…for I have sinned.

I’ve never read George RR Martin.

Don’t ask me why, because I really couldn’t say.  I adore the title of the series “A Song of Ice and Fire”.  I’ve just never found myself motivated to pick up one of his books.  Actually, tell a lie, I did pick up a copy of  “A Game of Thrones” in Waterstone’s once but put it down again before I got to the till.

Before the fantasy establishment mob besieges Cooper Towers with pitchforks and blazing torches, ready to burn the heretic,  let me just say that I am remedying this right this instant.  Since HBO has green-lighted a mini-series based on A Game of Thrones, starring the scrummy Sean Bean, no less, my interest has been piqued.

Piqued enough to go and buy the book.  Gawd knows when I’ll find time to read it, since I’m supposed to be writing one of my own here, but I’ll try.  Really I will.  Now put those pitchforks down before someone gets hurt.

Terry Pratchett once said in an interview that you’ve got to keep an eye on your secondary characters, or they’ll take over the show.  Turn your back for five minutes and there they are, merrily rearranging the plot to suit themselves, the blighters, and generally making more work for the poor put-upon writer.

I thought I might avoid that with Trinity Moon, since I was working from a synopsis (a heretofore unheard-of event, I might add, which has proved helpful and frustrating in equal measure).  Everything’s chugging along nicely, and I come to an action scene where Gair throws a lock on Ne’er-do-well No. 1 and laying his sword across the fellow’s neck, threatens to cut his throat.

Whereupon the strangest thing happens.  Ne’er-do-well No. 1 takes a firm grip on My Hero’s family jewels and purrs, in a very feminine voice: “Not if I geld you first, Empire.”

Eh?  Where did she come from?

<scrolls through preceding paragraphs>

Nope.  No girls there.  WTF?

So I continue typing, to see where I will be taken, and suddenly she’s sitting cross-legged on the table, twirling her dagger through her fingers and eating my dates.  Gair’s dates.  Whatever.  The saucy minx.  She’s got backstory, she’s got attitude, she’s sensual and snarky and inordinately fond of knives, and she’s made herself right at home in the story without so much as a by-your-leave.

I’ve just been mugged by my own imagination.  And I didn’t feel a thing.

Anyone who’s ever owned – or been owned by – a pet has to face these decisions sooner or later.  This is the fourth time for me, and believe me it doesn’t get any easier with practice.

Knowing it’s the right thing to do helps a bit, but not nearly enough.  Gutted doesn’t even come close to how I feel.

I know, I know, it’s only a cat, but damn it, she was my friend.

Cleo, 15 Nov 1992 - 22 Dec 2009

Cooper Towers is under attack.

The enemy has taken control of the shed, and advance scouts have been making daring daylight raids across the patio for several days.   They wear no uniform, operating in plain-clothes, the better to blend in with the civilian population.   Modern defensive strategy is useless against this new insurgency.

Day 1: Elite operatives spotted setting up observation posts at high points around the garden.  Utilising local cover, the enemy scaled the feeder pole and dropped onto the seed tray.  After approximately 28 minutes, he base-jumped into the choisya bush and made good his escape.  Enemy tentatively identified as apodemus sylvaticus.

Enemy operative secures the forward observation post and reconnoitres the LZ

Day 2: The shed was taken, under cover of darkness.  Shed door frame shows signs of forcible entry.  No casualties except a 12.5kg sack of premium wild bird food.  Moved all provisions out of reach to force the insurgents to break cover in search of supplies.  Observed two low-level raiders at close quarters.  Stalemate.

Day 3: Aha!  They’re getting a bit cocky.  They’d established their barracks in a disused nestbox, and the guard let himself be seen.  I grabbed the box and removed it, but not quite quickly enough.  One of the enemy escaped via a daring leap onto the shelving unit, where he hid behind the hosepipe and watched as his two comrades were escorted out of the combat zone.  I have designated this particularly audacious combatant “Steve McQueen”.

Day 4: Requested reinforcements.  HQ sent in a highly-trained Counter-terrorist Assault Technician (CAT) which performed a thorough sweep of the combat zone, but the enemy was lying low.  No sightings reported.  CAT redeployed to other duties.

Day 5: All quiet on the western front.  No sightings, but picked up some high-frequency communications chatter.  Cryptographers are having no luck decoding it.

Day 6 (am): I opened the shed door this morning and noted that all traces of bird food on the floor had vanished, indicating that Agent McQueen is still at large.  Reconnaissance of the upper shelves found the little bugger sitting atop my gardening gloves watching me.  The enemy’s audacity is breathtaking.  Lightly armed and agile, they are superb edificeers, shinning up the wall ribs like lumberjacks up a Douglas fir.

Day 6 (pm): It is time to take the battle to the enemy.  I have formulated a Cunning Plan, a masterpiece of Baldrickian subtlety, which hinges on the enemy’s affinity for holes.  I have reinstated the nestbox, and this time I will place my hand over the hole when I remove it.  Take that, Steve McQueen!

The battle continues…

On Thursday, I travelled down to London to meet my agent and publisher.  This, I thought, would make everything official, and I would henceforth be able to call myself a Proper Author.

Despite hailing the one and only cabbie in London who *doesn’t* know where the Dickens House museum is, I arrived safely at Ian’s offices so we could get acquainted.  He apologised for his visitor’s chair, a chrome and leather contraption in which authors have been lost, never to be seen again, and we exchanged tales of how book collections outgrow their shelves and having climbed the walls begin to colonise every available flat surface in one’s home like some sort of literary fungus.

