The Right Pair of Eyes

I've had a healthy four-week break from my manuscript while some sample chapters have been read by a trusted pair of eyes, eyes unaffiliated to me by marriage or blood. This is important. Proof-reading is not to be approached lightly, and yet I've had almost as many offers from friends and acquaintances suggesting they look at my story as advice that I include them as a character in some future book.

Finding the right pair of eyes can take time, for the simple reason that the reader has to know what he or she is doing. Proof reading requires not merely a knowledge of grammar and punctuation, but an acute understanding of structure and voice. This person should have some familiarity with the novel format, and an acquaintance with contemporary fiction. A reader who spends all their time correcting your use of the comma is missing the big picture you're trying to paint with your story. That said, maybe your story sucks so badly that all your poor reader can do is correct your commas. You decide.

The proof reader  has a responsibility to tell you the truth, and this can be a huge burden. If said proof-reader is a family member or spouse who's made their own sacrifices so you can play Ernest Hemingway out in the garden shed, then asking them to look at your manuscript is the worst thing you could do. Sure, they'll want your story to be good, but if it's not, then they'll wonder why you haven't spent your time more constructively. The house is falling down, your kids are out stealing hubcaps, and all you have to show for it is 90,000 words of self-indulgently poor grammar and negligible comma usage. Is any story worth this?

Get someone you trust, who has nothing to gain or lose, and who will complete the task in reasonable time.

I've just received my sample chapters back from one such person who gave me balanced feedback, and moreover enjoyed the story. Thank you, Alison. Time to approach agents - after I've fixed the shed and returned the hubcaps.

The Bibliography.

I've spent the past two weeks sitting on my manuscript for An Englishman in Rocket City. Not literally - just waiting around for the Frankfurt Book Fair to finish so I can start ringing around agents and hope to find someone in the office.

Now, this might seem like a form of procrastination, because I could just as easily send off samples to agents on spec from the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook, especially as most of them won't want to hear from another writer flogging their manuscript, but it's been useful putting some distance between me and the story. When I look over the first fifty or so pages again, it will be with fresh eyes.

Also, it's given me time to shift gear from writing the story every day to other things I wouldn't normally do but should, like worming the cat and submitting short stories. Most of the other writers I know who share this rung of the career ladder have managed to get plays produced and short stories published ad infinitum while completing their novel manuscripts. In contrast, I've concentrated on Englishman to the extent that if I have a pen in hand, it's either to work on the novel or grant someone access to my dwindling bank account.

So, after submitting my first short story in over a year last week, I got down to business with something else I've been putting off: typing up the bibliography for my manuscript. Like balancing a chequebook or pulling all the lint out of the velcro on your jacket, it screams to be done, while causing you to question its necessity.

As An Englishman in Rocket City is rooted in fact, I'm obliged to acknowledge my sources. One of my favourite authors, Glenn David Golde, provides great examples of bibliography in his two books, Sunnyside and Carter Beats the Devil - the acknowledgements are as interesting the stories themselves. Bibliographies show the reader you're not a total shyster, that you know something about the subject you've chosen to write about, and that you care enough to do some fundamental research.

My bibliography charts five years of my life; trips to America and France, visits to museums, conversations with people who have since died, the genesis of an idea. It also justifies those stacks of books I bought on the pretext of research. All this comes down to four pages of single spaced references. Surely I did more research than that. The bibliography, more than the 90,000 words that precede it, causes me to look back and ask if all that work was worth it. Yes. I know something I didn't know when I started.

Even though the MS will need further editing somewhere down the line, the bibliography marks a closure, an end. I'm ready to start ringing agents.

Finishing a Manuscript

Righty-ho, still in the blogging game. Got a bag full of notes for blogs from the past few months about the things writers do to try and earn money, but they've drifted to the bottom like the lint in my pockets. Why? My manuscript.

I'm just finishing up a 90,000 word manuscript. Four years of on-again, off-again work, coming to some sort of conclusion, or more accurately, a way-marker. Not an end. Anyone who's undertaken a long-term writing project will agree; there's no magic moment when you've finished. When you say 'I'm finished,' you're setting yourself up for disappointment and risk annoying those around you who have put up with you rabbiting on about people that don't even exist for the past several years.

What I have done, more accurately, is reach the final page of my manuscript, An Englishman in Rocket City. It's how I want it, but there will still be changes, even after I've sent it off. When it hopefully finds a publisher, there will be other changes - minor ones, I hope. It's dangerous to say 'I'm finished,' because that suggests there's nothing left to do; just as dangerous as carrying on editing and reshaping ad infinitum.

This is draft six. It took me two years of sporadic work to get to draft three, which I sent out to agents. That's not counting the preliminary work I did while completing my previous novel. The responses I got told me what I'd already figured out, that the idea for the story was good, the writing was sound, but it wasn't quite there yet. In the mean time, I'd started another project, which I dropped in favour of getting An Englishman in Rocket City right.

Eight months into the rewrite, I realised that First Person wasn't my natural voice. My first novel, Johnny Lonely, had been in Third Person and I'd deviated from that as an experiment. Time to go back to the drawing board. Last September I started from the beginning again. Switching to Third Person immediately made the story funnier, the main character more sympathetic, and retained a sense of mystery.

Exactly one year on, I have a manuscript I'm happy with and enjoy reading. It was a gamble going back and rewriting the whole thing from scratch, but one I hope will pay off.

Now all those months of neglected engagements and blogging are possibly at an end. My next step is to find an agent.

I write this because I must - use an alias

I write this because I must - that about says it. I'm not particularly keen on adding my voice to the white noise of the internet, especially when I have a novel to complete, but then, that's exactly why I'm doing this. My friend and guru, the novelist Wendy Robertson, said some months back, 'Pete, you need to do a blog.' The Writers' Yearbook backed this up. So has just about everyone I've spoken to who's connected with the publishing industry. So there we are.

A couple of weeks ago, The Bookseller ran a headline stating that we're eighteen months away from the tipping point, the event horizon where sales of e-books will outnumber actual book books. A blog, therefore, is a necessary part of a writer's marketing strategy. Hurrah.

When my first book, Johnny Lonely, came out, I did actually start a blog on my myspace page. It wasn't actually my page, but the page of the main character in my novel, Hughie Youngkin. What a brilliant idea, I thought, to do the page as if it were really Hughie. This created a number of problems, foremost that nobody searching the web for Pete Tanton could find me, including myself. Only someone who had already read the book would think to search for Hughie Youngkin. Still, the page got friends.

Then I decided to start a blog. Although it was Hughie's page, I wrote the blog as myself, further confusing any would-be readers. 'My public will want to know about the quirky goings-on at my signings and events,' I thought, and maybe they both did, but there's only so much you can write about sitting for three hours at a table in Borders, haranguing the Starbuck's customers. Now that Borders is gone, of course, I wish I'd continued blogging - they'd be historical documents by now.

I tried it again with Facebook, made the same Hughie Youngkin mistake, unaware that by setting up an alias, I was breaking the fundamental rule of Facebook, and denying all the folks I went to high school with the chance to look me up and see my book. How many more copies could I have sold...

So here I am, learning from my mistakes, trying to do it properly. My current novel, An Englishman in Rocket City, is close to completion, and I suppose I'll be writing about that. Or rather, I'll be writing it. And possibly blogging.