Step Five: The Waiting Game

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Ileandra Young

I was counting up my submissions yesterday. I’ve sent five so far and I’m doing for another this week. If I’m going to keep up to my goal of one a week then I’ll need to do one before I go away this weekend. So far, however, this week has been rammed full of other stuff I need to worry about.

I got some news at my job that was very worrying, for instance and then realised that my driving theory test is much sooner than I thought it was (bloody glad I checked my diary!!!). Top that off with lagging work on The Ice Wolf Tavern, where the guys haven’t seen me post for probably a month and a half, then there are lots of places I want to be giving my attention. And its a shame that I can’t.

So… having to wait is actually quite nice. It means there’s nothing more I can do for those people to whom I’ve made the submissions. I just have to sit tight, wait for the responses and cross my fingers for something positive or, at the very least, constructive that I can use to make the piece better.

But with waiting comes the insecurities. That tiny little voice at the back of your head which says ‘You’re not ready. Did you show it to enough people? Was your editing hard enough? Is the story even any good?! Have vampires had their day? Don’t you need to write mush and pink faff like Stephanie Myer to get anywhere these days? Is your cover letter good enough? Did you put enough postage on the envelope?’ All these things are just turning constantly through my head to the point that I feel knackered as soon as I get up. I don’t seem to remember feeling this way the last time around I did this. I can’t decide if that was over confidence in my abilities then, or if I was just so distracted by uni work that it made no difference and I was tired all the time anyway. I can’t tell. I do keep picking up that folder of rejections though, and remembering how it felt to get the letter back; even if it was bad news.

There is a submission I do want to make; I’ve mentioned it before. Problem is, I’ve chickened out of it twice and made the submission to another agent instead. Heh; pussy. I’m talking about John Jarrold. The email is all written up, with just one more thing to add that he specifically asked for on his site. The sample is ready too; I even went through it again with a fine tooth comb to be sure I’ve picked up all typos and grammar. But I can’t make myself send it. The odd thing is, something at the back of my mind tells me I’ve missed something, but I can’t put my finger on what it is. Until that feeling goes away, I’m not going to send it. I need to be sure that for each agent I submit too; everything is absolutely perfect (in as close a sense as I can get, since there is ALWAYS room for improvement). That’s why I’m spending a whole week preparing each submission (also to spread out printing and postage costs – yikes!)

So far however, the waiting game is such that I really should be looking at other projects to take my mind of it. There is the block of editing I’m doing, but pretty soon I’m going to need to go back to actually writing to remind myself of why I’m in this business. What with all the cutting and rewriting and swapping and changing and high profile agents, I’m beginning to forget the fact that I just love telling a story.

I’ll tell you what…. NaNoWriMo this year is going to be a life saver! By that point, if I haven’t started anything new, even if its only a 15k short, then I’m going to need to madness that is NaNo just to give me the enjoyment back.

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Book Review: Silent Scream

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Ileandra Young

Author: Lynda La Plante
Title: Silent Scream
Genre: Crime
ISBN: 1847396461
‘Hot young British film star Amanda Delany had the world at her feet. She’d had a string of affairs with famous actors, making perfect fodder for the tabloids. Then came a commission to write a tell-all memoir. When Amanda is found brutally murdered, DCI James Langton’s enquiry discovers the sad truth behind her successful facade. Addicted to drugs and starvation diets, she’d almost died from a botched abortion. Meanwhile, DI Anna Travis is up for promotion, but Langton is blocking her, accusing her of professional misconduct. This latest case could make or break Anna’s career. ‘

Poor, poor little Amanda Delany.

La Plante seems to enjoy bumping off sad, young women and having the police force come to the (delayed) rescue.  Maybe its because these books aren’t my usual reading choice; police procedural crime novels are a far step away from vamp-fic and high fantasy.  However I still can’t the shake the feeling that in picking up this book, I got onto a train and made all the stops sign posted on the poster above the doors:
-Crime committed
-Police begin hunting
-Higher authority steps in to ‘take control’
-Potential suspects lie through their teeth and subsequently get caught out
-Police still have no clue
-Anna and Langton have their almost love affair
-Anna finds that one teeny weeny piece of info that no one else could find which opens up the case
-Suspects are rounded up
-Anna’s brainy-brainy-brain saves the day

By the time the final suspect is brought in you know damn well that he is the murder and you’re waiting for the remaining forty pages to pass so you can hear him confess.  Suspense is held and deliciously tense, until a point where the novel turns from being investigative to explanatory.

