I was pondering the impact of place names yesterday afternoon as I drove down the M5 to Worcester for a writers’ networking event, organised by Jonathan Davidson, Chief Executive of Writing West Midlands. When I first moved to Sutton Coldfield with my family, more than thirty years ago, the county of our address was Warwickshire, a name with a rural and picturesque ring to it, but soon after that, it was changed to West Midlands, which conjures up a distinctly urban and industrial landscape.

It was only quite recently that I fully realised that the term, ‘West Midlands’ has two meanings:
(1) the West Midlands metropolitan county,
and
(2) The West Midlands region which encompasses many rural shires, from Staffordshire to Herefordshire.

A meeting room had been booked in The Guesten (a beautifully restored Queen Anne House) in the grounds of Worcester Cathedral – a lovely setting. Jonathan introduced the proceedings by asking everyone to give a brief account of themselves as writers. I felt very privileged to have been invited to give a short presentation about my own writing and my publishing experiences to the 20 or more other writers present, many of whom were published authors and poets with decades of experience themselves.

After a brief welcome by Peter Spalton, who had helped organise the event, I was interested to learn more about Apples and Snakes, a national organisation which promotes the spoken word and describes itself as Poetry with Bite.

The presenter was Bohdan Piasecki, Programme Coordinator for the West Midlands, based at The Drum, in Birmingham. For me, the highlight of the afternoon was Bohdan’s response to a request for a demonstration of ‘performance poetry’ by delivering a poem of his own.

After a short pause, he announced that he’d try out a brand new piece that hadn’t yet been tested. It was brilliant. The silence that followed his performance spoke volumes – it took me a while to step out of the space he’d created, back into the reality of the present. My only complaint is that I haven’t got a paper version, or better still, a video clip, so that I can see and hear it over again.

As for my own talk, I enjoyed myself enormously. Somehow, when I’m addressing an audience of writers, I come away with renewed energy, and today was no exception. Talking to a group of readers produces a similar effect, but there’s something about sharing the experience with other writers that gives me an extra boost, especially when I’m explaining how and why I started Novel Press.

Yesterday’s event made me focus on my achievement in transforming a manuscript into hundreds of copies of a beautiful and totally professional paperback book, a good proportion of which have already been sold – and are still steadily making their way across the UK and around the world. Who knows what the future will hold for Novel Press?

It’s been a long time coming, but after all the posts I’ve made since my very first one in May, I’ve reached the part of my writing ‘history’ that describes one of the most welcome phone calls in my entire life!

In the post before this one, I explained how I heard about a new publisher called Transita. (I’ve now remembered that I didn’t actually put my novel in the post, because they were happy to receive the first three chapters and synopsis via email.)

That was in the middle of November. By the second week in December, I decided to telephone them, pretending that I just wanted to check that they’d received my email , but really because I couldn’t bear to wait all through the Christmas season without knowing if I’d managed to jump over the first hurdle.

My heart was beating as the phone rang and rang. At first, when I explained why I was phoning, the woman said in a guarded voice, ‘Oh - I see. Well, we’ve actually had a huge number of submissions…’
Here we go again, I thought, my heart sinking. Then I told her the name of my book.

‘Ah! yes. The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society. That did sound promising, so if you’d like to send us the full manuscript..?

Like to!! I couldn’t get back to my computer quickly enough - and the large attachment was flying through the ether, making its way to the publishers’ Oxford office.

Well, at least my Christmas would be flavoured by hope. It’s a funny thing, hope - It starts off rather tentatively, but then gradually grows bolder, and promises all sorts of exciting futures - a really nice state of mind for the festive season. But back at work again in cold wet January, Hope begins to droop and fade.

I always like to have a fall-back plan before the inevitable rejection happens, so I started looking at the self-publishng alternatives. If Transita turned me down,there was nowhere else to try. I’d tried them all.

My husband was away on a business trip to Hong Kong and I was at home on my own on the Friday of the half-term week. It was nearly five o’clock, and I needed to put a letter in the post. A brisk walk up the hill to the post box would do me good.

I was just about to walk out of the front door when the phone rang. ‘Is that Christine?’ came the same woman’s voice. ‘This is Nikki Read from Transita. We would like to publish your book.’

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.