NEW BOOK NEXT SUMMER!

After 'Mrs Winchester's Gun Club' was published in August 2019, I sent my agent something else. This new book is maybe a harder sell because it is a little more experimental. My agent is in the process of sending it out there but not much is happening. I am a little impatient and so I decided to send other things out on my own initiative.

In this business you get a lot of rejections - it's part of the business and you just have to take it on the chin and rise up again after every hit. I sent a novella out but it got no bites. I sent short story collections out and they got no bites either.

Then early this year I sent something out to an indie publisher. It was very experimental in structure - even more so than the book currently with my agent - but I had previously sent it to Fitzcarraldo for their novel competition 2019. It did not make the five-long shortlist for Fitzcarraldo but I got an email from them to say that they had liked the submission and that it had been in the running right up to the final decision meeting and they wished me well in finding a home for it. So this indie publisher at the start of the year initially wanted to see only the first 10,000 words. I hoped it was enough to whet their appetite.

The pandemic shut everything down as you know so when three months had passed and I'd heard nothing I wasn't unduly alarmed. I did send them a polite query email. They were so nice and said they were sorry but they were a bit behind - understandably. But then within a month they had written to ask me to send them the full manuscript.

Of course your hopes take wing at that and it is a job just to stop them soaring - in case they come crashing to the ground from that greater height.

Two weeks ago the indie publisher asked if I was available for a phone call.

Flutter, flutter!

Then yesterday I got the contract to sign - which of course I signed quick as lickety split!

And next summer I should have another book out there. Only one small thing to work on in the first part of the book. More details to follow.

But for now I am very pleased with this news.