Tag: novel

On spirituality, a submission and the wonder of lists

Wow, I felt a lot of love for RS Thomas after my last blog post.

I wonder if we need more spirituality today, generally I mean. I speak as a moderate atheist. I think I used to call myself an ‘agnostic’ – wanting to leave the door open I suppose – but we all grow older, and so our thoughts and beliefs mature one way or another. I now love a lot of things about the church of my upbringing (although I hated it as a child!), but it stops well short of faith. The only church service I enjoy is Evensong, but I love the architecture of churches and can’t resist going inside any I come across. I’ve often sung the services in cathedrals with my choir the Lewes Singers: I will sing anything, but I never say the creed. It’s always a moving experience, but perhaps that’s the feeling of being in the presence of faith: people who truly believe. I don’t just mean those participating in the service, but also the thousands of souls who have worshipped there for centuries, right back to the stonemasons and labourers who built the massive edifices. I respect all that, and feel privileged to be a part of it.

But spirituality feels much wider, more inclusive than religion as such. My impression is that RS continually questioned his faith. Isn’t that what many of us do, even the atheists? What do we believe in? Surely it can’t just be Gaia, politics, football or reality TV?

On the writing front

Poetry latest: I’ve sent the full collection to a publisher for consideration. They’ve already seen about a third of the poems and asked for more. Yes, I had an offer of publication a couple of years ago from another publisher but for various reasons that never happened. So here’s hoping.

This has freed me up to finish the rewrites on my novel. Having had an excellent critique by Beth Miller of my query letter, synopsis and first page of manuscript, I knew I had to make some fairly significant changes. I started on it, but then got sidetracked by a holiday, putting together and submitting a poetry collection, plus a number of other time-critical projects. BUT I am back on it!

In parallel to the rewrites, I’m gearing up for submission by reviewing my list of literary agents. I started with a list based on the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, but as it always is with print publications not all the entries were up to date. So I augmented it by searching, visiting websites, identifying potential individual agents who seem interested in my genre, noting their requirements, Twitter names, email etc. Yes! A spreadsheet!

I’ve also created a Twitter List of Literary Agents. I love Lists on Twitter, and I think it has always been a much-unused facility. Once you have a list, you can browse tweets just from that list. Which means (in my case) you find out very quickly when an agent puts out a call for submissions, or who they have signed, or what they’re looking for, or when they’re closed and for how long, and so forth. Lists, people! They are useful!

Launches, project updates and two disputed works

The poor weather has meant I’ve not been spending time in the garden as I normally would at this time of year. Still too cold to plant out courgettes and tomatoes! So instead I’ve been keeping myself out of mischief with ‘deskwork’…

A poet friend whose website I created a few years ago has asked for a revamp, so I’m enjoying working on that. I’ve also got two Planet Poetry interview recordings coming up soon, so I’ve been reading and preparing for those.

Meanwhile despite days off and other distractions, I have kept to my ‘average 1,000 words a day’ on my novel and am past the 60k mark already, so the end-of-May (self-imposed) deadline for finishing the first draft is well in sight. Alongside this I’m researching agents and planning my strategy! I have no idea of a title for this book yet, but I’m looking forward to giving it some thought.

There seem to be plenty of launches and other events coming up. I just read today about Josephine Corcoran’s new pamphlet from Live Canon, to be launched on May 21st. Tomorrow Jill Abram’s launch for her debut pamphlet from Broken Sleep is happening in London – I had booked to go along, but then was offered the chance to talk about Planet Poetry to 3rd year students at Brighton University at their end of year publishing course. Peter and I couldn’t resist the idea of being on a panel and talking about the podcast! Thanks to Lou Tondeur for the invitation. On June 2nd I’m delighted to be reading at Frogmore at 40, Frogmore Press’s 40th Anniversary event in Brighton. I’m a tad daunted to be honest, looking at the names of the other readers. So I just hope I’m not reading first. Please come if you’re anywhere near Brighton, it should be a grand night!

The Charleston Festival is coming up (no, I haven’t been invited to read there!) and as usual I’ll be going to a few talks with my good non-poet-but-writer friend Caroline. On May 26th the amazingly talented and lurrvly Inua Ellams is reading. I loved interviewing him on the Planet Poetry podcast and can’t wait to see how he goes down with the Bloomsbury set.

A couple of weeks ago we were in Stratford upon Avon to see a performance of Cymbelline. I’d never seen it before and nobody I’d spoken to about it had seen it either. Turns out it is a disputed play (ie some say it’s not actually by Shakespeare) – it is certainly a bit of a mashup of other Shakespeare plays both in plot and plot devices. Postmodern, eh? A bit like that song that just won the Eurovision Song Contest sounding suspiciously like ‘Winner takes it all’ by ABBA – is it a conspiracy to get the contest back in Sweden next year for the 50th anniversary of ABBA’s win? Anyway, whoever wrote it (Cymbelline that is) we enjoyed it! (But personally I preferred the Austrian entry about Edgar Allen Poe…)