Out with the Son

I thought he knew what to ask for in the barbers. 
     'Two on the side and four on top,' his brother, twenty one and King of Cool, had said. And where were his manners? Fifteen years of my going on about please, thank you and making small talk to put people at their ease, seems to have been erased by puberty. Fifteen and he can only grunt at the sad eyed Polish girl, her bone coloured hair startling against her black T (scooped low enough to make the son blink rapidly.). She wears stilettos with those metal bits on the bottom, clip clopping on the tiles like she's been shod.

     'How you like?' she lisps, and the son's red slapped cheeks in the mirror tells me we're thinking the same thing. Is she offering him a sexual favour?  But my lad manages a grunt and makes circles in the air with his hand. She gets it, whatever style he's describing, and sets to.

      Behind him, on a plastic chair, tacky to the touch, I'm invisable. Men come in from the Reading damp and hang their jackets to the left,right and nearly on top of me. 'Oh, sorry,' I say. Sorry for sitting in the chair provided.

      On the chair next to me lie two newspapers, yesterday's Mirror and today's Sunday Sport. I've never read the Sunday Sport but I've always wanted to. Can anyone really walk upright with such big boobs? Did a man from Norwich really have sex with a gorilla and be living in California with her and their three children? I have to know and being invisable, no-one will notice if I pull out my glasses and have good look, will they?

     Of course I don't. I stare at a stain on the wall by a well thumbed calender. Miss Winter looks chilly in the snow with only scarlet fluffy mittens and a reindeer pom pom hat to keep her warm. Technically it's not winter, it's still Autumn but I mustn't be pendantic. It's my one vice.

     Twenty minutes later and with precisely three words being uttered by the son, the Polish girl is brushing at his neck and blowing - blowing! - rogue hairs away. He scowls at me but what can I do? 

     Time to pay. Hurrah because I have ceased being invisable. A couple of other mothers have come in with their grunting sons. The women know each other and have been whispering and glancing in my direction. It must the cardi/jacket. I bought it a few weeks ago at a car boot for two pounds. I tried to haggle but the seller wouldn't budge. 'It's Hobbs - Hobbs!' She said, almost crying at my ignorance. It must have been made by Hobbs! a long time ago, it's bobbly, the hem droops and brown is so not my colour.

     Clutching the son to stop myself going A over T on the rain slicked cobbles, I shout into the wind, 'I need a new jacket.'

     The son squeals to a halt.'What a brand new jacket?' As in not Ebay or boot fayre new.

     'What about next week's food?' He worries. You can't hide much from kids. 

     'Only joking,' I say.

     He laughs.

     Me too.

Welcome Cally Taylor!

Meet Cally Taylor, author of Heaven Can Wait which is hitting the book shelves as we speak.

Cally is doing a blog tour where she explains how she wrote Heaven Can Wait, edited it and found a top class agent too.

As my guest today,she’ll be showing in detail, how she wrote her query letters.  Do ask any questions for Cally in the comments box and I'll try and catch her for answers.  She has more dates in her tour of the blogs so look out for her.

Cally Taylor:

When Fia asked me to write a guest post on finding an agent I thought, I can do that. I’ll write about how I opened the Writers and Artist’s Yearbook, put a star next to the agents who represented chick lit and/or women’s fiction and chose six that represented chick lit authors I admired.

I can finish up the post by talking how I ended up getting signed to the Darley Anderson agency.

And then I realised I’d already included all of that information in an interview I’d answered for Caroline Smailes!

Uh oh, I thought. Now what?

That’s when I realised there’s something I’ve never revealed to the internet before – the cover letter I sent to Darley to accompany my synopsis and first three chapters!

Before I started subbing to agents I scoured the internet for examples of cover letters. There was so much advice out there – much of it differing – that I came away feeling more confused than before I’d started searching.

I’m not claiming that my cover letter is the perfect, or best, way to write a cover letter but it worked for me. From the six submissions I sent out to agents I received:

·        two requests for the full

·        two personalised rejections

·        one form rejection

·        one agent I never heard back from!

