Naturally, as Gollancz are still working the kinks out of their schedule for the first half of next year, there’s still an “ish” factor here, so I won’t be revealing the date until I know it’s firm, but it does mean that the countdown to launch has begun.

This is becoming alarmingly real.

Songs is moving from an electronic file wrapped up in a dream to something solid.  Tangible.  A physical object that I can hold in my hands and inhale that “new book” smell.  I cannot tell you how much that excites me.

It also terrifies me.  In a couple of months my editor will crack her knuckles and set to, and I imagine the process of delivering a final typescript that she’s happy with will be rather like childbirth.  There will be sweat and swearing and probably tears, and if things get really rough there might even be a little blood, before the finished book is smacked on the bum, weighed, measured, and packed off to production.

In the meantime, I’m not exactly sitting on my hands here.  I still have Trinity Moon to finish.  Although progress has been slow of late due to a variety of health-related issues (which also explain the infrequent updates to this blog), the strands are coming together into what I think will be a satisfying whole.  A bit darker than Songs in several ways.  A bit more menacing.

Watch this space.

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  Everyone was remarkably human–sometimes the unpublished author, confronted with the shiny glass edifice of the modern multinational publishing conglomerate, forgets that behind the revolving doors are real people,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?

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*.

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!“

Fuck.

Then I had to knuckle down to the serious business of getting together a synopsis for Trinity.  First draft down, just a little tweaking to do; it’s a tad longer than I’d like.

The omens are that I’ve left myself a bit of a mountain to climb in order to wrap everything up in Book 3.  Forcing myself to focus on the plotting of Trinity and what I could and could not do with the characters and timescales has thrown into sharp relief just how ambitious I’ve been here, without me even realising it.  The curse of the pantser.

Pruning will have to occur, no doubt about it, but how much?  And where?  Do I go all bonsai on its donkey and force it to fit, or do I follow my organic instincts and let the tree be free, man?  I’m not sure yet.  My brain is still full of Bollinger.  Ask me again in the morning, when my brain will no doubt be full of Nurofen.

Hmm, let me think about that for a moment…

I carry a USB memory stick with my ms on it.  All the time.  Yes, I am that sad.  Naturally I emailed the whole kaboodle off to the agent so fast I think his head’s still spinning.

He’s going on holiday on Friday, and said he’d try to read it all by then and get back to me, or failing that when he returns mid-September.

Colour me chuffed.

Rejection, obviously, but what sort?  Would there be an encouraging note, or just a form letter?  Gingerly, I opened the envelope.

Compliments slip, with two boxes to tick.  One saying “You twerp, we don’t handle this kind of fiction” or words to that effect, and the other saying “Thanks but not at this time”.

Neither was ticked.  Instead, the agent had written “Well written, but my list is full.”

I was quite obscenely chuffed with that.  Even if it meant “Well written, but not well written enough to blow my socks off and make me jam you into my list pronto even if it is already bursting at the seams”, I took that hand-written comment as a sign that I’m on the right track, and spent the rest of the day with a daft grin pasted on my face.  Little things, etc.

Ah-one, ah-two, sing along if you know the words, ah-one, two, three, four:

#You’ve got to

#Ac-cent-uate the positive

#E-lim-inate the negative…