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.

On Thursday I had a further phone call from that nice literary agent to see if I’d received the client agreement in the post. I know it doesn’t mean anything yet, in the grand scheme of things, but this is indeed A Step in the Right Direction.  On the way home from work I bought a bottle of bubbly to celebrate–I’d expected a real struggle to score an agent simply because so many have an entry in Writers & Artists that says “No fantasy, thanks”–and allowed it to go to my head for a little while.

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.

That’s what the literary agent who phoned me this afternoon said.  He’d thoroughly enjoyed reading my opening chapters, and could he see the rest, please?

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.

The first of my SAEs plopped through the letterbox yesterday.  I had a bit of an ohshit moment, and had to put it to one side until I’d remonstrated with myself and got my wibbles under control.

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…

New toys arrive tomorrow <bounce>!

It’s sad getting this excited over a humble laser printer, that stalwart of the office environment, scarred by coffee-cups and encrusted with dust.  But it’s mine, all mine.  My first laser printer.

I’ve managed perfectly well with inkjets over the years, but it occurred to me as I was prepping my submissions that maybe it didn’t quite set the right tone.  Didn’t look professional.  I sneaked a few cover letters on the Xerox multifunction thingy at work, on bright white 100gsm paper and was horrified how shabby my synopsis-and-three looked in comparison.  Any agent I had the temerity to send it to would promptly consign it (at arm’s length, by the smallest possible corner, pinky extended) to the nearest recycling box.

So over hubby’s protestations of “But we’ve already got two printers–what do we need another one for?” to which I replied “But you’ve already got a motorbike–what do you need a Fender Telecaster for?” (which left him so speechless I took it as a victory) I ordered a basic mono laser printer.

It’s black.

It comes tomorrow.

It’ll have that cool, sleek, new electronics smell.  There’ll be a New Toner Cartridge dance to do and a manual to read and buttons to press.

Then I’ll print out lovely black letters on crisp white sheets and they’ll be so gorgeous that I cannot possibly fail to make a good impression.  Let’s face it, *anything* that gives one a better chance of being read by these august personages, the Gatekeepers of Publication, has got to be a good thing.

Plus it’ll give the cat a box to play in so she’ll stop pestering me when she’s bored and I won’t have to explain to customers on my working from home days what that whinging noise is in the background.

It’s done.

The final edit on Songs, that is.  I should be relieved, elated, but I’m not.  It feels like an anticlimax (there’s that word again).  I was expecting some great rush of triumph as I hit the final full stop and clicked “Save”.  Instead all I got was “Jeez, is that the time?”

So what am I going to do with my evenings and weekends now?  I have been living and breathing this book for the last year; my husband looks up when I enter the room and asks “Who are you again?”

But that’s me.  When I’m writing, I am totally immersed in it, saturated by it.  I think about it on the loo, in the bath, on the train, in the five minutes between phone calls at work when I really should be digesting the latest epistle from HMRC.  Now that it’s done, I find myself vaguely bereft.

My reading has been sadly neglected.  Richard K Morgan and Joe Abercrombie stare reproachfully at me from the shelves where their new books have been sitting, unopened, since I bought them the day they came out.  Unread books in this house are an Abomination, and I have two dozen Abominations in the study.  I’m afraid to go in there.

So I’ve started querying agents.  I’ve been writing stories since I could write, pretty much.  Started aiming at novel-length fiction when I was a teenager.  I read once that the first million words is just practice and if that’s the case, I’ve served my apprenticeship and then some.  Let’s see if we can’t make all this hard work worthwhile.