craft – myelectriceye

this is not a newsletter*

*Oh yes, it is.

About fifteen years ago, I was in mid-town Manhattan standing in the monolithic Barnes and Noble on Fifth Avenue. I’d not long had my first short story published. I’d just bought a copy of Michael Chabon’s wonderful Kavalier and Clay and I remember, idly daydreaming that my own book might be in that book store one day (although at this point, I hadn’t written anything much longer than a shopping list.)

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon | Goodreads — If you haven’t read this … then you probably should.

Weeeell. I’m as statistically sure as I can be (without getting actual documentary evidence) that that has now happened.

Achievement unlocked.

So, The Lighthouse at the End of the World, has been out in the world for about three weeks at this point. As you might expect, this is a strange and (mostly) wonderful thing. I think, I’m just about beginning to get my head around it.

At the very least, the next time I’m at a literary cocktail party (of which I attend oh-so-very-many) and someone asks, “have I read anything of yours?” I can just point them at Barnes & Noble or Waterstones.

When the book came out in the US at the end of March, initially, it felt a little abstract. I knew this thing was out there, a stack of papery objects with my name on, about three-thousand miles away on the other side of an ocean. It was a slightly unreal, almost uneasy, feeling.

Then, the managing editor at Titan wrote to me, to tell me that The Lighthouse at the End of the World had been selected by Barnes and Noble as their speculative fiction pick for April.

A graphic advertising The Lighthouse at the End of the World as Barnes and Noble's speculative fiction pick for April 2026

Publishers are at pains to keep this sort of information completely under wraps, so the cheeky sods at Titan had kept this secret until the day after the US release. To say I nearly fell off my chair is an understatement.

Even so, it did still feel oddly academic until a day later, when I was queuing in the local Londis to buy a pint of milk. A friend of mine based in LA sent me a photo of my weird little tome sitting in the front window in one of Barnes and Noble’s Hollywood bookstores. There it is in the picture below, third row down.

If you’re a mouthy kid from Tooting (and I am), that is a pretty surreal moment.

Window display at the B&N in The Plaza, LA

So, the last three weeks have seen me trying to keep up with publication day without totally losing my shit:

An interview with Jim Mcleod at Ginger Nuts of Horror. Despite its brilliantly facetious name, this is a really cool site that takes its genre fiction (not too) seriously.
A guest post on the subject of Monsters at the Barnes and Noble reads blog.
Appearing at Super Relaxed Fantasy Club in London on 14th April. This is a very friendly meet-up for London-based fantasy fans and happens on the second Tuesday of each month at the Star of Kings pub near Kings Cross. Events are advertised on this Facebook group and consist of a couple of authors doing readings and interviews. The vibe is very low-key and friendly, I really can’t recommend it enough, if you happen to be in the area.
A conversation with Derek Tyler Attico for the Soul of the Story podcast on the SyFy Sistas YouTube Channel. Derek is a lovely person who I met at Worldcon a couple of years ago. He’s a consummate podcast host, brilliant writer in his own right and a pretty passionate Star Trek fan to boot. (He wrote The Autobiography of Benjamin Sisko for Titan).
In addition, I’ll be appearing at MCM Comic Con in London on Saturday 23rd May @ 2pm on the Debut Author Experience panel. Do come along and say hi, if you happen to be at the event. I was at this last year with my daughter as a punter and so getting to be on a panel here is amazing, strange and humbling all at the same time.

Generally, I’ve been steering well clear of reviews. Not because I’m an ego-crazed narcissist tyrant who doesn’t want feedback, (does two out of three count?) Rather, I really don’t need any extra brain-weevils in addition to the ones I’ve been blessed with kicking around in my head while I’m writing.

That said, here are a couple that my agent has cast in my direction.

Generally, I’ve been delighted with the book’s reception and Mcleod’s conclusion that “this is British speculative fiction doing something different” is the sort of capsule review that I want tattooed on my forehead.

It’s odd now to think back to all that time ago when I was in Manhattan. I hung around Brooklyn hoping to bump into Paul Auster doing a cigar run. Alas, that will never happen now, but at least I might be in the same bookshop as him. And that feels like something to celebrate.

My debut fantasy novel, The Lighthouse at the End of the World, the first in the Cities of the Drift series is published by Titan Books. You can purchase it here.

cover story

One of the things that is true for most of the writer-types I know, is that we care quite a lot about the covers that wrap our words. I mean, stating it now, it seems totally freakingly obvious, but that old saw about “not judging a book by its cover” suggests that if you are the-sort-of-person-who-does-care-about-that-sort-of-thing then perhaps you might be a bit superficial.

Okay then …

I am a lot superficial.

Looking over my contract with Titan Books I saw that it promised that I’d be “consulted” on the cover for Lighthouse at the End of the World, although “consulted” does feel rather like a weasel word which might shield any number of sins.

Over the years, I have met writers with cover horror stories to tell. Covers that were so anathema to their original intent that recalling them still brings salty tears to their sweet, sweet eyes.

Equally, I am aware that we writers (present company accepted obvs) can be an egotistical bunch of awkwards who feel that nothing short of gold leaf and vegan leather are suitable containers for our genius. So, it was a nice surprise to get a note from my editor last month to say that he would be sending over a few potential covers for consideration. (This is actually my first rodeo – as the t-shirt says so I wasn’t sure what to expect.)

The four options that materialised in my inbox a couple of days later were all brilliant in their own ways and each one thrust a sturdy finger into the eye of the all too common contemporary practice of asking AI to puke up some generic bollocks with wizards on it. (I do appreciate that I am privileged in this regard, but come on people!)

I’m happy to say that the process of going through them was incredibly consultative with a lot of back and forth between me, my agent, my editor and the design team, to determine which would work best. Once that choice was made we went through a few iterations to get it was just right.

And so I’m very pleased to be able to share the final version in all its glory, as revealed on the ReactormagSFF site on the 30th April, along with a neat one sentence pitch:

Enter a London like no other in this fast-paced, captivating fantasy novel filled with warring gods, alternate realities and a working class kid caught in the middle of it all…

Hope you’ll agree it’s gobsmackingly gorgeous. I couldn’t be more pleased. Thanks to all the wonderful peepage at Titan Books for their patience and hard work in developing such a great cover. (Although, if there is a gold leaf and vegan leather option perhaps we can explore it?)

Finally, if I may be so bold, preorders really do help a book release land, so if you feel that The Lighthouse at the End of the World might be up your alley, you can preorder it here.

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.

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.