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how i didn’t get a literary agent*

* until I did

why did I want an agent?

Self publishing is really popular and I get why. The traditional route to having your book in your sweaty little mitt is long, fraught and paved with having your heart pulled out and tango-ed on repeatedly by people, who for the most part, can’t even be arsed to call you back.

Despite this, I wanted to go trad because from what I could see from the indie authors I knew, the marketing side of that path was a whole second job. The notion of putting my pen down only to have to then source a decent cover, get the book produced professionally and perma-hustle my butt-off to sell it just didn’t appeal at the time. For those of you doing this my hat is in the off position.

pitches

To hook an agent, I needed an elevator pitch sharp enough to slice a rock. Ever the overachiever, I concocted three: a rapid-fire version for if I was stuck in a lift with Carmichael from Umbrella Academy, a mid-length one, and a longish one for the fabled moment when your agent/victim actually wants-to-know-more.

Cue me, muttering my pitches to myself at writers’ conferences, loitering by hotel elevators with a spanner. Spoiler: I never pitched to an agent in person.

yes, Carmichael. He’s basically a goldfish

PitMad & PitReallyFreakingFurious

So then there was #PitMad. Once every three months writers pitched their novels to actual human agents on the hellscape formerly known as Twitter. Essentially, the brief was to post a 280 character pitch for your meisterwerk including the appropriate hashtags. e.g.

#PitMad #HA Persuasion: Bridgerton x La La Land- Yrs ago, Anne let Wentworth go. Now he’s back—rich, successful, & still wounded. Can she win him back, or has she lost him forever? A slow-burn, second-chance romance of longing & regret. #HistoricalRomance

All participants would retweet the ones they liked (not their own obvs) and the literary gods would ‘like’ any pitch that caught their eye for follow up. I did this a lot of times and yeah, you guessed it, crickets.

what worked for me:

In the end, I realised that the odds were so stacked against writers that the only way of shortening them was to become mechanical and relentless about submitting my manuscript to people.

I bought a copy of the Writer’s and Artists Year Book and with the help of my glamorous assistant/wife scraped all the agents that didn’t hate on fantasy into a big-ass spreadsheet, rated them by how much of a fit the agencies might be (size, focus, vibe et. al.) and then sorted the heck out of them. Then the real fun began.

Ah, agent websites. To quote Kahn Noonien Singh, quoting Melville: “[To] the last, I will grapple with thee from Hell’s heart, I stab at thee! For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee!”

Okay. Maybe I’m overreacting a teensy bit, but while agency pages will all feature monochrome, smiley headshots of their agents, the most useful information i.e. what genres they read, likes/dislikes and their submission statuses is always buried behind an extra click or two. When sifting through hundreds of names, this gets old really quickly .

Suitably informed, I added the appropriate names into my spreadsheet and vroom, vroom it was submission time, baby.

submissions

submit to the ones you’re most interested in first in batches of 10. That way, if you do get a partial or full manuscript request you can let the other agents know, then gasp and chuckle with mirth as they fall over themselves to get in contact with you. Shoe’s on the other foot now, eh, mother-fathers!

tune your comps. These are your comparative books, the titles in your query letter that you’re comparing your manuscript to. Pick recent books, not Frankenstein x Bridget Jones (tempting though it is).

tune your synopsis and have multiple lengths of it .Is it annoying that every agency has a pet length and format? Yes. Is it necessary to stick to them? Absolutely. Remember you have to tell the whole story from start to finish. This is the time to kill-your-darling subplots.

tune your pitch letter and have different versions of that too. This is where all that practice you had pretending you were in a broken lift with Forrest J Ackerman comes in.

grow a thick skin over your robotic heart. Most of the time you aren’t going to hear back (and if you do chances are it’ll be a rejection.) Each ‘no’ earns a silent tear, a spreadsheet update, and another submission. Remember this is a numbers game and you only have to get lucky once.

keep up-to-date

The agency universe is a small one, but is in a state of constant flux. Check regularly to make sure that the list you’re working from is still valid. Agents move agencies. Agencies change names and they close and new ones open. In my case, the agency I was lucky enough to end up with (Greyhound Literary), didn’t even exist in its current form when I started querying.

never give up, never surrender

Years ago, the standard wisdom seemed to be if you had tried ten agencies and no-one was biting then you probably needed to write another book. Not anymore. The agents I met as part of my MFA advised to keep going until you run out of agencies. Publishing is fragmented, and marketing-driven, so persistence is key.

