In which we pivot...

Artists impression of GAG landing in Cornwall

I have always been a big reader (I’ve worked in public libraries for a decade) but I’ve never really written. Snippets here and there, usually in connection with visual work. I trained, you see, as a costume designer, working with clothes and sets and things. If you’ve ever seen the film War Horse, it was me who sewed all those army badges on (did you think for a second I might have designed the clothes?). It left me restless, so I went off to be an illustrator and an artists and lots of things in between sailing from place to place and project to project before I washed ashore in Cornwall.

What to do?

Create a semi-fictitious art collective, obviously. I started Granite and Glitter (GAG for short) in 2018, and used it to hide behind as I worked things out. It worked, in a way, I got to do some wonderful projects, painted some things. I was still searching for something though.

Then I found Eythin. An island, lost to all, thirty miles off the coast of Cornwall – Halfway between Boscastle and the Celtic Deep. An Island full of stories, and folklore. Granite and Glitter had become more and more folklore driven and Eythin gave us a place to play. It gave me a place to write. Because the pictures weren’t quite cutting it, Eythin needed explaining. It’s story needed to be told. So the text under the Instagram posts got longer, I started a blog. I started a podcast. I realised I was liking the writing more than the drawing so I did something I’ve never done and sat an wrote a book. It’s called Down Country and it is…patchy. A collection of Eythonian folk tales, a narrative thread of menace and beauty and I love it. Out on submission it went, with all the confidence of knowing nothing.

I had lots of nice no’s.

I thought I’d be sad, disillusioned, but to my surprise all I wanted was to learn from my mistakes and write another. So I did. I read books on how to be published, how to write, and in the background a magician named Pel was quietly working away, fighting with a Reverend and being crotchety. I wrote a first chapter or two and sent them to an agent for feedback.

Self indulgent.

Again, I waited for the interest to wane, it was a lot of work, but instead of giving up I rewrote it. Watched seminars and lectures and read and read and read and then in walked Nancy. Right onto the page and GORSE was there. All of it, give or take. I sent it to friends, who liked it, I sent it to my mother—a proofreader—who corrected it and then I went back on submission. I submitted to eight or so agents, and John was the last. No slight to John, it was a haphazard affair. In the relaxed and calm and not at all paranoid way that I have I was following both John and Julie secretly on twitter, as with all the agents, in case I could glean from them which way it might be going. That afternoon, Julie tweeted about a submission. It was very positive. I assumed because I am a narcissist that it was about me. I assumed, because I am full of doubt, that it was not.

It was. 

A subtle reference to artistic upending.

The next day John and Julie requested a full, then a meeting was arranged with much waving of hands and smiles and confidence in the book I wrote and afterwards, though I had intended to think about it for twice as long, I agreed to their offer of representation a week later. I haven’t regretted it once. I bagged two agents in one, and their work helping make GORSE a better book made editing, in a lot of ways, more fun than writing it. They helped me see the book more clearly, gave me the confidence to make it a little more horrible, a little darker. They made the characters sharper, brought some that stood in the shadows into the light.

Julie, with the help of a particularly intense tweet, made Nancy’s love life innumerably more exciting.

 Then we went out on submission. I’d been very lucky (I’d worked hard at that luck but still), I’d written a book in a year, gotten an agent in a week, and now? Now I had to wait.

 I’m not as patient as I thought I was.

Days passed, weeks, months and it was really very hard. There was nothing I could do to speed it up, nothing I could write or work on or do to make it more likely to work. So, in between wonderful update meetings with John and Julie where publishers I knew and loved sent the most wonderful, praising rejections, I wrote the second book, RAGWORT.

This was, possibly, a mistake.

Because, towards the end of last year I had a difficult call from my agents. We were nearing the end of the list. GORSE was too literary for the fantasy crowd, too fantasy for the literary crowd. They all seemed to like it, and hoped to read it one day, it just wasn’t for them. It is to both my agents great credit that I came away from that conversation bruised but not beaten, down but not out. We talked about next steps, talked through the ideas I had for other books, different books, and even though sat in the back of my mind was the book I might have written to no avail what I never felt was any sense I wanted to give up.

Is this something to do with a secret future book? Maybe…

I won’t lie, it was a difficult weekend. I know, of course, that writing a book is never a waste. I had developed as a writer, learnt a lot, but still. I couldn’t help thinking it was 90,000 words that I could have written about something else. Something that would sell. So I wallowed for a day or two. But that last meeting with John and Julie, sifting through ideas for books, little nuggets of half baked thoughts, some gold had come to light. Silver, at least.

I had a thought for…well, I’ll save the details for another time, keep a little mystery. Suffice to say I found another project to fall headlong into and I wrote and wrote and wrote. It all felt doable again. Then, just under a month after I thought we’d declared it dead GORSE came back to life. Solaris, an imprint of Rebellion were keen. I might share a publisher with Judge Dredd, incredibly exciting. It was quite a roller coaster, a ride that i had thought was ending, the track ahead not laid now suddenly extended. I bought new platform boots and met with Amy from Solaris in Oxford, she was wonderful, enthusiastic and full of ideas and I cannot wait to see how she changes and improves GORSE before publication. I’m so pleased to be able to share the deal, and talk about this project and I know by the time it comes out GORSE will be the best myself and all the wonderful people who have worked on it can make it.

I’ll try and update with posts about the process in amongst more stories from Eythin. In the meantime, please do subscribe to the newsletter, I promise it will be entertaining…