Then it was off to Orion House to meet the lovely Jo for lunch.  I was expecting the rest of the Gollancz team to be there.  I wasn’t expecting the Deputy CEO and the publishing director of Orion Books to tag along too.  Talk about wheeling out the big guns to impress the newbie!

But I needn’t have worried.  Everyone was remarkably human–sometimes the unpublished author, confronted with the shiny glass edifice of the modern multinational publishing conglomerate, forgets that behind the revolving doors are real people, drinking stale coffee and swearing at the photocopier, just like the rest of us.

So we ate and drank and chatted about this and that.  I made them laugh (and it didn’t sound forced at all) and they politely pretended not to notice when I dripped hoi-sin sauce on my lapel.  They offered ribald commentary on some of the agents I had submitted to–”I can’t believe she turned you down!” and “Oooh, dodged a bullet there!” and heaped praise on my book that sounded so sincere I had to let myself believe that it was.

Trying desperately hard to create a good impression, and conscious of the fact that I was wearing 3″ heels for the first time in two and a half years, I had eschewed wine for Diet Coke.  So imagine my horror when I went to the ladies’ afterwards and discovered that not only had my shirt come untucked, one of the buttons was undone.  Eek.

Then it was time for shaken hands and lovely-to-meet-yous.  In a flurry of kisses on the cheek, they were gone, off to cover meetings and whatnot.  Me, I tottered into Covent Garden and sought out the nearest pub.

I had survived my first literary lunch.  I should have felt different, somehow.  In a properly-ordered universe, I would have felt different, as the brown juvenile feathers were shed to reveal the shining white plumage of the grown-up author.  Instead I felt as if I had shared an end-of-term nosh-up with my uni study group (I know, I know, I never went to uni–bear with me, here).  If only I’d known how much fun it would be I wouldn’t have felt like throwing up since 5:30am.

So only one question remains.  Does this mean I am a proper author now?

To the 9-to-5.  The day job (members of the audience heave a collective sigh of relief – all two of them).

Today’s my last day at work.  After just shy of 21 years, a twinge of sadness is to be expected – you can’t work with people for that length of time and not develop some kind of friendship – but what’s really blown me sideways is the number of customers who’ve rung up, emailed, or sent embarrassingly large bouquets of flowers.

They’re either going to miss me an awful lot, or they’re really, really pleased to see the back of me.

The unsung ones, now quietly dropping off their respective perches and we never know anything about them until their obituary shows up in the newspaper. And you read it, and you think to yourself: “Bloody hell!” and sit there, quite stunned.

Freddie Spencer Chapman is one such. Worked behind enemy lines in the Malaya campaign of WWII, cheerfully blowing up the enemy with bamboo-and-gelignite bombs and inflicting so much damage with two comrades that the Japanese thought they were being taken on by 200 crack commandos. A life that, if it was fiction, would be dismissed as unbelievably far-fetched.

Read his obit, and I dare you not to be moved, inspired, uplifted, and also saddened that we don’t seem to make ‘em like that any more.

Quite a lot, actually.  A lot of to-ing and fro-ing, trying to find one that looks right, sounds right, balances well on a book cover and isn’t too hard to pronounce (so you don’t end up with lots of confused readers in the bookstore who want to buy your book but don’t know how to say your name and are too embarrassed to go and talk to the girl on the Customer Service counter in case they get it wrong and look like a plonker).

In the opinion of my agent, it is not dissimilar to the naming of cats.  I’ve always maintained that cats should be named something you wouldn’t be embarrassed to yell down the street at midnight to get the wretched thing to come home, and my subconscious immediately presented me with an image of a group of agents wandering around Bloomsbury trying to round up their authors after one of Gollancz’s legendary parties.

I’d originally picked Elizabeth Cooper as my pen-name, because I felt my real one didn’t exactly trip off the tongue.  It doesn’t seem to have hurt Conn Iggulden much, but there you go.  Anyway, my publisher was keen to go for something that balanced better on a cover, and we batted round some ideas.  We even tried playing the gender-ambiguity card for all it was worth, since research suggests that boys tend not to buy books written by girls.  Strange but true.

In the end, we decided that the rule book had been comprehensively trashed by the likes of Stephenie Meyer and Charlaine Harris, and that for fantasy authors female is the new black and Elspeth Cooper it would be.  Plus the foreign publishers loved it.  The name with which I have existed in a state of armed truce for some forty years, which I am reduced to spelling out over the telephone as echo-lima-sierra-papa-echo-tango-hotel only to have the person at the other end go “Um…”

But really, I don’t care, because in 2011 the name in gold-embossed lettering on that gorgeous cover over the thick hardback book will be *mine*.

…but a fortnight is a bloody long time to keep your lip zipped when you’re sitting on astonishing news like this.

Lest I get too big-headed about this, I shall let theBookseller.com tell the story:

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/98263-gollancz-signs-new-fantasy-series.html

Yes, that’s me she’s talking about.  Little old me who’s been scribbling away for mumblety-mumble years on a rag-tag collection of reporters’ notebooks,  A4 pads and the backs of old envelopes.  Who wrote the first draft of the opening chapter twelve years ago in a haze of rage and pain, and who wrote the entire siege of Chapterhouse in one sitting (read the book and you’ll understand what a big deal that was; go on, read it!) and bawled her eyes out as she killed off one of her favourite characters because It Had To Be Done.

Me.

As Nanny Ogg said, “Well I’ll be mogadored!“

That’s what the email said.  The email just received from my literary agent, currently on holiday somewhere hot with unreliable internet access.  The email that said my agent has received a bloody handsome offer to publish Songs of the Earth and the next two books in the Wild Hunt series.

Fuck.