Midwinter

Today is the winter solstice. The shortest day of the year. The marking of which is the source of many Christmas traditions. Such as the bringing of holly, ivy and mistletoe indoors. Such as the building of fires and feasting. Such as the making of offerings and gifts for a fruitful second part of the year, when the days get longer and the warmth of the sun returns.

I now have an early Christmas present. Amongst more rejections, I got a request for the full manuscript of my novel from a large and long-established London agency. I’m overjoyed to have reached the next step on the road to publication. My sample of work had interested them enough to warrant a look at the whole novel. So I reviewed my manuscript and sent it off.

This is an important step forward. But, of course, it doesn’t mean that my novel will now be published. No doubt many agents request the full manuscript and then decide that they don’t like the novel enough to take it any further. I did ask how long it might be before I got a response. Six weeks they told me. So fingers crossed for some good news.

However, I still don’t have any news from my consultant. Apparently she had contacted the surgeon who did my last operation and asked him to review the pictures from my CT scan. But he hasn’t yet responded. So I am still in the dark about the longstanding pain in my side.

Isn’t that just how life goes: the light is always tempered by the dark. But this time of year is all about celebrating the power of light over darkness. So I will light a candle, raise a glass of non-alcoholic mulled wine and send all good wishes to you and yours for the festive season.

 

Approaching an Agent

To get a novel published, you first need to find an agent to represent you. There are around a hundred literary agencies in the UK. Almost all are in London and most have a number of agents. Each agent is quite specific about the sort of novels that they are looking for. It took me a week of research to come up with a shortlist of agents to approach. The next step was to send out my work to them. Each agent specifies what they want to see. The basics are a covering letter, explaining why you’ve contacted them, a short pitch of your novel and a brief writing bio. Then you enclose a one-page synopsis of the novel and a sample of your writing. Some agents want just the first ten pages of your novel, others the first fifty pages. So I wrote the emails, attached the files and pressed send. Surprisingly, I got a reply from one the very next day. Were they so impressed with my glittering prose that they wrote back straightaway?

Unfortunately not, it was a rejection. Despite submitting my literary endeavours for twenty years, the stab of rejection still hurts. I’ve had countless rejections. You just have to shrug each one off and keep going. If you gave up at the first rejection, you’d never have any successes. It’s a hard lesson to learn, but rejection is a normal part of being a writer. Reassuringly, many famous writers had their first novel rejected multiple times (e.g. William Golding, JK Rowling, etc). One of the agencies I approached stated that they received 10,000 submissions a year and ended up taking only ten of these. Those are not good odds. They are probably worse than submitting to most poetry journals.

In fact, I should be pleased that they bothered to write back to me at all. A good number of the agencies stated that because they received so many submissions, they didn’t bother to respond to the ones that they weren’t interested in. If you hadn’t heard from them within a specific number of weeks, then you should assume the worst.