The Literary Consultancy in the Dock

Thankfully Mona blew out the match (see previous post) and we all had a good cry. It seemed that Mona Farthingdale’s crime had been less treason than lack of reason, coupled with an appalling sense of direction. She had confused the address of her literary consultancy with that of a high security naval dockyard, after a night of heavy drinking, during which she accidentally disabled Google Maps while falling into a defunct jacuzzi or ‘ditch’, as she later confessed.

Van Persie was forced to become a multi-millionaire striker after his PhD on Erasmus’ football enthusiasm was refused by University of Rotterdam

‘Arson in a naval dockyard is still on the statute books as a capital offence you know,’ she said, lighting a fresh cigarillo from the dog-end of the last, ‘but as I explained to the judge, I had just received the report on my novel from a well-known lit consultancy. I’ve been writing it for fifteen years, and it’s the only thing that keeps me sane. The report was not so much a critique as a post-mortem, in which I was advised to give my novel a proper burial.

Erasmus wondering whether this is the right time to pitch that book on football to his agent

People think that ghost writing is a breeze; it isn’t, it’s very stressful indeed. Just prior to the event, I had  simultaneously been writing, ‘Robin Van Persie on Erasmus’ and ‘Yeah Bitches!’ – The Authorised Biography of Andy Murray’s Border Terriers’.

I explained to the judge that my original intention had been merely to raise a point or two with the lit consultancy. It had never been my intention to sink two Frigates and partially singe a Destroyer,  but the challenges of conveying Van Persie’s view on Renaissance literature coupled to forming a narrative from some pretty intemperate celebrity barking, had tipped me over into a paroxysm of desolation.’

‘I say’, said the judge, ‘that would make a cracking title for one of those Booker type efforts wouldn’t it? I can see the cover now; The Paroxysm of Desolation by Mona Farthingale! Splendid! I bet you anything you could win with a title like that. Let me write that down.’  The Judge then quickly wrapped up the case, instructing the jury to take into account the mitigating circumstances.  I had suffered injustice at the hands of the ‘Get Published Industry’ and therefore should be found guilty on a much lesser charge.

He gave me six months and recommended open prison.

I found out in a letter he later sent me, that the judge himself had experienced a very similar humiliation, when he had paid an exorbitant fee to have lunch in a select Bloomsbury restaurant and simultaneously ‘pitch’ to an agent. His novel was crime fiction, based on a crooked judge and his links to the underworld, but some ‘chit of a girl who claimed to be an agent’, had told him that his story ‘lacked all credibility’. So, he had legendary gangster Carlo (The Mouth) Carpaccio turn up at her next book launch and eat every single one of the canapés, hoovering them in while he amused the waiting staff with a few light threats. The book subsequently garnered very little publicity and the agent  suffered a bad case of  ‘client list die-back’, even her photo disappeared from the agency’s website. Honour had been served.’

Carlo (The Mouth) Carpaccio

This story cheered us enormously and Mona handed round the cigarillos while we  partook of  several ‘Buttworth Litbombs’. (Three parts home-distilled potato vodka to one-part Echinacea, Zinc & Vitamin C) These fabulous cocktails had been the brainchild of a food writer called Pinky Dauphinoise, who had arrived at Buttworth shortly after having been dropped by her agent. It appears that this had happened only half an hour before she was due to sign a contract for a TV series with three book tie-in. It eventually transpired that the agent had been leant on by Mary Berry’s heavies.

‘I went mental’, said Pinky, re-charging our toothmugs with the health-giving distillation (None of the writers had suffered a cold since Pinky’s invention)

‘I tried everything, but people warned me that you must never cross Mary, she always fights dirty, that’s why I’m here.’

We looked to Pinky to tell us what had happened, but she merely shook her head hopelessly,

‘It’s too horrible,’ she croaked, ‘ you won’t sleep if I tell you.’

‘Never mind Pinky,’ hiccuped Stephanie, ‘her cheesecake once brought me out in dreadful hives and besides I think there’s a very good case for marketing the Buttworth Litbomb, I’m sure that you could build an empire even greater than hers.’

