Happy New Year

The old year has been rung out and the new one rung in. It’s time to wish all friends and family a Happy New Year. And how this is done does matter, as Scottish friends will confirm. The tradition is to remain at home for the bells, and then to go and visit all your family and friends to wish them a Happy New Year. That is why Scotland has a two day holiday at the beginning of January. To wish someone a Happy New Year whilst we are still in the old year is liable to bring bad luck.

My luck ran out just before Christmas. After keeping my distance for much of the autumn, I visited all our neighbours to give them cards and small gifts in the run up to Christmas. And, in a symbolic reversal of ‘A Christmas Carol’, I went down with the ‘flu on Christmas Eve. It’s the first dose I’ve had for over two years and I’m afraid to say that it’s still with me. So my festive season has been spent with Lem-Sips, eiderdowns and cough medicine. But T has been looking after me well. So I’ve managed to have the odd mince pie and scrap of turkey from time to time. Bah humbug.

I very much hope that 2023 brings you what you are wishing for.

Paul x

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.

A Good Step Forward

I’ve got the result of my cancer surveillance CT scan. In the words of the radiologist: ‘Stable appearances. No evidence of recurrence.’ They never say ‘all clear.’ Nonetheless, this is a huge relief. However, I did come away from the meeting with my oncologist with an important question that still needed to be answered. For the past three months, I’ve had a pain in my left side, which also follows the line of my ribs. I first went to my physiotherapist. He told me it was a minor muscle tear. But a month later the pain was unchanged. So I went to my GP. He sent me for a series of blood tests and an X-ray. All of these were normal. And still the pain continued. So when I got the appointment for my CT scan, I rang my oncologist’s secretary and reported my symptoms. She was concerned. My left kidney was where the cancer had first appeared. She told me that Radiology would be asked to specifically report on my left side. Unfortunately, their report did not do this.

At the meeting, I explained that I was afraid my left diaphragm had become damaged again. It was surgically repaired with mesh five years ago. My oncologist examined me and concluded that there were a number of possible diagnoses. The repair could have become damaged. Or some scar tissue could have torn. I have plenty of this, and some nerve damage, due to repeated surgery on my abdomen. Or this pain could be an early sign of something malign that had not yet grown enough to show up on a CT scan.

She said she would contact the surgeon who had done the repair on my diaphragm and ask him to have a look at the pictures from my scan. I was delighted she was going to do this. It would have taken me ages to get to see him again. She also booked me in for another CT scan in three months time, to check again whether any recurrence could be seen. I was reassured for now. She had been thorough, covering all bases. And these were good steps forward. I could sleep a bit more easily.

What Keeps You Awake at Night?

I’m still waiting to hear the result of my cancer surveillance CT scan. It’s been two weeks so far. I try and take each day as it comes, but that’s not easy to do. My main coping strategy has been distraction, primarily by immersing myself in other things. This takes a lot of effort, and only seems to work some of the time. I didn’t expect to hear anything during the first two weeks. I know it will get harder from here on in.

My primary distraction has been to work intensively on my crime novel. The report I got from the professional editor was very positive and encouraging. He also gave me a series of suggestions for improving the novel. In particular, he pointed out where I could cut some back-story and some scenes that he felt slowed down the momentum of the novel a little too much.

It’s so much easier for someone else to see where you could make structural edits to your manuscript. I did realize that it needed improvement and I recognized that the opening act was where I most needed to focus my attention. But I couldn’t see exactly what edits ought to be made. If truth be told, I was also resistant to making further structural changes. I had already rewritten a good part of the opening act of the novel over previous months. I’d invested a lot of time and effort in it.

With the editor’s prompting, I took a very hard look at what I had written. I noted down what the key plot points were in each of the scenes that he had identified as potentially cuttable. I soon saw that all of these could be placed elsewhere in story. I thus ended up cutting four scenes and one sub-plot. And now the opening of the novel does flow much better, with a more immersive intensity.

He also pointed out that my narrator tended to use certain exclamations and speech tags rather a lot. Turning to the ‘find and replace’ text command, I discovered that my narrator said ‘bloody hell’ 65 times over the course of the 281 page novel. Rather too many, don’t you think? Even for a crime novel. I ended up removing or replacing plenty of these. As I did for several other words and phrases that were overused.

