Finding an Internet Bride

'Someday My Prince Will Come' plays on the stereo as I flip one more time through the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook. The majority of agents seem to be interested in either women's fiction or children's, which becomes difficult when plugging an historical comedy about a bunch of guys building rockets.

My experience from the book launch the other night is that you have to find an agent you like. This requires me to be even more selective in my search, and on the basis of some of the agent photos on agency websites, pickings are slim.

It starts to feel kind of creepy, like finding a Russian bride online, especially as I'm looking at pictures of guys - it is a book involving rockets, after all.

Okay, so my prospective agent has to share similar interests, otherwise he or she isn't going to like the book. And I guess they have to look okay; I do not want to find myself in a small room, taking editorial advice from a heavy breather or someone with a leery smile. I want to find someone a little like me, but not too much, someone I trust, with whom I can share a drink, spend time with, who will be a good guardian for my story, and sit back with me and watch it grow over the years to come, and will hopefully produce with me more stories, possibly a series - a family of novels, if you will.

After ten mailouts and three rejections, it's still early days, and two of these rejections were very personalised responses, thank you very much. I don't know what I'll do if I run out of agents. Try America, where there's more of a market for my kind of book. And if I don't find one there? Maybe I can get a Russian bride with contacts in the publishing industry.