The final draft blues

Well, you've been patient with me and answered my questions during the penning of my first manuscript. Today, I sent it off. Instead of feeling delighted, as I did when the first draft came together, I feel something quite unexpected - depression. I miss my characters, I miss controlling their lives and I miss having a large work to fiddle around with, hone and perfect. It really is something close to grief, which I know is daft - I'm mourning for the figments of my imagination. Is this normal? Do lots of writers finish manuscripts and get the blues? What is the cure?

It's not at all daft to call it grief - that's just how human brains work. You were focused on something, quite intensely, and your brain got used to having it there. Now it's not there. That's how the grief mechanism works too (although the extent of grief is, no doubt, determined by how much time your brain has spent thinking about the person, place or novel). People grieve for all sorts of things and then tell themselves that it's silly, but it's not.

Writers tend to be passionate people; they're also isolated a lot of the time. Passion abhors a vacuum, and finalising a novel and sending it off produces a vacuum. So you need to fill the vacuum. Start creating your next story or, if that doesn't seem feasible, find another creative outlet. Sing, knit, cook, dance, whatever. But don't pathologise what you're feeling - it's normal, and you can make it better.

To answer your question about whether or not other writers get the blues when they finish something - I don't know. Whenever one of mine finishes something they have me standing over them pushing them to write something new. Well, actually, that's only true some of the time. Most of them just keep writing on their own. Often it's because they know they need to fend off the vacuum.

I could spend a lot of time talking about the 'creative personality' and what it needs, but I'll just sum it up by saying that once you've engaged in a massive creative task, like writing a novel, you need to keep that part of yourself active. If you do nothing, you're denying a huge part of your personality - and brain - what it needs. What you do is up to you - you don't necessarily have to write - but you do need to do something.

Okay, I'm Tweeting

Sheesh, I'm such a pushover ... Four people say, 'Yes, go ahead, go on Twitter' and I do it. And thanks to the reader who suggested that I may be consumed by the Tweet-beast but I'm already Twittering for something else - I realise it's addictive!

So there's a link on the sidebar now, or you can visit twitter.com/callsydney. This is an experiment to see if it's useful/insightful (my first priority) and if I can keep it up around everything else, without my work suffering. We shall see ...

To Twitter or not to Twitter

I'm toying with the idea of Call My Agent! on Twitter, mainly so I can give you lovely readers an insight into my crazed day-to-day existence and what happens in a typical day at the office. Of course, because my identity is top secret, I can't name my authors but I'll find some way around that. However, before I set it up, I'd like to know if anyone would find it even remotely interesting. So let me know, either in the comments or by emailing call [dot] sydney [at] gmail [dot] com, if you think Agent Twitter is a good idea ...

E-readers, iPads, chickens, eggs etc

Recently I took delivery of a Sony Reader. I had to buy it - new - on eBay as Australians can't buy it online from any official Sony website. Nor will Sony offer me any technical support for my shiny ruby eBay purchase because I'm not a 'real' customer. And I certainly can't buy e-books from the Sony store, but I can from Books on Board and other online e-bookshops who don't care that I live in Australia.

While I have bought a handful of e-books, I mainly use the Reader for work. I load it up with manuscripts and I convert all my submission emails to txt files and put them on it too. And I have to say that it's changed my life. No longer do I have to lug manuscripts home and wear out a shoulder joint in the process; no longer are my house and office adorned with piles of paper. I find that this new way of doing things helps me better keep track of what I've read and it's just more efficient all round. It also means I can take a smaller handbag on the bus (see above mention of shoulder joint for implied benefit) as the Reader is very small and slender.

One reason I made the decision to buy a Reader rather than wait for an iPad was because all I needed an extra device for was the reading. I already have an iPhone, which I love and adore, and I didn't want to buy a glorified, oversized iPhone just for the e-reader capability. Another reason was that the iPad weighs a lot more and isn't as compact in size, and thus the weight and size advantage of an e-reader over physical manuscripts or books would be somewhat lost. So, even though I'm an Apple loyalist - iMac, iPhone, iPod - I've demurred on this occasion, and I don't regret it.

