Chart / June

A confession: despite all my best intentions and the conviction that I would not get carried away with myself in the wake of having a novel published….I got carried away. I allowed myself to be swept up in the wind of hubris and ended up wasting two months on writing dead-in-the-water pitches. How? Because I wrote an 165,000-word story, which I cut down to 132,000 over subsequent drafts, and I believed this was a reasonable size for my Serious Novel. I thought – just because I’d sold a few copies of a sci-fi book and seen it in a couple of brick-and-mortar stores – that I could go to literary agents and say “hey, look, you don’t know me at all, but I have this difficult-to-sell satirical thriller which is at least 10,000 words over the upper limit for such novels”, and they would respond with “Wonderful, Grant, sign here”.

This has not happened. I want to say ‘unsurprisingly’, but until the middle of May, this came as a surprise to me. I was 100% convinced this was a reasonable expectation on my part. Seriously. Unknown writer, 550 pages, satire. I only understood how unrealistic this was when I received 11 query rejections in a row stating “Yeah, we can’t sell this (in the current market)” or “I don’t have any contacts for this”.

What was I thinking? I suppose I wasn’t. I was plotting too far ahead, and I overlooked the fact that you only get to do stuff like this if you have a track record to fall back on. I do not. And so: I have spent the past month cutting and cutting and cutting. And I am still cutting. It’s therapeutic. Every word I delete is a reminder that I am no way near as good at this as I sometimes think I am and that taut & twisty is better than prodigious & prolix. And at some point I’ll be finished with it and I can move on.

MUSIC! FOR THE SUMMER SOLSTICE LOVERS AMONG US

1. Nick Drake - One Of These Things First

2. Perfume Genius - Leave

3. Pretty Things - Sickle Clowns

4. Tony Allen - Koko Dance

5. keiyaA - I! Gits! Weary!

6. Rosie Lowe - Birdsong

7. Janet Jackson - He Doesn’t Know I’m Alive

BENNY AND THE JETS

Chart / February

Welcome to February, the truncated month nobody likes, not even those unfortunates who have a birthday in its 28-29-day lifespan. It’s also the one I find difficult to say in German. FebRUar. Each year for the past three years I’ve escaped Berlin to exotic climes in search of inspiration for writing. Last year was Oman, the year before Laos and Cambodia, the year before that China and Vietnam. Exotic. But now that I’m restricting myself to one long-haul flight per year, I’m staying right here to enjoy these cold-but-not-really-as-cold-as-they-should-be days in front of my computer, type type typing in the desperate hope that the literary stars will align and I’ll churn out something worthwhile.

Speaking of which, I finished Mekong Lights. Done. Digitally dusted. Nothing more to dot or cross or delete with a raised eyebrow like “how did you ever think that was even a little bit appropriate?”. You know what the very worst aspect of writing is? That’s right, the query letter. No? You try condensing 134,000 words down to 90 and hoping those 90 are magical enough to attract the attention of an overworked literary agent. It’s the most miserable of pots at the end of the rainbow, let me tell you. No way around it though (except yes there is: I submitted By the Feet of Men directly to a publisher. Still, not especially keen on going through that process again). Fingers crossed that third time’s the charm. If I do somehow manage to crawl my way out of the slush pile with my QL, I’ll write an article with a title like “7 ways to write the most baller query letter ever! (number 5 will surprise you)”.

And now to music, for it cures what ails thee:

1. Hot Sugar - 10 Racks Under the Mattress

2. Bernard Fevre - That Is to Be

3. Kaytranada - 10%

4. Hew Time - Bell Window

5. Dan Deacon - Arp II: Float Away

6. Recondite - Mirror Games

7. Seefeel - Industrious

Girl with a Life Aquatic Tattoo, Johannes Vermeer (1665)

Chart / November

Didn’t write anything on here for a month, did I? Well, I just didn’t have time. I had it in my head and I kept thinking ‘tomorrow I’ll write something mildly interesting, tomorrow I’ll come up with “the four most disappointing novels I’ve ever read” or “what I talk about when I talk about playing epic guitar solos”, but the truth is I was deep into the revision process for Mekong Lights (cut….cut….keep….oh god, cut) and I didn’t want to break the flow, so I simply ignored this little blog. Imma set things right in December though! You betcha.

Not much news in the old roundup section: I did a Q&A over on Bidwell Hollow with Nick Barron about - you know it - By the Feet of Men, which I enjoyed because the questions were well chosen. And I had an essay accepted in Bluntly magazine about climate change, but it won’t be out until the end of December, so there’s not much point highlighting it now. Other than that? Nichts. Nada. Nanimonai. Revisions took up every free moment, I submitted no short stories and I received no interesting news except from my publisher except to say “Your novel has been published for 3 months now!”, which is one more than it was last month and one less than it will be next month.

And now……tunes:

1. BROCKHAMPTON - GOLD

2. Iglooghost - Purity Shards

3. Lim Kim - YELLOW

4. Jai Paul - He

5. JPEGMAFIA - Beta Male Strategies

6. Kai Whiston - Hell For Ourselves!

7. Andy Stott - Promises

my friend drew this for me and it rocks.