Everything I learned about querying, I learned from Galaxy Quest

so what have we learned?

Querying is hard mentally and emotionally.

On balance, it’s probably just as much work as self-publishing and you have to be capable of dealing with a lot of rejection up front, but on the flip side you’ll then have someone in your corner who has not only bought into your current book, but you as a writer and be with you for the long haul

It is a lot of work, but never forget, you only have to be lucky once.

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fac 40: temptation by joy division: released 09.09.82

the cover of fac 40: temptation

Today marks the forty-second anniversary of Joy Division’s genre defying brutalist ur-techno torch song.

Released two years after the departure of drummer Stephen Morris and the hasty drafting in of Manchester scene-stealer and A Certain Ratio stalwart Donald Johnson, this single was the first to sketch out the path that they were to follow over the next decade, from purveyors of icy post-punk to stream of consciousness disco-dipshits.

Fac 40 was the first artifact that showed how the technicians at the heart of this tight-lipped foursome could bend their obsessions with early Kraftwerk, Philadelphia disco and the burgeoning NY club scene into shapes that fit with their own post-industrial motorik aesthetic.

Their first American tour, infamous in some respects because of its effects on frontman Curtis’s health was where the proverbial boys-in-long-coats loosened their skinny ties and learned to feel the groove.

To hear (then) freshly minted keyboard and guitar wizard Bernard Sumner tell it: “when we were in the US that first time … it was like we dropped into this parallel universe where it was okay to have fun. Where it was okay to stay up all night dancing and just messing about”

Curtis has said much the same: “People always think of us as this urban decay, punk outfit, but I was always into new things. I don’t care about genres, I’m into what I’m into. Like, I was at Paradise Garage one night with Barney and it was as though we could feel the ground shifting under our feet; not just the sound of something new; but the sense that there were new ways of being yourself out there, just waiting for us to find them.

As soon as we got back off tour we tried to accent more of that rhythmic side that was at the heart of what we did. With Stephen gone it gave us the freedom to experiment more and Temptation came out of that. You can hear some of Donald’s influence in there too: he was a crucial part of the way our sound started evolving.”

Bass player Peter Hook characterises the change of direction in less existential terms: “at the back of my mind was the thought that if we made dance records we’d probably cop off with more women.”

This aside, it’s difficult to say which were behind the abrupt volte-face in both the tone and concerns of Curtis’s lyrics. Gone is the existential doom and stasis of their third album Paradise. The clouds are clearing, the sun coming up. This is the sound of a heartbroken J.G. Ballard being driven to an all-nighter by Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider.

Surprisingly, Curtis himself revealed some of the reasons behind these changes: “that first tour. Leaving behind England, and I suppose more specifically, Manchester, gave me some space. It gave me the time I needed to sort out some difficult bits of my personal life. I was in a bad place. Ultimately, it took years.”

Joy Division’s subsequent movements are well documented elsewhere. The hop from Temptation to the joyous euro-disco of 1983’s The Terminal Beach was not far. The latter saw Joy Division dominate not only the UK charts but also TV screens. Their quixotic and electric (in all senses of the word) live performances on TOTP, transforming Curtis into an unconventional teen heart-throb who graced the cover of Smash Hits multiple times.

