The manuscript is FINISHED!

Shamefully, I’m a bit behind the times here as my manuscript was actally, finally finished some weeks ago now - woo hoo! - about a day before the school holidays started. It ended up being 102,523 words long – which is perfect – and the only real issue I had in the end was that some of my chapters were over 7,000 words long when I counted them. For those not in the know, this is absurb and required me to chop them in half and create two chapters where there had been one. So I ended up with twenty-six chapters I think, as opposed to my original twenty. But that’s not a problem.

I sent Valerie a couple of emails along the way telling her that I’d send her the completed manuscript when it was – er – completed (no reply) and then a second email telling her that it would soon be in the post (no reply….) and then a third email telling her it was actually in the post (no reply…………!!) That was three weeks ago and I have yet to receive a response of any kind. So my nerves are stretched to breaking point - as are my nails incidentally. I have very beautiful false nails (which my husband can’t bear to have mentioned as he considers it worse than wasting money) and the last time I went to have them done they didn’t cut them at all so I now have prohibitively long nails which get massively in the way of my typing. I am actually only typing with my nails now. Plus I can’t have them done again for another two weeks so by the time I can go back I shall have great big talons that precede me to the nail bar. But I digress.

Back to Valerie. So what do I do????? She’s been so supportive that I don’t feel I can chase her up just yet (three weeks is not long at all in the literary world) and in fact I’m happy to wait. But – what if she hasn’t received the manuscript at all? What if I’m wasting my time waiting for her to respond to something that she hasn’t received at all? So I could:

-         ring her (not an attractive option as it will be seen as pestering)

-         ring the agency and not her specifically to see if it arrived (possible option)

-         email her (again, pestering but at least I won’t have to work up the courage to actually speak to her)

-         wait until a reasonable length of time has elapsed and therefore be justified in chasing her up (this will be a complete waste of my life if she hasn’t received the wretched thing).

 

And the longer it goes on the worse the news will be, I fear. The other thing to factor in is that we have just had Easter, plus there’s a big book fair in April that all the agents tend to go to so she could have been away for a significant proportion of this month. Holly goes back to school on Thursday so I shall probably give it until then and if there’s still nothing I’ll send a brief, polite email.

            On the note of going back to school – Holly’s father has seen fit to PAINT her shoes. She is currently in Pre-Prep where red shoes are permitted (red or brown) and Holly wrecked her shoes within weeks of the Autumn Term starting by scuffing them along the ground. Or so we thought, it turned out that she had swopped them with a friend and the friend had ruined them. This makes Holly slightly less culpable, you see. Anyway, the shoes were worn, looking awful, and this was truly brought to my attention when Holly went to play with a friend and the mother greeted me at the door when I arrived to collect with the words “I hope you don’t mind but I’ve polished Holly’s shoes for you as they looked a bit scuffed.” Oh the shame! When Easter arrived her father decided that enough was enough (unbeknown to me) and failed to realise that you can get coloured shoe polish, so instead he got out the red paint, and painted the shoes. This has apparently taken the best part of the holidays by the time he’d applied a coat, waited for it to dry, applied another and so on and so forth. By the time I discovered what he was doing it was too late and the shoes were thick with paint. They don’t look bad, as such, they look – wrong. The beautiful red leather has been covered with shiny, gaudy paint. And as this is her last term of wearing red shoes, I can’t replace them. I could buy her brown ones instead but she wants black next year so she can have Daisy Change shoes, so red or brown for one term at £30 a pair? Don’t think so. I also don’t think that she’s allowed to have black shoes in Pre-Prep so I can’t buy her black ones that would last well into next year. And at the end of the term, at the speech day that every parent goes to, she has to go up on stage and receive her tie for Year 3. The shiny, painted shoes will announce her presence before she’s even in the hall, I should think.

            Anyway, I must finish as I have chosen the most inopportune time to write this – my house is a mess and my children aren’t dressed yet (at 9am) – but such are the whims of a writer. Just quickly - on Saturday we attended the Max Appeal conference at Imperial College in London. Max Appeal is the charity which supports sufferers of the chromosome deletion that Lizzie has. The seven hours of lectures were fascinating, if slightly mind-bending, but I shall have to leave that account for another time………