Getting a publisher

I promised myself that if I didn’t get an agent willing to represent me at the Winchester Writers’ Conference I would self-publish. I didn’t get an agent interested but an editor from one of the major publishing houses asked to see the whole of my book.

I sent it off in high hopes that this would be the breakthrough I was hoping for, but she thought there were some problems with the plot and made a few suggestions about which areas she thought would benefit from some rewriting. She ended by saying she wouldn’t take my book for now but she thought I had great potential. So I’m starting again reviewing the plot, the characters and the amount of legal jargon. I’ve begun by rereading the trial passages in Scott Turow’s ‘Presumed Innocent‘ and examining the extent to which he uses technical information about the trial process in his writing. Actually it’s quite a lot and he does explain the legal terms his characters use in some detail, telling and not showing. It is my experience that most people are interested in the legal process and want to know how it works.  I’d really like to know if that applies to readers as well as the people I meet.

Then I have done an analysis of my plot to see where I can improve the tension. There are three different plots that intertwine and I think I need to work on how they work together and when I need to keep them apart.

I think this is going to keep me occupied for quite a while and I suspect this blog will get  neglected in the process.

On another note we are off to France for a month so while I can write, access to the Internet is rather limited so a bientot.