I thought I ought to document all this, since in trying to get my book published, I have faced difficulties of monumental dimensions. It is no wonder that people find the process daunting, demanding, mind-bendingly troublesome, and so eventually just decide to give up. However, be that as it may, I am not going to give up. I have come so far already and am not quitting now, oh no, not after all this. To date, here is my story…
Four and a half years after I started writing my book, structuring the plot, and perfecting the confounding details, I finished it. It was a bit of a nonevent, it was a strange and forsaken hour of the night as usual, and just sort of thought, “Oh, well I think that’s about it then.” I played Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture quite loudly but even that couldn’t raise my spirits. Night after night for two solid months, I had haunted a small room, the one I use to make hats in, and stayed up until 5am. I was determined the finish the damnable thing. I did it by candlelight to enhance the atmosphere, and went through a fair bit of mead.
I went to unusual locations with my laptop for a change of scenery, in order to glean some inspiration for the poems which I included in the book, most of which, for some reason that isn’t even best known to myself, I insisted be in iambic septameter.
I ordered a copy of the 2011 Writer’s & Artists Yearbook, also known as ‘the bible’, which I understood that I had to have if I was going to get anywhere. I waited a month for it to come in the post. A month. I even emailed them to ask why it was taking so damned long.
I got it, I spent hours upon hours doing research in every avenue available to me to find out what I needed to submit to prospective agencies. I filtered through the list of agents who would accept fantasy and whittled it down to about a dozen. All of them required a synopsis. Believe me when I say it was not easy condensing my 431 page story into 1.5 pages. What is even better, is that one agent asks for one page only. Creamy stuff. Satisfied, I moved onto the all important cover letters, which my research told me had to be ‘killers’. The letters were so brain-wrenching to write that I was literally kept awake all night after spending nine hours trying to write them. I did the same the following day. And then the weekend after that. I started finding white hairs on my head. Eventually the words lost all meaning as I had checked them so many times that I thought, fuck it, they will do. In order to customise these letters to each individual agent, I did research on them, their agency, a large number of their clients, and the sorts of books they have. This, as you can probably imagine, took ages.
Now here’s where it really begins to get fun.
Being in the middle of nowhere as I am, I had no means of printing my submissions available. I had recently bought a new printer, which took me several trips to different shops deciding which to buy. Not wanting to waste it, I took a bus back to Dunedin for an overnight trip to pick it up and and bring it back to Cromwell. Meanwhile, I have been making changes to the first three chapters, revising them at least 100 times, and formatting them as the agencies require. Not only that, but I rewrote one whole chapter near the end of the book and made a number of changes to the manuscript. I spent many hours making marks and notes on the hugely thick heap of paper which was my completed manuscript, which is now a very scribbled on, dog-eared draft. Anyway, back to the printer bit. After a nice wobbly bus trip, I got my printer to Cromwell, and a friend let me keep it in his cabin.
I also brought with me 2.5 packs of paper, big envelopes, small envelopes, giant paperclips, binding rings, hole punch, concertina folder, you fucking name it. This was all quite heavy to carry. So anyway, I printed out one completed submission. The first time I tried this I made a formatting error and had to waste 40 sheets of paper. I packed it all together nicely and took it to the post office for weighing, to get an idea of the cost to send. $13. Thirteen, fucking, dollars. This mightn’t seem like much, but multiply that by 12 and then maybe another two dozen. That adds up to roughly several hundred dollars more than I can afford. I threw a mini tantrum in the post office. I then asked about IRCs, or International Reply Coupons, which I need to send with the submission on a self-addressed envelope if I want a response. If I get no response, the whole exercise is pointless. The woman looked at me like I had sprouted an extra head and said she didn’t think they had those. I threw another mini tantrum. I just sort of drifted away from the desk through the shop and back out to my van, clutching my very-expensive-to-send submission, and drove back to the campsite. I ranted at anyone who came near me. I called up my mother and ranted at her for a bit. Then after a while I went back to normal and my brain slipped out of ‘problem’ mode. I looked up these elusive IRCs on the net and discovered that they do in fact exist in the physical world. I returned to the post shop and told the lady this. She looked them up and discovered that they did exist in their shop too, only no one there had ever heard of them or knew how to sell me some. So I waited while the lady stood on the phone to head office for a while but I was in a hurry and had to go.
On return to the campsite, I searched the net for an alternative, and found one. I could hardly believe it. Royal Mail has a new service that allows you to pay for post online and print stamps directly onto an envelope. I was so excited that I laughed loudly and spun around in circles until I was dizzy. Then I decided that I would figure out how to print onto envelopes, given that my printer was new and I wasn’t sure. Shouldn’t be too hard, right? I made several attempts and printing onto an envelope to no avail. I was a little annoyed but not too vexed… yet. On my final attempt, the envelope did feed into the printer, and promptly got stuck there. I could not see it, no matter how many bits of the printer I pulled off. It simply sat there blinking a red light at me and bringing up error messages on my computer. I have no idea how to fix it, and there is no one around here who can help me. I cried a little bit, then called my mother and ranted at her again. I cursed the sky and shouted at unsuspecting inanimate things for about an hour. I sent an email to Brother explaining my quandary, and could they please help me. I await their reply. I decided the best option would be to make a cup of tea then go bang my head against something hard for a while, before going to sleep and having another go tomorrow. Figurative brick walls are the bane of my existence right now. It is un-fucking-believable just how many things fate can throw in your way when you’re trying to get something done. It is entirely understandable why people give up on trying to publish books but, to reiterate, I am not one of those people. This story is to be continued.
Just thought you’d like to know what I’ve been up to, why I’ve been too busy to participate in nanowrimo, and to put you off publishing a book if you’ve ever thought about doing so. Don’t, is my advice, unless you really, really want to. All this while working a full time job, writing my side projects, working on the two following books, and still making changes to the whole manuscript.
So yeah. That is my story for now, watch this space baby.
