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.