The breakdown of my cover letters always followed this structure

• Greeting
• How/why I decided to choose the agent (if they represented an author I was a fan of I’d say so. It shows the agent you’ve done your research and not just fired off the same letter you send everyone!)
• A short paragraph about my novel, giving the word count and a few details (I chose to use a blurb style to try and gain the agent’s interest. My synopsis contained the full details of the plot)
• A couple of lines describing the readership the book was aimed at
• A paragraph about the potential market for my book (I have no idea if this is a good idea or not but as my book was very different from anything on the market I felt I needed to try and convince the agent that it might sell! If you’ve written normal chicklit – i.e. not paranormal – you won’t need a paragraph like this because an agent already knows it sells!)
• A paragraph about my writing background
• Very brief paragraph about my second novel (I inserted this to show the agents I’d already started work on a second book in the same genre and that I wasn’t a one-trick pony!)
• What I was enclosing (this depends on what the agent asks for in the W&AYB or their website)
• Goodbye

Okay, so that’s the theory. Here’s the letter:

ADDRESS

DATE

Dear Darley

I am looking for an agent for my chick lit novel Heaven Can Wait, complete at 80,000 words. I decided to approach you after seeing your entry in the Writers and Artists’ Yearbook and discovering you represent chick-lit. I’m also a big fan of Carole Matthews and particularly enjoyed  her last book, “The Chocolate Lovers’ Club”.

Heaven Can Wait is an 80,000 word supernatural novel about Lucy Brown, a twenty-eight year old woman who dies the night before her wedding and ends up in Limbo. Lucy is desperate to become a ghost so she can be reunited with her fiancé Dan but before she can attain ghost status she must return to earth as one of the ‘living dead’ and find love for a total stranger in just twenty-one days. Can Lucy complete her task on time or will her best friend Anna get her clutches into Dan first?

The novel would appeal to women in their late teens to early forties who enjoy chick-lit and films like Ghost and Just Like Heaven. 

The supernatural seems to be extraordinarily popular at the moment with television programmes like The Ghost Whisperer, Supernatural, Most Haunted and Dead Like Me achieving huge viewing figures. I’ve also noticed a big market in the States for paranormal women’s fiction and a gap in the UK market for this type of fiction. I’m hoping my novel could fill that gap.

I have been writing fiction for three years and have won five short story competitions and placed in many others including the runner up prize in Woman’s Own magazine’s in 2006. Take a Break Fiction Feast and My Weekly have also published my short stories. Full details can be found on my website www.callytaylor.co.uk

I am currently planning my second novel [BRIEF DETAILS OF NOVEL 2]

I enclose my synopsis, the first three chapters of my novel and a stamped addressed envelope.

Thank you for taking the time to consider my work.

Yours sincerely

Cally Taylor

encs

Okay! So that’s it. I hope at least one person reading this guest post found it useful! Thanks for reading.

Cally

Blog: http://writing-about-writing.blogspot.com

Website: www.callytaylor.co.uk

Author of “Heaven Can Wait” (published by Orion paperback, out now!).

Whe

You F'Coffee?

 I wish they would.

Sophie and Emma ( not their real names),  are petsitters who don't have the Budda Belly of one who's inexplicably stopped petsitting to write a book.  They're coming for coffee this afternoon, 2pm.

That leaves four hours to decontaminate the hovel. And bake a Battenberg. Or maybe not.  Last time they came  Sophie's Bodened baby found a long, black hair in her fairy cake. It wasn't the fairy's.  Dear old Archie Bubbles Bum-Bum, my aged Jack Russell x Black Lab - someone lent his dad an orange crate - sheds enough hair to knit a sweater from.  I might do that and sell it on Esty.

Then there's the loo. We won't go there - teenage sons you know.  I'm hoping Sophie and Emma won't go there either. Maybe if I give them weeny, weeny cups of coffee, they won't need a wee wee and risk life long trauma?

'We've been worrying about you?' Sophie said on the phone last week, 'stuck in your funny little shed, scribbling away.'

I tried to explain that I am happy in my funny little shed and that at the moment I am wrestling with my protagonist's lurve interest whom the reader has to empathise with at first, then hate, then feel sorry for.
It needs my full attention see.

In return I got the tilted head and sympathtic smile.

'You have to get out and about and meet people.'

No I don't. I've spent the last fifty years getting out and meeting people and now I want to stay in and not meet people.  I want to stay in my shed and make people up.  People who don't want to come round and eat my cake which would last at least six hours with me at the bottom of the garden, in the funny little shed.

I said all this to my sister last night and she said I wasn't to flatter myself they were coming to see me, it was because of the baby. Apparently people with babies are always desperate to 'get out' even if it means going to visit hormonal old bags and eat hairy cakes.