Temptation was the track that hinted that all this was coming to pass, prefiguring the Madchester gold rush (a cultural moment which, despite ushering in, the band always viewed with the avuncular amusement of disco dad royalty). Meanwhile The Terminal Beach’s success bankrolled everything from Factory Records’ journey from marxist agitprop upstart to hegemonic multi-media brand and the Happy Monday’s tragedy tinged fourth album Stop Me and Buy Me One.

Was something lost in all this success? Perhaps.

For all those old post-punks screaming sell-out, one need look no further than the fact that Joy Division mk II (now consisting of Sumner and Curtis and assorted session musicians) are now on constant tour, converted into animatronic versions of their twenty-year-old selves, grinding out pitch-perfect versions of Love Will Tear Us Apart three times a week.

But as one-time Factory boss turned BBC Director General Anthony H. Wilson says of his protégés, “Success is its own prison, darling, but art is always art.”

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manilow magic

I think my fascination with weird spaces began as an introverted, book-licking kid, reading about the Bermuda Triangle in the pages of Unexplained magazine. Today, the Triangle might be more famous for the cheese deluxe of the Barry Manilow song, but back then it was a terrifying region where the certainties of Cartesian space and time seemed to falter, with planes, boats, and people entering it only to vanish mysteriously. (Most notably, Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind even hinted cheekily at their fate.)

Francois Truffaut shuts his eyes and thinks of the cheque in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind

As I grew older, I discovered these haunted landscapes in the pages of the “old weird” e.g. Machen’s The White People, Blackwood’s The Willows, and later, the deeply ambiguous Québécois outback of Atwood’s Surfacing. These uncertain, liminal spaces got under my skin, needling away, stinging like a hangnail.

This obsession only intensified when I came across Vandermeer’s Annihilation and the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic. In both of these novels, the weird landscape is the driver of the narrative. Roadside Picnic, set in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, explores the aftermath of an alien visit that has left behind mysterious “Zones” filled with gravitational anomalies, toxic hazards, and sinister locales where the shadows “look wrong”.

In the face of the economic exigencies of the late-period Soviet Union, human “Stalkers” sneak into these zones to make off with little-understood, abandoned technology to sell for mis-use on the black market. Red Schuhart, the novel’s hard-bitten protagonist, likens their actions to “children playing with matches in a house on fire. The Zone is the fire, and we’re too blind to see the danger.”

The Strugatskys’ Zone is an eruption into human reality, of what Lovecraft (everybody’s favourite tomb-faced, racist bell-end) would have called “the outside”. Consequently, the novel is much less about aliens than it is about the limits of human knowledge and subsequently the human condition.

Similarly, in Vandermeer’s Annihilation, Area X is a weird space that infiltrates human power structures, replacing them with a mycological plane reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs”. As its protagonist (known only as the Biologist) discovers, Area X is a place where the human experience is interrogated, undermined, and ultimately transformed.

What keeps me coming back to these books is their conjuring of non-human presence as absence, evoking Mark Fisher’s definition of the eerie as, “the sensation of … something present where there should be nothing.” In Roadside Picnic, this absence is the unresolved mystery of the aliens’ purpose. Some believe that Earth was just a stopover, humanity unnoticed, while others think the aliens never left, still lurking invisibly in the Zone: the mutations in Stalkers’ children hinting at, perhaps, a slow-motion genetic invasion.

Similarly, Vandermeer’s Area X is a metaphor for the climate crisis, a rebellion against humanity and capitalism by a Gaian hyper-entity. The Biologist’s journey through Area X, where the landscape observes her as much as she observes it, suggesting a move beyond the human towards a type of becoming-animal futurity.

These books resonate now more than ever, I think, because the early 21st century is a profoundly weird and eerie space. The climate crisis, flame-throwing cyber-dogs and generative AI have woven a sense of the uncanny, of presence-where-we-know-there-is-only-absence, into the texture of everyday life. The Bermuda Triangle, the Zone, and Area X have swallowed the world, making our sense of the human feel contingent and in urgent need of reinvention.

The Maz-master is a man at ease with his uncanny carpet choices

As Bazzer the Mazzer once sang,

“Bermuda Triangle, makes people disappear.

