Well, the moment fast approaches to see whether this beastie can survive in the wild, so…

will be signing copies of the book at Waterstone's,

The publisher’s lunch is rightly famous, to the extent that the name graces a trade magazine for the industry, and Douglas Adams incorporated a homage to it in Life, the Universe and Everything (1). In a world gone mad for time-and-motion studies, efficiency, value and the remorseless cheapening of life’s experiences, the publishing industry yet retains its dignity and its luncheons.

So, after a whirlwind tour of the Pan Macmillan offices, the three of us decamp to a one of those little, low-ceilinged places, too traditionally appointed for a wine bar, too much space to be a pub (2), that only seem to exist in London. The food is good, the drink copious, astonishingly copious. There is some kind of etiquette here, and as far as I can make out it can be summed up as “it is now impossible to refuse any offer of alcohol.” I half expect us to make it to absinthe before the end of the night. It remains a distinct possibility (4). We crouch (5) about the small table like criminals planning the next bank job (6), and as we eat they treat me to scattered anecdotes about the world of publishing, mostly consisting of who threw wine on whom, why she can’t stand him, and that time that such-and-so was discovered resting in the office the following morning, having not entirely made it home.

   There are some sorties on business, within this. The first one hundred pages of edits are passed ceremoniously to me by Peter, each one liberally filigreed with busy pencil (7), which is a milestone in the process. Oh the contracts are signed, the wheels are in motion, but only with receiving that plain envelope of annotated text did the clasping of hands, the joint venture, become tangibly real.

    In particular, and aside from the aforegoing, there were three important pieces of business that remained sufficiently insoluble in alcohol to get resolved:

 There is the matter of the book cover. I’m not entirely sure what input is usual here, and what happens when the author and the publisher pull in opposite directions (11) but we all three came to the table with the same idea. There must be a human figure, chiefly. I’d already had some problem with test readers getting a little thrown by whether the characters were insect or human, and although I’d attended to this in pre-agent rewrites, it was something I was keen to sort out – so stick a man on the cover, rather than a moth, and the reader is thinking the right thoughts. As we’d all turned up independently with the same kind of thoughts, the decision to put one of the Wasp-kinden front and centre came quickly thereafter. The second book, Dragonfly Falling, which I note is already showing for Amazonian pre-order despite the fact that I’m still working through the edits for that one, will have a different kinden as the poster child (12), and so on.

 Secondly, the name for the series was still up in the air. The working title was “Insect Tribes” which I wasn’t happy with, and the others were even less happy with. We brainstormed (13) this back and forth for some time and, some time later and quite spontaneously, Simon came up with “Shadows of the Apt”, which fits the long-term plotting very well (14).

 Lastly, the thorny issue of names. We batted about a number of options before resting on Adrian Tchaikovsky for the simple reason that it was easy on the reader’s eye and memory.

 Surely I jest? Not a jot of it.

 To digress briefly, there is a kind of mouthwash I essayed once, which tasted, oh, godawful foul, some kind of bastard mint-acid savour that raked the inside of the mouth and made you gag if you were unlucky enough to swallow any. The true horror, however, was that this flavour was just that, a flavour. Someone had carefully added that misbegotten taste to disguise how ghastly the stuff actually was. The horror, the horror!

So, then, Adrian Tchaikovsky was eventually picked from a number of options because it was still considerably easier than the original. I should state, I am of Polish roots, a fact I’m very proud of, however… I do have to spell my name multiple times every day at work, on the basis that this country is populated almost entirely by Franks who are incapable of pronouncing a perfectly civilised moniker that might happen, say, to kick off with a combination of vowels and consonants not ordinarily to be found this side of Gdansk. I had already given up, long before ever writing Empire, on being known by my own name as a writer. The thought of some poor reader approaching the counter at Waterstones and asking, “D’you have the new book by Cz… by Cz… oh, do you have the latest David Eddings or something?” was painful to me. So my Russian namesake was the least of a number of evils, as Pyotr Ilyich had already done the hard work (15).

 However, as the possibility of the Polish rights being sold seems extremely viable, there is an epilogue to this tale of Frankish ignorance, for in Poland, one would strongly assume, I may finally see my name in print in its unadulterated form.

(1)   “Missing, presumed fed”

(2)   The pub came later, and it was also one of those quitessentially Londinian (3) institutions, a tiny, cramped warren of beams and plaster and Ireland, the sort of place that has been bought up, dolled up and killed off by pub chains anywhere else.

(3)   There is presumably an adjective, but I have no idea what it might be.

(4)   Only once, only once, to date, at the Oxford residence of some extreme libertines it has been my fortune to become embroiled with. I remember that it tasted green, and very little else of the evening.

(5)   Subsequently “lounge”, and later “slump”.

(6)   Which would make the editor the guv’ner, my agent the Lock-Stock-style East-End rogue, and me some manner of hired muscle, I suppose.

(7)   I remain grateful for the sheer level of detail in that edit – whilst the agentle (8) edits had sorted out the bigger picture stuff such as plot and structure, the editorial (9) notes were at a sentence-and-word level, or dealing with paragraphs where the flashing fire of ideas in my mind had not entirely made it to the paper (10). Also, I was dismayed to see just how many words in the English language I was apparently quite unable to spell.

(8)   See (3) above.

(9)   On sounder footing with that one.

(10)  An odd side-effect of writing a book set in a secondary world that you’ve created in some detail – it’s easy at times to forget that the reader hasn’t had the thorough grounding in its history, geography and mythology as the writer.

(11)  Well, one can make an educated guess as to who gets the last word.

(12)   No prizes for guessing which.

(13)    The sort of storm with a great deal of precipitation, naturally.

