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Announcement
Jodi has an agent.
http://jmeadows.livejournal.com/ 745925.html
Our very own Jodi Meadows, Days in the Life mod, ferret wrangler, extreme knitter*, flautist, eater-of-chocolate and, lately, shoveller-of-snow . . . and writer of stories, has just accepted the offer of representation from a literary agent.
YAAAAAAY.
Back in my day it wasn’t absolutely required to have an agent, although it was generally considered a good idea. In my case Harper & Row, as it then was, took BEAUTY before I had an agent. My first novel was plucked off the slush pile. Yes. But that was over thirty years ago. Times have changed a lot.
In the present day you pretty well do need to have an agent. I don’t know if there are any commercial publishers who will look at unsoliciteds any more. But certainly if you want a crack at the Big Six you have to have an agent. And it’s going to be hard to be taken seriously even by the little independent houses if you haven’t got an agent.
Jodi wants to get published. Jodi needs an agent.
Jodi has an agent.
Did I say YAAAAAAY?
YAAAAAAY.**
Chocolate, confetti, flying ferrets, dazzle, sparkle, glitter and applause***: Go Jodi.
* * *
* ‘extreme’ in this case means she also spins and we have the guest blogs to prove it
** I never squee, of course. I’m too old. SQUEEEEEEEE.
*** Partly because I never saw anything so calm and understated as the brief announcement on her blog. THIS IS CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION. SOMEBODY NEEDS TO ACT LIKE IT.^ Eeesh.
^ Repeat after me: YAAAAAAAAY.
In which an Evil Cow enjoys tormenting her faithful readers*
This is the catalogue copy for PEGASUS:
A gorgeously-written fantasy about the friendship between a princess and her pegasus
Because of a thousand-year-old alliance between humans and pegasi, Princess Sylviianel is ceremonially bound to Ebon, her own pegasus, on her twelfth birthday. The two species coexist peacefully, despite the language barriers separating them. Humans and pegasi both rely on specially-trained Speaker magicians as the only means of real communication.
But it’s different for Sylvi and Ebon. They can understand each other. They quickly grow close—so close that their bond becomes a threat to the status quo—and possibly to the future safety of their two nations.
* * *
Sylvi sat up in bed. Something had moved very quickly between the window and the stars; something not only swift but large. There—there it was again, higher than the first time—no, gone again; no, not gone; it had banked and turned and—
Ebon folded his wings at the last minute, to fit through the window, and landed, therefore, rather abruptly and rather hard; his knees buckled and he rolled right over, wrapped in his wings, but making surprisingly little noise for all of that. Sylvi was out of bed and kneeling beside him before he scrambled to his feet again. Ow, he said. There must be a better way. Can’t you sleep somewhere with bigger windows?
Are you all right?
He walked once around the room, lifting his legs gingerly. Yes. Don’t worry. We’re taught to fall and roll like that when we’re babies and first learning to fly. They taught me really emphatically because I’ve always been too big. There were a lot of these doomsayers when I was a baby proclaiming that I’d be too big to fly. Ha. But you don’t break anything if you roll. Are you ready to go?
Sylvi, still confused by his sudden entrance, was nonplussed. Go where?
* * *
* Have pity, please. Remember that stories spend YEARS tormenting me.^ You won’t begrudge me a little teasing, will you?
^ PEG II is knocking the stuffing out of me right now. Whimper.
Tra la la la
It’s already way too late. What HAPPENED to this day? It was teatime a minute ago. Er. About five hundred minutes ago according to the clock.* For most of which I’ve been at this computer** and I’m really ready to go do something else . . . like play the piano. Or work on the lullaby*** . . . which would involve this computer and (dreadful to relate) Finale. Hmm. I know! I could sing something! I have a new song to learn!
I had my first voice lesson in forever today. It was going to be really, really, diabolically, breath-stoppingly bad too. In the first place it has been something like two months since my last. Blondel was busy with extra concerts around Christmas† and then PEGASUS, as you know, closed over my head as the waters of the abyss. I’ve sung a bit over the last two months, but not that much, less because I’m not having lessons and don’t have that spur of not wanting to make a fool of myself on the next Tuesday than because . . . I don’t sound very nice, you know? My excuse for singing at all is that I’m having voice lessons with the idea that I will improve.†† Also, once you start having someone telling you helpful and inspiring stuff it’s demoralising to slip back into cluelessness. So I was trying to sing a little again over the weekend on the assumption that Blondel would probably expect me to sing something as opposed only to lalalalalalalalala††† and I could at least remind myself of melody and those awful places where I have to come in on a note without an accompaniment to tell me where . . . and the reminding didn’t go too well and I was Totally Depressed.
So it was going to be bad.
And it wasn’t. It was enormous fun. I’ve slipped some, but not that much, once I had Blondel telling me to sing through my eyes and out of the top of my head and so on again, all that hopelessly irrational balderdash that somehow makes perfect sense when Blondel says it but I can’t say to myself. Also, of course, there’s Blondel’s voice. When he says ‘never mind the note, just create the space for it’ and then as example fills the room with a sound like . . . like a pegasus looks, you’re all ‘yes, sir, yes, sir, whatever you say sir’.