Bermuda Triangle, don’t go too near.”

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High on hauntology: brexit

Hauntology is a type of cultural archaeology these days, given that its moment has almost certainly passed. It’s perhaps unfairly characterised as the whining sound emitted by Gen-Xers as our brief moment of cultural hegemony (comic book movies/post-modernism) is squeezed between the more demographically generous buttocks of millennials and baby boomers.

But then we were always the forgotten generation. The latchkey, step-parented kids who watched too much TV, stayed up too late, ate too much junk food, and swallowed way too many drugs.

As much as Simon Reynolds might (reasonably) reject this as a “lazy” analysis in Ghosts of My Life, hauntology, at least in its Fisherian incarnation, does have something of the quality of an old man declaring war on the moon. If nothing else, the emergence of Grime and UK Drill rebutted Fisher’s notion that Jungle was the last revolutionary pop music pretty much at the very moment that he was asserting it.

But while the hauntological cultural moment may have passed, daily struggles with the consequences of Brexit seem to suggest that we are very much living at its political apex.

This is because if there was one cultural frame for the whole Brexit project, it was the one of a Britain isolated from a fascist Europe, fighting as the plucky underdog and winning the Second World War single-handedly.

Indeed (and as Rafael Behr has pointed out), to listen to Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Paul Dacre, and Boris Johnson, one could be mistaken in thinking that it was they who stormed the beaches on D-Day, completed years of national service, or presided over the sunset of the Raj in India… except… they are, of course, too young to have done any of this.

Enough said.

In place of lived experiences of WWII, these ontological jokers draw on a national ur-myth whose foundational canon would have been served up regularly during their long summer respites from the Winchester College bullies: Dad’s Army, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, and countless 1970s WWII action movies. (Although Farage has more in common with Basil Fawlty in “The Germans”).

All of these gesture towards a Britain that never existed. A cosy “cor-blimey guv” Albion of officers and men, where the little people knew their places. A Blighty standing toe-to-toe “alone” against Fascism which had yet to suffer post-war decline or post-imperial embarrassment. (Dog whistle alert: is it possible that part of this myth’s appeal is the sense that this Britain was so much whiter?)

Come along now, chaps.

There is something decidedly hauntological about all of this. The way in which a phantasmal and retrospective political and cultural movement has choked the life out of the pro-European futures articulated in the political and musical ground zero of post-punk (Empires and Dance, Europe After the Rain, Europa and the Pirate Twins); an insistence that the only way forward is a ghoulish simulacrum of Britain’s finest hour. It’s hard not to see echoes of Fisher’s assertion in Capitalist Realism that the only way forwards is backwards.

It is worth remembering perhaps, the Conservative Party’s original antipathy for the EU has its roots in a deep suspicion of the demands of the European Social Chapter and a fear that this was introducing “socialism through the back door”. (Reverse echoes of Truss’s paranoid anxieties of invisible supra-sovereign forces working to undermine a national government?)

Allying this dislike to the screen memory of a Greater Britain, spitfires over Dover, Rule Britannia, and the “good” empire, resulted in a toxically hallucinogenic brew that the Conservative Party was forced to ingest as some sort of ayahuascan post-imperial hangover cure.

JRM has some really good shit.

Watch high priest Rees-Mogg’s eyes rotate behind his wire-rimmed spectacles like that snake from The Jungle Book. Witness lonely Gove’s cocaine jitterbug or Truss’s dead-eyed X-Files-lite rants about the deep state.

Retro’s opioid hit is, of course, that it gives the comfort of what we’ve known before, a Freudian return to the womb/nanny, along with a convenient yardstick that renders all other political practices inadequate by comparison.

It created a subjective/objective purity test where outspoken beliefs in Brexit dividends were more important than any rational concerns rooted in its evidential costs. A position which provided the pretext for Johnson to purge his party of anyone other than the faithful.

