Poetry keeps intruding when I’m focusing on prose, so before I carry on with my account of trying to find a publisher for my novel, I have to make a brief mention of a very entertaining poetry event I attended on Tuesday evening at the welcoming and atmospheric Kitchen Garden Café in Kings Heath.

It was part of the Poetry Bites programme, organised by Jacqui Rowe.

There was a real buzz to the evening, created not only by the highly entertaining and thought-provoking performance of Luke Kennard,the guest poet, but also from members of the audience who’d signed up for their three-minute floor-spot to recite their own poems. I love hearing these – there’s such a wide variety of styles and subject matter, all delivered with great enthusiasm. And I enjoyed having my own three minutes of attention too.

So far, on this blog, I think that my fiction has taken up most of these posts, and I see that I’ve already reached 2004 without saying much about what had been happening with my poetry. That will have to wait, while I carry on telling you about my novel.

By the time I’d received the disappointing news from Leigh Pollinger, it was already 2004, (see this earlier post) and I’d almost exhausted the supply of literary agents listed in the 2003 Writers & Artists Year Book . Each attempt seemed to have led me round and round, backwards and forwards through a maze of impenetrable hedges. And now I found myself at the start again.

This time, I decided to try a different route to publication. Tindal Street Press, the small, Birmingham-based publisher had recently had its profile raised by the success of Clare Morrall’s brilliant book, Astonishing Splashes of Colour. I’d re-worked The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society to its final, final shape and length, so I felt I had nothing to lose by approaching them. After all, I was a ‘local author’ and my book was based mainly in the Midlands, with several key scenes taking place in Birmingham. I could be in with a chance.

Several weeks later, I allowed my hopes to rise when Luke Brown, the Editorial Assistant asked me for the whole manuscript – their reader had obviously liked what she’d read so far. As the weeks went by, I tried to think of what I could do next if they turned me down. After being rejected by nearly 40 agents and a few publishers, it was beginning to seem that the only realistic option for The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society would be to publish it myself.