From the Slush Pile



Digs gardens, paints boaty stuff... and writes books?

 Bearing in mind how much of 2012 was wet, windy and unfit to garden in, perceptive readers might very well wonder what the heck I got up to for big chunks of the year.  After all, my own posts lamented my inauspicious timing in setting up as a gardener in such a climate, with work so scarce.  I also bewailed the way the rotten weather kept potential customers away from craft fairs at which I was attempting to sell my 'Roses and Castles' canalware, the other string to my bow, so clearly I wasn't painting furiously to keep up with demand.  And while the blog might have entertained you, it's scarcely great literature requiring hours of deep thought to compose.  The principle is essentially
i) think of a daft pun and
ii) add text vaguely related to i). 

Avid readers of the blog (that'll be my accidental pot-growing pal in Hampshire, then) may recall that in the depths of a very grey summer I was pondering using my writing skills for more profitable ends by jumping on the 'Mommy Porn' bandwagon.  Fear not, friends; I didn't.  'Fifty Spades of Clay', the Staffordshire-set horticulturally-themed bonkbuster remains, mercifully, unpenned. 

But I have been dabbling in creative fiction and, to recycle one of my dubious jokes regarding the above notorious novel, have written a work of 'leftie chick lit', a genre for those fed up with being screwed by sadistic multi-millionaires.  Following the trials and tribulations of a down-trodden middle-aged grandmother, her Sun-readerish husband and an unexpected allegation of benefit fraud, my tale (in two parts - trilogies are so last year!) is set in the deeply unfashionable, wildly unglamourous, tea-swilling world of an independent welfare rights advice project, complete with cast of quirky characters, gallows humour, peeling paintwork, second-hand office furniture and state-of-the-Ark technology.  Located 'somewhere in south Hampshire' and with the nicely misleading title Severe Discomfort (it's a clause from the Disability Living Allowance regulations), the first part has already proved to be utterly resistible to several literary agents.

Despite promising myself I was going to do this 'properly' with an editor and publisher and all that jazz, I've realised that as it's neither a celebrity memoir nor racy romance (not that it doesn't have romance - it does, but I do believe in leaving something to the reader's imagination!), it probably isn't going to get snapped up soon via the conventional channels.  So it's either self-publish or languish in the slush pile.  But I want this story out now because, if I'm being completely honest, with both the Social Security system and advice-giving organisations being decimated by current Government policies, it's a little piece of counter-propaganda.  If it had fewer pages and I had more funds, I'd hire a plane and drop copies across marginal constituencies the length and breadth of the UK.  But three hundred pages from 30,000 feet would make a right mess of your photovoltaic panels, so realistically, that's not an option!

You can be parted from very serious amounts of cash going down the self-publication (or as the sceptics might say 'vanity publishing') road, but I seem to have stumbled across a genuinely helpful, friendly web-based organisation called CompletelyNovel through which I've been able to do quite an effective DIY job.  For a cost that's barely into double figures I'm already staring at a proof copy of a book with my name on the cover; that's actually quite weird! 

And of course already I'm spotting typos I completely overlooked on screen, even reading it aloud, so it's just as well it's not on 'general release' yet.  But when it's been de-bugged and is finally available from the publishing company, or your local bookshop (or Amazon - but don't buy it from them until they're paying their taxes, good citizens), you'll be the first to know!