Progress and Priorities or Lack Thereof

I am trying not to think about the strife I went through while in the process of getting my first agency submissions away. After all my mind splintering efforts, five artfully whittled letters and accompanying examples were sent away. Weeks later, after ‘the wait’, of those five, I have received four rejections. Some polite, some rude and impersonal. I wasn’t feeling too confident, but it is depressing to remember the effort and expense I went to only to reap no benefits.

It is the story of my life, work work work for no gain. No, think not of me that I am giving up. I expect many more rejections, perhaps even dozens, but my next trick will be to attack the problem from a different angle, and force my presence upon the prospective agent/publisher. I am going to do it in person. Perhaps not all of them, but a few if I can, and since Britain isn’t looking hopeful, America is next on the list. I will also do Canada. This has always been Plan B. Giving up is not an option, and would be an utterly stupid thing to do as my life would cease to have a point to it. Many great authors were rejected loads of times. Look at J.K. Rowling, rejected 12 times. Ursula Le Guin, told that her book 'The Left hand of Darkness' was unreadable, John Grisham's 'Time to Kill' was turned town 28 times, Stephen King's 'Carrie' was rejected 30 times. Stephenie Meyer's 'Twilight' was rejected 14 times, I'm surprised it wasn't more, but the point is that it went on to do well. Four rejections at this early stage are certainly not going to put me off.

As far as the book goes, I’ve long had the feeling that it takes too long to ‘take off’, but I think I’ve found a way to change that. My brain is an overflowing bowl of ideas lately, only I’ve hardly had the chance to write anything down as I keep getting invited to parties, dinners, barbeques and such, and haven’t the time. Bloody fun getting in the way of work again :p  

The almighty second draft of epic doom is in encephalous utero as we confabulate, and something shinier and more beautiful may emerge. Nay, will emerge, unfurling its sticky wings and flying free to charm and impress the world. *Cough* A ha ha anyway...

I’m feeling a bit miffed about the artist I commissioned to draw me a picture featuring my characters. Well, the second one. The first one told me she was, after many months of me asking her, ready to take my instructions. All excited, I wrote a verbose description of what I wanted. Then she told me she was too busy with other tasks again and that I had to wait a few weeks. I couldn’t help but feel miffed then too, that despite my asking her many times over a long period, that she put who knows how many others ahead of me in priority. So I thought bugger it then, I’ll ask someone else. I did, she seemed very keen and liked my ideas, so I sent her away a different but still very verbose description of what I had in mind. I kept track of her commission statuses and saw that she was finishing others’ first, but was pleased to see that mine had been started. That was oh hmm, eight months ago now, and I’ve had nothing from her. I thought artists wanted to be commissioned, I thought people liked getting paid. So you know what, fuck the whole idea. If artists are going to keep putting other commissions ahead of mine, or forget mine entirely, then I don’t see why I should bother even asking. If my books are a success, then they won’t be the one I ask to do the covers. I wouldn’t ask at all except that I really can’t draw, and thought it would be nice to see an image other than the one in my head.

Thinking of this has put me into something of a sour mood. I think I’ll remedy that with a large bowl of ice-cream and chocolate sauce. By the way, my diet’s going really well.

Actually it is, well I assume it is, since I can see my collarbones again. They’ve been missing for a while. The fact that I’ve been spending evenings doing exercise, ie bike riding along the lakefront, has also meant that I’ve been too exhausted to cogitate any creative ideas. 

Ah, my excuses are plentiful, aren’t they? 

However, getting my slightly marshmallowy body into a more pleasing shape is also a priority. I want to look a bit more decent when I reemerge into my usual society, or when I come ‘out of hiding’.

I’m counting down the days until I leave the orchard and the speck on the map which is Cromwell. Four more sleeps. I’ve been here now for four months, and living in the back of my small van the whole time. Not a glamorous lifestyle but there you go. Next I’m going to spend two months stressing irrationally, then hopefully I’ll go to Canada. Whatever comes after that will come as a surprise, I don’t like to be too prepared. Anyway, I’m getting distracted from that promising bowl of ice-cream.

