Friday 29 June 2012

Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death.

Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile. Julie Burchill

So how polished do you have to be when you send out submissions. Well of course your submission should be word perfect. Why? Well for one ,if you havent taken the time to be word perfect, punctuation and all, are you really that keen? how bad do you want to be published? It doesn’t show much willing if you don’t try and be perfect. I realised this with Goa Tarffic- maybe I had conceeded failure before I had even sent the submissions out. I can say for sure my first chapter wasnt thrilling- Goa Traffic has a slow star- but some books just have a slow start don’t they? Well maybe they shouldn’t as S J Watson recently tweeted – you wouldn’t watch a film where nothing happened in the first hour…. Dare I mention Castaway... maybe not FYI Tom Hanks is my favourite actor so I watched anyway – although the non-speaking business was a little tiresome.

So I have given my submission to someone in my writing group o punctuate (well I will send it this weekend). How have I reached this stage in my life with no idea on how to place a comma? I am ashamed – I cant even begin to describe! I am definitely going to be reading my language for dummies book again! 

But it got me thinking – what are agents looking for? Are they expecting really polished pieces of work? and if you are that polished surely it inhibits your creativity (or its me just being jealous of people who know how to punctuate) But lets move away from the puncuation… back to my age old argument that everything is subjective – What does an agent pick a writer on- well it must be a combination of things: 1) a novel will sell 2) a writer they like – likeability is super high on the list I think – it’s very important 3) a writer who produces good quality work – but what is more important – I would say the creativity – the plot but maybe I am wrong maybe it is the quality of work. I suppose it is all subjective and each agent will decide their own criteria- but anyways – I am waiting my return of the submission package so that I can send it on to 5 agents – Watch this space!

Ohhh and also H has finally started on my mobile site so you can now look at http://www.marissadeluna.com/ on your smart phone or i-pad without your eyes being totally offended by the garish unmatching colours!