Welcome to Graham Storrs, author of the recently-published and excellent e-novel “TimeSplash”, which – in my humble opinion – should be mandatory for all readers of good science-fiction. Graham and I met in 2008, and I’m delighted to have him gracing the pages of this blog!
Retreats and Advances
My life has been a strange dance with Writing. Sometimes it leads. Sometimes I do. Sometimes we waltz together gracefully. Sometimes we stumble and trip. Yet, somehow, we lever lose our hold on one another, and the smile on my partner’s face never loses that suggestive hint, that almost lascivious promise that, when the dance is over, we will leave together.
I have written since I was a small boy and, before that, I used to tell endless stories to my little sister, and before that, my mother used to tell me stories, sitting on the edge of my bed, light coming in from the landing, magic swirling in my head, my head a stage as big as the world. When I was sixteen I knew I wanted to be a writer. But sixteen is a bad time to discover such a thing, pressed on all sides by serious adults wanting you to make terrible decisions that will shape your life. Perhaps, if it hadn’t been that the only adult who said I should follow my heart was a crazy uncle, who shortly afterwards found himself in a mental hospital after exposing himself in the high street, I might have taken a different path. As it was, I followed a career in science and software engineering.
And danced in secret.
The stories piled up – on paper, in those days – handwritten or typed, on a toy typewriter that once belonged to my sister and needed a very precise rhythm to avoid jamming all the keys together. And the stories disappeared. I moved about a lot and was careless. Once I threw away boxes full of manuscripts as a gesture of love. Wasted, of course. Hundreds of stories. Whole novels. Yet it didn’t matter so much. It was the dance that mattered and a dance is only for the moment.
In another world, I was being published all the time. I wrote about psychology for children on my toy typewriter and sent the manuscript to Macmillan. They made it into a book, with an orange cover and a picture of a field mouse on the front. I did other children’s science books. I wrote something funny about science and New Scientist published it. I published dozens of scientific papers, and over a hundred technical articles about artificial intelligence and robotics and programming, about communications and psychology and human-computer interaction.
So I thought I might try to publish my novels too, because that’s what was really important. I sent them to publishers who mostly ignored me. A very few said, “We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. Find yourself an agent.” So I sent them to agents. They ignored me too – although not so much as the publishers did, maybe one in six agents replied to me. They said, “We’re not taking on new clients. Try sending your work directly to publishers.” I was doing it all wrong, I now know – the rules are very strict – but no-one mentioned that. I kept doing it all wrong for quite a while. If the Internet had existed then, I imagine I’d have been the butt of many a snarky joke among insiders who couldn’t imagine how anyone could be so stupid as to not know what agents and editors wanted.
There was a period of ten years after this that I didn’t try to publish at all, just wrote my books, paragraph by paragraph, in lunch breaks and the other small eddies of my other life. Then I started trying again. With the same result. Until something quite extraordinary happened. I heard, through a peculiar route, of an opportunity to bypass the usual submission process. It was a competition to win a place on a manuscript development retreat – which would not have appealed to me except that there was the promise of a Big Six publisher on hand for several days to talk about the manuscript. It so happened, I’d just written what I thought was my best novel ever – a book called Time and Tyde, so I sent it off and won the place, and had my life transformed.
At the retreat were other writers in the same position as me (including my host, Janette Dalgleish) and for a few days we were all immersed in the publishing industry. There was the Big Six publisher, one of her editors, one of her authors, her author’s agent, the CEO of the local writer’s centre, and a local independent bookseller. A full spectrum of professionals from across the industry. They gave presentations, they chatted, they ate with us and drank with us, they critiqued our work and – most importantly for me – critiqued our approach to publication. All the writers there had a wonderful time – we bonded, and we still keep in touch two years later. And somewhere in all this, something went click! in my brain.
One month after the retreat, I had my first ever fiction acceptance – for a short story I wrote when I got home. In the next year or so, I sold eight more stories, and then my first novel. It wasn’t Time & Tyde. The Big Six lady didn’t want that after all. It was TimeSplash, the book I wrote immediately after the retreat.
It’s easy to become jaded with the idea of publication. The constant grind of rejection is hard to bear, the research and the work needed to make a successful submission is galling when you have little enough time for writing. I think all of us at the retreat were feeling it in different ways, and I think we all came away reinvigorated to some extent. Within a year of the event, another of the attendees had signed a deal for his manuscript (which is now in print, a great read, and available from Amazon) and quite recently yet another was shortlisted for an Aurealis Award.
My life is still a strange dance with Writing. We still stumble, but I’ve learned a few more of the steps. I devote more of my time to the dance these days and I think it shows. My partner and I have an audience now, which is strange. It adds a new and surprisingly intense emotional colouring to the moves we make. When people applaud, I could cry. I still get that come-on look, that promise of consummation, and it still keeps me dancing, dancing…
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Before I go, I’d just like to say a big thank you to Janette for her kindness in hosting this stop on my blog tour. Janette is one of those people whom aspiring writers should follow (here and on Twitter) for her powerfully positive attitude and cheerful outlook. One day soon, I hope to be able to return the favour when she has her own book to promote.
The TimeSplash Blog Tour
Graham Storrs is the author of TimeSplash, a fast-paced time travel thriller. This post is part of the TimeSplash blog tour running from 16th February to the 5th May. To find out more about the book, characters, Graham, publication and inside information about writing the story, go to the TimeSplash website and check out the blog tour schedule page at “TimeSplash – The Blog Tour 2010″