(14)    Well, in brief you’ll recall that ‘Aptitude’ refers to the ability to understand and use the new technology, that the Apt races are on the up, and the old Inapt races are fading. The ancient world, with its magic, superstition, darkness and fear, is very much the shadow of the new world of progress and light, and like any shadow, you just can’t shake it off.

(15) It’s the same name, of course, but the Slavic languages are simply not intended to be represented in the Roman alphabet. Poland, being a mostly Catholic country, did its best with the Romans’ meagre stock of letters to represent the vastly rich variety of different sounds in their repertoire. Russia, being originally Orthodox, got on quite well with the Greek-derived Cyrillic, but when Tchaikovsky came to Western notice, the name got put through the mangle a second time and ended up with an almost entirely different cast of Roman letters.

So, you can become quite an authoritative expert on a lack of news, in the not-quite-a-writer business. You soon learn to recognise the various vintages of wait that life serves up to you, from the urgent, piquant sting of the wait just after you’ve submitted your manuscript, to the dry, harsh but full-bodied waiting when it’s around that time that you think you should have heard something, to the bland watered-down waiting that you get after the better bottles are dry and it’s been too long to seriously expert a result. All of these become old friends, and each time you make your submission, you do the rounds of the old watering holes, sample the same old vineyards. If you’ve trodden this path, then odds are you know what I’m talking about.

There are bottles left unopened, however, until you make a certain kind of progress. When you send your full manuscript off, you open a special celebratory cask of waiting that has a fruity, bubbly savour, and yet a distinctly sour and lingering aftertaste, and that, frankly, neither keeps nor travels well: going back for a second glass a month later is a distinctly disillusioning experience. It’s that old enemy, hope, of course. They put hope in the grapes, and it might as well be corked, frankly, but still, you drink it. What else is there?

So, there I am, with an agent, and for the first time the business is out of my hands. It’s up to Simon now to plead my case for me, to tilt in the lists against the black knight, and all I can do is wave my handkerchief from the tower window to encourage him and/or sit mutely behind him and tug at his gown on occasion (1). This is, to date, the hardest wait of all. Perhaps it should be the easiest, now that the agent is acquired, now that the plateau is gained. Lies. There is no plateau, only a slope, and one that will continue, I am sure, long after publication – why, there’s sales figures, sequels, diminishing readerships: even if there was a laurel involved then resting on it is only a polite way of saying waiting.

True, you gather momentum as you pass the various milestones, but equally true, the gradient increases, and at this point it felt as though the path ahead was near-vertical, and it was unclear whether I had sufficient momentum to clear it. The thing is that the waiting earlier is easier simply because you can tell yourself all manner of stories about what is going wrong, and you may well be correct in the telling, and anyway, you’ll almost certainly never know any different. After all, who knows whether they really read it, or whether the reader wasn’t someone who secretly loathes your name or your theme or some chance choice of word on the first page. Who knows whether it was just a bad time, whether the reader got out of bed on the wrong side, broke up with her husband/his wife/their partner/the dog, trod in a puddle, got a car clamped or stolen, had an unfavourable horoscope, and then spilled coffee in their lap immediately before reading your sample chapters? In such circumstances, anyone might form an unjustifiably prejudiced opinion of a work, and, you’re willing to bet, readers have days like that all the time.

And probably that’s true. Given the volume of submissions and the rather smaller number of people paid to read them, how many really do get a fair reading? How many are rejected, that would have won awards and sold a million copies? Oh, surely, far more are rejected that would have bankrupted the publisher and seen the editor lynched if they ever saw print, but still, the holes in the sieve are large. All sorts of things might fall through.

Get this far, though, and the gloves are off. There are no excuses going. The agent has read it, and applied his literary spanner to tune and tighten the work until it becomes the sort of book that Jeremy Clarkson would drive from Monaco to London in, beating James May in the plane (3). The book is no longer an “unsolicited manuscript”, such as many publishers pointedly do not accept. You have an advocate, a respected literary man with the backing of a well-known agency, representing many actual authors of whom you have heard. Every possible factor is now in your favour.

So, no excuses then. If you fall from grace now, there are no safety nets, you just fall and fall, because the agent wants to sell your book to a publisher. This is the only way that the considerable time and effort that the agent has put into it will ever be justified. Your knight has put his spurs to the destrier and couched his lance, and if he fails to strike the quintain at this point, well…

Best not think about it.

But of course, you do think about it. This is the time, more than any other, for soul-searching, lying awake, fretting, mithering and general existential angst. It is out of your hands. It is out of your hands and in flight (5) and nothing you can do can call it back or alter its course.

And so you wait. As mentioned, I’m a lawyer (7), and where possible I do my own advocacy, as to my mind wrangling out a matter before a judge is the best part of the job. Whenever I’ve had to instruct a barrister to speak instead, it’s been nailbiting in a way that actually doing the work myself never was. Delegation is a hard thing to do, and when your life’s aspirations are the things being carried off to market in someone else’s basket…

So, the unkindest cut of all waiting, and I won’t say that I didn’t plague my poor agent, which did nothing for my chances and which I cannot recommend, but it was impossible for me, in the end, to sit there like a soldier’s wife and wait for word from the front. There’s a saying about no news, and at first no news is good news, and then it becomes bad news, and at last you decide that it has, by grim process of inevitability, become good news once again.

And then the news came, and Simon asked me if I would mind terribly if Macmillan were to buy up books 1 through 3 for mumblemumblesum of an advance, and the sun came out, and the world looked quite different.

(1)   Metaphors are like knotweed. You should never let them get out of hand, or you’ll never be rid of them. As both a lawyer and a fantasy writer, it has always been easy for me to see the business of legal representation and advocacy as a kind of knight-errant affair (2)

(2)   Only most of the time the wicked baron is your client, and very few knight-errants charge by the hour.

(3)   But only because of a virtually deus ex machina series of problems at the May end.(4)

(4)   And if you still have no idea what I’m going on about, it was an episode of Top Gear.

