Who is the first agent you approach?  The best one, of course, whoever you think that may be.  In my mind, it’s the Curtis Brown agency.  So when the time came for me to start trotting my new novel around town, I headed to their website first.  They have an online form which, frankly, makes life a lot easier, both for the author and, no doubt, the agency as well.  I filled in all the required boxes, clicked send……and was told that I had already submitted that novel.
WHAT??
But I hadn’t!  It was the first time I’d submitted the novel to anyone.  Had someone stolen my title?  Yet I’d made sure I’d never mentioned it on any online platform, paranoically keeping it a secret for as long as possible.  Mystified, I sent an email to someone called “info” at Curtis Brown, then moved on and approached another agent instead, one I actually like rather just think are the best.
You should know, at this point, that while I do indeed have a landline, the sound is permanently switched off.  In fact, the only reason I have a landline is that I can’t get a good TV/broadband package without one.  And also, if you don’t want to put your mobile number on a website, you can just put your landline number instead.  When the phone does ring, a little red light flashes, something I absolutely never see.  In fact, I didn’t even know it did flash until I spotted it and thought, hmmm, I bet that’s just a nuisance call, but what-ho, I’m in the mood to be bothered, so I answered it.
Can you imagine my amazement when I discovered it was someone from Curtis Brown?  And can you imagine my sheer utter embarrassment when I discovered that I HAD submitted that novel before?  I don’t even remember doing it!  The phone call was lovely but I felt MORTIFIED.  It took a lot of hard thinking afterwards to remember that over two years ago, I decided I couldn’t stand working on the novel a moment longer, that it was finished, and that I really needed the help of an editor.  So I must have cobbled together a synopsis and the first three chapters and a cover letter and sent it off to them.
BUT WHERE ARE THEY?
I can’t anywhere on my computer find the cover letter and the synopsis I must have written.  Did I do this at work one bored afternoon?
Anyway, whatever happened, I had done something mad and stupid and now I couldn’t submit the VERY THOROUGHLY edited novel that was, hopefully, a much better prospect.  Unless I changed the title.  The title I had settled on originally was “Season of the Falling Sun”.  However, throughout the novel, I NEVER use the word “the” in front of “falling sun.”  So the title was actually incorrect anyway!  It seemed to me fate, or someone else, was trying to tell me to change the title.  So I did.  And it works.  And that’s what I used to submit my novel to Curtis Brown, which the online form accepted.
But after all this, do you think they are going to take any notice of it?  I’ve got everything going against me: 

• I’ve submitted it before
• I forgot I’d submitted it before
• It’s 160K words long
• I’m not anybody
• Competition is fierce

I’m thinking me and Curtis Brown weren’t meant to be.
 
But out of this fiasco, I got one thing right:  the title.  Hoorah.

It’s taken me eight years to get to the end of my Big Novel but it’s done!  At last!  Bring on the champagne!
 
I really finished it over a week ago, wrapping up the last of the Killer Edit, and producing a synopsis and cover letter while it was still fresh in my mind.  But yesterday I did the final bit of formatting.  When I write (directly onto the screen), I don’t use indents as I find them hugely off-putting, and I write in block paragraphs i.e. with a line space between each paragraph.  I’ve always written like this as it keeps things neat and tidy inside my head and on the page, but obviously the final product can’t look like this.  You certainly can’t self-publish a manuscript looking like that and no agent or publisher is going to look at something so unformatted.  So my final act was to add the indents, then go through the entire novel getting rid of those line spaces between each paragraph.  And also getting rid of the indents at the beginning of each chapter AND the chapter number (indenting afterwards throws off the centring). 
 
I know lots of people write with tabs.  This makes me shudder from head to tail!  The horror!  But there you are, we all have our different foibles.  No doubt anyone watching me write in block paragraphs is filled with the same horror!  I just don’t get why anyone would want to use tabs – if you’re self-publishing, you absolutely can’t use that manuscript and have to get rid of every single tab!  Anyway, this is utterly beside the point.  Once I’d done my formatting, I was done.  I felt it was finished.  The moment of great finality had come.  My novel had reached the end.
 
I first came up with the idea about eight years ago but didn’t start working on notes until a year or more later.  I only know I wrote the first words on the first page in February 2015 because I blogged it on my website.  The first draft was the battle from hell and took over two years.  When I say “first draft,” I really mean countless drafts.  The restarts, the rewrites, the rethinks, the restructuring.  The replotting.  The gigantic plot holes I had to fill and refill.  The rock hard shapeless stone I had to hammer and hammer and chisel and hammer some more to try and find the angel within.  It was a nightmare.
 