We all agreed that it was important to think positively and that there must be a way to turn our situations to an advantage.

‘It’s true’, drawled Mona, ‘for instance my judge turned out to be a bit of an old darling. We are thinking of collaborating, he says that with my writing talent and his connections to psychopathic criminals, we might, at last, be able to crack publication for both of us.”

 

The Classic Buttworth Litbomb

 

What was your Inciting Incident?

 

Last time I left you in the library of Buttworth Open Prison, (see previous post) on the brink of making an extraordinary discovery. I had already ascertained that Buttworth once ran a creative writing class, which had been closed. When I’d asked the reason for this I got some shifty replies from the screws.

Then, one evening as I lay reading Sid Field’s ‘Screenwriter Problem Solver’ on my bed, the door slammed open and in one smooth action, a hand plucked me from my bed, threw me into the corner and put a knife to my throat. ‘Snout or a filleting, you chose,’  rasped a voice so filled with bile and venom that I cringed like a whipped hamster. Before me stood a creature that had once perhaps been female, but was now hideously indeterminate. Her one good eye blinked at me with a depth of hatred that I found hard to fathom. I lowered my eyes to the knife that was at that moment indenting the flesh above my Adam’s Apple and the hideously tattooed arm that held it. Then I caught the legend that ran down the creature’s forearm:

‘INCITING INCIDENT.. PROGRESSIVE COMPLICATIONS.. CRISIS.. CLIMAX.. & RESOLUTION’.

‘Aha!’ I gasped

‘Don’t aha me,’ wheezed the creature, ‘I’m Crack Lily and I’ve done for better girls than you, schmucks who read Syd Field and believe that you should always ‘know your ending’! Well here it comes girl!’ She took hold of my face with her other hand and moved it left and right.

‘I love an unscarred face, like a blank page, so many possibilities.’

So saying she shifted the knife to my left nostril. ‘ I like to see someone’s narrative change.’

‘A good inciting incident?’ I ventured.

Lily shifted the patch she wore over the other eye and looked at me with the hideously scarred horror that lay beneath.

‘What did you say?’, she growled

‘You’re a graduate of the three day Robert McKee Scriptwriting Course aren’t you?’

She staggered backwards. I glimpsed the knife with another dawning recognition.

‘That’s the complimentary letter opener from the ‘Writers of Tomorrow’ Conference, isn’t it?’

Crack Lily faltered, wild eyed and the letter opener clattered to the floor. I watched her crumple, then whimper and then crumple some more. She looked up at me from the floor.

“You were there too?’ she hiccuped. I nodded and she fell onto a bean bag crying hysterically.

Later as  Crack Lily sat on my bed, she confessed in a sweet light voice that her name was actually Stephanie and that she was the author of six screenplays which had all gone into ‘Production Hell’ and never been produced, except for one.

‘The last screenplay’ hiccuped Stephanie, ‘.. it was the story of my life, it was a bleak and despairing account of a writer’s struggle to maintain some kind of artistic integrity in the world of crass commercialism.’

‘What happened?’ I asked

‘It was bought by Richard Curtis, who threw me off the project and turned it into a fluffy little movie about a confectioner who spreads love, success and money to the people who buy her heart-shaped sweets.’

‘I saw that movie’

‘I didn’t, I was arrested at the Premiere’

‘I think I saw that photo, were you spread-eagled over Meryl Streep and had Curtis by the bowtie?”

Stephanie (aka Crack Lily) nodded wordlessly and ran her fingers up and down the Writers of Tomorrow complimentary letter opener.

‘You think that was bad?’ broke in a new cultured voice from the doorway. I looked up and saw an elegant grey-haired woman lighting a slim cigarillo while simultaneously skewering a smoke detector with a switch blade.

‘That’s Mona Farthingdale, ‘Ghost writer to the Stars’ she’s in here for arson in a Naval Dockyard.’

We watched as Mona lit a match very slowly and smiled into the flame.

 

 

 

 

I went missing for an entire year and absolutely no one noticed!