(5)   Because we need another metaphor like a hole in the head (6)

(6)   Yes, I know.

(7)   A legal executive is still a lawyer. Lawyer is an imprecise catch all term that, ILEX forgive me, is a lot easier on the ear and more impressive in the imagination than “legal executive.” One of my very earliest jobs was an “Administrative Executive” for the Legal Aid Board (8), which taught me pretty damn quickly that putting the word “executive” in a job description, just like calling your new housing estate “Sunview Villas”, is as much a warning signal to the unwary as bright colours on a frog or a rattle on a snake. Notably, below the Administrative Executives were the Administrative Assistants, a post as menial as if the organ grinder’s monkey had hired another, smaller, monkey to do backing singing.

(8)   Now the “Legal Services Commission”, as if that changes anything.

Or somesuch. The other problem is that once you can actually cajole anyone into reading the wretched thing, those readers are likely to be family or friends (4) who are far from likely to give you a stern ticking off over your lazy characterisation and inadequate grasp of the semicolon. Noel Coward would, on the whole, be satisfied with the general level of criticism that this sort of audience generates.

Another level of audience that you may be lucky enough to have access to is the writing group. This is that pack of like-minded aspirants who get together on occasion to read their latest pieces to one another. I’m sure there is a whole gradient of these, from the formal (paid-up?) kind, nightclass-like, all the way down to a few kindred spirits who get together on occasion just for the joy of it. Grandfather Tolkien had his Inklings, after all. The tradition is an honoured one. I’ve been lucky enough to be welcomed into a group called the Deadliners, the modus operandi of which includes giving the member set rules to write short stories to, which was a particular spark of inspiration to me and led my writing on paths that otherwise might have remained untrodden (5). However, these sorts of groups are probably not a good source of disinterested review. Everyone’s work is on the slab, after all, and so people will tend to cut gently. When I joined the Deadliners I was quite overawed by a lot of the work on show, and suspected that my own offerings were being handled with unmerited kindness.

However, whilst in my early writing years I was essentially violently allergic to criticism of any non-gushing kind, I have since learned to listen to it. The key has been that review is a dish best served at least luke-warm. I am always in love with anything I’ve just written, but leave it a month and even I will tend to push it around my plate and poke holes in it.

So, the agent read the first draft of Empire, is what I’m working up to, and I received for the first time a serious critique of it, with three pages of suggested changes.

Now, this process is like an onion. I don’t mean that it necessarily makes you cry, but there are layers and layers. Later on I would have an editor go over the manuscript, and then again a proof-reader, and each reader would feed back on a very different level.

My agent, then, fed back at a kind of macro-level. Nothing of punctuation or grammar or the like. His major points fell into these categories:

(a)    Major themes of the book.

(b)   Reordering of sections

©    Television serial chapter endings

(d)   Parts that didn’t make sense

(e)    Slow bits that needed cutting

This all sounds very alarming, but in fact it wasn’t, although possibly this is a testament to my agent’s reserves of tact. The Major Themes bit is nowhere near as all-encompassing as you might think. It was more a matter of him saying, “…at this bit, did you mean…” or “…this almost sounds like…” and me thinking about this and realising that, yes, while the thought had been a million miles away at the time of writing, it seemed to have slipped in there anyway. At least one of these threads to the plot was detailed and (retrospectively) evident enough that we decided that I must have been thinking of it at least unconsciously, but it had entirely escaped me on a surface level. End result: a book with a lot more resonances and connotations.

The reordering is more of a technical matter. The original manuscript, where there were different characters off doing different things, tended to cut fairly rapidly (2 pages or so) between groups, which gave the manuscript a disjointed, jumpy feel to anyone who had not, in fact, written it. Sometimes, where interrelated action is going on in varied locations, this can be a good thing, but where there is no need for it, it only breaks up the narrative. The feedback on this was basically help in bringing related sections together so that, where possible, chapters would focus on one set of characters or another. The TV endings issue is a related one: I had a tendency to give chapters cliff-hanger endings that were immediately resolved in the next one, which works fine when you’ve got a commercial break, but not so well in a novel.

Other than that, you always need a fresh pair of eyes, especially when writing about an imaginary world. I’d lived with the insect-kinden for a long time before this book came out, and a lot of their world had become second nature to me. Sometimes I would know exactly what I was talking about, but those vital sentences, or even scenes, that would render the opaque transparent for the rest of the world were absent (6). My favourite one of these was when I had to eventually report that there was nowhere I could convincingly fit a discussion of the insect-kinden contraception and the mechanics by which conception of half-breeds occur. This remains absent, and no doubt these pages will eventually fill in the gaps (7).

So: Empire in Black and Gold had gone through the wringer for the first time (8) and come out decidedly more polished, comprehensible and rounded. Next would come more waiting, but in a sense the worst wait of all…

(1)   I think it was Noel Coward that said… but I couldn’t swear to it. However, I’ve avoided the phrase “I think it was…” after it got so deservedly lambasted by Michael Bywater in his Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost and Where Did It Go. He cites this as a “lost world” because the internet has changed all that, and it’s the work of a moment to see who said what when, and how (2). In memorium of “I think it was” I haven’t checked, honest.

(2)   Unless you’re looking on Wikipedia, in which case you get a peculiar concensus of “I think it was…” from all quarters of the globe.

(3)   On a kind of Shroedinger’s Cat sort of level: lock a manuscript, an atomic source and a reviewer in a box: when the source decays it prompts the reviewer to write a highly uncomplimentary review of your hitherto un-savaged book. Now, as there is a 50/50 chance of a quantum event resulting in the review being written, is your book still any good or not?

(4)   Oh you’d think so. This is, however, not counting on the one friend of mine who, given the (only paper) manuscript for one of my books, was discovered some six months later using the still-unread document to prop up his wobbling table. I mention no names. You know who you are.

