I need....

Have been debating the wisdom of posting unpublished (Unpublishable?) work on the sister blog to this one. I have a serious catalogue of work; two completed novels of over 100,000 words, innumerable short stories and several screenplays but the problem as always is getting it read. All my submissions seem to be languishing in various publishers 'slush piles'. No one critiques work unless you pay them, and you can't trust relatives / friends to read your output because they will always try not to hurt your feelings.

What with all the lack of response it's pretty hard not to want to pack it all in. Perhaps there's a service for those wanting to rid themselves of the writing compulsion. Get this damnable aspirational monkey off my back. On second thoughts, no. Without that derangement I wouldn't be me, and that's not going to happen without double electroshock and a prefrontal lobotomy.

There's only one thing for it; a letter writing campaign. I'll start with this one;

Dear Santa,

For my extra special Christmas present I would like to engage the services of a really first class agent. Please. I've been ever so good.

It's worth a try.

Why does this not surprise me

Picked up via a blogger called Tim Worstall; a frustrated author submitted copies of the first three chapters of Pride & Prejudice, Northanger Abbey and Jayne Eyre which I am informed are amongst the crown jewels of literature to 18 different publishers. Can’t stand Jane Austen and that genre myself; hated it at A-level, and still find it turgid and unwieldy even now, but chacun a son goût. The irony is that only one of the publishers recognised it.

This simply reinforces my long-held view that you have to be either an insider or extremely lucky to even get a book read by publishers. For an industry that should be crying out for new talent, this hardly seems the way to go about finding it. You don’t find Radium unless you do the hard work of processing a lot of pitchblende.

Mind you, this piece in the Telegraph made me smile. A book signing by Alastair Campbell disrupted? Tsk, tsk. Well done that man.