#19 Agents and Publishers oh my!
Some good news for me on the writing front. My editor at Doubleday Canada, Melanie Tutino, responded with great and cheering enthusiasm to my new novel, The Recent Dead. Completely heartening for me after what has been a long and, at times, difficult, writing process. She’s made an offer for the novel which is fabulous. I’m expecting her editorial notes any day now, which is also fabulous. I love editing, and I love being edited. So that’s all great!
I also have a new agent. I’d been with my previous agent, the marvellous Rachel Calder at the Sayle Agency, for many years. But from a week or so ago I am now represented by Cathryn Summerhayes at Curtis Brown. Cathryn won The British Book Award’s Literary Agent of the Year in 2019. Tiny fact: when I first began to work with Rachel, back in 1990, she herself was an agent at Curtis Brown.
So, The Recent Dead. It’s a ghost story, a supernatural mystery, about a young woman called Flo who might be able to communicate with the dead if only she can figure out what it is they are saying.
If you’ve read my ghost story for the smartphone, Breathe, you might recognise Flo - she’s the main character in that story too. I’ve been living with her inside my head for so long now I have a second novel planned and nearly fully plotted.
Meanwhile I had a friend visit from Vancouver and we went on a road trip to the south coast, stopping off at Great Dixter, Christopher Lloyd’s garden and house, which turns out to be almost overwhelmingly beautiful this time of year.
Before that I read all five of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels one after the other. The Talented Mister Ripley is by far the most complex, disturbing and dark; the four follow-ups feature Ripley living in a beautiful house in France, with a lovely wealthy and undemanding wife, drinking wine, gardening, and only murdering when the occasion arises. Highly recommended.
And in AI, I’ve mostly been talking SLMs with various people - Small Language Models - otherwise known as ‘narrow and defined’ LMs because, well, there might be some kind of ethical, environmentally sustainable version of AI out there somewhere. It can’t all be SkyNet, can it?