When that “first” draft was done, I abandoned it.  I changed my writing style and began a series of lightweight novels that weren’t allowed to go over 80K words.  I wrote short stories.  Novellas.  Flash fic.  Anything SHORT!  Well, shorter than 180K words, which is what it ended up as – it really was gigantic!  The novel also underwent several title changes.  The heroine had her name changed at least seven times.  Even her hair colour changed.  Huge chunks of world-building never made it into the novel, or if they did, were cut out again.  A huge amount of research was never used.  I can’t tell you how BIG this novel was, how MUCH work I put into it.  And what did I end up with?  A great big rock-solid heavy chunky faux-fantasy style disaster.  I ended up HATING the thing.
 
At the start of 2019 (before the pandemic really took hold), I did a massive edit, called the Red Edit.  I tore out 20K words.  I hacked and hacked and hacked.  And then I forgot I did all this and went off to have a writer’s crisis while the world locked down.  It was only when I needed a huge challenge to get me out of my deep funk that I faced the Killer Edit.  In this, what would have to be the final edit, I began to strip the novel back.  I simplified it as much as I could.  I thought I’d be able to rewrite the novel in a whole new style but honestly, I think that might have killed me right off.  I just had to the best damn editing job I’ve ever done.  I even did things like search over-used words such as THAT, AS IF, JUST and many others as it gave me another chance to rewrite badly structured sentences.  I got rid of every single instance of SO THAT, a phrase I used about a million times.  I mean, my God, truly, the writing in this novel was AWFUL.  I know what I was trying to do, though:  I know the mood I was trying to create.  But it just made a great big lumpy muddy mess instead of a dreamy gothic concoction.  My romantic ideals didn’t work.  I also, by the way, got rid of every single semi-colon.  Now, I know how to use semi-colons and I hadn’t used them incorrectly, but it was part of the simplification process.  Simple punctuation.  Simpler language.  Shorter sentences. 
 
There are chunks of this novel that still don’t work.  Yet there are parts that I am very proud of, that work for me, that are beautiful.  But the fucker still comes in at 160K words.  No agent in their right mind is going to look at it.  I have, over the years, both loved and hated this novel.  I’ve called it That Novel.  That Difficult Novel.  My magnum opus.  My prize winner. 
 
Now I’m just going to call it my finished novel.
 
Cheers.

Today I begin the brand new edit of a gigantic novel I have edited several times.  I’ve written about this novel here many, many times.  In another blog, I might even go and have a look at all those old posts to see what I’ve written!
 
But today I want to pat myself on the back – not because I’m starting a major piece of work, but because I’ve done more this year than I’d thought.  I’d quite forgotten that at the start of the year, I did a HUGE edit of this novel.  I chopped and chopped and pared down and whittled and rewrote bits and rethought Part 3 and gave it more life and really, really worked my arse off.  I even made notes for what was to be the last edit – not a proofreading-type edit, but an actual rewrite-type edit, in which I sit down and rewrite the whole novel (with the most recent draft open next to me) so that the words feel fresh and new on the page as they come out my fingers, so to speak.  I even made notes.  I made pages of notes.  I told myself what to do. 
 
I even gave it a name:  The Killer Edit.
 
And then I did what I needed to do:  I walked away from the novel so that when I came back to this killer edit, I’d feel fresh and raring to go.  Which, amazingly, is just how I feel!  This is a HUGE project.  I’ve been working on this novel, on and off, for bloody years.  After the year I’ve had with writing failures, I feel ready for this enormous challenge.  I want to be consumed by its problems and find ways of fixing it up!
 
What gets me is when I last worked on this novel:  it was March.  Yep.  March this year.  Just as Covid19 began to raise its head.  Just as this new word was added to our vocabulary.  I last modified the notes for my Killer Edit on the 6th of March.  It doesn’t seem that long ago.  But it also feels like a whole lifetime.

I’ve just spent the last hour trying to think of names for the two main characters in a new short story.  What a waste of time!  I wanted to make notes for the story;  instead I got stuck on what I was going to call the prince and princess. 
 
Why is it so difficult?  There was a time when names used to just jump into my head.  I never worried about whether a name was cool or not.  It was just a name.  A name that seemed almost preformed was Gomenzi, anti-hero of my novel “Transference.”  I was sure I had heard it somewhere before because it felt familiar.  It doesn’t, however, seem to exist.  It doesn’t come up at all if you Google it – aside from my novel “V. Gomenzi”.  These days I Google all names to make sure there isn’t some famous person with that name, although this is only true of names with surnames;  my characters often only have one name, particularly if they are gracing the pages of a sci-fi story.
 
