As you know, we’re trying to sell novels here. If you read much about writing on the internet then you will also know that that a lot of agents now accept email submissions. This is great for us down at the bottom end of the world because it saves a lot on postage*.

Like a lot of authors I have my favourite agents. Those who sell a lot of books in the genre we** write in, and who sell books that we both love to read. There are even a couple of really special agents who were encouraging with the last manuscript and they’re the first ones we’re going to send to the next query too, when the book is polished enough.

One of these agents is prefers snail-mail queries but one is happy to take email and I have queried her before via email.

Last night, as I glanced through my junk email folder prior to deleting it, what do I see? The agent’s name against a letter touting miracle pills for the male of the species (you know the ones).

That was fine. I understand that we all end up caught by spammers stealing our email addresses, and although it infuriates me I know that there is little I can do about it. Most of the time the poor innocent victim doesn’t even know their address has been spam-napped unless they get an undeliverable mail message back about an email they didn’t even send. What I normally do is add the victim to my junk-mail list and their emails are automatically routed to the junk mail folder.

I caught this one, so I said, yes, agent was a ’safe’ person and all was right with the world.

Except … these spam mails seem to go around and around among the users on the list until the spammer gets sick of it, or we add most of the other users to our junk mail list. It’s fine for me, because I do run my eye down the list of senders of junk mail before I delete them, and I can recognise important names. Like the agent’s.

But it doesn’t work back the other way.

This agent has by now probably received spam mail back from me. She doesn’t know me. What’s she going to do? If she’s anything like me she’ll already have clicked on ‘add sender to blocked sender’s list’. Which means that next time I send my carefully crafted email query to her, with its extra line mentioning that even though nothing came of it, she had asked to see a full for the last novel, that email will go straight into her junk folder, or will be deleted, unseen.

Sob.

*A quick note on postage. The internet has been a boon for us trying to sell our work, and not just because we can email queries to prospective agents. It’s great for the snail mail too.  Why? Because it’s so easy to order postage stamps from other countries. Those of you who remember international reply coupons (IRCs) will probably agree with me that they were hopeless. But now I can order postage stamps, and even correctly sized postcards, and include them with the query. It’s fuss free for both me and the agent.  I love it. 

** The constant switch between I and we is deliberate.  See I, we, and the grammatical intracies of me talking about us.

How different are the names of characters in your novel?

Progress on Barrain has come to a standstill at present as I am concentrating on the novel for my critiquing group.

I gave Calder the first 30,000 words to read last night.

It’s a difficult story to write in that I am trying to hide the true identity of one of the characters, to keep the reader guessing who it is until the end of the story.

“Well,” Calder said at the end. “I know it’s not Vas.”

It wasn’t Vas, but I was trying not to give away who it was, so I asked, trying to sound surprised, “Why wouldn’t it be him?”

“Because of the name,” she said. “You would never name a hero Vas.”

She went on to remind me that we had a character named Vasst in Potion,  a spineless group leader who turned traitor. We also have Vlad the Impaler in a story idea we have yet to write.

“Which leaves Hanna and Julan as the only two people it can be,” Calder said. “And I don’t think it’s Julan because Julian was the bad guy in Shared Memories, so it must be Hanna.”

It was Hanna, in fact, but I had gone to a lot of effort to make Julan feisty and likeable, so that most readers would think it was her.

Flabbergasted is probably too strong a word to describe how I felt, but it did make me pause.

“Arrax is a hero, of course,” Calder said. “Because his name starts with ‘A’. A lot of your heroes have ‘A’ names.”

Arrax is the hero. And yes, in prior books, both Alun and Aled have been heroes too.

I made a list of names and characters in our stories.

Calder did have a point.

There were other similarities. Lots of ‘n’ and ’l’ sounds in the names. One or two syllable names, particularly for the good guys. And definitely a trend to bad guys with names starting with ‘V’.

I have to rethink some character names.

Calder asked me, the other day, how I ’saw’ what I was writing as I wrote it. 

She is very visual. She sees the story almost like a movie as it unfolds in her head, and the hardest part for her is getting that picture down exactly as she sees it, and not losing what she has seen as she translates it to paper.

I had to think about how I do it, and I still couldn’t say for certain. All I can say with certainty is that I seldom see movies.

Most of the time I am inside the character’s head, seeing what he or she is seeing, thinking what he or she is thinking, feeling what he or she is feeling, sometimes even smelling what he or she is smelling. It’s very focused. I couldn’t necessarily even tell you what the view is outside that narrow focus, who else is around in the story. It’s often a nebulous grey area (dark grey) and I have no idea what is happening there.  It’s a bit like a spotlight on the stage. All attention is focused on the spotlight, and everything around it is dark.

Sometimes I can’t even tell you what the main character looks like outside of some general characteristics. Scott, from Barrain, is tall, blonde and obviously nice-looking.  He’s athletic, because he snowboards and skis. Not so long ago he’d be classified as a yuppie—I don’t know what that translates into in this generation. But one person’s nice looking and fit is not the same as someone else’s.  I can’t give you an exact idea of what Scott looks like because I don’t really know.

Ask Calder though, and she could probably give you a police identikit photo of him. And that photo, incidentally, is unlikely to look anything like my version of Scott.

Packing to go away seems so much harder than it used to be.

Once it was just throw some clothes into a bag and we’re ready. Anything we’d forgotten we bought along the way.

Nowadays the clothes are the least of my worries.

Have I got my mobile phone? Have I packed the phone charger?

Next it’s the work in progress. Have I copied the novel I am working on onto the laptop? What about my current research?

Then it’s the computer itself. Is the laptop packed? What about the accessories, especially the power cable. And the mouse for those days when the touchpad is just too much? What about the wireless card? And the phone-away number for the wireless card? Are we sure the place we have booked has wi-fi access? Do we have a flash drive, just in case?

There’s an extra bag for the PC and all its consumables. There’s an extra bag for all the paperwork we need to carry. The car boot is full, and we’re only driving to the airport.