The Difficult Second Album

It's a music business truism that's as old as Cliff Richard's wig; the second album is difficult and a potential career wrecker. There are, of course, exceptions such as a It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back that completely eclipse the artist's first album but it's a truism for a reason.

As I enter the final stages of my second Sci Fi novel, Redeeming Blood, I am beginning to have some empathy for my coke addled counterparts in the music business. The second book set in the same universe is, of course, a different propostion to a second album but there is the same inescapable conclusion: it's difficult. However, it's difficult in different ways. I have no brand or public perception that defines me or my output and into which my second book has to fit but I do have other challenges.

Some of the difficulties stem from the constraints of a shared universe. When I started Without a City Wall the entire universe was mine. It was a tabula rasa upon which I could create whatever pleased me. Now that I am adding more stories that are close to or even coincident with the events of the first book I have to make events logically and chronologically consistent. This demands a more organised style of writing and more planning than was necessary for my first effort.

Another hazard is deciding on the degree of autonomy for the second book. This in an issue that I have revisited multiple times in Redeeming Blood and I've changed my mind every time. This book is clearly a companion piece to the first but to what extent should it stand alone? For it to work as a completely independent piece of fiction it would require an enormous amount of exposition of the events of Without a City Wall. So there is a careful balance to be struck on this matter and that takes a lot of thinking and a lot of rewriting. Dune Messiah is a fantastic book but can its artistic value be fully realised if one has never read Dune? I would conclude that answer is no and I will, therefore, add no more information in Redeeming Blood than is necessary to sustain that book's narrative arcs.

There is a positive aspect to the second novel experience and that is confidence. It took me a very long time to write Without a City Wall and during that protracted gestation I experienced many periods of Alvy Singer style self-doubt. With Redeeming Blood I am reinforced with the knowledge that I can finish a Sci Fi novel and it can be good.

The Agent

Before I started on the journey of being a published author my only frame of reference on the business of publishing came from tangential references in Alan Bennett's diaries. I therefore knew what to say at a dinner party with Harold Pinter but had absolutely no idea how one got a book published.

To pursue what is known as a 'trade publishing' arrangement an agent is necessary. This is a person who can evaluate a book, judge its commercial worth, and introduce it to publishers. It may, in theory, be possible to secure a publishing deal without an agent and it may even, in practice, actually happen but it is an event of such rareness as to not merit discussion here.

An author finds an agent for their work by the process known as 'querying'. In the query the author will describe their book in brief (but not too brief) and positive (but not too positive) terms in order to convince the agent of its merit. Some agents will require a sample of the work, others may ask for it later should their interest be sufficiently piqued.

At times during my efforts to secure the services of an agent for my work I felt akin to Sir Pellinore in Le Morte d'Arthur; doomed to spend a lifetime in pursuit of the Beast Glatisant but never actually to catch it. However, I did succeed and I have a terrific agent.

This is what I've learned:

• It's a long process, my average response time from prospective agents was 71 days from the initial contact.
• The effort must be targeted. Concentrate on agents who are open to submissions in your genre. If you carpet bomb the entire literary agents' community regardless of their suitability to you and your work then you're just wasting TCP/IP packets.
• Follow the instructions on submissions precisely. Their game, their rules.
• Build an interaction. Write something engaging and personal in your query that shows you've put some effort into understanding the agent's needs. Simply doing Ctrl-V every time with your query isn't going to get it done.
• Finally, make sure you've written a really good book and get comfortable describing it and discussing it!

My numbers:

Agents queried: 39

Responses: 16 (41%)

Rejections: 14 (88% of responses received)

Offers of representation: 2

The Rutter Continuum - First Sequence

This was a blog post I wrote in Doha in the summer of 1999. It bore the grandiloquent title of "On the Trail of the Desert Bigfoot" and was accompanied by pictures of me in gorilla suit in the dunes of the Umm Said area of Qatar. Sadly, none of the pictures survive. I can only assume that my foremost literary influences at that time were H.P. Lovecraft and Viz.

Our story starts in mankind's oldest inhabited city, Damascus. I was in the old town, in a tea shop just to the east of the Great Omayyed mosque. It was dusk on a hot and humid July evening, the sonorous call to prayer drifted over the city's dusty, cluttered rooftops. I sipped at a small glass of hot bitter tea and looked across the table into the dark eyes of the man seated there. He had a leathery weather-beaten face with a covering of white stubble. It was a face that hinted at an untold story of unspeakable hardships endured in the desert. I deliberately broke his gaze and looked up at the towering minarets.

"So. You have the map?" I inquired softly.

Without a word he slid an ancient piece of parchment across the table toward me. His hand remained firmly on top of it.

"Inglezi. You know the nature of that which you seek? Only madness and death can result from this enterprise!" He croaked. His was a harsh guttural voice, yet he spoke refined Arabic with a Cairo accent. Silently I pushed an envelope across the table. It contained 5,000 US dollars. He stared at the envelope for thirty seconds before raising a trembling hand from the map and claiming it. Immediately standing up he looked at me as I picked up the map.

"Do not search for Al-Malyaam, Inglezi. Only evil can come of it." With that he disappeared into the heaving crowds around the mosque.

The Al-Malyaam or Desert Bigfoot is a large primate rumored to inhabit a remote region of the Rub-Al-Khali desert in the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula. No specimens have ever been found and only a few eye witness accounts exist. And after five years of laborious research in libraries and universities from Prague to Melbourne I held in my hand a map that could lead to a sighting of the Desert Bigfoot. As I travelled deeper into the desert following the ancient writings on the map my mind turned increasingly to thoughts of the curse the old man had mentioned. Yet the staff at The Rutter Continuum place little value on their sanity or personal safety when weighed in the balance against our readers' unquenchable thirst for enlightenment. On the twelfth day of my journey I spied a nugget. Not of gold, though my joy could not have been greater had it been the most precious of precious metals. No, it was a glistening brown nugget of shit. It was a fresh Desert Bigfoot dropping laden with worms and other varieties of parasites! I immediately scooped it up and inhaled deeply. Yes! There was the distinctive nauseating aroma which legend tells us is typical of Bigfoot shit.

My heart started to race I knew now that I must be close. Then, I heard the low howling wail from far across the dunes. I started to sprint across the sands desperate that my quarry should not elude me now that I was so close. As I reached the top of a large dune I looked down into a valley. There, I saw it. The Desert Bigfoot.

I sank to my knees as of tears of joy coursed down my cheeks. It was a strange and beautiful sight with its coarse black fur caked with excrement and other filth. It disappeared over the crest of the dune with a curious rolling gait. One fleeting glimpse was not enough I staggered to my feet and started to pursue this marvelous beast. I tracked it for hours across the burning sands. It was a magnificent spectacle to see this huge primate striding across the desert continually groping its genitals as it walked.
The beast knew not that I followed it for the senses of the Desert Bigfoot are reputedly very dull. But my fascination for this animal overpowered my sense of caution and I strayed too close. The shy and gentle creature began to pursue me across the dunes, screaming and gesturing wildly.

After a chase lasting many hours, the burning eye of the sun began to drop behind the shifting mountains of sand. The Desert Bigfoot grew tired of the pursuit and returned to it's filth-hole somewhere in the vast sandy desert where doubtless a litter of hungry young Bigfoot cubs waited for the return of their parent who would probably eat them.