A year ago, stung by the world’s indifference to my abundant literary talent, I abandoned writing. Yes, I know, I know, I KNOW! – I should have kept going. I blame the whole thing on the ‘Writers of Tomorrow Conference’ whose advertising blandishments simpered into my inbox and then proceeded to advance upon my rational mind like a vacuum cleaner salesman high on a motivational TedTalk. It promised me everything. For the eminently reasonable sum of my entire savings, I could learn how to pitch any novel of any length into a couple of pithy sentences. Furthermore, it slavered, I could master the technique for selecting an appropriate lit agent, write them the ‘Golden’ letter guaranteed to intrigue, delight and make them realise that together we could set the publishing world on fire. The course would teach me easy ways to network with publishing folk without the use of recriminations or even veiled threats. I was being suckered in. After all, I had just reached the conclusion that trying to sell my erotic thriller, set in the fevered and highly lubricated world of Model Engineering, to an literary agent whose main area of interest was potholing, had been the mark of a certain desperation. So I signed up, gentle reader, and arrived at the University of Billericay with my ambitions vaunting all over the place. I saw it all now. My attitude had been all wrong. I just had to go about things in a different manner. I’d be reasonable, charming but assertive. How stupid had I been? I felt that after a few workshops I would be well on my way to that previously impossible destination – publication.

The ensuing fracas during the opening address for ‘Writers of Tomorrow’ was, I fear, a consequence of these suddenly dashed hopes and a thousand other literary misjudgements.

Writers of Tomorrow Conference January 2014 University of Billericay

But as I mentioned to the judge, the kidnapping of the guest speaker at the point of the complimentary letter opener was a regrettable misunderstanding, but an entirely reasonable confusion. In my view putting a sharpened object into the hands of ANY assemblage of unsuccessful writers and industry professionals was asking for trouble, especially coupled with the free bar. I believe that it should have served as a mitigating factor to the charge of assault with a deadly weapon. I was, you see, under the impression that the diminutive person making for the microphone was an impostor. We had been promised a best-selling new talent to give the key note speech and here instead was some kind of fugitive milk monitor striding onto the stage. Again, in my defence, having wrestled the creature into the disabled toilet, my sole intention was to ascertain her identity and detain her until Security arrived.

New Publishing sensation Posy-Pam McNicholls

However, after she had plucked her best-selling memoir ‘Let the Talented Through” from the ‘One Direction’ tote bag she wore so jauntily on her shoulder, and shown me the author photo on the dust jacket, I was forced to admit that she was the writing prodigy, Posy-Pam McNicholls aged eleven and three-quarters, I did actually let her go. On the way out I asked her in a slightly ironic fashion, whether she had contacts in the literary world. She smiled at me in an imperious fashion and said that her mother was a Broadsheet Columnist and her father was the novelist Drew McNicholls. I laughed with a touch of cleverly suppressed irony and declared that there was nothing like making it on your own. She answered that bitterness was unattractive in an older woman and that if I thought I could write, it would pay me to write a polite letter to an agent who specialised in my genre. I literally couldn’t reply, so hard was the pressure of my teeth on my tongue. Then she sniffed loudly and asked why I smelt so strongly of gin.  Admittedly she had a bit of a bruise to her leg and was crying on the way back into the room, but I think the girl, although talented, is cack-handed and tripped over that banquette without any aid from me.

A few weeks later I was detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure in Buttworth open prison, where I found the networking possibilities far more fruitful than those at ‘The Writers of Tomorrow Conference’, although I did recognise a few familiar faces from the ‘Aspiring Writer Circuit’. It seemed that I was not the first nor the last writer who had been driven into the arms of the penal reform system; frustration mounts, penury bites and the results can sometimes be ugly.

Life at Buttworth – the Treadmill ran the Superfast Broadband

One great compensation was the Buttworth Prison library where one rainy day I  made the most extraordinary discovery. If you want to know what it was you’ll have to read my NEXT POST!

The Amazon’s Grippe

Ah, if only Dorothy could return to the moment when she had caught Coleridge greedily eyeing that eel. The ensuing months had proved catastrophic. Only now was it possible for her to  recollect the ensuing emotions in tranquility. She had remarked as much to William as he lay in his darkened room. On hearing her voice he had lifted the many layers of damp muslin that she had laid across his brow in an effort to assuage his virulent fever.