I found the martial chart here. Tried to find an email address for the blogger (Even slatterns should have manners), but I couldn't so if it's you, forgive me and thank you.

Right pass me the body armour, I'm off to tackle the loo.

Try, try, try again.

Our garden backs on to a large wood and from late summer to early spring, wolf spiders exchange the oaks and elms for my little house. I wish they wouldn't. Last night one, as big as those War of the World beasties, thundered over the duvet towards me. As I screamed it went under the duvet and over my legs.

If you have no fear of spiders, then I apologize. This is vaguely connected in a Robert the Bruce kind of way, and is much more interesting and constructive from one who really knows his stuff:

http://oldenoughnovel.blogspot.com/2009/08/dear-writer-no.html

Fish Publishing

I'm very happy that my flash fiction made it into this anthology, but sad that the patron, Frank McCourt, has died. Anglea's Ashes was such an unsentimental tale of the worse of times.

I've just finished When Will There be Good News by Kate Atkinson. It was so brilliant I can't read anything else for a while and Reggie, one of her main characters, is constantly on my mind when I should be thinking about my characters. However, one of them has been behaving badly. I spent six weeks getting to know him and he's let me down. I never believed other writers when they wrote about their creations going off on a limb, but this is exactly what he' s done. I thought teenage sons were bad enough.

Fia of the Shed

My father, a burnt out advertising man, promised himself that when he retired he would build a shed and write his novel. It would have been good. I may not have liked it - his Gorbells humour could cut deep - but the writing of it would have satisfied him.

It never happened and now I am nearly the age he was when he died, I have his shed.
Of course it's not his or mine really.
The last tenents left it behind and no
wonder, it's so heavily insulated, I'm surprised it hasn't sunk into the earth.

Apparently, alledgedly, the last people grew funny plants in it. I did wonder at all the electrics and big lamps. And the spiders with their funky, unfinished webs.

I've wanted to show off my shed for a while but didn't want Debs to think I was suffering shed envy - although I do indeed envy her the lovely shed of sheds. And Grumpy.

Creating Characters

When I wrote my first novel which begat the next novel, which begat...yes this is how I seem to write. Am I alone in finishing a book, knowing it's rubbish but picking at the bones of it and creating another and another until, maybe, I'll have something that works?

My first novel, Sitting Pretty, had three POVs all in first person present and each protagonist was me, me, me.

My current WIP has just one and I'm using third person which took a while to feel as intimate with. But unlike Sitting Pretty when I rushed to just finish a M/S, I know that I have to build believeable people and let a good deal of the plot come from them.

There are lists all over the internet of questions to ask your characters which is all well and good but you have to know your actors before you can answer these and how to you do this?
Once you do know them inside out, then you can reveal them by the actions, thoughts and words of other characters but until then, you - or rather me because you may know how to do this all ready - have to put them together.

I don't have this problem with all of the people in my book, but two or three of them are proving a nightmare. I have started to build one of the men by using bits and pieces of past boyfriends - ouch! And then I've added a bit of 'what ifs' so I'll just have to see how they go.

Until they are all comfy in their skins, I can't write any more or do any more plotting apart from a loose story arc. I need them to get their bottoms into gear so they can add the tension, my flabby plot so desperately needs.

I am an Aries. I have zero patience so perhaps I can be forgiven for being a bit snarly while they discover themselves? Oh, and any books you can recommend would be much appreciated. I have thought about one or two I've seen on Amazon.

Sorry about the stick people with their elephant ears. Poor things, no wonder my characters don't trust me.