Like HAL9000 in Kubrick’s 2001, the delicious cognitive dissonance from this hauntological hit caused a psychic crisis which sent our ruling elite scurrying for higher and higher doses of post-truth (e.g. legislating to make Rwanda a safe country, an obsession with getting out from under “the yoke” of the European Court of Justice.) It’s monkey which they have, as yet, been unable to shake off.

“Open a trade border in the Irish Sea, HAL” “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that”

The predictable paranoid comedown from all of this has meant the right have already started on the betrayal narratives: Brexit wasn’t done properly or has been sabotaged by fifth columnists/deep state forces. Ignoring, of course, that the Brexit that they espoused was a construct that would never have been achievable in any of the political contexts from which the UK was starting.

Is there any escape from this toxic nostalgia? Currently, it is hard not to agree with Fisher’s grim analysis that we are trapped within a mirrored box of our own making. As time passes and the veterans and survivors of World War II are gathered up, all we see are reflections of reflections.

To paraphrase Orwell’s O’Brien: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine Nigel Farage driving around in a jeep on the beaches of Normandy forever”. Perhaps, all we can do is hope that as the hauntological cultural moment has passed, then perhaps soon its political variant will do the same.

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So who needs an MFA anyway?

What is an MFA?

It’s a Master of Fine Arts, so a form of post-graduate degree. The one that I studied was in creative writing, something which over recent years has become a favoured form of post-grad qualification if you’re in the business of writing.

If I’m a writer then, do I need one of these?

No, you really don’t need one.

So why did you want one?

My work was feeling a bit stagnant. Plus, I had a novel on submission to agents and no-one was calling back, so I needed the proverbial kick up the backside to start my next project. Oh and there was a pandemic on, did I mention that?

No, but I’ve spent the intervening time rocking back and forth in a foetal position pretending it never happened. So, how does this MFA thing work?

Depends on whether you’re enrolling full time or a part time. As a part time student, my course was two years long. The first year was focused on weekly lectures, reading, essays and craft. The second was a 40,000 word dissertation which is effectively a novel excerpt.

What are other common reasons for studying one?

There’s an assumption, I think, that you might need one if you ever wanted to teach creative writing (untrue). Secondly, there’s the hope (often sub-textually hinted at in the glossy brochures) that enrolling on one of these courses might help your career, either by aiding you in snagging an agent or a book deal. (This too, is pretty much a load of old cobblers).

Finally and most importantly perhaps, there’s writerly validation. If you’re putting your stuff out there on an even semi-regular basis, it’s easy to become prey to the creeping suspicion that you might not be any good. Being around a group of generous well-read writer types can really help you feel like a proper writer.

Are you a proper writer?

Why’d you have to go and ask that?

Okay, so what were the good things about the MFA?

One of the most useful things was the encouragement to take my work seriously. By this, I don’t mean shaking my fist at a world that refuses to understand my genius. Rather, I mean understanding more about other writers and the contemporary ‘context’ and seeing how you fit into it (or not).

Doing this sometimes meant writing essays about your own unfinished work, which is totally odd and arguably self-indulgent as a practice but, which was weirdly useful. It gives you context, distance and the ability to assess your work as a piece of ‘literature’. (I know, right?)

Secondly, there was the amount of required reading. Having an excuse to sit around and read was a real luxury, not to mention being liberated from the torment of choosing what to read next.

Anything else?

The best thing was probably the the aspect of the course that the faculty had the least control over, that is: the other people on it. Mixing writers together often has unpredictable results. At one end of the spectrum are the groups presided over by bores who wang on endlessly about manuscript format and at the other are the Milfords I’ve attended where most attendees are generous with their thoughts and feedback.

Thankfully, our MFA squad was totally the latter rather than the former, to the extent that even after a couple of years of post-graduation we’re in still in contact and reading each other’s work.

Ok, enough with this rosy glow BS , how did it suck?

Well, the obvious thing was how expensive it was. And it was hard to shake the feeling that once you’d ponied up your fees the university weren’t that bothered about much else.

