Monday 27 May 2013

Have you been on a theatre tour?

Afternoon gang,

It's been a while I know but now I'm back. Forgiven? Cool.

Lots going on here at HB towers. We went to The Grand yesterday for a free tour with one of our nieces. Here's the twist. They'd made a mistake with the time and the chap had left. Oops. But about a dozen folk turned up wanting a tour. So a volunteer who just happened to be there for a rehearsal of Carrie's War stepped in and did an impromptu tour. Full marks to him. We got to go on the stage, underneath to the dressing rooms, learned about the history etc and it was very interesting. Needless to say elements of the tour will feature in my upcoming book.

Quick blog traffic update. 7116 views from countries including Sweden, Germany, Latvia, Hungary and Malaysia. I've also done 156 posts!

Anyway, this is another brief post in my ongoing agent adventures series. Last time I'd received my first rejection letter from Random House. That was May 29th.  July 10th brought rejection from Transworld the reason being "there's too much out there" but despite this they said "it was an enjoyable read, your style is accessible and you have a good eye for detail."

July 23rd was marked by rejection from Headline. Marion Donaldson, editor, said "I enjoyed the novel and I think Jamie writes well, but in the end I didn't love it quite enough to want to make you an offer."

My agent, Vivien, went on holiday then and returned in august. August 28th brought rejection from Little Brown. The following weeks saw rejection from Orion and Piatkus.

By this point Vivien felt she'd exhausted all avenues and just like that the dream was over. From April where they had asked to see the book, signing with the agency in May, by the end of August apparently Playground Cool, my debut novel, my MA book, was not up to scratch.

It hit me quite hard but I was convinced it was easily fixed. Book two would stun everyone, Vivien would sell it and I would be back on track. I was very wrong and I didn't react well.

More next time...

Saturday 4 May 2013

My wife the movie star

Afternoon gang,

It's been a strange day so far. The wife is doing a 12 hour stint at work. But not because of anything work related. She's supervising a film crew who are there for the day. Knowing my wife, I'm already anticipating her being in the film and the whole thing snowballing.

Anyway, I've done very little so far. Earlier I endured Piranha DD. Great if you like loads of naked wet chicks running about being eaten by giant piranhas, not great if you've any interests beyond this. Still, I sat through it.

My ongoing project to transfer all my CDs to my hard drive plods on. But there's still about 250 to go.

I've also cleaned a bit of my cooker which is a miserable task.

Which all means no promo or writing has taken place. In fact I haven't written a damn thing for weeks. Until last night! I was about to bung a pizza in the oven about 1am. I put the oven on and spotted a strand of the wife's hair on the floor. I picked it up wondering how on earth it had got there and bang, I grabbed the nearest pen and scribbled a scene on the back of a credit card offer letter from Virgin.

The point being that you can never tell when an idea will pop into your head but that scene has got me thinking which usually means I'll start doing something soon. But until then feel free to keep buying my books as a motivator.

Right, I'm off to clean a bit more of the cooker before tea. Until next time.