Streamwriting

I just got an email from one of my clients, Larry. He’s written a rather fab book set in 1960’s London about a young lad with a smack addiction. I’ve been helping him spruce up the writing and polish the submission chapters. Today he got an email rejection from Lucy Luck Associates. He writes:

‘There was a suggestion that it had “strong potential as a commercial novel”, although it wasn’t strong enough to make the breakthrough yet, and didn’t have that “magic spark” for Lucy Luck that would persuade her to represent it. I’m inclined to keep working on it, even though it may always be the kind of book that agents feel they “don’t love enough” - which is what most of them say. (Nine rejections so far plus two email queries not responded to.

What to do? What to do?’

Nine rejections so far? I have another client, Julie, who’s written a real page-turner of a book about a young girl who wants to be a musician, and she’s received twenty.

I’m currently on eight. (Though actually I’m trying not to count.)

I was moaning about this the other day. Actually it was the night that Liam did one of his gigs and according to him, ‘I talked all the way through it.’ Too right I did. I was talking about me.

Anyway, during Liam’s set I was chatting to a Dutch friend, Rob, who has just finished his sixth book. I told him about some of my clients struggle to place their book and indeed my own journey. Rob replied he that he had received twelve rejections before his book went on to become a bestseller.

Admittedly that was in Holland and they are rather dull books about corporate stuff. But still! It gave me a spark of hope.

I have another client who emailed a query to a publisher (Avatar Publishers in the US) and within THREE hours the guy had emailed back to ask to read it. The next day they arranged a deal.

Sounds great huh? But before her lightening quick deal with Avatar she’d spent a lot of time sending it out, getting it rejected, feeling flat. So she approached me and was fully prepared to make changes in order to give it a better chance. And look what happened!

Jack Canfield, Chicken Soup for the Soul, got a whopping 145 rejections before getting a YES. After receiving a mere eight I wondered how he managed to stay upbeat about sending it out. Today, I got a standard emailed ‘not for us’ from MBA Literary Agency and was horrified to realize I had become CONDITIONED to the no word.

This could NOT do!!!!

What Jack Canfield did was each time he submitted he changed something about the submission so that he continued to feel excited about it. I imagine if he had sent the same material off in the same wording 145 times he wouldn’t have felt a thing after a while. So, the trick is to strive to keep excited about the submissions and do this in any which way you can. Don’t send them out on ‘rote’, do something new.

I’ve already made some changes on my opening chapters in response to helpful feedback I got from Judith Murdoch, and I’ve rewritten the covering letter several times. I’m now embarking on this blog. Anything to keep my vitality for my novel, that initial ‘yes! It has to succeed’ feeling alive. Because when something is alive it has more chance of attracting the desired outcome.

What about you guys? Any ideas how to keep the freshness? Send them in. If you have already got your agent or book deal then I’d love to hear from you. Success stories feed the soul and make us all believe. Or if you just want to moan and get it off your chest, then do that too. A rejection shared is a rejection halved….

Which would mean I only have 4 rejections! Hurrah.

Lucy Luck Associates - http:// www.lucyluck.com
Avatar Publications - www.avatarpublication.com
MBA Literary Agency - www.mbalit.co.uk
Judith Murdoch - no website as yet.
Jack Canfield - http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=99195881

So, yesterday my musician friend Liam took himself and his guitar off to Majorca.

‘There’s a scene there,’ he said. ‘I’m going to do a few gigs, write some songs, hang out with the Geldofs….’

Having spent the entire last 2 weeks in Liam’s company I found myself just the tiniest, weeniest bit envious. ‘Off you go then,’ I grumped. ‘Have a great time.’

On the way to the airport we stopped for lunch. Which was just as well because the car was about a hundred degrees hot and I had already sweated about 2 stone in weight. The restaurant was called Tinteros and is kind of crazy. Even for Spain. There no menus as such and what happens is that the waiters walk up and down the aisles carrying plates of food and yelling out what the contents are:

‘Gambas pil-pil!’
‘Calamares!’
‘Rosada!’

I found my appetite to be somewhat reduced, sitting across the table from my new chum, and realising with a heavy heart just how much I would miss him. I do confess I have trouble when people leave. It creates an emptiness I find hard to fill.

‘I’ll miss you,’ I gulped finding it hard not to sound like a cliché. ‘You’ve touched my life.’

I felt a lump catch in my throat and I looked the other way. Out onto the sun-decked beach and into the sparkling Med.
‘It’s been great,’ he said. ‘Knowing you.’