Other names that have leapt into my head are: 
Angelica Zippoli
Alenka Koie
Claire Halward, with parents Nick and Karin
Dett (who had a number of variations such as Detter, Detteth, Detteria and Besredetth)
Sistia Scarpora
Yani
Domitian (okay, I stole that – but who would think to use it now!)
Ziann Rama
 
The list goes on! 
 
Recently, in the last year or so, my pool of imaginary names seems to have run dry.  The heroine in my short story “The Crystal Vision” had so many name changes that sitting here, right now, I can’t actually remember her name.  This is NOT a good sign.  All characters are a part of me, after all;  it’s like not being able to remember part of your own name.  I’ve just checked:  her name is Lightness.  Urgh.  No wonder I couldn’t remember it.  It isn’t really a proper name at all (her mirror-twin is called Darkling, which is even more ridiculous).
 
I’m currently doing an enormous edit on an enormous novel I “finished” three years ago.  The main character in this has not only had her hair colour change but also her name – at least seven times.  I really, really wanted to call her Igraine.  And this is where my problems start:  the names I love are invariably mythical or made-up and used in famous novels.  Igraine was King Arthur’s mum.  The name has pretty much never been used for anything else (unless you’re a trendy parent, the kind to saddle your kid with names like Merlin or Frodo or Galadriel).  I worked on it for an age and eventually came up with my own made-up name, Ilgria.  When the novel was done (at least, I thought it was done), I realised I didn’t like the name at all.  My daughter agreed, saying she thought it made the character sound old.  Being highly enamoured with Tolkien names, I pinched a word from Elvish and called her Elanen.  My daughter promptly mispronounced it.  I promptly discarded it.
 
The search went on.  After several more attempts, I came up with Alegria, which is basically just Allegra dressed up a bit.  When I started my Big Red Edit (which has currently turned into a bit of a rewrite), I realised it was horrible and had to wrack my brains all over again.  Finally, I hit on Elanor.  It sounds a bit like all the names I’ve been wanting to call her, so is ideal.  And it’s pretty!  But it’s also a very famous name from, yes, Tolkien, being both a flower and Sam Gamgee’s eldest daughter (she even has her own Wiki page).  I eventually settled on a variant of the spelling and my heroine is now called Ellinor.
 
But you know what?  I don’t like it. 
 
While that name-search hangs over my head, my new short story, which I dreamed up all of two weeks ago, has run aground on the same deserted beach.  It doesn’t help that she’s a princess and he’s a prince.  The ONLY name that seems to go with prince is Charming.  Yes.  Really.  Prince Charming.  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
 

You don't.  I didn't, anyway, yet I am a ferocious editor of my own work and a brilliant proofreader.  This latter quality has been discovered in my Real World job and everything that is written is brought to me;  I invariably find a hundred obvious mistakes that everyone else has missed.  It all boils down to experience.
When I first started writing (I was twelve), it was by hand.  Nothing got edited!  When my typing speed overtook my handwriting, I didn't do much more than correct mistakes with a bit of Tippex.  My first PC  (it was an Amstrad....ahem) meant I could do a weeny bit more editing, but even then, I didn't do much.  I wasn't a proper writer yet and considered that everything I wrote was perfect first time.
HAH!
I turned into a Real Writer when I began the Fleet Quintet.  Working more professionally, using what is now an ancient version of Word, I was far more willing to rip things apart;  to rewrite and rewrite until it worked;  to throw out what didn't work and begin again.  Nowadays, the REAL writing for me begins when I do the Big Edit.  My writing seems - generally - to follow a particular pattern.

• The story is created in my head, then in notes.
• The first draft is an attempt to get the story down and is usually an excruciating process of self-doubt, anxiety, wordlessness, and zero inspiration.
• This "first draft" will consist of several edits, usually rewriting of earlier bits because something later on doesn't work.  So there's still a lot of plotting going on as well as character changes, even name changes.  Sometimes there are changes from third to first person.  Sometimes I restart the whole damn thing from the beginning.  But this is ALL still part of the "first draft."  I'm still getting it down on paper, as it were (or on a computer screen).
• The Big Edit comes when the first draft is finished.  I might have a rest period before I start this.  It usually entails reading the whole story in one go (or several if it's a novel) and making notes but NOT changing anything.  That comes later.  Depending on how well the first draft went, the Big Edit could vary in length.  I've been known to abandon a story altogether and then come back to it and finish it with a flourish.  It happens.
• The Red Edit is when I print out the story and read it VERY closely indeed, armed with a red pen.  This is probably closer to proofreading, though by the time I get to the Red Edit, I've already done a thorough spell and grammar check and would  have proofread it before printing it.

