All the submissions I sent off in January have a colossall mistake in them - not wishing to say I was ill or anything but I attached an old file where I'd been cutting out sections to re-order them and experiment. It was the last file I had saved so it looked like the right file but any non-infected human (polite version) could see the mistakes - they started on page two for the love of *****!
I check all four submissions in a row and once again admired the bird table in the back garden. UNRELATED?
Since I've stopped coughing quite so regularly I've started to notice a lot of different things:
- How ill I was
- How many files I haven't tidied into sub-sections labelled "Rubbish" (Only the author, with time on her hands, would ever want to look at them again)
- How some mistakes are easy to make and impossible to put right
- How many birds come to the bird table when you have enough time to put food out, and to stand still long enough to notice the affect this has on the flighted population in the urban landscape.
8 days in I re-read NEAR EDGWARE (all the way through). The double entendre section still makes me laugh - neither Jess nor Caleb were intending to have the conversation they realised they were floundering in!
NEAR EDGWARE is riddled with double meanings. A superficially small iceberg floating in seemingly still waters, truth will out, eventually.
9 days in I'm editing STAYING LOST and realising how close to querying it is - that will be a struggle. It is aimed at a different reading audience - MG - but, basically, the same agents.
Resting his forehead on the stone shelf, Jon pressed harder to take the pain away. The rustling from the blanket added music to his desolation. The pain in his head gave him comfort and dispelled the sensation - not of weightlessness, but of nothingness. He didn't cry. He was in a place where pain could not be helped, or halved, by crying: the wound was too deep and the pain too great. He wanted to go back. He wanted what he'd had twenty-four hours before.
If you could have anything at all - what would you want?