Oddly enough, I can lie awake at night imagining alternatives to ‘bloody hell’. I’m not going mad. It’s just my distraction therapy in action. If I wasn’t worrying about my novel in the wee small hours, I’d be worrying about the return of the big C.

Alive and Kicking

It’s come around again quickly. Tomorrow, my cancer surveillance CT scan takes place. I currently have a nine month interval between scans. It’s been eleven and a half years since my first tumour was found. It’s been six years since my last tumour was removed. And it’s been five years since I’ve been under a surgeon’s knife. The type of cancer I had does not respond well to drugs. So the primary treatment is surgery. I hope and pray that I never have to be chopped open again. Each time they go in there is collateral damage. This, it seems, is inevitable, however beneficial the purpose of the procedure.

My abdomen was slit open four times in six years. The end result is that the tissues of my torso have been seriously weakened. Indeed, the lower part of an abdominal muscle was removed completely during emergency surgery seven years ago. As the tissues repaired after each of these procedures, I was left with lots of scar tissue and adhesions. These give me pain and loss of function in different parts of my torso. I know each of these sites intimately, especially when they nag at me in the small hours. The worst is my left side, where my ribs were cut open five years ago.

Ah, I hear you say, but you’re still alive. Not many of those who’ve had Stage 4 cancer are still with us. Don’t get me wrong, I am delighted to be amongst the lucky few. Learning to live with the unwanted results of surgery is a luxury, compared to the other option. But I don’t seem to keep this knowledge in the front of my mind. Like anyone else, I naturally try and do things as part of normal everyday life. But when my body brings me up short with a stab of pain, I have to step back. And say, no, I just can’t do this anymore.

It’s a challenge to accept your limitations. In my head, I’m still a younger man. T is doing her best to stop me injuring myself. She has taken on plenty of arduous tasks. And she acts like a conscience, telling me to stop if she sees me embarking on anything too foolhardy. I try my best. But from time to time, I do too much or I go too far, and I end up hurting myself. It’s not easy being a survivor.

In Joyce's Country

This is the view over Lough Corrib from our cottage. We spent a lovely two weeks there. The cottage had a sunroom with a large picture window and we often sat watching the light change on the lough. It was also the only place in the cottage that had an internet signal. There was no phone reception at all. But that didn’t seem to matter. We sat and read, went for walks and bike rides, and recharged our batteries. The nearest village was Clonbur, one mile away, which had a good shop, a bakery and three pubs, two of which served food. The cottage was whitewashed and sat amongst fuchsia bushes and fruit trees. It had been the home of the grandfather of the current owner, who had improved and extended it. We ended up being one of the last holiday lets, as he had recently retired and was moving in there next month.

The surrounding area marks the border between counties Galway and Mayo. It’s called Joyce’s Country, after the Anglo-Norman landowner, and consists of Lough Mask, the Partry Mountains and the densely wooded margins of Lough Corrib. Nearby is Cong, famous for the Augustinian Abbey with its fishing house built on the river, and for the country seat of the Guinness family, which has now become a very posh hotel. But 1000 Euro per person per night does not buy you exclusivity, for the grounds of Ashford Castle contain a number of rights of way and thus are open to the public. We walked there through ancient woodland beside the lough and had lunch in the tea room.

Despite having pulled an abdominal muscle a week or so before our trip, I still managed some good bike rides. There were plenty of quiet back roads to explore around the shores of Lough Mask and across the stone-walled farmlands of South Mayo to the old market town of Ballinrobe. T did plenty of writing. I focused on reading. I’d brought a selection of crime novels with me. I really enjoyed ‘Christine Falls’ by John Banville, the first of his Quirke novels, and ‘The Searcher’ by Tana French, a novel with a frontier feel, set in the West of Ireland. I also enjoyed ‘I Know What I Saw’ by Imran Mahmoud, a novel with PTSD and memory loss at its core, but was jolted by the final twist which left me feeling somewhat cheated. The good thing is that they all gave me inspiration for my next redraft of my crime novel, which is what I should now be getting down to after the holiday.