The second year was a bit disappointing too. While the first focused on some great lectures, craft and reading, the following one was a much more isolated affair, with each of us toiling away on our dissertations/manuscripts with our respective supervisors.

The only break from this was a ‘summer term’ which consisted, for the most part, of an academic circle jerk wherein members of the faculty interviewed each other about their upcoming books.

So was it worth it?

I suppose if I consider this in purely concrete terms it was a failure. Did it help me land and agent? No. Did it help me get a book deal? Nuh-uh.

This is going to be one of those, “it’s about the journey,” things isn’t it?

But it is is an about the journey thing, my dude. I’m pretty certain I’m a better writer because of the books that I read (even the ones I disliked) and the essays I wrote. Most importantly, I’m probably a better writer because of the feedback I gave and received from my fellow students. Looking back, that’s ultimately what made it worth the time and money.

Fair enough. Are you a proper writer now then?

FFS.

new story at egg+frog

my short story The Mating Ritual of the 3D Printer is now up at the excellent egg+frog a new journal of British writing. Read it here:

bsfa best fiction long-list: good vibrations

I’m delighted to announce that my story good vibrations, published by the mechanics institute review last year has been long-listed for the bsfa best short fiction award.

bsfa logo

You can read the story here and see the full longlist here.

hulk is tired

I’m not exactly sure when it happened, but I think I might be a bit bored with speculative fiction. Or perhaps, speculative fiction is a bit bored with me.

Could it be that we’ve just been seeing too much of each other during lockdowns one through three?

“It’s not you, it’s me,” spec-fic might say on our regular date night held in the corner of a friendly tavern (built beneath the shadow of towering rocket-ship).

Certainly, I seem to have read a lot of speculative fiction lately that simply moves the genre furniture around the house rather than adding a new wing (or preferably) trap-door to it.

It’s a thought that reminds me a little of what Robert Eaglestone thinks is genre’s birth defect. For him, literary fiction is really where it’s at.

“It says everything,” he says. (Which is the whole point apparently.)

From his perspective, genre fiction, too-often, is only ever talking to and about itself.

And while I think this observation does articulate some of my own weariness, how to square this with his rather contradictory special pleading for lit-fic itself, which he regards as a non-generic type of writing whose tendency to be in conversation with its own history is validation of its uniqueness rather than a flaw.

As an aside, I wonder if beneath some of the slightly sniffy attitudes expressed towards spec-fic in literary circles lies the fact that it often sells a lot better than literary fiction.

Having all that filthy lucre smeared over your tentacles means that genre
cannot be art at all, rather it is something commercial, hybridised and
degraded. That said, Dickens and Cervantes both turned out contemporary
best-sellers and you can’t get much more canon than little Davy Copperfield or the Madman of La Mancha. (It’s possible then, that perhaps critics will even regard Stephen King a little more kindly in a hundred year’s time.)

So, I’m not entirely sure where this slightly circular and self-indulgent post has got me.

Perhaps, I should start seeing other genres?

I’ll be honest about it with speculative fiction. We’ll go to the usual place on date night, drink half a bottle of chianti and work out some ground rules. Without them, in this sort of situation, someone will always get hurt. (Most probably be me.)

Or perhaps, after all, it really is just as the picture below says: Hulk is tired and Hulk should have a nap.

Image of the hulk sleeping. “Hulk is tired.” He says, “Hulk will sleep and everything that has made Hulk tired will change”
Hulk is really tired.

autonomicon

autonomicon is a simple bot inspired by Alan Trotter and Allison Parrish’s work that generates Lovecraftian automatic writing by pulling random snippets from an online resource storing Lovecraft’s corpus and splicing it together with words suggested by a simple statistical API.

To use just click the ’Summon’, button to get the next word from the bot or select one of the word tiles to add your own choices into the mix. The algorithm determines which words are the most likely to follow the last word displayed (the numbers beneath them are a measure of probable occurrence).