Submitting some chapters (and keeping your fingers crossed)

Well, as mentioned yesterday, I feel I have finished my Route 66 book as much as I can on my own so I’ve readied it for submission! It’s always an exciting moment, sending it off into the void in the hope it’ll catch your chosen agent on a good day.

I’ve previously looked through The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook and selected an agency (see this post) based on the fact that it represents one of my favourite travel writers, Bill Bryson. Greene & Heaton has been established for a good number of years and has no less than seven agents to choose from. Looking on the website gives me a good feeling; their philosophy is a good one and makes me warm to them already. They also feature a small blurb about each agent, which I find invaluable when deciding to whom to send the sample chapters.

I finally settled on Claudia Young. She has a mesmorising pair of eyes and looks like a laugh. The latter is something I would find most desirable in an agent, the former merely a bonus! Most importantly, her blurb mentions travel writing so I feel it’s a fair assumption to make that she reads it herself and will recognise my ability to tell a travel story almost as well as those writers to whom I aspire.

So, agent chosen I have printed out a carefully-drafted letter and synopsis. Let me tell you, writing a synopsis is difficult. Probably more difficult than writing the actual book, I think. Or maybe that’s just me. Anyway, I do find it difficult and wasn’t quite sure how to do this for my non-fiction book. But I have done my best and the whole thing is now packaged, ready for a stamp and the postbox.

So, fingers crossed for the next few weeks! The wait is going to be unbearable, I know, but at least I have the start of term to keep me occupied.

Claudia, it all rests on you, now!

Feeling like you’ve finished

There’s no better feeling, in my opinion, than of finishing a book. I don’t mean finally typing the last word and hitting the full stop. No, I mean revising, changing, improving until you feel really, really happy with what you’ve produced.

This is how I finally feel about my Route 66 book. I’ve gone through and done what I believe is a final edit and I feel it’s ready to send off to the agent I have previously selected (see this post). It’s never easy, knowing when a book is “finished”. After all, I’ve spent ten years going over my book The Sillow Orb and I don’t know if I’ll ever be satisfied with it. But I do feel as though this travel book is good. It has lots of interesting historical facts, thoughts and feelings from me, conversations with people and, I hope, lots of humour.

It’s taken a while to get the revision done. After all, I chose the agent a year ago. It feels good, though, to have finally got the book in a position where I feel happy. If it were to be accepted for publication, I know there’ll be an editor who will have their own ideas about the book. You know what? That wouldn’t bother me a bit. It would be such a relief to finally have someone “in the know” feel that my book is worth something, that I will bow to their superior knowledge and let them do what the heck they want with it. Some authors, I’ve heard, can be precious about their manuscripts. Not me. At least, not to start with!

So all that’s left to do is print off the first few pages, put together a blurb and some selling points that might interest the agent, write a lovely letter telling them how fab I am and voila! Publication could be mine soon.

I am determined to be optimistic. This is my one big ambition in life. I will do this!

Reading the competition (Part 2)

I have finished reading Billy Connolly’s Route 66 book. And though I admit there were some parts that I skipped (like Billy’s visit north of the Mother Road to meet some guys who’d worked on the atom bomb – like that has anything to do with Route 66), I must say, albeit grudgingly, that there are parts that are quite readable. For me, they are the parts where he visits places I’ve been, landmarks I’ve seen and towns that Simon and I passed through along the way.

In true competition feeling, I marked all the places in the book where he talks about something that I have in my book. At first I thought he’d missed out a lot, although I look at the book now and I can see there are actually quite a few bent corners. So I’m making my way through both books together, comparing descriptions and references and making sure that my book just has a different feel. It’s not easy. After all, there’s only so much you can say about certain things. But I’m determined that my book shall fill a slightly different gap in the market; Route 66 written by a woman, travelling with just one companion and discovering some of the history of towns and societies that we passed through.

This was, I feel, something that lacked in Billy Connolly’s book, although by no means am I suggesting I have it all figured out. It’s just that when Billy visits the Amish community, or those guys who did atom bomb-related stuff, or Monument Valley, it’s as though the production company couldn’t find enough interesting things to with Route 66 itself, so bulked out the TV programme and the book with random visits. Apart from our visit to Las Vegas via the Hoover Dam, Simon and I really lived Route 66 for 11 days. There was little about the road we didn’t enjoy reading about or looking at or discussing late into the night. For us, it truly was a discovery of this famous route and we didn’t need to veer off the track to find excitement.

So I feel slightly better having read the whole of his book. By no means is it an exhausive account of life on the Mother Road. There are more than enough landmarks along the route that don’t feature in his to make my book a realistic alternative. I am excited again! Today I shall compose my letter to agents and I shall get it posted off to the first on my list next week.

The journey seeking publication begins anew – regular updates to follow!

Folds in Billy’s book where he mentions something that I also mention.