(5)   One memorable Deadliners challenge saw each member write a title down, and then there was a random drawing following which the writers would have to produce a story to the title that they were given. One wit decided that Cyber-Squirrels of Nutcluster 6 would be a lovely one to spring on someone. The luck of the draw gave his own title back to him, by sheer fluke and poetic justice. I can attest that the story of that title does now exist, and it is exquisite.

(6)   I shouldn’t kick a bad film when it’s down but, well, regarding the Dungeons and Dragons Movie: if you’ve been luckless enough to buy the DVD of this execrable film then you will discover a set of “deleted scenes” thereon. The astonishing thing is that you become swiftly aware that these scenes appear to have been chosen because they made sense of the plot. The entire raison d’etre of everything that happens to the hero of the film has been carefully excised from the theatrical release. Moreover, there is also an alternative ending in which the annoying fool character stays dead and the hero is sorry about it which, whilst it could not quite have rescued the film from being atrocious, would still have given it one redeeming moment. Suffice to say, it would appear that someone got into the editing suite with the sole intention of absolutely and totally ensuring that this turkey would not fly, and they left its bloody, severed, stunted wings on the editing suite floor.

(7)   When a mummy insect and a daddy insect love each other very much…

(8)   And indeed a second time, as we went round twice on this one, but more of the same, especially the re-ordering, but I’m counting this all as one go.

Actually, that’s bunkum. Hope is a curse. It inflames the senses. Sentence a man to ten lashes, and the eleventh lash shall break him, not because it falls on the back of the previous ten, but because he had hope (1). Hope is a terrible thing indeed. The government should ban it (2). To wait here, at the very brink, was torture. If the word had come back negative, I’m honestly not sure how I’d have taken it (3). I swore to myself, however, that I would not press the agent. Busy people, after all. Lots of irons in the fire (4). No way was I going to mess up my chances by annoying them. What a fool I’d be, after all, if they were standing with Empire in one hand, and Bloodthroes of the Minglords by Lupin Onpodswallow in the other, desirous of a new client but unable to make the choice, until some loon calls them up and harangues them over the telephone about it. Idiocy, surely, to poke them with sticks when all is at such a finely balanced state.

So you can see where that’s going. Yes, I called them. I was weak. I’m only human after all. I got to the point where, in my hyperattenuated state, I felt that I had nothing to lose, and I put a call in.

And they suggested I come over and meet up.

Actually, I can’t swear blind I didn’t call twice, the first time to be pacified with some pleasant chat. I am that stupid, honestly. However, I got the invite. Come over to London some evening to talk about your book.

Charlie, on uncovering the golden ticket in his chocolate, was positively restrained in comparison. (5)

We made a date, some evening after work. I had expectations. In my mind was a great glass and steel monolith, the interior of which would be partitioned into soulless offices, and I would meet some blank-faced suit who would have me sign things without reading them properly, and then turf me out. I was anticipating the cold whirr of corporate machinery. You must remember, my training is in the legal industry. I was expecting to have to jump through hoops.

I foresaw formalities.

I bought a coat. This was the extent of my forward planning. I was without a respectable garment, save for an old trenchcoat that flashers would have disdained, so I went hunting for a coat.

I had thought about how to present myself. A suit? Too formal. I was supposed to be the creative type. I looked for a writer’s coat. Ingeniously, I did this during the lunch-hour before the evening of the meeting, just to ensure that I had no real time to make a proper decision. I found something in green, vaguely military-looking. I thought at the time that it looked free-spirited and a little rebellious without being impudent. This opinion was not later borne out (6) but it was too late, then. In my new coat I went to meet my destiny.

My relationship with London has always been a strange one. There is a lot about London that grinds down the human spirit: the crowds, the traffic, the sheer crushing gravity that being the spiritual centre of the UK brings. However, my brightest memory of childhood is being taken to the Natural History museum (7), and there was one university night when a friend’s birthday party culminated in an all-night trawl down the embankment and across a London that never slept, but simply turned from face to face as the small hours ticked passed, as five drunken students in black tie lurched and staggered, unmolested, through a formerly unglimpsed world. Also, I recall my first experience of the tube train, on my way to Moorfields Eye Hospital at age fifteen. I had just read Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, and fresh in my mind was the amorphous monster pursuing his protagonists through the tunnels of that sealed, alien city, the sour, cold air forced ahead of it by its onrushing bulk. When my very first tube train arrived it scared the crap out of me.

The street of agents, as I thought of it, was not a concrete and steel sort of place. There were little bars and restaurants, all subtle and expensive and looking as though the same family had owned them for generations. There were doors marked with nothing but a reserved brass plaque that gave a name and, sometimes, let you in on what manner of business was conducted there behind closed doors. Where the plaque omitted this information, if you did not know, you were not the sort of individual to make use of their services.

Eventually I plucked up the courage to ring the bell, and was asked up in my green coat into… the cave of wonders.

Well, all right, not the cave of wonders. That would have been silly. No glass and chrome here, though. No cold handshake and contract (10). Instead of the barren office, however, the room I was ushered into was a library, or perhaps a well-appointed professorial study. Certainly, there were a couple of computers quietly glowing away, but then they are a necessary evil in both libraries and university studies these days. However, most of what met my eye was… books.

Shelves and shelves of books. Floor to ceiling books. Stacks of books. Books I had read. Books I had intended to read. Books I had never heard of. Books in translation, in foreign languages, in foreign alphabets. Where the walls were not obscured by books, there were posters: choice slices of publicity from the agency’s history. For those books were not just idle reading matter: they were hard-won medals from the skirmishes of the publishing industry. They were the books of the agency’s clients, each one a testament to a victory: no less triumphant, and considerably less gauche, than the heads on a game-hunter’s wall.