‘What was that Dot?’

‘Oh William it’s so wonderful to hear your dear voice again!’

‘You said something about recollecting emotion in…’

‘Tranquility’

‘That’s good. I like that. Pass me my notebook,’ William commanded in a surprisingly strong voice that belied his pathetic condition.

Needless to say Dorothy had handed him the notebook, a little grudgingly, and watched him write down her phrase. She must forgive him, she thought, he had been terribly ill.  Their homely local sawbones Dr Blundercase being stumped by William’s condition had pleaded by letter for a medical opinion from the renowned Viennese physician Dr Werner von Passingfad, who had declared William a victim of an entirely new disease which he had identified as ‘Amazonian Algorithmic Obsession’.

The madness  had all begun with William axeing her arbour in order to ‘build a marketing platform’. She had hoped that Coleridge might have brought some sense and proportion to bear upon her brother, but who would have believed it? The whole thing had been Coleridge’s idea in the first place! It had apparently come to him in some sort of dream. Admittedly William had been introduced to Ms Snocking, the self-publishing sensation,  at a London book launch, some weeks before. He had revealed the publishing stats of ‘Lyrical Ballads’ and she had laughed so immoderately as to spill the strange concoction that she was imbibing, (known as a cocktail) right down William’s embonpoint.  William couldn’t help resenting the fact that Coleridge had so obviously exploited his little confusion concerning the  word ‘launch’ to suggest that if it were a naval occasion, he might dress as Lady Hamilton, (the infamous paramour of  Lord Nelson).

‘Damn, damn Coleridge to hell!’

‘What was that?’ Ms Snocking asked.

‘Nothing’ William replied.

‘Don’t apologise William,  network!’,

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Dressed like that, Mr Wordsworth, you have definitely caught the attention of the Big Six publishers, was that your publicist’s idea?’

‘No, I assure you, just a little practical joke on behalf of a friend.’

‘Whatever. Just get yourself around the room and milk it!’

‘Milk it?’

‘Meanwhile I shall send you my pamphlet on ‘The Key Secrets to Going Viral.’

‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘Save it honey’, said Ms Snocking, ‘isn’t that Lord Byron giving you the booty call?’

With that Ms Snocking had apparently abandoned William to the depredations of London literary society and left.

He appeared back in Grasmere a few weeks later dressed in the tatters of a silk gown and gibbering like a Cockermouth cockatoo, ‘I must trigger the Amazon’s algorithms, I must trigger the Amazon’s algorithms’, until he passed out on his once-nurtured pea patch. Shortly after, Coleridge turned up and together he and Dorothy tried to raise the wild-eyed poet from the ground whereupon he screeched and cried out.

‘No Byron, not again, please unhand me, for the love of God, if you kiss me once more, I shall…’

Here, once again, he fainted clean away and was carried into the house by Coleridge. It must have been a few days later that William  explained to a disappointed Coleridge that ‘The Amazon’ was not a six foot bare-breasted woman of alarming beauty, who had pursued him day and night in order to tear him limb from limb, but merely a bookseller, who had a list and that if enough people bought the new edition of Lyrical Ballads,  the bookseller would put the book on his ‘recommendations’ list. After Coleridge got over his disappointment, he took a bottle of Aquafortis from his jacket and took a swig.

‘Lyrical Ballads is going to start flying off the shelves like Molly’s hot-buttered jam-topped griddle cakes and I am going to show you how,’ said Coleridge as he began outlining to William his ‘marketing dream’  for the new edition.

The Lost Journal of Dorothy Wordsworth

Dorothy awoke with a strangled scream. Coleridge had finally gone mad and was laying waste to the cottage with an axe.  Another crash brought her to her senses and confirmed that the noise was, in fact, coming from outside.

She cast off her thin worn blanket and stumbled to the window, accidentally knocking over the bottle of Coleridge’s Aquafortis from her nightstand. She bent to pick it up noting with mild horror that she must have drained it to almost the last drop the previous night.

