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

 

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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

Strictly Hedda

Dear Henrik

Thank you so much for letting us read your latest play.

Here at the agency, I think we are all agreed that it is an extremely powerful piece which asks many penetrating questions concerning morality in modern life. In short, WE LOVE IT, although some of the subtlety of your legendary word play may have been lost to us – a Linguaphone record bought from a charity shop by one of our more enterprising interns,  entitled ‘Norwegian for Fun’, went some way to establishing a flavour of your native tongue, however as your main character, Hedda, never finds herself in the unfortunate situation of having to call room service to inform them that her lavatory is blocked, or inquire of a jolly grocer whether he has an adequate supply of pickled herring for immediately shipping to the United States, it ultimately proved to be of limited utility.

Although we are totally convinced of the quality of your dramatic writing, you did ask us for a  report, so we feel that we must point out one or two small reservations that we have about your current plot outline, and perhaps make some useful suggestions of how these tiny problems might be resolved.

Firstly, your main character, the eponymous Hedda, is a vivid, vibrant character but we came to the conclusion that she really wasn’t very likeable.  She  has  married her husband because as she says, ‘she had danced herself to a standstill’, but we only hear about this dancing,  we never witness it. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could see Hedda perhaps reviving her dancing career? As it is, she  is bored with her husband  and frankly,  so are we. He isn’t very likeable either, is he?  Ask yourself Henrik ; would a woman like Hedda, who has been the toast of some obscure Norwegian town, really marry a man who is devoted to his  Aunty, and obsessed by embroidered slippers?   We think that you should ditch the Aunty and the slippers and make  George into a lovable ‘professor distrait’ with a secret sexy side, which he shows when he whisks Hedda onto the dancefloor and lets her feel the strength of his critical treatise.

Hedda is also very tetchy with her schoolfriend, Mrs Elvsted, who seems very tense. Whether she is a victim of her hormones, or a disenchanted religious maniac,  we never discover, because you simply haven’t shown us what her problem is. Imagine if you wrote a scene where Hedda and Mrs Elvsted take advantage of Happy Hour at the Soused Herring Cocktail bar. They get absolutely rat-arsed, ripping into embroidered slippers and ridiculous academic rivalries. Later while they are sitting in the road wearing traffic cones on their heads, Mrs Elvsted confesses that she desperately wants to go in for gynoplasty, and Hedda gives her the name of a good surgeon. They cry, put their arms around one another and bond. Now we are really getting to know these characters.

But, in your outline Hedda simply doesn’t get any nicer, does she? Enticing her former lover Lovborg (isn’t the name  a little too obvious and a tiny bit silly?) to have a drink despite the fact that he is a reformed alcoholic, thus setting about his ruination, and then, lo and behold, burning his much vaunted ‘brilliant manuscript’. Isn’t this all a little far fetched? I mean Hedda must have a nice side to her too and we NEVER see it.  At the agency we always tell our authors that it  repays to make your characters well-rounded – no one is simply that nasty or miserable,  Henrik.

It goes on, when she hears that her ex- lover, Lovborg, (really got to think about changing that name) has shot himself in a brothel, what exactly does it add? Wouldn’t it have been better if he’d just had a minor traffic accident and then there would have been the possibility of Hedda nursing him back to health and a little redemption?

Henrik, we find this very hard to say, but we really don’t think that you are going to find pitching this very easy, if you insist of ending the story with the main character rushing to her bedroom and  shooting herself dead with her father’s pistols. It’s  such a downer. We can see publishers all over London just shaking their heads and flinging your masterpiece into the recycling. Please re -think!

Perhaps, after the surgery,  Mrs Elvsted and George get it together. Meanwhile Hedda has nursed Lovborg back to health. Then all four of them could take a holiday. In the final scene we see them  ‘dancing to a standstill’ to some wonderful tune, on a balcony overlooking the Med.

The audience will leave the theatre whistling that tune and feel that they’ve had a life-enhancing experience, rather than going home to wrestle with modern morality and ultimately slit their wrists. Don’t you think you owe them that much after they’ve forked out 70 quid a seat in the West End?

Once again, thank you so much for consulting us at the agency and we wish you the best of luck with your play.

Regards

Fabia Glossy-Smarte

p.s. Just a thought… what about a change of title? Maybe  ‘Strictly Hedda’?

Hideous Publishing Accidents #4 – Becoming Lotus Adams – Part Two

Two months had passed. Sally gazed into the mirror above the phone noting that the bruising around her eyes  from the rhinoplasty was almost gone. She tried to smile in order to assess her new teeth veneers and the laser enhancement of the rest, but feeling the slight pull on the scars behind her ears, she desisted. At least the mottled horror of the chemical peel that had given her the appearance of a jackal’s arse, had all but dissipated.

Over the past months, she had woken in the twilight of anaesthetic recovery rooms and wondered what her motivation was for inviting such pain and discomfort. Why was a plain and tired-looking woman, for whom menopause was merely a memory that had slipped below the event horizon, trying to transform herself into a photograph that she had stolen from Facebook? She looked at the photo that she had sent to Hilary Slade ; the  anonymous pneumatic blond  that she had passed off as the author of her own book, and thereby created a monster called ‘Lotus Adams’. This was the girl that Hilary Slade wanted to sign and make a literary star, not Sally.