Well, all very florid, but it made it real, standing there, surrounded by those actual books, seeing names I knew, titles I had read, and knowing that this office had brought them about, that the man showing me around was part of the magic (11).

And so: was it contracts and terms and business?

Well, actually, agents are people too (unlike lawyers, some would say). So I ended up in thsi wonderful book-lined room with someone of about my own age talking about Dr Who and Blake’s Seven and looking up humour on the internet, and drinking. Mustn’t forget the drinking. It was my first introduction to Magners cider, which these days is all over the place, but will always, to me, be proper author’s cider. I had rather a lot of it, although not quite as much as was poured for me, owing to spillage. And we spoke of the book, of course, because an author’s ego is always hungry for talk of the book. We are not quite real, until we exist in the minds of others. Or something. Talk of possible publishers, of lists, of imprints. Dropped names. Expectations. All told, it was more of a night in with friends than a hard-edged business meeting, ie. infinitely preferable.

As we were wrapping up, I asked, with a certain trepidation, at what point he would be making the decision about whether to actually, you know, take me on. At the back of my mind there had remained some tiny splinter of suspicion, that it was all some kind of audition. I think an audition had been, at root, what I had expected. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But no, no tests, at this point. No trapdoor abruptly opened beneath me. No Jeremy Beadle leaping from behind a stack of books like the twentieth century’s least-loved gargoyle. I was finally allowed to understand that I had crossed the Rubicon (12), and that from this point things would be different.

(1)   One of my childhood’s absolute favourite books, Dianne Wynne-Jones’ The Homeward Bounders, has a very nice twist on this subject. Hope, indeed, is an anchor.

(2)   Interesting thought. Has all the tedious, squalid, self-serving and outright lunatic legislation of the past century merely been a well-meaning government programme to rid us of the scourge of hope?

(3)   True, I’d been in this position before with Flames of the South and survived the disappointment, and no doubt I’d have shouldered my way on if Empire had gone the same way, but I was older, when Empire was being weighed in the balance. More water had passed, irrevocably, under the bridge, never to be reclaimed. In fact, as chance would have it, I was approaching the age where, some ten years previously, I had sworn I would get somewhere with the business, or bust. What “bust” meant in this context I had never really considered, but bust was certainly what I was nearing, when I sent the Empire manuscript off.

(4)   An interesting idiom. When would you need a number of irons in the fire, really? Sources suggest branding cattle, but the torture imagery is fairly persistent.

(5)   One wonders what his reaction would have been if, after a particularly hefty bite of chocolate, he’d found half a golden ticket. Doesn’t bear thinking about.

(6)   With the gold buttons done up I looked like the biggest soldier China never had.

(7)   I cried when it was time to leave. No prizes for guessing that my time there was split between the great vaulted bones of the dinosaurs and the serried and intricate ranks of the insect galleries. (8)

(8)   And gone, both of them, or at least the way they were when I was a child has gone. Now the cabinets of infinite wonder, the thousands of specimens of once-living things, and most of the great fossils too, have gone to make way for some kind of amusement arcade, that to my jaded eye is only peripherally amusing or educational. When I was a child… ah well, that’s the old complaint, but when I was a child, I was more captivated by the relics of the diverse wonder of life than any number of edutainment video games (9). And where have they gone, those testaments to nature's charms? The collections broken up, the skeletons dismantled, in dusty storerooms, in drawers seldom to be opened, if ever again. Surely not thrown out? Are the appalling odds against any creature being preserved over the millions of years not enough to warrant a chance for children to marvel over those hoary bones. Did all those insects die for nothing?

(9)   I am deeply horrified to find that “edutainment” is a word suitable for a dictionary, according to Microsoft. I demand my little red underlining!

(10) Signature in own blood optional.

(11) For some reason this puts me in mind of Mr Benn at the fancy-dress shop, but that has all kinds of connotations I don’t want to go into.

(12) One wonders how Caesar would have felt if the Rubicon had been receding from him daily for over a decade. Pretty pissed off, I can tell you

After the striving, and the despicable cost of postage,

After the rejections and the resubmissions,

After all of these things, and so ad infinitum,

And if your gods favour you,

You may hear the Call.

The Call should, if there was any poetry or justice in this world, come to you in the sound of a great bellowing horn blown on the mountaintops to summon you to your rightful place; there should be signal fires leaping from peak to peak; a messenger, arrow-shot and near-death, should crawl the last few paces to your door with desperate words of battles at last won. All of this, you should have. However, if this world possessed its proper quota of justice and poetry, we wouldn’t be writing fantasy, now, would we?

So it comes by way of a small letter. A letter, mark you. Not the stodgy bulk of a returned manuscript. That, in my experience, has never betokened anything other than dismay. Instead they keep the sample chapters you sent them, and they want more. Specifically, they want the rest.

There are a number of options as to the identity of “them” (1). They might be publishers. They might be agents (3). But be warned (4), whilst I couldn’t say whether Many are Called and Few are Chosen, it is possible to fall even at this fence. I know because I’ve been there.

It was a good few years back, but I had completed a book which I had originally entitled Southmarch (5). I sent off the first chapter to the usual suspects and one publisher actually got back to me — O excitement! – and wanted to see the rest.

The manuscript was duly dispatched, and damn the postage, and… wait, and wait, and…

And they didn’t want it. To be honest to myself, the book wasn’t all that. It started well, but flagged, had a nice sea battle in the middle, but the ending was unconvincing, when I looked at it later with the clarity of distance (8). They were very pleasant about it, but firm. It was a case where the first chapter, which frankly was dynamite, did not quite justify the thereafter.

Back to the drawing board for me, but a valuable lesson learned. I had an example, in my own fair hand (9) of a hook that caught a fish, even for a moment. It’s worth noting that I took the lessons from that first chapter into Empire, so the experience was worth having, even though I pounding a nail into me head at the time.

