A confession: despite all my best intentions and the conviction that I would not get carried away with myself in the wake of having a novel published….I got carried away. I allowed myself to be swept up in the wind of hubris and ended up wasting two months on writing dead-in-the-water pitches. How? Because I wrote an 165,000-word story, which I cut down to 132,000 over subsequent drafts, and I believed this was a reasonable size for my Serious Novel. I thought – just because I’d sold a few copies of a sci-fi book and seen it in a couple of brick-and-mortar stores – that I could go to literary agents and say “hey, look, you don’t know me at all, but I have this difficult-to-sell satirical thriller which is at least 10,000 words over the upper limit for such novels”, and they would respond with “Wonderful, Grant, sign here”.
This has not happened. I want to say ‘unsurprisingly’, but until the middle of May, this came as a surprise to me. I was 100% convinced this was a reasonable expectation on my part. Seriously. Unknown writer, 550 pages, satire. I only understood how unrealistic this was when I received 11 query rejections in a row stating “Yeah, we can’t sell this (in the current market)” or “I don’t have any contacts for this”.
What was I thinking? I suppose I wasn’t. I was plotting too far ahead, and I overlooked the fact that you only get to do stuff like this if you have a track record to fall back on. I do not. And so: I have spent the past month cutting and cutting and cutting. And I am still cutting. It’s therapeutic. Every word I delete is a reminder that I am no way near as good at this as I sometimes think I am and that taut & twisty is better than prodigious & prolix. And at some point I’ll be finished with it and I can move on.
MUSIC! FOR THE SUMMER SOLSTICE LOVERS AMONG US
Nick Drake - One Of These Things First
Perfume Genius - Leave
Pretty Things - Sickle Clowns
Tony Allen - Koko Dance
keiyaA - I! Gits! Weary!
Rosie Lowe - Birdsong
Janet Jackson - He Doesn’t Know I’m Alive
BENNY AND THE JETS