‘Bring on the facial fillers and the blond weave’, she said, narrowing her eyes, as best she could, forgetting that the skin above her eyelids was now taut and unforgiving.  The frozen rictus of a smile from the unfamiliar creature in the mirror was a little alarming.  Sally wondered how much her yet unsettled surgery might frighten a hairdresser.  Perhaps she should give it a few weeks more.

Hilary Slade, editor at Brown,Brown & Taupe

Hilary Slade had Peppie, her assistant, call Lotus Adam’s mother regularly with exactly the same result. Some waffling reply about her daughter’s imminent return from the Himalayas. Hilary had begun to wonder whether the woman wasn’t stupid. Did she not understand the urgency of the matter? In her considerable experience, an offer of a publishing contract usually overcame all and any obstacles, both moral and geographical, to even the most scrupulous anti-materialist.  Evidently not in this case. Her fingers itched with the frustration of  ‘The Impossibility of Finding Lotus Adam’. Mmnn, good title for her own book, perhaps.

A week later, Dr Haar had talked Sally out of the facial fillers and persuaded her to go for a longer-lasting solution to reclaim  the plump skin of a twenty year old.

‘Do you know any twenty year olds whose plump skin we can claim’,  she had joked inadvisedly to the slightly paranoid Dr Haar.

The procedure normally cost well over two thousand pounds and with her funds receding like greasy water down a recently unblocked drain, she had sought out Dr Haar, who promised to carry out the  ‘Organic Facelift’  for a fraction of the cost, due to the fact that he had very low overheads.

Sally could appreciate how he had kept his overheads low, when she had climbed the winding staircase to his clinic, above a fried chicken take-out in an unfashionable part of South London. But it turned out that her misgivings were misplaced, even despite Dr Haar’s insistence on her paying cash upfront. He had extracted fat from her backside and magically transposed it to her thinning temples and cheeks some days later. After sleeping upright on pillows, dosed on painkillers for several weeks,  Sally’s face had, as he promised, regained a youthful fullness.

One morning, the postman delivered verification of Sally’s official name change. Holding the documents in her hand, she gripped a hand-mirror and stared at her new face. ‘I am Lotus Adams’, she insisted truthfully, before having to lay back against the pillows feeling a little odd. She didn’t know if it was the painkillers or the hormone replacement therapy kicking in.

Peppie arrived breathless at Hilary Slade’s desk the same day, with the news that Lotus Adams had arrived back in the country at last. Hilary’s reaction was one that no one at Brown, Brown & Taupe had ever known before; she burst into tears, for at least five seconds. Then blowing her nose on a Hermès scarf , she gave an alarmed Peppie instructions to make an absolutely firm arrangement for a meeting with the maddening girl.

Arriving at Brown, Brown and Taupe a few days later, Sally or ‘Lotus’ stopped to admire her reflection in the glass doors. Blond hair extensions curling just below her shoulders, Lotus sported a long silk tunic and trousers with a fine silk scarf swathing her neck, achieving, she hoped, a ‘recently returned from Katmandu’  boho elegance. Shaking in the lift she  calmed herself by practising the rejuvenating exercises that her voice coach had promised would lift her voice several tones higher.

Hilary Slade had cleared her morning in anticipation of meeting Lotus Adams. The legal department had sent up the contract and it lay on her desk wanting only a signature. Then Hilary heard the tinkle of ankle bells and the much-longed-for Lotus was before her, all hair and silk, laughter and handshakes. Hilary noticed that she seemed a little unsteady as she sat down on the office sofa. They made a little light conversation about Nepal, which Lotus seemed quite hazy about. Peppie  brought in the coffee and biscuits and Hilary noticed that Lotus couldn’t hold her cup steady.

‘Jet lag,’ Lotus explained, laughing a high girlish laugh.

Hilary had suggested she take her gloves off, but Lotus merely replaced the cup onto the saucer with some difficulty. Hilary Slade was beginning to re-assess the situation, wondering if  Lotus was at worst a possible drug-user, at best, some kind of fashion throw-back; who wore gloves indoors? Ian came up from the legal department for the contract signing,  Peppie confirmed the restaurant booking for lunch and Hilary reminded herself of the night she’d sat up reading Lotus’ book. So, the girl was a little whacky, few of her authors were ‘normal’.

As Sally/ Lotus took a grip of the pen to sign the contract, for a fraction of a second she registered the fact that Hilary was staring at her hand. She had tried to sign wearing her glove but cursed the fact that despite having practised her signature as ‘Lotus Adams’, she had never thought to do so wearing a glove. It had been impossible to grip the pen. In her desperation she removed the glove and saw Hilary’s eyes instantly register the fact that her hand was fanned with sharp bones, mottled and sinewy; in short, the hand of a sixty year old woman. But it was done, the contract was signed, then everything went black.