To conclude, the book publishing saga continues. I do often wonder why I make things so hard for myself. I could try publishing here in New Zealand, but the challenge wouldn’t be quite so monstrous, in other words, not as much fun, or as much of a monumental achievement when I get there. I shall press on in this journey until my legs fall off.

Technical Thinking

You know, I have read dozens of online articles on writing tips; what to do, what not to do, sentence balancing, beginnings, hooks, adjective use, and so on. Many of them contradict each other and could easily leave one feeling rather confused. They always leave me feeling uncertain of my own work, and make me think about everything from a more technical perspective. They make me question myself. I begin to wonder if anything I have done reaches these persnickety standards. While these articles are intended to help, since I started reading them, I swear my writing has become worse! Much worse! There simply isn't the flow or the sensation of a natural thought process. It seems stiffer, sounds less like my voice, doesn't read as easily, in short it just isn't as good. I think too much about what I'm doing. It's like anything that you're well practiced at; the less you think about it and let your learned subconscious do most of the work, the better the result. I much prefer reading over the things I've penned spontaneously, without giving them a speck of technical thought.

Here is an example. I ice-skated for ten years competitively, starting when I was 5 and finishing at 15 when our rink closed down. I was no master of the sport but I was quite able to do all spins and jumps etc. It was ingrained into my brain. Eight years on, I can return to the rink (our new one) and have another go. Firstly, ice-skating isn't like riding a bike, you can't just hop on and still be able to do it.
I am nowhere near what I was, but here's the thing. I can do almost all the spins and jumps as before, provided I don't think about what I'm doing. The moment I start thinking about where my arms are, am I balanced properly, should my leg be straighter, and worst of all, will I fall over, everything goes to custard and I can't do a thing. My brain knows how to ice-skate, it is printed in my subconscious. I just have to let my body remember what to do, without trying to remember it consciously, and it just happens. And it happens right. Well, a little wobbly, let's be honest, I'm taller and heavier now than I was eight years ago.

So really, things that you know well how to do can suddenly become complicated when you start thinking about how you do them. Although these 'writing tip' articles often do offer sound advice (some people sorely need it) I'm quitting them because they hinder rather than help me. Sod them! Who's to say that the people who wrote them know what they're talking about anyway? The best writing comes when you're not paying as much attention to details and technical stuff. If there are errors, they can be fixed later. Do what seems best at the time, think less, and change any fuck ups afterwards.
I have had to remove and redo whole chapters of my book because of this. Bits I did while I wasn't totally in the mood for writing but rather forced myself to sit in a silent library and do it, and thought about every sentence from this new perspective. It simply doesn't work.

Perhaps this is one of the only occasions where it is best to act first, and think later.

The Saga Continues

Alright, alright. I'm trying to cool down from a huge outburst of fury and shouting. I just checked my e-mails and shouted 'Fuck!' so loudly that I'm certain all of Cromwell heard me. Great clouds of birds flew out of trees, and rabbits scattered in all directions. I rarely get e-mails but I got two very important ones at once. One I certainly could have done with two weeks ago.
First, please try and understand my anxiety and meritorious patience in regard to waiting for the coveted British stamps to come in the post. Imagine that all your mind-bubblingly troublesome, nightmare-inducing problems would be solved once a package appeared in the mailbox. I ordered and paid for these stamps, thinking that I had finally, finally found the solution to my international post issue. All that was left to do was wait. Until today, when I received the following...

Dear Customer

Thank you for your recent order which we have unfortunately been unable
to process.

Royal Mail Direct is a service offered to customers based in the United Kingdom
and Northern Ireland (with the exception of British Forces based overseas).
For this reason we are only able to deliver orders for stamps to Business addresses
located in the United Kingdom.

I have therefore refunded your card.

Kind Regards, etc etc.

I responded as civilly as I could given my fury, pointing out that it was nice of them to tell me this, but would have been even nicer to let me know before I had spent two weeks waiting on tenterhooks. Could they please make it clear that they do not ship overseas. I made it clear, in the nicest way possible, that they had caused me a great deal of discontent.

