Spring cleaning

Have revisited the blog for the first time since June last year. Plenty of water under the bridge since then.

Item one; first visit to the UK since I left in 2007. Amazed by the plethora of health and safety inspired signs all over the UK. Amusing and disappointing visits with old friends. I do miss them sometimes, but not so much as to want to return to the UK. Some walked past me without recognising my face. Have I really changed that much?

Item two; have got my permanent residency, so no more work permits.

Item three; novel length MSS completed. Second in series almost so. First readers are already asking when the second will be ready. Another month if all goes well.

Item four; new job. Part time, which suits my current lifestyle.

Item five; am thinking about self publication more and more, and the possibility of using social media to draw attention to my work. Facebook might not be the best way forward, but Twitter sounds like a worthwhile even money bet. See if I can put together my own Audio versions, and donate some eBook copies and sound files to VIRL. I've been told I have a pleasant reading voice, and my dulcet tones can be heard booming out from the Coal Mine exhibit at Nanaimo District Museum. Feels rather spooky to hear my own voice sometimes when passing by the entrance and someone is listening to one of the brief passages I'm narrating. It's nice to think my drama training finally found a venue.

Item six; planning another visit to the UK in July 2011. Laura and Joanna will be graduating from their respective Universities, and Angie and I will be there to celebrate their success. Side trips to France are in the mix, as is a possible stop off in Dublin, one of the few European capitals I've yet to visit.

Item seven; Completed new Tampions for our two Cannon at the Museum, also the display stand for the Sculling outboard. Looking forward to seeing them in place. The Nanaimo Bastion reopens this May after a significant refurbishment. Displays have to be reorganised and put in situ, or as David the curator says with one of his gamine little grins, that will be another little job I can help them with.

Have done a little spring cleaning on the blog, and am debating whether to begin afresh for the novel marketing, or use this one.

Head down

I started a MSS in January. Nothing special. Genre fiction. Today I will complete it. Good, believable characters, and the story sprints along nicely from premise to conclusion, all one hundred and twenty thousand words of it with a cracking denoument. That's pretty good as output goes. Five months from a few hundred words and the roughest of outlines to quite a reasonable piece of work. There's even thoughts of a sequel, although I need to revise what I'm doing with the other two major projects first.

It's the longest piece of work I've ever written, and despite some minor niggles, I'm pretty pleased with the first draft. Now all I have to do is sell it. I'll try New York first of all, then take a punt at some of the Toronto publishing houses.

Rejection slips will come thick and fast in the next few months I'm sure, but in this business, the 'Noes' are the price of the 'Yesses', and getting a business to take a long shot with a relative unknown such as me, with only a handful of stories and articles published under my own name is not going to be a simple proposition. I know no-one in publishing. I never managed to go to University, so never made any contacts who might give me a recommendation. All I have is a large pile of unpublished stuff gradually rotting down to compost, or being chewed into nest material for the mice at my Mother's old house back in England.

There is always the self publication route, but then again, you don't get the marketing assistance that way.

Hunkering down

So my last post was August 5th? Wow. A lot has happened since then. I've driven coast to coast with Angie and the dog, sleeping in a slightly superannuated Minivan most of the trip, getting eaten alive by the local insect population, and generally testing my marriage to near destruction in the process.

The good news is that Angie and I have now found a place, hopefully sold our old house in England, put ourselves on the immigration merry go round which is more like a rotating door than anything else. One wrong move spits you back out onto the street. Never mind, the novel proceeds well if slowly, but I'm going to have to go back to my old IT career if anyone will have me, as we're trying to regulate the hemorrhaging of our available capital.

When the house is finally disposed of we can pay off the mortgage, which will leave us with a moderate sum to build a new home with; once we have sorted out all the immigration issues that is. For the moment we're hunkering down and conserving our resources. We have rented a small place on Vancouver Island near a village called Cedar, which is nice and with terrific views. Every mornings sunrise is a treat.

All we have to do is navigate the employment maze and perhaps we can stay a little longer.

Rejection slip

Ye cats! I just got an e-mail from Macmillan. That was the fastest rejection I've ever received. Looks like MacMillan have been swamped by manuscripts and have pulled up the drawbridge like most other people in the publishing world. This leaves me in a bit of a quandrary; do I keep on pluging away at the publishing houses or do some self publishing via Lulu.com or some other free self publisher.

I'm pretty sure it's not the writing, it's more the marketplace. Best thing to do is to have a go and see what happens. If it flops, it flops. If it takes off - well, the mainstream publishers have just lost money and my custom for good.

Submission

There's always a nervousness around the house every time a piece of work gets submitted. Today was one of the bigger nervous episodes. I despatched a synopsis and sample package off to Macmillan, and hope that they are still looking for new authors. This is the fifth re-write of the story, and I like how it has turned out, so here goes nothing. "Shifting States" the new first volume in the Cerberus trilogy works. The story works, and I personally like it and have enjoyed writing it. The characters have more life than before. You can feel them much more.

It occurs to me that there's not a hell of a lot of good science fiction out there, in England at least. Well, not stuff that piques my particular interest anyway. By good science fiction I mean 'hard' science fiction, not space opera, fantasy or horror. About the only English science fiction writer I currently like is Peter F Hamilton.

Having written that, there's not much of a market for Sci-Fi, at least not if you look through the Writers Guides. There are quite a few publishers and agents who refuse to even look at the genre and many actively discourage it. Yet there's so much published that I find very uninteresting reading anyway. No accounting for taste I suppose.

Anyway, here's hoping.

The next leap forward

Our house goes on the market this week. We’ve been inviting valuations and listening to the ‘spin’ from those traditionally greatest at it – Estate Agents. We invited three of them in to talk to us and give us some ball park figures. Two quoted what I call ‘silly money’’ prices at us, and another was almost spot on our own estimate.

Subject to the aforementioned, Angie and I have elected to go with the first estate agent at a price we think is reasonable for the property and location. We could ask for more, but somehow that feels greedy and might possibly end up self defeating.

What with one thing and another, work on my MSS has ground to a complete standstill. I’ve been looking at the fragments and decided it needs a bit of a restructure. What I have is good solid stuff, but needs a move around rather than another rewrite. Use the old ‘flashback’ gag a bit more. The whole story feels like Icebergs drifting around the Arctic as winter sets in. Everything is there, but it just needs to cool a little more so that the story becomes a whole navigable mass.

Back on track

Right. I'm more or less recovered now, the Doctors have given me a clean bill of health and I've pitched in to a new project, the 'Moose Calling' blog. After receiving my first cheque from those nice people at Google I'm all revved up and raring to go. The science fiction novel is finally beginning to take shape, as is my entry to the Daily Telegraphs writing competition. It might work, it might not, but I won't find out by just sitting on my hands.

Life is suddenly full of possibilities once more.