But the Call came again, thank you. This time it was an agent’s letterhead on the simple communication: let’s see it all.

So I sent it all, and they saw it all, and the telephone call came (note the advance in intimacy this time, not a mere letter but actual human contact (10) ) to ask whether I might not want to drop into London some time to meet face to face.

(1)   Giant ants from a black-and-white B-movie, for example. (2)

(2)   Or even giant bees from a black-and-white ant movie, conceivably.

(3)   They Might Be Giants, even.

(4)   It seems that every time I talk about getting published I’m flourishing caveats and admonitions like some overbearing parent. However, this particular road to Damascus is paved with broken glass and angry lobsters, so I think the warnings are justified.

(5)   However I later decided that Southmarch made it sound like some unauthorised sequel to Middlemarch (6) and so I skimmed off the title of one of my very, very early efforts at writing, which I had called Flames of the Dark (7), and changed Southmarch to Flames of the South. It was a title I was never particularly happy with. I find that, with titles, I am either immediately and permanently happy, or never entirely satisfied. Empire in Black and Gold falls happily into the former.

(6)   Tad Williams later brought out a novel entitled Shadowmarch, damn him.

(7)   A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, suggested the alternate title for this one as A Burst of Guts in the Dark, which actually fit the book rather well. It was, I must stress, a very early effort.

(8)   With endings as with titles, either it’s right there and always satisfactory, or I have to reach for it, and am never one hundred per cent settled on it. However, as of the last six or so books I’ve assayed, the ending is usually one of the inspirations that comes to me as part of the introductory package. It’s been a long time now since I started a book I didn’t know how I would end.

(9)   Which fair hand bears a remarkable resemblance to Times New Roman.

(10)  And note, as well, that again the manuscript stayed firmly there, rather than being returned here. Over the years I rather naively blew a lot of hope and prayers on returned packages with my address written in my own writing, in the erroneous belief that people sent the stuff back so that you could print out the balance of the work, add it to the returned chapters, and resubmit it complete. To my knowledge this never happens, and the return of a manuscript is the end of the line, sure as taxes, before you even open the package and read the one-liner they’ve enclosed with it.

Also, it’s worth paying close attention to precisely what you are submitting. What impression does the bleary-eyed, coffee-ridden reader get of your great work? Some books start with a bang, some start quietly and build slowly. However, that reader has only a few chapters, and of those, the first few pages are key. Your first chapter is the strumpet that you are pimping, and she is best tricked out in all the finery you can scavenge. Paint an inch thick.

This is a shame, frankly. There are many ways of structuring a plot, and not all of them need a warm-up act. There are many classic novels, probably the great majority, that start slow and work up, rather than sending in the clowns in Act I Scene 1. However, as a green new writer, your work must grab the interest of the reader from the start, and then hold it, hold it with hooks and claws and raptorial killing arms, until the reader gets to the end of the pages you have sent and thinks, “I could do with more of that…” Whether the reader is a literary agent or from a publishing house, that is what you must accomplish, and so your first few chapters must explode off the page. If you have a book that is reeking with action, adventure, mystery and magic, but which begins in a quiet and sedate manner (the children yet to discover the door to the magic kingdom, let’s say) then it may be worth turning your mind to the humble prologue. Fantasy prologues have a certain reputation, and you do run into a lot of rather similar ones (1). However, if there is a tremendously exciting monster/mystery/war/metaphysical conundrum later on in your book, that will make men weep, women gasp and children nag their parents until they get bought the action figures, all’s one unless you can indicate its existence to your current audience of one, who only has your first three chapters to go on. A prologue where the tail of the monster is glimpsed (3) may not go amiss.

Aside from that, keep writing, either revising the same or starting afresh. As mentioned I’ve skipped on to new pastures each time, because I find that I need to seize ideas when they occur or the momentum is lost, and constant new writing is one way to hone your skills. As a sequitur, a word about sequels.

The fantasy genre, particularly, thrives off the series. It’s easy to blame Tolkien, but he wanted his mammoth work to be a single volume, divided internally into six tranches. At his publisher’s insistence it was released as three wodges (4), each containing two of Tolkien’s subdivisions. So it was that the fantasy trilogy, that oft-mocked stereotype, was born. Except that the stereotype is grievously behind the times. It’s a rare thing now for a series to stop at three. Looking at Jordan and Erikson will demonstrate that the current trend can run as far as ten or more volumes, and each large enough to stun a bear if hurled with moderate force (5). So: you’ve written your book one. What do you write next?

For a very long time indeed I wrote no sequels. Everything I wrote was capable of being followed by a “volume 2 of…”, but all those volume twos are yet to claw their way out of my brain. My logic was that, following the rejection of the first book, why waste time on sequels when I could be writing some fresh first volume to submit? Except…

Except that, some several years ago, I started writing a book based on an old setting of mine, that had seen light in a tabletop campaign once, and had been kicked about and mulled over since before my university days, but that had never actually got as far as the written page. So came forth Empire in Black and Gold, which I enjoyed writing a great deal. When I finished it, rather than reach for my Writers’ and Artists’ Handbook, I made the decision to just keep on writing. I knew that if I submitted it and received the usual round of rejections, I would not have the wherewithal to finish the later books. So it was that, a few years later, I was sitting on a trilogy.

Then I submitted Empire. I did not make much play of the sequels. In fact, I thought it would come across as presumptuous to try and flog three books to people out of the blue. The interesting moment came, to jump ahead a step, when I actually got as far as meeting my soon-to-be agent. I, rather optimistically as I thought, took along copies of books 2 and 3, just in case the subject should come up. I was still thinking how cheeky this would be, at such an early stage.

