I love reading and reviewing thriller and mystery novels. I read a book a week - sometimes in one sitting if it really grips me. To do this the plot has to be really good, the characters believable and, most important for me, I need to root for them. This doesn't mean they have to be 'nice,' but I have to feel for them.
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.
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 talkinghow 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 Waitis 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 novelwould 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.
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.
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:
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.
