Solace & Grief: The Cover!

*blaring of trumpets*

Of Thwarted Wine And 50,000 words

There is every reason why today should have seen me curled in a foetal ball of nausea, hissing at natural light and sobbing at the prospect of solid food, viz: the fact that I stayed up until nearly 4AM last night listening to music from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and doing my level best, along with Fiona, in whose house we are currently lodging, to polish off a fifth bottle of wine. There are precedents for all these things, usually resulting in the afforementioned state of misery. Instead, I woke up at quarter to nine, made myself a large serving of scrambled eggs with pesto, ham and fetta, drank some OJ, brought the washing in, watched some Stars in Moderately Priced Cars segments from Top Gear on YouTube, and then spent the rest of the day writing. Admittedly, this also involved a nap around 3PM, the making of BLT sandwiches for our hungover household and a reasonable quantity of internetting, but by and large, I’ve had a productive day. Which is astonishing.

Currently, the sequal to Solace and Grief is sitting pretty at 50,000-odd words, many of which are being systematically replaced with better ones. As a WIP, The Key to Starveldt has been causing me endless strife, partly because of my perception that the second volume in any trilogy is inherently the trickiest, but mostly because I stuffed it up bonza on the first go. Happily, those scenes are now a thing of the past – well, almost – and the process of trying to fix my own errors before anyone else can point them out has been an extraordinarily valueable learning curve. After months of strategic note-making, scene-rearranging, word-scrapping and character-changing, I’m finally making what feels like genuine progress. Sure, the word count isn’t rising much, but that’s because I’m deleting old words at a rate  roughly consumate with my addition of new ones. 

And this time, it feels right.

 

 

Winter Conference Highlights

Yesterday was the Pan Macmillan Winter Sales Conference – my first ever book event, which I attended as part of the Ford Street delegation. It was a long day in the Yarra Valley full of free food, speed dating with sales reps, speeches and free wine, although not necessarily in that order, and I had an absolute blast. So here, recorded for posterity, are some of the highlights:

1. Spending the day with the wonderful George Ivanoff and Meredith Costain.

2. The proliferation of tiny little custard tarts topped with glazed strawberries, of which I devoured my own bodyweight.

3. The self-help author whose pitch to a room full of publishers included the words ‘nobody reads books anymore’ and the admission that he didn’t read, either.

4. The number of sales reps/Pan Macmillian people who were not only lovely and interesting, but fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

5. The speed-dating session, wherein I repeated myself umpteen times in the pursuit of marketing my book, but nonetheless had a fabulous time. And also, it was actually timed speed-dating. With table numbers and a stopwatch.

6. The free drinks from 5:30 onwards.

7. Bradley Trevor Grieve’s speech at dinner, which included a toast in Swahili and a rousing defence of dogs, and which made reference, among other things, to Hitler, skydiving, French cinema, fevered morphine dreams, Egyptian mythology, Paris Hilton and hermaphroditism.  

8. The part where I was awarded a soft toy Siamese cat for asking a vociferous and pedantic question about undines. 

9. The fact that, due to the effects of free alcohol and the suggestions of not one, but two lovely PanMac people and also my own madness, said toy cat was promptly dubbed Selina James Grieve. Thanks, Anita and Robin!

10. And this was only my first conference.

Midway Point

We’re halfway through the year.

This is exciting on many levels, not least of which is that in 43 days, I’ll be entering the UK for a glorious five months. Already, so much of significance has happened in 2009 – Solace and Grief being accepted for publication, joining the excellent SuperNova writing group, planning our trip – that part of me finds it hard to believe how much else is yet to come. Tomorrow, for instance, I’ll be meeting my publisher at Ford Street, Paul Collins, face-to-face for the first time. Later this month, I’ll be attending my first ever event as a writer, the Pan Macmillan winter sales conference, about which I am both exhilirated and nervous. Once we’re in the UK, Toby and I will have our second wedding anniversary in Bristol; we’ll be in Scotland for winter and Surry for Christmas, which will be a new experience for both of us. I’ve started writing short stories, which is a new and fascinating thing – not that they’re brilliant so far, but I’m working on it, and the more I write them, the more confident I feel. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been blogging less: my strange ideas are ending up in stories rather than expository posts, refracted through a fictitious lens instead of a journalistic one.