It was not cheeky, it turns out. It was very well received. What I hadn’t considered was the publisher’s eye view. You have a writer with a book, that has sequel potential. In the alternative you have a writer with a book who has completed a sequel or two. There’s a certain reassurance in those later books actually existing, even in an unpolished format, and it allows the publisher control over the release schedule, as fast or slow as it prefers, rather than having to gamble on book two being finished by any given date, or at all. It surprised the hell out of me at the time, but turning up with a series, rather than a singular, seems to be a definite advantage once the first book has snagged some interest. It does involve considerable investment of time on your part, and you have to be confident enough about the book, but maybe that in itself is not a bad litmus test.

(1)   Principally “evil dark lord commits a small atrocity and expounds upon his plans” or “prophecy and omens mitigate against making any long-term investments (2)”

(2)   Or, in extreme cases, starting any long books.

(3)   Or an opening skirmish of the war, or a clue to the mystery, or a syllogism of the conundrum, or whatever.

(4)   It’s the official term for a quantity of Tolkien. Honest. It derives from the old Numenorian "ewoejen" meaning "lumps of the stuff."

(5)   And that’s just the paperback. A solid fantasy hardback could breach tank armour.

You’ve dispatched your sample chapters to agents and/or publishers. Now what?

Well, very little. Wait for the little rejection slips to come fluttering to your door. As mentioned, even that can take some time. When you finally strike gold you’ll know about it but,before then, you’ll live in an agony of ignorance, wondering each day what has become of all the paper messengers you sent out into the world, and not one of them has the grace to inform you of its progress.

On no account should you start calling the recipients of your work and badgering them for a response. This may, in fact, yield a response, but not the response you were hoping for. You will win no friends by making a nuisance of yourself. This is all about power balance. They have the power, and you, at this stage in the proceedings, are a supplicant, and one of many. I really rather doubt that there is such a thing as a publisher’s blacklist (2) but if there was, you wouldn’t want to be on it, now, would you? Later on, of course, when your books are being made into films and you live in a castle in Scotland, you can make as much of a nuisance of yourself as you want. (3)

Eventually you will probably find that either all your little birds have returned, empty-beaked, to the nest, or you’ve given over the remainder to storm and predators, on the basis of extreme effluxion of time. You may by then be working on a new book. You may have been brushing up the faded colours of the original. Sometimes (rarely) you will receive constructive criticism from people returning your work, most often agents in my experience. Treasure this like gold dust.

And submit. And wait.

How long must you wait? Well, I waited over ten years, punctuating the wait with one submission or another. There are no guarantees.

You may think this is a hard life. It can be soul-destroying. You can reach some milestone birthday or other and think, “Should it not have happened by now?” The leaves turn brown and fall, and you wait like an ageing princess in a high lower, watching for the glint of sun on armour in the distance, but each time the White Knight just rides on (4). Spare a thought for some distant cousins who have it harder. (9)

The truth is, it’s a royal bitch trying to break into any artistic institution. Making a living with your creativity is, in any field, massively oversubscribed. The aspiring writer has some key advantages over, let’s say, the actor or the opera singer. The reason? Why, there’s the wretched rent to pay (10). The days of wine and roses, when you were a student (assuming you were) and could play fast and loose with your time, are soon over. Unless you are independently wealthy or have a celebrity relative, it’s time to pay the bills. Nothing cramps your artistic style more than having to work for a living but, Lord knows, we all do. Spare a thought for those whose chosen dream cannot be tapped out in evenings and weekends. There are those who cannot don the pinstripe, even just to keep the wolf from the door.

I was a mediocre amateur dramatician at university, but I had friends who took it very seriously indeed. That is a cliff’s edge, and if you want the chance to fly, you must throw yourself off. We writers have the chance to tie a rope about our waists first, working by day, writing by night, hauling ourselves back up each time we cast ourselves off. My friends had the choice: stay up top and give up the dream, or jump. They jumped. They went to theatrical schools and became equitised (11), and their lot is very similar to a writer’s, save that it’s harder. They do well enough, my friends. They seem to be able to scrape the rent together. You see them, it’s true, in films, on the television. Still, they are waiting for the big break, just as writers wait, and they can’t put in eight hours a day for Consolidated Actuarial while they do it, because they must be ready to drop everything when the chance comes. And they’re good at their trade, too. That’s the howling unfairness. I’ve often sat and watched some film and thought, “Now why isn’t Al in this?” or “Tim would be perfect for that role.” And time goes on, and they make ends meet, but it’s unjust that they haven’t been discovered yet. Just as there are a lot of published books out there that are dross, and a lot of talented writers unread, so there are a lot of good actors yet unfamed whilst in their place hollow men strut and fret their hour upon the stage, and then are heard all too bloody often.

I digress. But this is a blog and therefore the home of digression. Next: What to do besides wait.

(1)   The Goon Show, of course.

(2)   Although after sufficient rejections this doubt begins to erode. It’s easier to blame an international publishing conspiracy than the brute forces of mere chance.

(3)   I am not for a moment implying that she makes a nuisance of herself, but she has become the archetypal author-made-good.

(4)   After depositing another batch of rejection letters. It would, I think, try the patience of any Disneyesque heroine (5) if each successive Prince Charming left a polite note explaining that (a) he wasn’t currently looking to rescue any more princesses (b) he really only rescued blondes (8) or © all of the above.

(5)   The traditional Snow White type that couldn’t do anything for herself (6), rather than the later, more girl-powery ones.

(6)   I swear, that woman even needed seven dwarves and about a million miscellaneous animals (7) to get the housework done. It’s easy to whistle while you work with that kind of staff on the payroll.

(7)   Like Upstairs Downstairs re-enacted by the cast of Redwall

(8)   Ideally blondes with a solid history of being successfully rescued before.

(9)   No, not lemurs, although they are having a rough time of it.

(10) Robert Service, from his rather appropriate poem It is Later than you Think.