It just doesn’t quite hit the spot for me.

There is another of these books floating around – a colleague at work has it – and we’re going to do a swap when she’s done.  I’ll write up another review then and see how I feel; maybe the next book will go some way towards making me change my mind.

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80 Post Challenge – Post 23

Posted on August 14, 2011 by Ileandra Young

Describe the longest amount of time you have ever been away from home.

Depends on which home. I have danced around a lot since leaving my mum’s and coming to Leicester. In fact if I could going back and forth in the first year of uni, then it would be a semester at a time that I was away from home an that is AGES! But I’m not going to count that, because its weak. O.o Instead I’ll counting my mapping project that I did while at uni. It makes the most sense because it was between my second and third year, so we weren’t moving out of the house we had found; it was much easier just to stay put.

You may know that I did geology when I was at uni. It was fantastic and took me to all sorts of places that I never would have thought to visit otherwise. Picturesque spots in Wales and Scotland and even in England were the geological features of the UK are most visible. I’ll tell you what as well, the UK is amazing for it! Almost every major geological period is represented here and you can see all of them if you know where to look. I remember a point when I put my hand on a rock from the precambrian and I could all but feel the age of that piece of granite. I felt very small and young.

Anyway, my mapping project was in two parts. The first part was after the first year and sent me to the Isle of Skye for two weeks. A bunch of us went, realising that we could reduce costs and also have a bit of fun if we selected areas on Skye that were different, but close enough that we could share accommodation. We booked up this lovely little cottage between the four of us, drove down in Chris’s car (I still have no idea how the hell we managed to fit it all!) and spent the fortnight going over a small portion of the mapping area in preparation for the following year.

Heh, that trip was a lot of walking up and down hills, running from sheep and getting scared half to death by grouse as they suddenly shot up from the long grass not two feet from where you last stepped. We had a couple of days off in town, got well acquainted with the local pub and even found some other students from our year group who were doing a study further north on the island. All in all it was incredibly pleasant.

The next year we did it again. But this time we did it for six weeks and took another friend with us. We rented a bigger house nearer to the mapping area, meaning that I could just walk out of the place and begin. With the base of what I began the year before I was able to keep painting a pretty comprehensive picture of the rock types of the area and get my map and my notebook filled up enough so that I could come home and write the report.

I’ll always remember the trip because of how long it was. It was about the time that I was really starting to get into working on The Ice Wolf Tavern, though it was called Ileandra Dark Huntress at the time. It was still on MSN before they closed their group feature and was very, very busy. I had plenty of threads to play in and lots of other background stuff to organise to ensure that there was plenty of world content. But at this place, we had no internet! Okay… that is why I remember it so well. It was agony; no internet and I didn’t have a computer either so all of my writing I was doing by hand (I hate writing by hand!).

It reached a point where I had reams and reams of paper and just no idea what to do with it (six weeks is a long time in a place with sparse entertainment, particularly if you’re me and refuse to watch TV). So I think I convinced Dave or Chris to let me borrow his computer so at least I could type a little bit of it. I was writing Gaea at the time so my head was filled with daemons, elves and vampires. Quite a mix when my head was also rammed with dip and strike measurements, angles and various igneous rock types.

It was a fantastic trip, despite all that. One I’d do again in a heartbeat. Probably not so much for the mapping, but because Skye is really beautiful and I enjoyed the clean air, the friendly people and all the walking. Seriously… by the time I was done, I really did have buns of steel!

 

 

 

 

My 80 Post Challenge is brought to you with help from Tom Slatin’s 80 Journal Writing Prompts.

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Riots

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Ileandra Young

I figured it was about time I said something about them. I’m passionate enough about it when people ask me face to face. The heated discussion on my Facebook profile yesterday almost made me realise that I have more thoughts about it than I realised. I’m not massively political or hugely aware of world news; I tend to stick my face in a book and hide from the real stuff, but a lot of this is really close to home.

Tottenham. My old stomping ground. I lived there for the first eleven years of my life and only moved northwards after that when changing schools. My mum and sister are still there. This is why when Dave told me about the news on Saturday night, the first thing I said was that I wanted to call my family in the morning.