I’m loving 2009. My only worry is that so much will have happened by December 31 that the sheer volume of significance will cause a mental implosion – that it will be too hard to remember each little thing, and so I’ll forget everything instead, swept away by the Big Event of 2010, which will be the book release itself. But at least I’ll be able to use my blog as a reminder. After all, that’s part of why it’s here.

Linkalicious

Like most people, I occasionally Google myself. (Shut up.) Perhaps unlike most people, I habitually learn something I didn’t actually know, but probably should’ve done. Hence the following, quasi-belated links:

Running Deep, a short story;

The Nihilist Ice-Cream Parlour, another short story; and

An interview with Paul Collins, my publisher, in which (among other things) my book is mentioned.

Squee!

Bookness

As of Easter, my editor has finished with Solace and Grief. Apparently, she even enjoyed it, which makes me glow with a quiet firefly-warmth. I’ve taken a break from the sequel these past couple of months, so hearing this now is like snuggling happily into a favourite blanket. The exhausting thing about trying to get a first novel published – or rather, one of the many exhausting things – is that if you stop work on it, nothing happens. Editors do not magically gain access to your halfway finished draft, nor do agents ring and ask if they might peruse the most recent chapters. Instead, you are alone in your creative universe. Progress only happens when you make it happen – and when the necessity of eventual publication hangs over your head like the proverbial Pointy Thing of Damocles, there is a guilty need, both pressing and urgent, to always be doing something. Submission is only a temporary fix, elation quickly overriden by a nagging question: now what? Most publishers take months to respond – what happens in the interim? Editing what you’ve already sent off is a good way to keep busy, but waiting for a response still feels like sitting on your hands. In more ways than the obvious, publication comes as a refreshing change. Perversely, it grants the freedom to vacation from your characters sans guilt, to sit back and work on something else (or catch up on your DVDs, whatevs) in the delightful knowledge that somewhere, some wonderful soul is tinkering away on your behalf. The novel is being Worked On, and all is right with the universe.

Solace and Grief, as I may or may not have mentioned, is the first of a trilogy. Book 2 is currently under construction to the tune of about 40,000 words, with the caveat that the last 20,000 are in disarray. Literally. Many scenes have been roughly hacked into a new order, but before I read through and start a-stitching with my elegant surgeon’s keys, there’s a small matter of imperative: a new character whose intentions I must fathom absolutely before putting her – and the middle chapters – back in play. I’ve not addressed the problem for a while, but now that the editor is done, certain mental wheels have started clicking. Soon enough, the story will start to itch at me, and when the internal pressure reaches critical strength, I’ll fling myself back into it with a vengeance.

Assuming all my uni essays are done, that is. Publication changes many things, but – alas! – the intrusion of the real world isn’t one of them. Damned necessity.

Novel News

I signed my first book contract yesterday. In a way, it was a more momentous event than actually hearing the novel had been accepted, because it was concrete, fixed in paper. For the first time, I spoke to my publisher on the phone. We chatted about the contract, diverting fragmentarily into what comes next, and now it’s finally hit me that there is a next, that I don’t have to start reshopping again, and that all the emailed back-and-forth about series names and schools and libraries had a point.

I’m actually getting published.

Dazedly, I keep wandering into Reader’s Feast at lunch, greedily eyeing the ‘M’ slot on shelves and noting where my book, potentially, could sit. At home, working on the next volume, it startles me to think of not needing to submit all over again; that, like a privileged second child, it will never know the anxiety and heartache of its elder sibling’s early days. Wandering into Readings, I feel my stomach jump to recognise books on display as originating from my new publishing house. And so on.

I don’t have many details yet. I’m new at this. But the book, for those who are interested, will be called Solace and Grief. It’s young adult fantasy. I’m working with Ford Street Publishing and the wonderful Paul Collins. Also, I’m now on Twitter. And I am – and will continue to be – extremely, wonderfully excited.