With my current WIP (the Prizewinner), I'm doing a combined Big and Red edit.  Hence Big Red Edit!  When I picked up the novel again a few weeks ago, half of it had already had its "red edit" but with loads of notes.  What I really wanted was to have the notes in red on the page, not on a separate bit of paper.  Instead of redoing that first half (it's a LONG novel), I'm now Red Editing chapter by chapter:

• Read the chapter through thoroughly, correctly everything on the page with red pen that you would normally do on a computer.
• Then make these corrections on the computer.  This gives you a SECOND chance to see your corrections which means you really have to think about what you are doing.

So far, this is going quite quickly.  Sometimes a red pen edit doesn't work when you see it on the screen.  Sometimes I see something on the screen that I missed.  
In the end, I'll end up with a novel that has been thoroughly overhauled, which is what I'm aiming for.

The Big Edit has begun!  And it's begun in red pen, which means I have pages of manuscript covered with little red scribbles.  My red pen leaked everywhere too so my fingers looked as if they are dripping blood.  Hugely appropriate when I consider how much of my novel I've had to cut....
I began this red edit two years ago and abandoned it in disgust.  I thought it was a bad novel and not worth saving.  It was also unbelievably long, coming in at 185K words.  No agent in the universe wants to read something that long unless it's brilliant and going to win the Booker Prize.  Picking up where I left off, however, I've discovered it's not that bad.  In fact, I got so involved in reading some bits of it, I forgot to edit it!
I spent two years working on it, from February 2015, probably the last time I've written anything without being conscious of its length (I'm more controlled these days).  I had no idea it was turning into this massive project!  I thought I was never going to finish it.  I battled with the story.  I drowned in notes.  I rewrote and restructured and rewrote some more.  I wrote more notes, more than I ever had for any story, trying to find the male character's voice, failing miserably.  In fact, it's very possible I have failed on every front when it comes to this novel.  I've referred to it before as That Difficult Novel.  In the spirit of hope and a bright future, I'm now going to call it the Prizewinner.  (I may discuss in another blog what I think is wrong with it - and why it works despite that.)
It was meant to be a brief fairy tale.  It was meant to be sensual, a woman's learning experience, a man tortured by some weird affliction that resulted in immense pain.  He was meant to be demonic, she was meant to be heroic.  It was meant to be about beauty and knowledge.
It's now none of these things.  You may catch a glimpse of Beauty and the Beast in it (hasn't THAT been done to death...) but otherwise those nobel themes have long since been lost.  As for the sensuality:  unless you really know what you're doing, you just end up with porn.  Or, worse still, Mills and Boon type porn.  I didn't want either. I'm going to have to cut about ten dripping wet sex scenes from this novel.  Somehow I'm going to have to learn to express their love and desire and all that romantic stuff in a different way.

One thing you learn in your Big Edit:  nothing is ever as terrible as you think it is.  There's always something salvageable, whether it's the story itself, the plot, or the writing.  My Prizewinner has some good writing.  It has a fantastic twist.  The story is worth reading.  But it takes too long to get going (my usual flaw) and sags in the middle.  However, the end is mindblowing.  Getting the reader to get as far as the end is my challenge!

The picture below is very much what the novel is about:  beauty, nature ... and a lot of water.