They are very close to the fuss. In Tottenham, the carpet place which is now nothing more than a crispy shell is not half a mile from where I used to live. Enfield Town is where my first job was. And my second for that matter and I used to ride the bus through there to get to the third. These are all places I know, places that are close to me and it breaks my heart to see what people have done. It wasn’t all that long ago that Enfield Town was renovated and made beautiful and now bits of it are all smashed to pieces. And for what? A new stack of CDs? Some DVDs? A bike or two? Certainly nothing worthy of such force and destruction, though very few things are in my mind.

I was thought I was safe in Leicester; this city shows very little tolerance for yobs and mindless violence, but they struck here too. To steal, cause havoc and make a mess. The craziness has reached a level that I didn’t think was possible in this modern, civilised world we live in but I was soooooooooo wrong. The need to spread violence and anarchy has spread through the country like fire through bushland and it makes me sick.

Reading through a group on Facebook made me think about writing this, because I wasn’t going to at first. The comment was that Poundstretchers had been absolutely sacked but Waterstones (both of them) were completely untouched. Then another comment actually made me smile; that one particular publisher was actually a little sad that Waterstones wasn’t deemed good enough to rob.

For those of us wanting to publish and especially for those with books stocked in those shops, then you probably disagree, but I feel almost that if I wanted to rob somewhere… if I wanted something so badly that I had to steal it… it would probably be a book. But I guess that’s just the person I am.

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80 Post Challenge – Post 22

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Ileandra Young

What is the most amount of money you have had at one time?

Hmm, now do you mean in cash in my hand, or do you mean in the bank at any one point?

The most cash I’ve ever held in my hand (that was mine to do with as I liked) was when I moved my saver’s account from the post office. Whenever the post office stopped doing it (it was before I moved away from Tottenham, so this was pre eleven years old). My mum and I had already taken some over to the bank across the street, but we just had to do the last part. So we drew it all out over the till; I had to put my little pre-pubescent signature on a slip of paper and then take the cash in a big brown envelope which I put in my pocket.

I remember looking at all those notes and feeling like my life had reached an important point. I had never seen so much money before. Bless me I think it was about £300. I put it in my pocket, latched onto Mum and walked proudly out of that place to simply give it all to the bank. Hmm. Well I’m glad I did because the money did come in useful when I eventually made it to uni. There was more of it by then too. ^_^

The most cash I’ve ever held in my hand that wasn’t mine, was probably the second year of uni when the electronic payment got screwed up to pay my rent for the student house. I needed to pass over something in the region of £800 which meant I had to draw it from the on campus bank and take it up stairs to the accommodation office. I remember feeling shit scared. Never mind that it was a wonderful sum of money – that I couldn’t spend on stuff I wanted – but it was also a very crowded place with people who had seen me draw it from the desk inside the bank. I think I managed to collar about three friends to stand around me as I went, because I was shit-scared of the thought of getting robbed. Lol. I didn’t, thankfully. And paid up for that semester with very little trouble.

The most money I’ve ever held in my bank that wasn’t mine was probably about seven grand. :-O It was a loan I’m afraid, nothing fancy and had plenty of places to go. It all vanished rather quickly actually, though it arranged my finances and my life in such a way that I was pretty glad I did it. It needed to be done; being a student makes it too easy to build up debt and then suddenly you realise; guh… gotta fix this. It was lovely to see such big numbers in my account though. Made me feel, for a least a second, that I was rich. Lol.

The most ever held in my bank that was actually mine was probably a couple of years ago when I got a decent bonus from my job. I’ve no idea how much it was, but even after the tax man had dipped his hand in and run off laughing, I had more money than that I remember having for a long while. It comes with my salary and therefore its one month of large figures that makes your eyes pop as you think about all the pretty things you can buy. I seem to recall that I bought a computer and paid a load of bills. Perhaps not the most exciting thing in the world, but it was stuff that needed to happen. That’s the problem with being a grown up too; its not about My Little Pony, Happy Meals and whatever else it is you think of when your 10 and holding £300. Its about wondering just how many bills that amount will pay and then how you’re going to manage the rest. Heh.

And that was before the recession when things weren’t quite so crap as they are right now. That amount of money, back then, actually went a good deal further than it ever could now. I think that’s what’s most depressing about it all. Its not the amount of money that means anything these days, at least in terms of what’s in the bank. I’m getting paid more now than ever before, but the value of those figures is significantly less than when I was getting paid almost 15% less on a monthly basis. Oh well eh?

 

 

 

 

My 80 Post Challenge is brought to you with help from Tom Slatin’s 80 Journal Writing Prompts.

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