A Writer's Virtue

I have never been one of life's more patient souls. A supermarket queue of more than two people can get me tapping my feet and sighing with exaggerated despair. I hardly ever buy off the internet, as I find the thought of having to wait three days (and I think I'm being generous to Royal Mail there) for a package to land on my doormat frustrating in the extreme. I often have to fight the temptation to finish slow-talking people's sentences for them, regardless of whether or not I know what they are actually going to say. As a child, I was once heard to utter the dreaded "Are we there yet?" before I had even got into the car. So what does all this prove, aside from the fact that my family and friends must be pretty patient themselves to put up with me? Well, the damning truth is that despite being a writer, I really don't have the temperament for it…. because writing, you see, is All About The Waiting.

Take the "simple" act of writing a book in the first place. Admittedly the only person you're waiting on to finish the damn book is yourself, but by God, I sometimes feel like shouting at my own fingers as they hover hesitantly over the keys, fluttering feebly with pent-up phrases. Come on! Just type a word – anything! And then repeat that 80,000 times… Writing a novel is playing the long game, and for someone who can't even get through an Easy Level Sudoku without losing interest, that's a challenge in itself. When I wrote my last novel, the whole thing was as clear as day in my head from about 10,000 words onwards. I could almost read it word for word in places – and yet I still had to write it all down. Surely there should be some kind of thought-reading machine that can do that for you by now? Yes, I get impatient with science and technology, too.

When you've put that final full stop on the page, things don't get much better. You gird your loins, take a deep breath and rush down to the Post Office with your trusty jiffy bags, all addressed to various luminaries within the agency firmament. Then you go back home and make yourself a nice glass of Ribena. Then, well, you have to find other things with which to accompany your time for the next however many weeks. I realise in retrospect that my own waiting game when it came to hearing back from agents was mercifully brief – but did it seem that way at the time? No. It did not. Every morning, I would charge to the front door and splutter with indignation at the blank mat. Where on earth were my rejections? (I didn't entertain the possibility of acceptances at that stage, you understand.) Of course, if they had come back by return of post, I would have been equally outraged. They didn't even read it! Which just goes to show that as well as being terrible at waiting, I am also perverse. Luckily, I managed to get an agent before I slit my own wrists with frustration, and she in turn managed to cope with the increasingly falsely bright and breezy sounding emails with which I bombarded her over the next few weeks. Just wondering if you'd heard anything more from the publishers?! I know I only spoke to you half an hour ago, but hey, you never know!! Actually, I probably deleted most of these before I pressed Send, which is just as well.

By April 2008 – fanfare please – I had a publisher. At last! The culmination of all my hopes and dreams, and an end to the hell of waiting. At least, that's what I thought. It is only now, as I hover on the brink of publication (seven weeks on Monday, and counting) that I can even permit myself a hollow laugh at my former naivety. If you thought it was bad before, just try testing your patience over the pre-publication period. You sign the deal, you celebrate in a flurry of champagne corks and confetti (well, you could have done), and then absolutely nothing happens for months on end. Well, of course that's not quite true – plenty happens, but it's all at the publisher's end, and short of hiding out under your editor's desk, there’s no way you’ll get to see much of it. Over the past year, I've tried many things to attempt to get the year to go quicker. I've become a dab hand in the kitchen, I've taught my cat an excellent repertoire of tricks, and I even considered a jewellery-making course when the going got tough. At the end of the day, however, time is time. You can't hurry time, no, you just have to wait. Or was that love? No matter. The important thing to remember is that, in the immortal words of Guinness, good things come to those who wait… and despite all the hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing, finger-drumming moments along the journey, I wouldn't have it any other way.