The Holding Pattern

This is the sucky bit. The first three chapters of my manuscript are with an agent. I must wait.

Back in the day, agents were used to being approached on an exclusive basis but this is no longer the rule. That said, I have approached this agent on an exclusive basis. They don't know that but I doubt it would give me much of an advantage even if they did. What I need to decide is whether to leave my book with them for six weeks before approaching another agent or whether I should just get to work sending parcels to agents every week or so. Any thoughts?

If I were to take this approach, it would probably make sense to send out three submissions every couple of weeks. Small problem: I can't afford the postage.

Operation Sh*tstorm Returns

The need to get a publishing deal is huge. This is the main factor in my wanting to send out work to as many agents as possible.

The full-time job that Mr W was offered still hasn't started. Meanwhile, he's had to give up part-time work elsewhere because the council fined us for it (the work was all above board. He told them about it in advance.) He earned a little over £30 and they fined us £90 for it which has to come out of our budget every week! Our housing and council tax benefits have also been reduced. The upshot of this is that we now have enough coming in to pay for rent, insurance, lighting and council tax but no money for food, heating or anything else.

'Heating?' I hear you say 'but it's June.' Well, yes it is but the heating - as long-time readers of the blog will know - emanates from an oil-filled tank behind the house. This oil is responsible for heating everything - including the water. No oil: no hot water. If you click on 'Operation Sh*tstorm' you can follow the drama so far on this front.

The oil monitor has only two bars left. The cost of oil has gone up. The cost of a minimum drop of oil will be about the same as a month's rent. Can't be done.

In all likelihood, we won't be able to buy any food this month but my stockpiled rice is doing well and we have many peas. Hubby has made some chicken stock too so we won't starve. Calories are surprisingly easy to come by. Sugar's cheap. It's entirely possible to maintain your weight on not much money and we're both well-cushioned enough to sustain a drought. Starvation's not a worry. The worry is malnutrition. We're almost definitely both suffering vitamin and mineral deficiencies and we can't afford multi-vitamins. There's hardly any iron in our diet for instance.

Right. I'm going to stop talking about that before I get depressed. The point is: the money I spend on postage, paper, ink etc should be going towards food and oil. It comes straight out of our food budget. It's a huge gamble. It feels so arrogant and selfish of me to think that I can somehow work us out of this poverty with my writing. How the heck do I know whether it's any good? It just seems like the only option. How did J K Rowling afford to sit in a coffee shop all day writing? I'm a million miles from being able to spend money on something as frivolous as going out for coffee.

Could be Worse...

Thank goodness we moved house. The last place we lived in was fire damaged, had wood worm and there was a black bucket at the end of the bath which supplied the water. The place was constantly damp and generally falling to bits. The place we moved to had no carpets or curtains but it's gorgeous. It's really hard to believe how poor we are when you walk round this place! It was pretty easy to believe at the start as we couldn't afford carpets and I had to make curtains. Since we couldn't afford proper fabric, the curtains I made were not impressive. Eventually, we resolved our floor and window issues with the help of some astounding bargaining tactics and lots of free carpet fitting thanks to my husband's step-dad. Now it's amazing.

Back to the point. Given our financial constraints and the long cold-bath summer which stretches ahead of us before the onset of another hypothermic winter: should I send chapters to other agents or just wait?