The second e-mail was a very polite rejection from the first literary agent I submitted to. This is fine by me, I am expecting much rejection, doubtless this will be the first of many to come. The Writers' and Artists' Yearbook even has a big section on dealing with rejection. I'm pleased they responded so promptly, that's something else I can stop waiting for. Perhaps I would have been a trifle more disappointed had I not had this other message to compare it to, which sent my blood raging. Bastards, bastards, bloody fucking bastards. May corkscrews find their eyeballs.

Anyway, so as the title suggests, the saga continues. I am still in utter disbelief at how immensely difficult this has been. Like, woah. Seriously, woah.

The next step and only option remaining to me is to drive to Queenstown or possibly Alexandra if they have them, and buy some IRCs. Then and maybe then can I finally send off my other submissions. This means taking a day off work, which I really cannot afford to do. It also means driving my 'not quite up to scratch and likely to conk out' van a long way. Let's see what figurative brick wall fate throws in my way this time, I'm almost looking forward to finding out. This whole journey, if we can call it that, has been rather remarkable, don't we feel? I am going to do my level best to go the rest of today without ranting at unsuspecting people. I suppose having something to be angry at is better than being totally bored, and boredom is so ubiquitous these days, especially around here. I am going to have some chocolate milk now, for it will be balm for my soul. 

If Patience is a Virtue, then I'm Going to Hell

You know a day is going to go badly when you begin it with a solid smack to the head on a freezer door. That was the precursor to some day in the vicinity of last week, which I am trying to blot from my memory, because it was simply another wreckage of a day in the curly path to book publishing. To quote Blackadder, the path of my life is strewn with cowpats from the Devil's own Satanic heard. After fighting with the printer and pulling the large, delicate piece of equipment to bits, I successfully removed the aforementioned stuck envelope, and leapt about with a few triumphant hurrahs. I then spent two hours filling in things on the Royal Mail website, thinking that now I can finally, after all my struggles, print the prepaid postage onto the envelopes and send off my submissions.
But nay, not to be! Some very small print enlightened me to the fact that the postage is only valid for three days. What, I ask you, is the point!? So yes, another utter failure and waste of time, since the postage was required 6-8 weeks later.
Then I returned to the post office for the third time to enquire about IRCs, and guess what, they don't have them at all. They suggested I drive to Queenstown, an hour or two away, which I cannot do as my van is still without a WOF and still has a split exhaust. Well fuck me. That would also cost a lot in petrol, which happens to cost slightly more in this area than it does everywhere else.

So, I think that the freezer door smacking me on the head was simply put there in advance by fate, as undoubtedly I would have spent the evening smacking my head against something hard anyway. It was just saving me the trouble. I thought booking tickets on a Romanian website was difficult, but that was a cake walk next to this.
I then purchased from the net some British stamps, which I am having sent here to the orchard. I wish I had just known to do that ages ago, would have saved a Hell of a lot of fecking about. However, on the same day I ordered the stamps, I also ordered a pocket dictaphone from eBay (terribly useful little gadget). That arrived last week, to my delight, yet still I check the mail drawer in vain every day in the hopes that my stamps will have arrived. Lord oh Lord I am at the point of tears. My entire plan is falling to pieces, time is running out quickly, I feel like I'm drowning in pressure and penury and am becoming more uncertain every day. It doesn't help that today I learnt that I am currently earning less than minimum wage, spent all day today working in the rain, and for no readily available reason I am sore absolutely everywhere. Seriously, I feel like I've run a marathon and can hardly pull my socks off without difficulty. Mind you, today did start with me sitting on an upturned bucket under a tree in the rain in a cherry orchard, entirely alone and wondering where everyone was.

In conclusion, I think the first thing one does in the morning sets the tone for the rest of the day. Tomorrow I'll do something cheery first thing, and be wary of the freezer. Do not worry about my little cafard, a touch of melancholia is needed every so often to balance things out. I'll get over it tomorrow perhaps. It would be even better, and certainly put a big, inane smile on my face if my stamps actually arrived. Hope springs eternal I suppose, it is wrong to rely on Royal Mail to be efficient and prompt, because they simply aren't. Being held back from the most important thing you've ever done by two sheets of stamps is, to say the very least, staggeringly frustrating.

What I've Been Doing Lately - Freyja's Adventures in Writing-a-Book Land

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.