As Dorothy placed the empty bottle guiltily beneath her pillow, there came a cleaving of wood from the end of the garden. Craning her head through the window, the morning light brought back her searing headache. Something  had changed; the garden, only yesterday so sweet with wild rose and eglantine, was now a muddy mess of trampled earth. She gasped, a dagger of disbelief slicing into her heart. William hove into view with an axe.

‘William, noooooooooooooo’

‘What ails thee Dot?’

Her throat dried and she uttered a croak of despair.

‘Have you got wind again?’ asked William, throwing a rough hewn piece of timber carelessly to the ground as if it were a too easily won metaphor.

‘My arbour,’ cried Dorothy, ‘you have destroyed by arbour!’

‘Had to be done lass.’

‘But,’ said Dorothy scrambling for the Aquafortis secreted beneath the pillow, and raising the last pitiful dreg to her lips, ‘…but why?’

‘I’ve realised why I’m not selling any books, Lass.’

‘I cannot follow your tangled reasoning brother.’

‘I need a platform.’

‘You have destroyed my arbour to make a platform?’

Later that morning Dorothy was trying to console herself with starching some small linen. No matter how much starch she added however, it was diluted by the steady drip of her tears that fell coincidentally upon her brother’s items of intimate nature. She was laying her iron back upon the stove and preparing to add more starch, when she heard the front door being flung asunder and Coleridge’s familiar ‘Hallooo’ rang through Dove Cottage. Suddenly alive with barely contained pleasure, Dorothy absent-mindedly tipped the whole packet of starch onto her brother’s intimate garment and ironed furiously until Coleridge had sought her out in the kitchen.

‘Dear, dear Coleridge thank the very heavens that you have arrived in time to stop William from a madness that has descended upon him in the night. He has wreaked destruction upon our little piece of heaven.’

‘What has he done?’

‘He has  destroyed my arbour.’

‘Excellent’, shouted Coleridge, helping himself to some cold mutton, ‘how are your bowels today Dorothy?’

‘Very bad  thank-you Coleridge.’

‘Mine too’, Coleridge replied, biting down hard on a giblet pie and toying idly with a raw carrot, ‘I think they are worse than they have ever been.’

‘Oh Coleridge!’

‘Never mind, Dorothy, we must soldier on,’ he said demolishing half a loaf of bread still warm from the oven, ‘I can’t stand here idly chit-chatting, I just popped over to see how William was doing with the platform.’

‘Not you too Coleridge,’ said Dorothy ignoring the scorching smell arising from her ironing, ‘Has this madness infected your magnificent brain as well?’

‘William and I have committed ourselves to revolutionizing the marketing of poetry. The second edition of Lyrical Ballads isn’t exactly flying off the shelves. As old Aggie Fisher the rag-gleaner observed to me only yesterday, ‘The way things are going, ‘ says Aggie, ‘Lyrical Ballads are going to end up pulped and turned into cheap trinket boxes, embossed with some asinine legend, like ‘A Souvenir from the  Home of the Lake Poets’, or somesuch tosh and sold to half-witted tourists.’

‘Aggie said all that?’

‘Well I think that’s what she said, it’s hard to tell when she has no teeth. The point is Dorothy, we have to  take this book-selling business seriously.’

‘But what can we do Coleridge?’

‘I ran into a formidable creature called Ms Snocking on my recent trip to London. She herself is an author and eschewed all publishers in favour of becoming her own!.’

‘How very foolhardy of her.’

‘Trust me’, said Coleridge gnawing at a turnip, ‘she is a visionary and we are about to change all of our futures. No longer, Dorothy, shall you slave over a hot gusset or spend your fast-fleeting youth gathering mosses for no discernible reason.’  Coleridge broke off to cough intemperately at the smoke pouring from Dorothy’s ironing, ‘We shall transform our fortunes, move somewhere…less damp, less smoky,  eat …better pies, it all awaits us.’

‘But what has this to do with William’s destructive arboreal madness?’

Coleridge, eyed up an uncooked eel lying in a dish on the table. ‘Everything,’ he said.