I also got through Fear No More‡ almost as if I knew what I was doing. Which was a real surprise. I think this had less to do with my having sung a little over the last two months than it did to having been obsessively listening to Bryn Terfel singing it: The Vagabond & other songs by Vaughan Williams, Butterworth, Finzi, Ireland, Deutsche Grammophon 1995, one of my favourite albums anyway,‡‡ and when Blondel gave me Fear No More a while ago I fished it out and started playing it a lot. I find it easier to listen to a bass-baritone being amazing than another mezzo. A mezzo makes my own shortcomings a little too graphic. So today when Blondel said okay, what do you want to learn next I said hesitantly that, um, I now had my own copy of Finzi’s Garland‡‡‡, and Blondel said oh, yes, you liked It Was a Lover and His Lass, didn’t you? So we had a run at that—I am crazy—but if Blondel can stand it I can. So that’s my Everest for next week. Yaaay.
* * *
* If I’ve had my head down all that time that explains the stiff neck and granite shoulders. Maybe I could get a hellhound to gnaw on the shoulders a little.
** Which did not contribute to my spiritual upliftment by freezing and crashing just as I got to the end of a long complicated email to my editor’s assistant in answer to her long complicated email about the pullulating mass of notes I sent in last Thursday. Hers had come in last night after I got back from a less-than-personally-optimum bell tower practise at Old Eden^ and I couldn’t face it. But meanwhile I’d had one of those godsawful waking-up-at-4-am-screaming moments, only on Sunday afternoon while I was wide awake, of realising that something important had got left out of PEGASUS . . . I can see why us authors are seduced by length. If you put everything in you won’t leave anything out. So I’d been wondering if I dared mention this or if Putnams would have me summarily killed, and then Mignon’s email came in and I thought ah ha! I’ll just sneak in a couple of sentences when I answer hers! And then I wasted a whole barrowload of time idiotically looking for the cut scene(s) where the left-out bit appears . . . well, it wouldn’t have been idiotic if it had worked. I’d’ve been much happier importing a few sentences that had once been a part of the book than making them up cold, now, after I’ve turned the book in and the material no longer answers to me, like a horse setting her jaw against your hand on the rein. Gah. But while I obsessively save all my outtakes that doesn’t mean I’m going to be able to find the one(s) I’m looking for, should I need to go back and look. And I didn’t. So I had to make something up. Less than two hundred words. Took hours. Gah.
And then my darling precious adorable computer froze and crashed just as I was finishing my slightly sidelong and circuitous (and grovelling) email to Mignon and I had to do it all over again. For a long, horrible, stretchy-suspended-time moment I thought that the crash had eaten the two-hundred-new-words document as well as the email but fortunately Word had saved even if Outlook was feeling suicidal.
^ I’ve told you that the bells at Old Eden are possessed by demons in cold weather because they don’t get rung enough and everything seizes up and they haven’t invented bell antifreeze, probably because there isn’t enough money in it. There are two ways to deal with old, cold, plain-bearing+ bells: you can either be a big strong guy to begin with, like Leo, who last night kept looking bemused and saying, there’s a problem?, or you can be clever like Vicky, who is about half my size and can ring anything. Although I was iniquitously delighted when I’d been making a mess of ringing the three which kept coming down on me++ and . . . it came down on her too.
+ http://www.heatons.fsnet.co.uk/Ringing/Glossary.htm#P : ‘Plain Bearing A type of bearing in which the gudgeon pin is not supported on balls or rollers. Such bearings need frequent lubrication and the ringing of bells mounted on plain bearings requires more effort than of bells on more modern bearings.’
++ Which is to say refused to do its full 360°. Shorter arc means you make horrible crashing noises AND once a bell has started down, inertia will make it come down farther unless you pull like a madwoman to get the wretched thing back up again.
*** Yes, the lullaby from PEGASUS.
† Including doing a recording. Well, I can’t believe he’s not going to be famous, with that voice. I have occasional dark fantasies of wondering how long he’s going to be giving singing lessons to the likes of me, but I might as well enjoy him/it/them while I can.
†† This is probably perverse, but it’s my kind of perverse, which is that belting out Gypsy Rover whilst hurtling hellhounds just doesn’t do much for me any more. I want to sing, you know, well. I’ll settle for well-ish. There’s only so much you can do with nothing. But I think about how far I’ve come learning to ring bells on nothing so there’s probably hope for my singing too.
††† Given Blondel’s range of ghastly and depraved warm-up exercises I wanted to be able switch over to singing a song as soon as he’d let me.
‡ The Finzi ‘Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun’ that I was working on before I crashed and burned over Christmas
‡‡ Although Terfel’s Fear No More is actually too slow. With that voice, he can get away with it. But.^
^ Yeah. Sue me.
‡‡‡ Let Us Garlands Bring, five Shakespeare songs for voice and piano, one of which is Fear No More
PEGASUS Thursday
YES. IT’S REAL.