I nodded. We really had had a great time together. Drunken fun, frivolity, giggles, fairgrounds, ferias, sofa movies and an instant friendship that grew stronger and stronger.
Plus I fancied him. Not at first. No, it wasn’t lust at first sight; it was a spark which grew later. But later was too late because by that point he was leaving.
I took a reluctant nibble of rubbery squid and smiled.

Later I dropped him outside departures. He had one hour to make his flight. We hugged. And off he went.

I pulled away and put on the CD he had given me as a gift and played my friend at high-volume all the way home. He’s a fantastic musician and I felt so totally proud of him. Here was an artist doing his thing! Hanging out with a man and his guitar made me reflect on the comparisons between musicians and writers. My life felt solitary, hidden up an Andalucian mountain, writing indoors huddled over my laptop, sending out my prized book to agents in the UK, receiving rejections, trying again, and all the time this sense of privacy, of isolation, of being one girl trying to make it in a competitive world of authors who perhaps have a more commercial book than mine.

Hardly anyone in my village has read my work except for a few friends and even fewer still know what the book is about.

‘Yeah it’s about this 12yr old boy who’s an angel and he’s got a mission to save ….’

In contrast Liam had played a couple of gigs during the few weeks he was in town. His creativity was public and out there for everyone to see, to enjoy, to appreciate. He could take his guitar along to a party and entertain the masses. He could play with friends, sing with strangers – he could showcase his talent. I imagined taking my laptop to the same party and reading out excerpts – somehow it didn’t have the same vibe - or indeed two writers sitting side by side doing a gig as they type on their computers…..

Although the public face of these two arts are different, in some ways the profession is similar. Liam has written and made a CD, and like my book, it does not yet have a home. His next job is to go around and find a label for it (as I would need a publisher) and finding a label is not that easy.

‘There’s lots of male singer/songwriters,’ he mused.

And so he works hard, he plays gigs, he pours himself into his music and he does not do it for the fame, or the money, he does it because this is his life.

It’s a useful reminder, at a useful time, that I write not to get an agent, or to get the amazing book deal, or the first break, but because I love writing. Writing is what I do.

And so back in my empty house, missing my little Liam, I return to the rather exciting journey of my book.

Wanna see Liam in action? Listen to his brilliance on www.liamgerner.com My fave is By The Lake.

Today the idea hit me.

I’ve been having one of those miserable woe is me days. I live in a mountain village in sunny Andalucia, I’m drenched in sun, not rain and I don’t have to get up before 10am, not if I don’t want to.

But from the inside I’m grrrring. Why? Because I’m fed up of waiting for ‘the ideal agent’ to come back to me and say something like:

Dear Hannah,

Top London Agent who miraculously has a gap in their books and wants to sign you up ASAP.

Instead, another day of silence.

So I thought hey! Why not write a blog and tell the WORLD about what it’s like to sit on the precipice of success, nervously knawing my fingernails as I wait for an agent to recognise my genius and snap me up to their books as quickly as you can say Harry Potter, Christopher Little, Bloomsbury and Rich List.

And thus, this is a blog about a writer who has written a book The Voices of Angels – quite a good yarn if I don’t say so myself, might even include a few tasty tit-bits here and there on this page….) and who waits for the recognition she and it, quite frankly, deserve. Having sent it out to one batch of 6 agents earlier this year and got a chorus of no’s, (admittedly a nice, rather melodic chorus) it’s now out with a different batch and I sit up my mountain waiting for the big yes. WE’LL SIGN YOU UP! In the meantime, I thought why suffer the wait alone! Why not share the journey with the many thousands out there who are also sitting patiently (or not so patiently) in the same boat as me. It might even be quite fun…..

As a bonus, I’ll throw in some handy writing tips I’ve picked up over the years as a reader in the film industry and as a self-styled Book Doctor. I tend to have an all-round approach to writing – whatever that means. And I’ll also share the pearls of my experience over the past year as I’ve planned, written, edited and submitted my first novel. It’s been quite some journey…..

Talking of journeys…..

Today a young musician friend popped round and dared to interrupt my self-pity rant.

‘You’ve chosen this path Hannah,’ he sagely advised as I glared at him across the kitchen table. ‘You know there’s going to be highs and lows.’
‘Crap,’ I politely replied. ‘I’m fed up of being the impoverished artist! I want my break and I want it NOW!’
Liam nodded in what I thought was a very understanding and compassionate manner.
‘Fancy a game of shit-head?’ He said after a while. ‘Might cheer you up.’