More thoughts on a Writing Life/"
A Game of Snakes and Ladders
A Game of Snakes and Ladders
Chapter 8 – in which I look for an agent and find myself playing gooseberry.
The French sailor’s hint that I would flourish in Key West stayed in my mind. Then a friend in Edinburgh, who had visited the island in the 70’s, suggested that we might go there together in the winter of 1992. From the point of view of life, expansion, a love affair and eventual marriage, this was a good idea. From the publishing point of view, it was to find myself slithering once again down a snake, without finding a corresponding ladder for some time.
We arrived in Key West that January, without any notion of staying there; then I met my future second husband. By 1993 I was living there, having sold my house in Edinburgh and said goodbye to family and friends – a drastic and sudden departure from what had been my life.
Without an agent or editor for my fiction, though, I was at sea in the publishing world.
When you arrive in the US, even fairly well-published in your country of origin, you start again at the bottom – unless you are very well-known. I wrote, and sent out manuscripts to agents, and had no response. Finally I answered an ad in a writing magazine, put there by a woman I will call J. who said she was a literary agent looking for work. We corresponded; I was a little put off by her lack of spelling ability and her constant forgetting of my name, also by the fact that she expected to be paid in advance. But hey, perhaps they did things differently here. We met, she took me and my husband to dinner in Key West, and she was good fun. When she asked me to meet her at the American Book Association conference in Chicago the following summer, I agreed. I flew to Chicago, she met me at the airport and asked if I minded, she’d booked a suite at a hotel and was meeting an old lover, a man there whom she had not seen in years. Would I object to sharing this space with them? I had little option at this point; I agreed, thinking it a little weird, but wanting to be broad-minded. In fact, I slept on a couch in the adjoining room to theirs for one night while they cavorted noisily in the bedroom. I went to the ABA conference with J. and we walked from stall to stall, visiting publishers, handing out business cards, until she said that her feet were sore, she was exhausted, and she was going back to the hotel to ask her man for a foot massage. Did I mind? I went on trudging around the immense area of books, publishers, magazines on display, and she went back to the man and the hotel room.
That night, I called the one person I knew in Chicago, picked up my bag and went to stay with her and her husband in their loft. Again, I was on a couch in one corner and they and their five dogs were in the rest of the large open-plan room. The five dogs variously visited me in the night and I woke early, got my flight back to Key West, and thought – one day, I will tell this story, about how not to find a literary agent. I never saw or heard from J. again.
My friend the writer, Ann McLaughlin, put me in touch with John Daniel, of Daniel & Daniel, who were one of the earliest hybrid publishers, in California. She had published all of her five novels with him, and he did produce lovely books and was a nice man, she said. It was a way to start again, at the bottom of the next ladder. He published my Australia novel, “The Circus At The End of the World” and then my Key West novel, “Seas Outside The Reef” as well as two collections of poetry (Taxus Press in the UK having ‘let me go’ too, finding my recent poetry ‘unmusical’ i.e. possibly too American.) I hardly cared at this point if my books reached a wide readership; I simply wanted them to exist. I had piles of these novels on my studio floor for years, gave them away as gifts, took them to the library and the local jail. But they had a life, some people liked them – I was not completely invisible.
I had been working during the 90’s on my novel “The House in Morocco”, based on my times there, and sent it on a wing and a prayer to a new publishing house that was looking for novels with an ‘international’ flavor and was starting a new trend by selling mainly online. This was the Toby Press. My editor, Aloma Halter, lived in Jerusalem. They were interested in a book set in an Arab country. I was overjoyed when they took it, and produced a gorgeous hardback, in 2003. It was short-listed for the EMMA awards (Ethnic Multi-cultural Media Academy) in London and I flew over, in great excitement, and took my daughter to the ceremony. The winner was a Scandinavian woman who had written a book about an Afghani family who took her in (and who eventually sued her, I remember, for misrepresenting them).
Back in Key West, back to the drawing board, or writing desk – and on with the next project.
People say, don’t give up. It wasn’t even an option. It was just what I did – snakes, ladders, flaky pseudo-agents and all.
(to be continued)
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