I have something like fifteen books out and this moment never gets old. Looky looky looky what my editor sent me today.
And yes, I met my deadline. . . . by about an hour and a half. Hey, I made it. That’s all that counts.
PEGASUS Tuesday
It has been a seriously sucky day. It started with oversleeping by two hours. Which meant I did at least get two hours of sleep, but this is still not optimum. I’m used to having bad nights, and a lot of the time it’s not a totally huge deal; for one thing, if I can’t sleep, I turn the light back on, and read. Insomniac nights are probably my best opportunity for catching up on all the homeopathic journals I go on subscribing to; I have found through trial and error that I will be less pissed off at myself in the morning (I’m going to be tired; at least I can try not to be pissed off) if I’ve actually done something with that time I would rather have been asleep in. But in the middle of the Week of the Copyedit Nightmare, I don’t dare. I put a pillow over my head and try to count sheep.*
I have cancelled Blondel so many times that when I finally go next week** I will probably find I’ve forgotten his street number—I’m sure I remember his street*** but assuming that I will have let the RaspBerry go flat† and in this mobile-phone era the nearest public phone†† being about a mile away I am having no trouble at all imagining††† trotting up and down that hill looking for a front door that seems familiar. . . . And Niall was having one of his Upper Level Handbell Evenings tonight which I had briefly entertained a fantasy of taking an hour off this evening‡, if I’d got my daily page count sufficiently appeased by then, to attend long enough to have a go at plain bob major‡‡ Silly old me.
There have been a positive cascade of yucky publishing details that discretion, a desire to go on getting published by someone, and Fear of Merrilee prevent me from detailing here, much as I long so to do.‡‡‡ One bright spot however is that—I remember telling you that this was happening, but I haven’t been telling you how many times we’ve gone over the Final Cliff of Failure and then been snatched painfully back to the possibility of firm ground, and let me tell you, standing on the possibility of firm ground is unpleasantly vertiginous—we do, in fact, have a cover for the new YA edition of the much-repackaged SUNSHINE.§ I thought the end of last week that this had crashed and burned at the foot of the Final Cliff of Failure—they wanted to use a photo cover and I Have This Thing About Photo Covers.§§ And there wasn’t time to try again. Was. Not. Time.§§§ I knew this. So I went off to have a sulk over the weekend# and . . . lo and behold, yesterday they had magicked something out of nowhere and today . . . we have our cover. Yaay. ##
And then there is PEGASUS. PEGASUS, as often happens at this stage, is rapidly deliquescing into mrgmp*&^qvvvll%@j????frell. I should get through it tomorrow, leaving myself an evening### and the following morning to make sure my notes look like they make sense, whether or not they relate sensibly to the manuscript, before I shoot them back to Putnams. Supposing I can recognise relative proportions of sense/nonsense when I see it/them. If you’ve got any candles to spare, I could use one or two.~
Let’s have a couple more pictures of roses. 
And then I’m going to go lie down in that bed thing again and think about sleep.
* * *
* Or pegasi, or hellhounds, or bottles of champagne, or roses, or bars of Green & Black’s. . . .
** Yes. Next week. Nothing shall come between me and a voice lesson next Tuesday. Although we’re just about going to be starting at the beginning again. Larynx? Soft palate? Vocal cords/folds? I forget. Coming in on a note all by yourself with no accompaniment? Hell. I remember that bit.
*** Nothing is sure in this life, especially when it relies to any extent on my memory.
† Oh, it’s good for another day . . . oops
†† Mobiles fry your brains! Bring back phone booths! And stop ripping out the old red ones^ which are not merely an ornament to the countryside and an enticement to the tourist trade but a haven in a sudden hailstorm! Ask me how I know this! And yes, I can get the hellhounds in too!^^
^ Unless you’re going to do something really wizard with it http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/somerset/8385313.stm
^^ Disturbingly underfoot is kind of their default position anyway, unless there are rabbits, pheasants, or trundling bits of wind-galvanized garbage to attract them.
††† But I have a vivid, one might almost say overactive, imagination
‡ Note that Blondel, with commute, takes two hours, and he’s earlier in the day. There was never any way I’d’ve got enough pages done by midafternoon.
‡‡ Eight bells. Ie needs one more person than Niall, Colin and me.
‡‡‡ Mmph! Mmmmmblrggggglphmp! ARRRGH!
§ All my books have been through the odd new edition or two, but SUNSHINE is in a league of its own. The one constant is the Neil Gaiman quote.
§§ Also about Body Parts. What is it about pieces of people that is so popular on today’s face-out bookshelf? Ugh.
§§§ This is all based on a promotion opportunity that will either include SUNSHINE or it won’t. The promotion is already scheduled.
# I haven’t had time to sulk. I have three weeks’ work to get done in six days.
## Yes, I’ll post it here when I can. I think they’re still gajoining up the squirglicks and blethering the gazambles. Art departments. You know.
###Will I make it to Ditherington bell practise tomorrow night? Stay tuned
~ Although Luke’s need is still a whole lot greater. I think we’ve still got about a month before the next big consultants’ summit.