(11) Equitable? Equilateral, perhaps

With that suitably insect-bound quote, on to pillage: The perils of publishing parasites (2)

This is actually a serious bit, somewhat more suited to arousing anger than cavalier treatment of arthropods by the BBC or genre snobbery. Basically: be warned.

You have sent out your book chapters to all and sundry. The road has been long. Oft it is that you have near lost hope. Like someone adrift on the infinite ocean, you would take any line cast to you… but be warned.

The letter turns up, after so long: they want to see the whole book. Some publisher, or agent, has snapped at it. After the years of waiting in the wings, at last the cue is spoken, you can make your entrance onto the stage.

At some cost you prepare a copy of your manuscript (double-spaced) and post it (with return postage, no doubt) with jubilant feelings. You count the days, waiting with bated breath. You imagine the eager scribe poring over your pages, the fruit of your long labours. At last the letter arrives.

They love it

Only…

They’d be every so glad to publish it if only you could see your way to contributing a little to the costs of publication: you being a new writer, you see, and them taking a big risk on you, and obviously you’ll make it all back, eventually, but until then, well, surely you can see that it’s only reasonable, so sign the enclosed contract and let the magic start and so forth and so on and so forth.

You might think that this would come from fishing the wrong ponds but no, there is your publisher, plain as day in the Yearbook/Handbook. Surely they must be reputable? Surely, therefore, the practice they describe is the norm, in the industry. How are you, the aspirant author, to know?

The practice is not normal in the industry.

I have run into this twice so far, and both with names that I got from the Handbook. I suspect that the firms in question evade detection because they claim that they only sometimes ask for a “contribution” towards publishing costs. It doesn’t matter, they’re still vanity publishers.

Vanity publishers will tell you all about the later-famous authors who started off that way. Vanity publishers will promise a great deal.

The publisher I hit upon got as far as bunging me a contract, whereupon in exchange for a four-figure sum they would publish my book and make me a genuine bona fide author. The word “vanity” was never mentioned, but that was entirely what they were. Thankfully the internet can be your best friend here. A quick spin about the world wide web revealed some extremely vocal dissatisfied customers. A little more digging found very little in the way of pedigree as far as the publisher’s stable of authors went. For a rather large sum of money, according to the sources I discovered, I would have got an extremely small print run of badly-made books, no publicity, nothing. Aside from something self-congratulatory to stuff my library with I might as well have been royally mugged as take up their contract. Moreover, there is a reason that vanity-published authors find themselves lacking credibility — the people telling you so earnestly that they want to publish you may not even have read your book. They just want that fat cheque, in return for which they will promise steak and cook up gruel instead. The point for them is that initial outlay of yours. They will publish anything, dross upon dross, and if your silk purse is tumbled amidst the sows' ears, it's only by chance. They don't care, although you can be sure they will claim credit if the book somehow, despite these encumbrances, actually takes flight. All told, like any con artist's game, they make it look as though you can't lose, but you can't win. At the time, however, I agonised for some time before turning them down. When you’ve been on the long road for years enough, even the mirages make your mouth water.

The second experience was with a purported agent. The chappie contacted me, I even spoke on the ‘phone. He told me how many people he had placed. He only wanted a little reading fee, just a few hundreds of squids, peanuts really. Again, heart-in-mouth, all elation – genuine interest from a genuine publisher…

Until I did my ground work. This time the agent chappie did much of it for me. He had a website with his authors on it. I looked them up, I noted who had published their books. Amazingly, I had hit upon a second-generation parasite. All of this man’s authors, who had paid him up front for the privilege of his representation, had ended up published by vanity publishers, for which, of course, they had also paid.

For the avoidance of doubt, I called a genuine agent that I had been submitting to for a while, without success (3). I ended up speaking to the agency’s owner, after whom it was named, who assured me that no reasonable agent would be asking me to make that kind of a deal.

By another bizarre coincidence, a friend of a friend turned out to be one of the dodgy agent’s authors. The friend (4) had mentioned to me that the friend (5) had a book in print, so I got his number from the friend (6) and had a chat. “Do not under any circumstances have anything to do with him,” the friend of a friend said. “He’s a waste of time.”So, saved a fair whack of money, but I can’t say I felt good about it at the time. The problem is that you go so long with only rejection, and then these peddlers of false hopes loom from the mist, and for a moment, just for a moment, you think you’ve cracked it. You run towards the oasis, crying and whooping, and if you’re lucky you come to your senses. If not you find you’ve been stuffing your face with sand. It is a vile trade, to prey on people who are very earnestly trying to make something of themselves, to lure then in like a big, ugly deep-sea fangly fish (7).

So be warned, and remember, the internet is your friend in this. One advantage in a medium that offers a free soap box to just about anyone, is that dissatisfied consumers can make put their cautionary tales into the public domain. If you get an offer from a publisher or agent that seems dubious, check them out. After all, if they’re the real deal then they’re going to be up front about publicising themselves, and especially all those other well-known authors they publish or represent.

         (1) The title is from the de Morgan reworking of Jonathan Swift: de Morgan writes, “Great fleas have smaller fleas upon their backs to bite’em, and those fleas have smaller fleas, and so ad infinitum.” While the metre is more regular than Swift’s “So naturalists observe, a flea / hath smaller fleas that on him prey…”, de Morgan misses the pointed final couplet, fitting here, “So every poet in his kind is bit by him who comes behind.”
 

        (2) Not a particularly dire Hanna-Barbara cartoon in the 70's, although perhaps it should have been.

(3)   By the most freak of coincidences the agent I called is now my actual agent. Just one of life’s weirdnesses, but I still remember their kindness in actually taking the time to set the record straight.

(4)   My friend, not the friend of a friend

(5)   The friend of a friend

(6)   Oh, you get the idea.

(7)   What the hell am I talking about? http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail119.html