The Catcher in the Networking Event

‘If you really wanna hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably wanna know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like….an all that David Copperfield kinda crap, but I don’t feel like going into it.’

Marcy

‘For Chrissakes Jerry you can’t do that,’ wailed Marcy choking on the dregs of her martini and stubbing a cigarette into an ash tray with all the lethal ease of a slaughterhouse despatcher on piece work. Marcy was my agent. I was her client. We hated one another.

‘You really can’t introduce yourself to people like that. These days people have to like writers, writers have to like publishers, publishers have to like writers, even agents have to like their clients, apparently.’

‘You are asking me, J.D. Salinger, the champion of adolescent alienation, a writer who is sickened by hypocrisy and corruption to go and schmooze with men in Brooks Brothers suits?’

‘They’re the ones with the generous inside pockets that accommodate the big fat wallets, deary.’

‘ Listen, I would rather jab myself in the eye with this new-fangled thing called a biro, than walk into a room full of jerks that I’m supposed to impress.’

‘Put the pen away Jerry.’

‘I mean;  people who can talk, talk – and people who can’t talk write – right?

‘Wrong Jerry.’

‘If I could talk why would I bother writing?’

‘I wish you’d shuttup. That’s why I arranged this coaching session.  I’m cirrhosing my liver in an attempt to make you understand that things have changed.  This, Jerry, is how you get published these days.’

‘Look Marcy.’  I  was losing this argument. I’d interrogated some bad bastards during my de-nazification assignments in Germany, besides Marcy they’d all  look like the flower girls at a society wedding.

‘No, you look Jerry’, she said pointing a vermillion nail at me and narrowing her eyes like a raptor about to eviscerate a pet bunny, ‘you’ve won this goddamn prize and the lousy reward is a networking event, which you will haul your ass to if it’s the last thing you do.’

‘Jeezus H Christ, Marcy.’

‘Shuttup Jerry,’ she said lighting another cigarette and inhaling like a vacuum cleaner on turbo. She exhaled all over me. I flinched but disguised it with a dismissive snort.

‘So, what in the name of a sonuvabitch marketing man’s wet dream, does one do at a networking event?’

‘It’s simple,’ said Marcy, pouring herself another Martini and siphoning vermouth and gin like a dehydrated ant-eater, ‘ You go to a hotel where you meet publishing industry professionals, you know, publishers, agents and you MAKE NICE Jerry. You talk. You smile. You act like you wanna get published, capische?’

Dehydrated anteater

I took a cab downtown. The driver was some kind of  wearisome crazy who claimed to know all about writing and stuff. I glanced at his license and saw that his name was Jack; Jack something or other. All the way he was telling me about his terrible compulsion to keep driving  to California and back for no discernible reason. And how he wrote  a novel on  industrial toilet roll with complete and absolute disregard for the semi-colon.  I asked him how come he was driving a cab, if he was such a great writer an’ all. That’s when he stepped on the brakes and turned round to fix me with a manic stare, and while all the cabs behind leant on their horns, he told me how his agent had made him go to a networking event.

‘Man, if that’s what it takes to get published,’ Jack said, ‘ I’d just as soon spend my life driving a vomity-stinking cab,at least I’ll have the company of people who I don’t have to pretend to like, I don’t wanna join all those phoneys, being phoney.’ 

‘Jack,’ I said, ‘you’re right, that’s what they are, they’re all goddamned phoneys; we are the authentic ones.  Are you into Zen?’

‘Am I into Zen?’ said Jack waggling his head as a great smile spread across his face, ‘do you dig The Bird?’

‘I like owls’

‘No the Bird, man; Charlie Parker.’

‘He isn’t a publisher or an industry professional is he?’

‘He’s a Boddhisatva man, he might even be God, I could take you to hear him play his sax.’

‘You know what  Jack, I’d love to hear God playing the sax,  screw Marcy, forget the hotel, but first I’ve got a driving job for ya.’

‘What you got in mind?”  Jack  asked tapping out a crazy rhythmn on a pair of bongos that he’d wedged between his knees.

