps in this 'modern' society of people arguing about what’s moral and what’s just fucking rude (yes, you of the tiny, tiny orange hands) I should just go for shock and awe. Perhaps I should be upsetting people. Perhaps I should be ‘incendiary’ and ‘polarising’. Perhaps then I’ll attract enough attention that someone will want to publish me.


Is that it? Is that what you do?

What's in a name?

Apparently, if you’re an author trying to get a book published, everything. And I’m not talking about the title of your book. Wait, back up - we need context.

Once upon a time, when my age was in single figures and life was much simpler, I wrote stories. Made-up, convoluted, sheerly-for-fun stories. When I was nine years old, I wrote my first fan fiction (although I’m not sure that word had yet been invented). It featured Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Watson and Mrs Hudson, and it bore witness to Mr Holmes bemoaning the lack of a case or in fact anything of interest to a visiting Watson. What it taught me was that (1) it wasn’t necessarily Holmes who was bored of life, and (2) I loved doing it. However, it would be a full five or six years before I would have access to something called a word processor, manufactured by the Raytheon Corporation, and I began making up my own stories in earnest.

A lot of things came next. Eventually I ended up living overseas, and had finally (through either luck or unconscious planning) secured myself a flat for one. I had come from a large family and the tenancy of a near-empty flat with no-one in it but myself was pure magic. I knew very few people and I liked it that way; I threw myself into writing in my spare time.

However, while I was typing away on what today would be considered an antique Sony Vaio laptop, I was conscious that my own stories were vapid, meandering, and definitely lacking in anything that might be called ‘plot’ even if you squinted a bit and tilted your head when studying them - but that was ok. After all, I was just writing for fun, for myself. No-one ever saw my output.

It came to be that a good friend of mine shared a love of good old-fashioned telly from old Blighty, and so we purchased a boxed set of Sharpe and got watching, beers on hand.

We went through the entire box. And in 2006, I wrote no less than four separate Sharpe stories - or fan fiction. These were published on a website I ran, and then later on, were added to the FanFiction archive. I received reviews. I read them. I read them again. And then I realised just how poor my writing was.

There was absolutely no doubt about the plots; they whisked along and questions were answered, puzzles were solved, some people died and some people were saved, and the story went pretty much the way of every episode in the telly series. No, what was poor was my actual writing. The language, the execution, the (mis)use of format - the basics that made it easy to read. But did I give up? Fuck, no. I kept right on writing and learning. Next came Doctor bloody Who and a total of eleven stories, plus two crossovers. I could see the improvement, and I could appreciate the constructive criticism that came with them all. I was very grateful people were bothering to read my work at all, and I made every effort to make every page of every story - every paragraph - the best that I could.

Round about December of 2007 I switched fandoms. I didn’t turn my back on Doctor Who, but I was running woefully short of things I could put the Doctor through. And so my new virtual voodoo dolls for torture became the brothers Winchester, of Supernatural fame. This time it was a case of fifty-one stories plus four crossovers - and I’m not sure I’m done with them yet. It also heralded my first script, my first semi-lucid experiment in abstract word art, my first out-and-out comedy farce, my first poem-like satire, the development of the ‘Sam rolled his eyes’ game, and some great feats of stretching in terms of actual writing skill and execution. In short, I loved it and some of those stories are still by far the best work I’ve done.

There were other stories, too, though. A brief bit of fun with an A-Team story, two Farscape stories, and even an Enterprise story (although that last one still makes me cringe, and every time I see it’s still there I want to delete it). A quick go with Burn Notice (which I still like myself), and then two Avengers stories (focusing exclusively on Hawkeye and Black Widow being badasses). Then came new obsessions, and a crossover between Supernatural and Constantine was as timely as it was fun. The most recent piece was a solo Constantine story, and I’m still very fond of that one.

I did bemoan in an earlier post the state of my current writing skill level. I was whining about how I thought the magic had all gone, that my stories now were flat, boring, dull and pretty much worthless. That I could see the ending a mile off, which meant any reader would too, and it was a monumental waste of my time to produce more stories when, looking back, I had written such exciting and well-executed pieces that felt like they worked on several levels at once. When I re-read parts of some of these, I’m reminded of how good I was, whilst riding the high of enthusiasm and fun.

