UPDATE 2013

Maybe blogging is the way forward for now.

For the first time in over 14 years I'm not working on a new book, and for a very mundane reason:

I've got a day job!

This means rising at 5:30 and leaving home at 6:45 for a 40 minute commute to my workplace, a hospital in Schwetzingen, Germany, where I'm a social worker. I really enjoy the work and if I ever need to set a novel in a German hospital, well, I'm getting all the experience and a thousand anecdotes! I intend to stay at that job till I retire in early 2017. It's a good thing.

But three years ago, I'd never have dreamt I'd be here. The two long-term plans furthest from my mind were a) returning to Germany and b) returning to Social Work . Yet here I am, and loving it!

Since I'm an early morning writer, that means no more writing for a while, and somehow that's a good thing too. Those who know me, and have read the now-hidden pages of this blog, know of my struggles for the last nine years or so; I've written one book after the other. I've worn my fingers to the bone writing queries, and I could paper my wall with rejections.

 It hasn't been only rejections; I've had four different agents, three of them with major agencies in Britain and the USA;  one of my books was highly praised by a Bloomsbury editor and another made it to the sales meeting of Ballantine, USA. But still: no sale. Seems I don't write the stuff publishers think will sell, and I'm not the type to write for the market. So, no vampires or werewolves or aliens or erotica or whatever the current trend is from me, and I've reverted the ups-and-downs story of that journey, as recorded in the early years of this blog, to draft.

This was originally a LiveJournal blog with a small following of aspiring writers, but I think it's no longer relevant or wise to keep it up. The past is past; I'm looking forwards now, and though I won't be writing anything new, I do have a writing plan of sorts.

The writing I'll be doing is revision.  I can do that on the weekends and, maybe, even in the evenings; it's just for novels that I need to be up early with a clear head. So, I'll be revising all my published novels, as well as the unpublished ones sleeping in my computer, and it's ready-steady-go for the digital age: they're all going to come out as e-books, all revised and polished and smartened up! The first one, Of Marriageable Age, is almost ready to go; just a few little kinks to sort out, and she'll be out there again. The rest will follow...

For me it's a Brave New World, and I can't wait to enter it!

The wonderful thing is that all the pressure has gone. I don't need the money. I don't need a breakthrough. I don't need success. If one person buys my books or 100, it doesn't matter. I don't need a bestseller. I don't need sales. The books can do what they want: if people enjoy them, so much the better. I've written them and my job is over. I'm no longer starving in a garrett and trying to put two kids through school and adolescence. They've flown the coop and I have my steady income. My (disabled) husband is in good hands, and close by. I'm a normal person again with tax taken off my salary (how wonderful, not having to put it aside!) as well as pension contributions and health insurance and what-not. It's so relaxing to be normal!

And yet, I still march to a different drummer. It's all inside me, and if it's ever going to show, well, it will show in my books and not in my external life.

And maybe in this blog, which is all the creative writing I'll be doing from now on.

And when I retire in 2017: well, I've got two books in a trilogy to write. And then I'll have all the time in the world to do so. 

Agent A: Writing down Memory Lane

This is what my first "computer" looked like; this was the late 1990s.

That little green stripe was my screen. I could view maybe three lines of writing at once, correcting typos, exchanging words, etc. I thought it was brilliant; such an improvement on having to type directly onto paper.

I saved my documents on floppy disks. These looked like this. In fact, this is an original of those disks. I am about to have its contents extracted so that I can read them again.

You probably can't read what's written on the floppy; there are 

a few crossed-out items, and then, "Perfidia" and "Die Woche".
Perfidia was the title of that first novel.
"Die Woche" has nothing to do with death. It was an article

I wrote at the time which was published in a German

 newspaper, Die Woche.

Original blog post from 28.01.07, but never made public.

Ten years ago (ie 1996-1997) I wrote my first novel . I'll call it Book A. 

Up to that point, I’d never thought I could do such a thing as write a whole novel. Reading had always been my passion, and making up stories my hobby, but only in my head. I’d never imagined I’d ever have the discipline to actually sit down and put those stories to paper. The very thought of planning a full-length novel gave me a headache, and short stories just didn’t interest me.

But one day I sat down and started, and from that moment I never looked back. The words simply flowed out; characters leaped into life, and even without plotting, all kinds of twists and turns arose unbidden from my imagination. I loved it.

I ended up with 700 pages, a monster of a book, wild and passionate. Let’s call that Book A.
At the time I was living in Germany, in a little village miles from anywhere. I had no computer; I wrote on a Brother Word Processor, a thing like a typewriter with a separate monitor. It had no hard disk, but I could store my writing on floppy disks, which held only a few chapters at a time. To print out a whole novel I had to print one chapter at a time, one disk at a time, and add the page numbers manually. But that was good enough for me.

Once my book was finished I wondered what to do with it. I had no idea about the publishing world. I knew no writers and had read few books on writing; in fact, just one, Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer.

And of course, I had no internet, no Google. What I did have was a big book called The Writers Handbook, but that was more about publishing in America, which seems a little out of the way. Somehow I found out about a British writers’ magazine called Writers' News, and subscribed to that. In the very first issue, I read a short article about a literary agent who was just starting out. Let’s call her Agent A.

I wrote to her about my book, and eventually sent her the full manuscript.
A few weeks later I got a phone call. “Can you visit me in London?”
Rookie as I was, I had no idea what this phone call meant, I only knew I had to go. So I said yes immediately.

Nervous as a schoolgirl called to the Head, I went to her home/office in North London. I was convinced she’d called me all that way only to say my manuscript was absolute rubbish and to forget writing for the rest of my life.

The first words she said was: “I think it’s terrific...”
I was so excited I almost missed the end of that sentence: “...but it needs a lot of work.”
Right there and then she went through the manuscript with me. Pages and pages were dismissed with a stroke of her red pen: “That’s rubbish.” Hundreds of pages got that treatment. I ended up with 430 pages (I didn't have a word counting facility in those days, I didn't even know I was supposed to count words!).

She sent me home with some wise advice: take what’s left and rebuild the whole thing from scratch.
That’s what I did, but it still wasn’t good enough.

Another draft, another submission later, she was satisfied enough to start submitting.
Nothing came of it. One or two editors, she said, would be happy to see a revised draft. So back to the drawing board it went. Back to the agent. Back to the editors.
And then a long, long silence.

When I could no longer bear the silence I rang her up.
She told me she’d had no answer up to now, and it didn’t look very hopeful. I burst into tears. I was utterly and completely devastated. I knew it was over. I had put all I had into that book, blood, sweat and tears. It had kept me going through a desperate time. It had been my lifeline... and it was a failure!

But the word failure just isn't in my vocabulary. I'm a lemons to lemonade type.

So I dried my tears, returned to my Brother, and started Book B.

By this time, three years had passed since writing Book A

...to be continued....