I wish the Reader were available to more Australians, although I understand the difficulties of introducing an e-book-only device in this country: there just aren't that many e-books produced for the Australia/New Zealand territories. So if you were Sony you'd be thinking (collectively) that there's no point going to the trouble of making the device available if there's not a lot for people who aren't in the publishing industry to put on it. And while there isn't a device like it in this country - and Kindle doesn't count, really, because it's for Kindle books only - there's less incentive for publishers to create e-books. Thereby we come to the classic chicken-and-egg scenario, and frankly I don't think Sony should be the one to go first.

Australian publishers are slowly starting to produce e-books - although two (Macmillan and Allen & Unwin) have been doing it for a while - but it's not really fast enough. They're also not, as far as I can tell, planning to produce e-books for overseas titles for which they have the ANZ e-book rights, which is a source of frustration. Many is the time I've gone through the buying process for foreign English-language books on Books on Board, putting in my payment details, only to be presented with a screen saying that the e-book is not available in my territory. No, and neither is the print book. Except in the library, which is where I have to go if I want to read it. And that means the author doesn't get the royalty they would have received if I'd bought the e-book. Which will probably never be produced in this territory. Around we go again.

So we're still waiting to find out what's really happening here, but time is running out. And in the meantime I can't buy many Australian books for my non-Australian Sony Reader and I would really like to. I would probably buy more of them, especially if the price were lower than the RRP. But I can't. Cheep cheep.

If it looks like a duck ...

A writer friend of mine is excited because the publishing house she likes is accepting non-fiction. She's writing a memoir and I'm encouraging her to call it fiction because she has told me it would be a 'fictionalised memoir' with bits of it made up. She is a journalist who blogs about her life and I know that in her blog entries she has embellished - no, lied - to make things sound more interesting. That's not journalism and that's a whole other story. I've told her how angry and duped readers of A Million Little Pieces felt with vast portions turned out to be fabricated. How would you classify her manuscript - is it fiction or non-fiction?

If she's making up more than the odd childhood conversation and name of her favourite TV show - and some leeway is given to memoir writers because we all understand you can't remember all the little details - she's writing fiction. If her life isn't interesting enough to make a memoir that people want to read, she shouldn't try to get her memoir published. That doesn't mean she wouldn't write a great novel. And while it's okay to pretend it's true on her blog - she's the only one responsible for that - it's not okay to pretend it's true with her favourite publishing company's money and reputation riding on it.

A couple of other points to make:
1. I love it when people say they have a 'favourite publishing company' because this is usually only based on the books they've seen in bookshops, not on anything else they know about the company. And while that's fine if you're buying the books, what about when you're wanting to get published? What about the other publishing companies? Some of them may be just right.

2. James Frey's A Million Little Pieces was hugely controversial but there is a story - perhaps apocryphal - that it wasn't his idea to label it as a memoir. He apparently wrote it as fiction. And is now rumoured to be writing all sorts of fiction stuff under pseudonyms.

Names, dates and places

I am helping a new author with a manuscript that is based on a true story with several real people mentioned. It's reasonably tame content, but to avoid offending some people I suspect some of the storylines/occupations/names (and possibly the setting of the story) will need to be fictionalised before publication. Is it better to let an agent consider the manuscript based on its raw form, or should these changes be made before contacting an agent?

It doesn't really matter either way: the agent could consider the manuscript with the real place and people names included and a note saying that some names will have to be changed; or they could consider it with the names changed but you'd still have to tell him or her that some names/place names have been changed. And if the manuscript gets published, the publisher will certainly need to know the real names, occupations and so on, and what they've been changed into, so the publisher can give the list to the defamation lawyer who will read the manuscript for them ...

So, really, the author should do what he or she is comfortable doing and keep meticulous records of the details that have been or will be changed.

Submissions and competitions

Can I enter a manuscript into a contest if a publisher is already considering it? Would the contest folks and/or the publisher dislike me doing this?

There is no publisher I know of who has a rule saying you can't send your manuscript elsewhere - including into competitions - while they're considering it. However, it's quite possible that the competition will have rules about what you can do with your manuscript so you would need to check those. If the rules say you can't have the manuscript under consideration anywhere else, you can then decide whether or not it's worth it to restrict yourself this way. (I've made my feelings on this subject clear elsewhere.)

If the competition rules don't preclude you having the manuscript under consideration at another publisher, the polite thing to do would be to send a letter to the publisher who's considering it saying that you're planning to enter the manuscript into the competition. That way there are no surprises if they decide they want to make you an offer.