So here’s where we are: one million, three hundred and twenty-seven thousand and six hundred words (give or take fifty) in nine years. Plus the eight books I have written, coming to around one million, three hundred and forty-nine thousand and two hundred words in themselves - and that was over the same time span. That means that, on average, I’ve written nearly three hundred thousand words a year for nine years. That’s just over eight hundred words a day - every single day.

Put like that, I seem like quite the writer.

What of these eight books I’ve written? Where can you find them online or at a bookshop? You can’t. I’ve been trying on and off for the past four years to get the first of the sci-fi books published, and lately the stand-alone high-concept novel taken by an agent. As previously discussed, I’ve gone from getting very nicely-worded and appreciated rejection letters to being completely ignored by agents altogether. This is after I’ve taken advice from a book doctor, an agent herself, two books written by agents on how to get them, and countless blogs and online articles written by agents. All the submissions were to agents who said they were looking for the type of writing I thought I was pretty good at, and all of them were sent my work exclusively, one at a time. I was beginning to think that it wasn’t them but me - that I was completely shit and the old net myth of fan fiction writers being legends in their own minds was true (especially after certain arguably poorly-written ‘yummy mummy’ semi-porn novels have been published since with great fanfare). In short, it dawned on me that perhaps my work was simply badly written, and it was being turned down or just blatantly ignored due to its crappiness, not because of anything I had or hadn’t done in the submission process.

And then I saw an article that popped up on my tumblr dash. Someone else, a woman who had been successfully published herself, had shared a news story she had read. I read it too. And then I got angry and not only reblogged it, but then debated what to do about it as it pertained to me.

Female Novelist Learns How Far a Male Pen Name Can Take Her, an article over at the Mary Sue, left me stunned. (Short version: she submitted under a fake man’s name and got instant replies and even - GASP - taken up on her book. Repeatedly.) I was shocked, and I was angry. Why shocked? I had a sneaking feeling that this kind of thing still went on, but until I saw actual figures, I was reluctant to put much stock in it. Angry? I was all shades of raging. Why should anyone have to change their name to even get looked at? Why should someone’s identity make a difference?

Certainly, parts of the article made me wonder if this was the reason I was getting ignored by agents. But it couldn’t be, could it? How could an agent, who specifically stated they were looking for debut female writers, fail to even read something by a debut female writer? It’s not like I sent my novel to someone who only took in non-fiction about gardening. I bothered to check each agent’s website, I bothered to check if they would be interested in my kind of writing. I mean there’s optimism and then there’s just stupidity.

I did what any other English woman would have done after having read the article; I made a cup of tea. As I was waiting for it to cool sufficiently for me to drink, a lot of shouting went through my head. Should I change my name the next time I send my novel out? Should I take on a man’s name to get my novel read? Should I just keep to using my first initial only, and keep hoping for the best? And then the other side of the coin hit me: wait - why should I? I shouldn’t have to hide my identity to get ahead. I shouldn’t have to invent a Remington Steele just so someone would read my words. None of this was reasonable. And yet I was contemplating it anyway.

Because the Laura Holt part of me was thinking it through. What if I did send it away under a man’s name? And what if they did write back asking for the entire novel to read? And what if, after that, they wanted to offer me representation? Well then the jig would be up, surely. There would be a face-to-face meeting and they would instantly discover that I am not the Remington Steele they were expecting.
But then the Alan Shore part of me shouts “A-haa! It’s not for me to justify why I had to use a man’s name to get read - it’s up to them to justify why, when meeting me, they are disappointed that I’m not a man!”

The Spock part of me spots flaws in this logic. After all, it wouldn’t be fair to send it to an agent under only a man’s name, and then get all high and mighty when they do read and ask for more of the novel. Mainly because they never saw it under my actual name, so I have just assumed they wouldn’t even read it under my own name and skipped the part that would have made it fair. Then again, you can’t send it to them twice. This precludes any kind of fair chance and goes straight for the 50/50 chance of being read, instead of the 1/50.