It was 3pm when Hilary Slade  left the hospital and flagged down a black cab. It had been the best and possibly the worst day of her career in publishing. She had signed a fabulous debut author in the morning and then witnessed her death an hour later. She needed several strong drinks, if not a small dedicated private cocktail bar. When Lotus had collapsed after the signing Peppie had called an ambulance and Hilary had accompanied her author to the hospital. Bumping along in the ambulance Lotus had regained consciousness for a while and gripped onto Hilary’s hand.

‘You will publish the book, won’t you?’

‘Of course.’  Hilary had assured her.

‘Even if I die?’

‘People don’t die of jetlag, Lotus’  Hilary had said.

Then a few minutes later Lotus had gripped her hand once more.

‘Doctor Haar’.

‘Haar?,’ Hilary repeated.

‘Yes,’ Lotus tried to smile and croaked on her last outward breath, ‘Haar, Haar’.

Then she was gone. The paramedic started heart massage, in A& E Hilary winced as she heard them use the de-fibrilator, but all to no avail. Hilary rang Peppie from the cab and told her the news, then instructed her to meet her at a  bar in order to map out their pitch to the Marketing Department.

‘Peppie stop saying OMG and listen, ‘The Impossible Conjectures of Slime Mould’  now has everything, I thought Lotus was its USP… but Lotus’ death is even better.’

‘That’s an awful, despicable, morally abhorrent thing to even think, let alone say, Hilary,’  Peppie sniffed.

‘I know, but it’s irresistible, death is always the shrewdest marketing move anyone can make’.

The Impossible Conjectures of Slime Mould
A Postumous Debut Novel
by
Lotus Adams
(All Royalties to be donated to the Brown, Brown & Taupe Fund for Mature Unpublished Writers) £19.95

Hideous Publishing Accidents #4 – Becoming Lotus Adams – Part One

Hilary Slade of Brown, Brown & Taupe

Sally replaced the phone reverentially back onto its stand, ending the phone call  for which she had waited an entire lifetime.

Technically the phone call hadn’t been for her at all. The  silky tones of  Hilary Slade, the well-respected editor from illustrious publishing  house  ‘Brown, Brown & Taupe’,  had wanted urgently to speak to someone called  ‘ Lotus Adams’.

Hilary placed a trembling finger onto the  manuscript that lay before her on her desk . Her eye strayed to the letter that lay beside it, with a photo of the author clipped to the top.  Lotus was  perfect, so perfect that Hilary in her giddy state felt that she might almost have invented her.  She was not only the very image of Botticelli’s Venus but was evidently deeply intelligent, witty and wise beyond her tender twenty-two years.  She had a life perfectly shaped for a literary profile.

Valentine Adams, Father of Lotus and ‘Moving Spirit’ of the Adam’s Alternative Theatre Experience

Her parents were separated but Lotus had grown up in her family travelling theatre troupe, playing Ibsen to itinerant Mongolian sheep herders and Pirandello to irritated New Guinea tribesman . Her parents had separated and her mother ran a small-holding in deepest Sussex, whilst her father lived in a Buddhist monastery, deep in the Himalayas.

Hilary had read Lotus’ book through  the night, with a excitement bordering on hysteria before dashing, sleepless  into the office in order to talk to its intriguing author.

Sally had the unhappy task of informing Hilary that Lotus was spending time with her father and would, unfortunately be away for some time.

‘But surely she has a phone Mrs Adams?’

‘No signal in the Himalayas.’  Sally had quickly replied,

‘But this is impossible, she can’t  write a book of such brilliance and then just disappear’, huffed Hilary.

‘ Brilliance, you say’. Sally steadied herself against a kitchen cabinet as a flush rose up her neck.

The travelling theatre challenging in every possible way the orthodoxies of mainstream dramatic thought

‘Mrs Adams, I have been a literary agent for twenty years and I can say categorically that

‘The Impossible Conjectures of Slime Mould’,  is the novel that I have been waiting for  my entire career’.

‘But surely, if her novel is that good, you can go ahead, I’m sure Lotus would want you to publish.’

Hilary had gone on to explain, that Lotus’ youth, beauty and exotic upbringing would be the package that she wanted to sell.

‘Package?’ Sally queried.

‘Get her back here, as quickly as you can Mrs Adams’.

‘But did I hear you right, you did say that her book was brilliant?’

‘Yes, Mrs Adams, but I need Lotus’.

The tribesman had a moving and somewhat frightening empathy for early Twentieth Century Italian Drama

Sally having replaced the receiver looked up into the wall mirror above and searched for a solution. After all, the problem was a sticky one. It was so good to know that the book was brilliant and yet so bad to know that there was no such person as Lotus Adams. Sally had written the book herself and Lotus had been her own invention. After decades of unsuccessful submissions, Sally had stolen the photo of some anonymous beauty from Facebook to prove a theory that she had long held about the publishing industry.  For if Hilary had seen the true face of its author attached to that manuscript, would it have made it out of the slush pile?

After all these decades of duelling with bitterness, envy and out-an-out hatred for all successful writers both living and dead, Sally couldn’t let this opportunity slip.  She had some money saved, a little time and absolutely nothing to lose.  There was, after all,  no option but to become Lotus Adams.