What do you do when your head is full of novels?  There are so many I want to write.  And I want to write them all now.  
I want to write the fifth and last novel in the Fleet Quintet so that would be, at last, a quintet and not a quartet (though for many years it languished as a trilogy....)  Ideas for this keep popping into my head.  The problem has always been how to tie up all the lose ends.  There are quite a few!  And no part of what is remaining of the story is linear.  I have finally hit on the idea of a Storyteller.  This in itself probably isn't very original but it leads to several twists and revelations.  In fact, the revelations are what draw me to the story.  I am, quite frankly, just dying to reveal them!
I also want to write the next Exodus Sequence story.  The main character has appeared fully formed in my head and man, does she talk a lot.  I can hear her voice, her accent, what she has to say, who she says it to and why.  There are two other characters, both instantly recognisable from an Exodus Sequence story called "Crashed."  This isn't particularly a sequel (the stories aren't constructed that way) but it does explain an awful lot.  In fact, there is quite a lot of explanation in this story but because it is done by this brilliant character (the one whose voice I can hear in my head), it sounds great.  I really need to start writing these conversations down.
I also want to write the next fantasy novel.  I've been trying to get the first one published for a year now, so far in vain.  It's created something of a dampener for me but I decided I just had to get going on the second one otherwise the series will never get going and I'm really keen that it does.  So out of all my choices, I picked that one and am into Chapter 2.  Commercially, it makes the most sense, despite an agent not yet picking it up.
And then there are the short story spin-offs from this "low fantasy" series.  The short stories take place in the fantasy-type realm, while the series of novels are set in the real world, so to speak.  I've loved creating both.
And then there are those present-tense literary style short stories, snippets from my own life told in the third person, a very strange experience which is proving to be amazingly cathartic.  I've written one so far and it was wonderful to get it all out - truly turning aspects of my life (which bother me) into art.  There are quite a few more where that one came from too.
And then there's that strange novel I want to write which was my first ever screenplay.  Fortunately I abandoned the screenplay idea (I'm no good at it) but the story is well-developed and would make a great novel.
And then, finally, there is That Difficult Novel, where this diary began way back in February 2015.  Has it really only been four years since I started it?!  How is that possible?  It feels like decades ago.  My Great Literary Work, this has turned into an albatross and it weighs heavily around my neck.  I know I can fix it up.  I know I can turn it into something spectacular. 
But, dear God, when?  I've got enough work to keep me busy for the next ten lifetimes.  It doesn't seem to matter that no one is reading my work.  I am more fuelled than ever.  It just doesn't die.  The fire is burning so high it's lighting up the whole sky.
It's overwhelming.
​

This diary began on the first day of writing what turned out to be That Difficult Novel.  I can still remember the joy I felt, going for a walk afterwards in the winteriness of Russell Square, all hyped on coffee and Great Expectations.  That first page that I managed to write, so proudly, had to be hammered at several times before it took any shape and all the joy soon left me as the immensity of novel's premise dawned on me.  Does anything you write ever turn out the way it's mean to?
But now it's done.  I can't think what else to do to it to improve it.  It's the best I can do, for now anyway.  So what do I do with it?  The short, commercial, lighthearted novel I wrote last year is currently sitting in an agent's cyber slush pile.  Do I try and find a different agent for this one?  Would it be really weird if two different agents took on two different novels?  
Is that ever likely to happen???!!!???!
I had thought to find a publisher instead.  Virago, I thought.  They're perfect.  They'll like this.  It's right up their street.  But they don't accept anything that hasn't gone through an agent.  Is it worth my while to keep looking?  Most publishers' doors are closed nowadays.  I remember running into this problem a thousand times long ago, doors obstinately closed in my face because I wasn't enough of a celebrity - let alone a human being - for any publisher to bother with.
So why don't I just self-publish this one too?
Because I've failed as a self-published author - not because my writing is bad (it isn't brilliant but the most successful self-published authors, I've noticed, write utter garbage) but because I'm not very good at the marketing side of things, it would seem.  I would love some help and that kind of help would come from an agent.
And in the end, really, I just really, really want my books in a pile at the table near the door of Waterstones.  I want people to read my books.  I think This Difficult Novel is worth reading. I worked my bloody arse off on it. 
​The magic of that first day, when I wrote the first page, eventually wound up in the novel.  The magic is there.  I just wish others could find it too.

More than a year and a half has passed since I finished the first draft of The Difficult Novel.  Once again, I am working on it.  It's not half as bad as I thought.  In fact, it's quite good, which is reassuring.  But it remains difficult.  I'm concerned that it takes too long to get going.  If this was a story of Beauty and the Beast (to use an analogy), then you have to wait until chapter 14 to meet the Beast!  But the greatest difficulty lies in its length.  I wrote the novel with one chapter per document, thus had no way of telling how long the novel was.  Part of my current edit is getting all those chapters into one document.  I'm up to chapter 18 and already I'm over 90 000 words.  I suspect that this novel is close to 200 000 words.  Dear God, a serious door-stopper!  Who the hell would ever publish that!!  Who would even want to read it?!?  It's treacle slow and intensely detailed and I worry that no one would ever want to get to the phenomenal resolution.  It's worth it when you get there and I fear chopping the novel down (as virtually everyone might suggest) would take away the impact of the ending.
On the other hand, a novel of 800 000 words* recently won the Booker prize, so perhaps I shouldn't worry.  This Difficult Novel may be difficult for a reason:  two hundred thousand words of gold, perhaps.  Or so I keep telling myself.
Did anyone ever look at Michelangelo's David and say, hmm, no way, buddy, WAY too big.  It's not going to fit in any doorway.  You gotta cut the legs off. 
I don't want to cut the legs off my novel, ​she said obstinately.

* sorry, it wasn't 800K words but over 800 pages, which comes to only 267K words.  Perhaps there is no such thing as "too long".