And again, put that way, am I really going to be so stubborn that I refuse to improve my odds of getting read? That in just calling myself Bob or Dave or Richard instead of my first initial would give me a one-in-two chance of getting read?
But that’s not the real question at all. What it comes down to is this: does using a pen name to ‘fool’ agents into reading your work count as lying? Are you tricking someone into reading something, making their unconscious prejudices work for you? And if you are, does that constitute a lie, or a con, on your part? Or a self-inflicted wound to their reputation? Are you helping to perpetuate these prejudices by using them to aid yourself?

And that last paragraph, ladies, gentlemen, both and neithers, is where I come to a full stop. Using the system to my advantage only keeps the system in place; not using it means I never accomplish what I want, and what I have wanted, since I was nine years old. I morally can’t do one, and I physically can’t do the other. It comes down to how much of me cares about changing the system for others. How much do I want to stick it to The Man? And do I want it more than my book(s) published?

One thing is for certain: I’m going to need more tea.

The Age of Miracles

Alright? Long time no see. I’ve managed to improve my lot in life. How, you may ask. Well, let me tell you…

It mostly started a few months back. Tired of trying every agent in the Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook and getting rejected, I jumped at the chance of attending the 2014 Festival of Writing. I booked my Saturday, sorted two copies of the beginning of my book, and sent them ahead of me for perusal by the agent and book doctors with whom I’d booked discussion sessions.

Thing is, actually getting to York from The Sunshine Coast (A.K.A. not London) was shaping up to be a public transport nightmare. I would have to get a bus to the train station, get a train to The North, change to a taxi to get to the B&B I’d booked, and then rely on buses to get around.

After scratching my head over the possibilities of a flight from Southampton to Leeds Bradford airport, and how I was going to get to Southampton in the first place, and how to get from Leeds Bradford airport to the sodding B&B, I went with ‘fuck that’ and instead went about looking into hiring a car for the weekend.

Quite unexpectedly, I ended up buying a second hand car. A year’s tax and MOT came with it, and I was set. Literally all I had to do to get it to York and back, not a small feat at around an 600-mile round trip, was buy it some engine oil. Now that’s what I call a result.

Anyway, the festival was great. Walking into the hall and seeing all the people - the writers - waiting around just as I was doing was oddly pleasing. People were generally politely curious, happily chatty - ‘What kind of books do you write?’ - ‘Have you seen what Hodder & Stoughton are starting next year?’ - ‘What version of Scrivener do you use?’ - ‘Do you do that thing where you move the scene punchline six times before putting it back where you had it?’ - and so on. Not one person looked at me like I was a flake, someone who pretended to be ‘in the arts’ because they wanted to sound creative. It was… nice.

I don’t like to mix with people. So I didn’t. I was happy to be by myself, and have my one-to-one discussions with the agent (very exciting to hear her enthusiasm for my book) and the book doctor (who pronounced it a 9; if it’d had gone up to 10 or 11 he’d have taken it himself to hand to an agent). I was so stoked; I’d finally got a car, and it was all for booking this epic weekend for myself. I’d had professionals look at my work and decide that it was a biscuit away from being taken on by an actual agent. And to top it off, Saturday night after the festival my sister and I found a really nice pseudo Mexican place that did AMAZING chimichangas. Sorted.

And then it came to pass that my mate had a mate who had an empty top floor in his house. Yep, you’ve guessed it - I jumped at the chance of renting it. Back to no distractions, back to my own space, back to my own time and mood and feeling like I want to spend four hours writing and no-one can stop me. All the notes I got from the agent and the book doctor? Yeah, you bet I’m going to spend the next few weeks and months working on them, on my book, and turning it into an 11. I’ve spent too long sending it out and getting it turned away; this next agent on my list is going to look at this and demand the rest of the manuscript. And then it’ll all snowball into representation and a publishing deal. FINALLY.

A friend of mine once said that the year of the snake was my year. I think this year, the year of the horse, is turning out to be my year.

Soopytwist.