Roxane Dhand's Blog, page 3

I’m
all of a jitter. I can’t settle in to anything and have been flitting about
like a dry leaf in the wind.

I’m
still waiting for feedback from my agent on the manuscript I sent her last
week.  My conscious self knows that she’s
on her annual meditation retreat. I know she’s
completely off-grid, and isn’t able to receive messages via email, phone or any
other social media. From 1st May she
will be occasionally checking email but will not return fully to the office
until 7th May.

My rational self knows this, but my irrational self checks the
email every three minutes. Do I really think that she is reading my manuscript
upside down on her yoga mat?!  Or secretly
reading it with a torch after lights out in the dorm?

Obviously I must do.

My symptoms are quite bizarre from rapid heartbeat, to flutters
in the stomach to sweating palms. I lie in bed at night worrying I’ve written
is rubbish. I’m beginning to feel that sense of panic – you know that stress
dream where you have your English ‘A’ level approaching six weeks away but you
haven’t read your set texts? 

Never mind, you console yourself; there are five weeks to go and
then four and suddenly it’s the night before and still you haven’t read them
and you just know you’re going to
fail.

If she hates it, I can’t write 100,000 words – i.e., a new book –
in a week!

I’ve Googled up my symptoms – I know I shouldn’t – which are
variously interpreted as paranoia, possibly severe anxiety but best guess? Hypochondria.

Maybe I‘m just going mad.

The biggest news of the week was that the Lithuanian edition of The Pearler’s Wife came out from Lankos Baltos. It’s the first of three translated editions coming out this year. It was utterly overwhelming to think that people would be able to read it in another language. I even tweeted in Lithuanian on its release day. Note: I don’t speak Lithuanian, but Google translate has become a necessary tool in my research, so I gave it a whirl.

I also turned in the completed manuscript for my next book. It was a bit anticlimactic, only because my agent is on holiday so I won’t hear anything back about it for a couple of weeks, probably. So this week, I’m in limbo land.

In respect of my next project, even though I’m still a way off starting to write, one positive thing has happened. I’ve started to assemble a reading list and the postman has been staggering up the drive – almost daily – with armfuls of Amazon parcels.  He did ask me if I was writing another book with a look of deep resignation on his face, and suggested — helpfully he probably thought — that I might find the Kindle editions a little less cumbersome? The trouble is,a lot of more elderly research books aren’t available in that format so I far. For now, he’ll have to continue to push the print copies through the letterbox.

It’s all part of the process for me. Reading as much as I can about the era and place I’ve selected for my new setting. Eventually something will jump out at me and my story can begin.

So a few more little steps towards the edge of that cliff  before I can jump off and get started. Thanks for reading.

I wanted to talk here about what it was like to actually get a book traditionally published. It seems like a dream sometimes, but I haven’t woken from it yet, so I think it must be real.

It takes a long time to write a book and longer still to get it published.

In my naivety, when I began the hunt for an agent, I thought my masterpiece was already a finished novel – complete at 90,000 words.  It would only be a matter of weeks before I would see it in print.

Here’s what actually happened:

I was offered representation in June 2016 and the first round of edits came back from my agent after six months.

You learn very quickly when you join an agent’s list, that you must take your place – quite rightly – behind established writers who are churning out the bestsellers, year on year. You sit on your hands and learn the true meaning of patience.

First impressions were favourable but there was still work to be done.  After six months, my agent had read the manuscript, giving feedback and suggestions for improvement. I needed to work on my transitions; some sections needed to be reordered; I needed to show the reader how my heroine reacted to certain situations. Spell it out, I was told.

That didn’t seem too bad so I set to, spending a month working dawn to dusk on a new draft and emailed back the new version.

This was better, I was told yet – behind the scenes – this iteration was sent to a reader and one of the agency’s editor’s for further scrutiny.

Another few months went by, the manuscript improving with each round of edits. After a year of working closely with my agent, to turn my “rough draft” into a form she deemed worthy, we were ready, she said, to send the book out on submission. She compiled a lengthy list of publishers she thought would be interested.

To my surprise, a mini auction ensued and she secured for me a two-book publishing deal with Penguin Random House (Australia) and a one-book deal with Harper Impulse in the UK.

I was very clear I didn’t want two different versions of the same book so the two publishers worked collaboratively, providing a chapter by chapter analysis of the manuscript and gave brilliant and perceptive suggestions to further improve the book.

There were two or three more rounds of edits, revisions, tweaks and amendments, until they said we were done.

It took twenty months to get The Pearler’s Wife on a bookshelf.

 It was published in February 2018 in Australia and March 2018 in UK.

Thanks for reading. I’d be happy to answer any questions you have. Just leave them in the comments below.