‘Do you know a place where I could spend fifty years as a mysterious recluse riding on a slim output of novellas, albeit with a massive cult literary following?’

Jack executed a totally illegal U turn at this point and sped back down Fifth Avenue flipping open a cigarette case and offering me a handful of benzedrine.

‘First we pick up my buddy Dean Moriarty,’ said Jack, ‘then we aim this cab into the setting sun and go searching together for cheap wine and literary seclusion.’

‘Amen to that Jack,’  I said feeling my eyeballs execute a 360 and hit the base of my brain with a not unpleasant sensation, ‘Bye phoneys, hallo obscurity!’

Mrs Dalloway Comes Out in Downton

Dear Virginia

Thanks so much for sending us your synopsis and what, according to our submissions policy, (readily available on our website) should have been the first three chapters of your book.

Unfortunately, I stopped reading after the first line. Virginia, I am not sure if you realise that a first line is crucial. It must engage the reader and pull them irresistibly  into  a story. The first sentence of your novel would appear to be,  ‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’ Ask yourself, what does this sentence achieve? Does it engage? Does it intrigue? Does it conjure a landscape that a reader might long to inhabit? Or does it convey a mere whimsical inconsequentiality? What do we learn of Mrs Dalloway that would interest anyone other than a person gripped by some kind of floristry-based obsession?

Added to this, the fact that you have employed a rather juvenile tactic  in order to circumvent the usual submission requirement of three chapters, by opting apparently not to have ANY chapters at all, and on that basis submitting the WHOLE of your novel,  did you no favours at all.

I do not know whether you are unfamiliar with the concept of the synopsis, but I can assure you that thirty close-written pages outlining the thoughts of your main character really don’t fit the bill. Even two pages, I’m afraid Virginia, are almost too much for a busy editor these days. We need to know, at a glance, whether you have a story, if it is the right shape, that the characters have arcs. We need to see that you have hit all the plot points and have a satisfying denouement, preceded by a gripping climax, obviously.

The premise of your novel is sound enough; the idea of your main character Mrs Dalloway, preparing mentally and physically for an evening party which many of the important people in her life,  will be attending, including the Prime Minister, has great potential. But what do you do with this? There is little sense of pacing or rising jeopardy. In short, nothing, but nada, appears to happen.

Forgive me, but how Mrs Dalloway evades arrest as she  wanders  aimlessly through London Streets, darting back and forth between the past, present and future, I really don’t know. You, Virginia, appear to be equally lost, unable to  decide on your narrative style, switching  from omnicient description,  interior monologue, and even, egads, soliloquy. Please Virginia, you must think of your marketing demographic.

I think you would do better to drop this  ‘stream of consciousness’  thing, that you constantly bang on about in your accompanying letter and concentrate instead on STRUCTURE.  Don’t forget, SOMETHING MUST HAPPEN ON EVERY PAGE, not just a lot of waffling about Big Ben chimes, sugared almonds and a kiss exchanged with another girl.  BTW, I think you are missing a trick by not bigging up the lesbian potential of Sally Seton. After all, if kissing Sally Seton was the happiest moment of Mrs Dalloway’s life then she really ought to come out, don’t you think? ; quite possibly at the party.

Think less, ‘stream of consciousness’ and more ‘Downton’.  Imagine that Julian Fellowes, (temporarily deranged by an excess of champagne cocktails and  Beluga caviar), had fox-trotted across  his  croquet lawn and taken a header into his aristocratic haha, thus incapaciting his writing genius, and YOU were asked to write your party scene as a culminating episode of this lucrative soap opera.  You could have Mrs Dalloway  kissing Sally Seton brazenly in front of the Dowager Countess of Grantham, Peter Walsh kissing the Prime Minister, implicating the government and even minor members of the  Royal family in a scandal,  eventually embroiling the entire country in a constitutional crisis. Now that’s a party scene. Think of the American serial rights!

I hope I have given you food for thought.

I am sorry that we were unable to help you on this occasion and I wish you the best of luck.

Best Wishes

Dido Bagge-Shawe

Editor

Hatchet Books