Death of a Cat

Yesterday afternoon the car in front of me knocked down a cat. It lay, kicking, on its back while the car drove off. I stopped, remembered my hazards and ran over thinking, please die now, die now.
The cat was bleeding from everywhere. I knew it was hopeless because of a pet first aid course I’d laughed my way through. We’d practised on a dog manikin called Casper – CPR, get it? Made jokes about his lack of gender and other childish stuff.
But I felt for a pulse in the cat’s femoral artery – nothing. Now I knew that the writhing and the kicking were nerves and adrenalin. But my eyes didn’t believe this.
I carried him to the pavement, cradled his warm ginger body and told him that, had he lived, he would have been a king among cats, a mouser like no other, Top Cat.
Running from house to house to find an owner, I wondered if I found one, would they think it was me, the cat killer? I might have to assure them that were it me, I would have been a blithering mess and incapable of coherent speech.
At the fifth house, a man with greying, almost shoulder length hair, answered the door. Yes, he had a ginger cat, a rescue cat about two years old.
Clamped under his arm was The Guardian and in the other hand, a half eaten baguette. A hoop of onion had escaped onto the man’s white t-shirt. I felt relieved. Why? How shallow I am. If a messenger turned up on my tiny doorstep, my husband with his shaved head and hard chin would be liberal and well mannered too.
So I ran with Guardian man and when he cried on the cat’s body, I cradled him too. Then I gave him a towel from my car, a dirty dog towel. We had a short, polite tussle over my giving up a precious towel – the blood might not wash out. I no longer needed the towel, I said. I have a hundred, no, a thousand towels.
I didn’t take the number of the car that killed the cat and I never asked what the cat’s name was. A name would have made a hard thing harder. Perhaps it’s good that I don’t know who hit and then ran. It’s just a cat. No law says you have to stop. Unless you count decency and kindness of course. Maybe the driver was young and frightened. Or old and agitated? I don’t want to believe differently.

First Edition

I’m a big fan of First Edition magazine, although I do wish they’d stop playing around with arty backgrounds so we can actually read all of the poems and short stories.

Last month Spiral Skies - never know if it’s okay to print real names or not – had a wonderful short story in First Edition and this month Lane had a great poem published by them.

Congratulations to both writers.

I’ve submitted my second to last assignment to my tutor on the Open University’s Creative Writing Course. In June I’ve opted to send the first three chapters of a novel rather than poetry or nonfiction. This week I’ll be writing an eighteenth draft of my first chapter.

Or wiping off those felty lines of dust you get between the skirting boards and the carpets.

Shall I go to Cork?

I am still incredulous that I am a runner up in Fish's One Page Story. And honoured too.
Should I go to Cork for the prize giving? It's a long way and the pirate and I are both students - very, very mature ones. But it looks so much fun and to be with other writers would be like coming home.

I am Born

Looking over a draft of a short piece I did for my Open University course, I thought I'd post it because it's my birthday. I might even have some cake.

I am Born

I was born just after McCarthy died - perhaps worn out from brutalising America - when business men wore bowler hats, when free love was waiting in the wings and when my mother still believed she loved my father.
In the 'burbs of Surrey, Bearstead hosptial was the birthing Mecca for the middle classes - as long as they were Jewish. This was no obstacle for my father, a boy from the Gorbals, who wore a chip on his shoulder as heavy as the Burma Star won when he was no more than a child.
'My money's as good as anyone else's,' he would have hissed, running his fingers through blue black hair and staring out from a face still little
more than a scull, for I think that most of him died in that war.
My mother would have lain in her confinement in a four women ward, its womb pink walls patterned with shadows from the large fire.
With gossamer negligees wrapped around their swollen bodies, executives' wives hung tiny white gowns to warm for expected off spring.
And once born - bonding not yet been invented -
Jamaican midwives, delivered with Windrush, would laugh and catch slippery babes in their magnificent arms and then glide like galleons under sail, to the nursery,far away.
'I didn't even miss breakfast,' my mother would have smiled at my father, still dressed in his suit, a Lucky Strike in his pocket.
I think my unobtrusive entry made my mother immediately fond of me.
As for my father, he just loved me.
***

Death by Shopping

I shouldn't be here. I should be unpacking nine bags of shopping.

'How many bags you got?'
I'd considered this for long enough to make the woman behind me tut.
'Fifteen.'
The boy scout behind the till stopped chewing gum to give me a look. A 'you're lying,' look. I mean how much do you get off your shopping for using your own bag? A penny? I had nine big bags. I could have had thirty tiny bags. Very mean of me but even meaner of Costalot.

I felt mean because not only do supermarkets filter out every sunbeam that threatens to disrupt the carefully engineered enviroment of grey conformity, they filter out your soul too. I think they do it at the sliding doors. They leach it out of you along with your personality. They don't want oddly shaped customers any more than they want pimpled pears. And it's all our own fault. We've deserted our village shops to save time and money. And have we saved time and money? Not me but then I lose shopping lists and impulse buy.

Tomorrow I'm going to see my butcher,Jim, who may or may not have his teeth in. At nearly eighty he's about twenty years too old to work in Costalot and he'll insist on telling you the kill number of the bit of beef you've just bought - with cash cos he don't like the visa machine. Yay.