*Subbing* seems to be the hardest word

Forget cardiovascular workouts, forget frenzied, passionate all-night lovemaking sessions… al...though…no… no… c’mon, focus now…and forget the sheer icy panic you get when you think you mightn’t have locked the front door before your 2-hour trip… or turned the gas off (seriously? WHO forgets to turn the Gas off?) Nope - if there’s anything guaranteed to quicken my pulse, send my heart-rate into overdrive and my blood pressure soaring, it’s sending out a submission.
And I’m not alone *gulp* am I?

 Over the years, I've probably lost about fourteen pounds (that’s a stone, right?) just sitting at the keyboard with my finger poised over the left-clicker – THAT’s how trembly my right hand gets. I've never needed one of those mad machines that shakes my cellulite into surrender, like a crazy blender with no lid… oh no, all I have to do is prepare my nice polite enquiry email, make sure I’ve got a new document with three chapters in it, polish my synopsis until I can see my (sweaty) face in it, swallow back whatever meal that threatens to re-appear and hover over ‘send’.

I’ve even been known to do it with my eyes shut; it gets that bad. As if shutting my eyes somehow makes the whole process that much easier, less stressful, more dream-like. Like it maybe didn’t happen because I wasn’t looking? Isn’t that a bit like calories not counting if you eat something when nobody’s watching? Love that idea. Eating alone is my diet of choice. But I digress.
Subbing.
I used to take Subbing to the max. “Extreme Subbing” if you like. Back in the days when paper, ink, envelopes (including self-addressed) and stamps were de rigueur. And Post Offices. My God, Post Offices. I’m still very surprised that the lady behind the counter who worked the 2 o’clock shift didn’t ever ask me if I’d thought about therapy, the number of times I got her to weigh the envelope with contents, then take out the self-addressed envelope and letter and weigh it all again so I’d know how much the return postage would be. Because sometimes I might have used ‘heavier’ ink than the last time. I mean, wouldn’t it stand to reason that the lower an ink cartridge gets, the fainter the print, and the lighter the whole caboodle? And I didn’t want those nice people at the Marsh Literary Agency* thinking I was a total prole for not understanding something as straightforward as the Royal Mail standard postage weights and measures guidelines. Well, did I? Such ineptitude would surely send my manuscript back to the bottom of the slush pile - for only submissions by writers with a basic grasp of Post Office Protocol would be worthy of reading.
At least that was my worry. Well, one of them.

Along with all the others. Did I put the right letter in the right envelope? did I put the right SAE in the right envelope? did I stick stamps on every-bloody-thing? And of course, did the nice Post Office lady really understand what it is I was asking her to do in the first place anyway?
I’m surprised I slept at all.

But at least in those ‘paper-days’ I’d have been able (if I’d been so inclined and that convinced that something in an envelope was awry) to stake out the box into which the envelope had been posted, lie in wait for the post van to collect the contents and then wrestle my envelope from his sack so that I could rip everything open only to discover that nothing WAS actually wrong in the first place and actually I DO need to seek psychiatric assistance of some kind.
After my second book did the (boomerang) rounds and I worked out I was probably spending more in posting my submissions than I was getting paid for in the part-time job which fuelled my habit, I decided to just sub to Agents whose email details appeared in the Writers and Artists Yearbook.  And there're a fair few of them.  But it doesn't make the 'sending' any less traumatic.  In fact there's not even the consolation of being able to lie in wait for the Royal Mail van after you've hit 'send' - and the blind panic I felt once when I realised I'd sent an enquiry to two different Agencies but addressed to the same person, was something I do not wish repeating in a hurry.

And, so having committed this idiotically heart-stopping misdemeanour, would YOU:
a) send another e-mail saying 'oops, sorry about that - I'm a fool who doesn't deserve representation.  I insist you send this message and any attachments directly to your recycle bin', or
b) pretend you didn't notice and hope they don't either, or
c) convince yourself that they'll think you're just a typical creative-type who, although obviously a skilled story-teller, has a head too full of creative ideas to master the banalities of basic emailing.
Yup, me too.  I'm a c) person every time.

*Just one of a number of very lovely Literary Agencies Out There.

Postman Pat and Plotting

British 1980s children's TV is the focus of much drunken nostalgia among my generation, but I have to say that when I saw an old episode of Postman Pat recently, it was pretty boring. Pat did sod all except drive around the countryside and chat to Mrs Goggins.

My son is nearly three and, although we don't have a telly, he watches DVDs of the all-new Postman Pat: Special Delivery Service series on my laptop. Pat's 21st-century incarnation is brilliant – each episode is action-packed, with a race against time, a heart-warmingly positive message, and a catchy soundtrack.

For those unfamiliar with Postman Pat: SDS, a quick description of the average episode might be in order. Pat is talking to his son Julian, when his mobile phone rings and poor Julian faces the potentially life-scarring knowledge that his dad's job is more important than he is. The caller is always Pat's boss, Ben, asking him to do a Special Delivery – and this one's urgent! All deliveries are somewhere within a one-mile radius of the mail centre, so Pat and his black and white cat, Jess (still sprightly after nearly 30 years), set off in one of their vehicles – van, motorbike or even helicopter. A variety of mishaps conspires to stop Pat reaching his destination (more often than not, involving a certain amount of incompetence on his part) but the Special Delivery Service ALWAYS gets through. Pat delivers the parcel with seconds to spare, and is everybody's hero.

So what does this have to do with writing?

The episodes aren't realistic – as far as I know, small Cumbrian towns don't have Flying Machine competitions involving a rocket that can be accidentally launched by a sheep, and if real postmen got into half the scrapes Pat lands in, they'd get the sack – but the stories work within their own logic. The plots are well thought out and even the unrealistic events are believable because they are set up well in advance – something I believe is vitally important in a novel.

When Pat needs a fishing rod to rescue a lost teddy bear from the river, you can be sure that a few scenes earlier we'll have seen Ted Glen fishing further along the bank. When a magpie needs to be tempted with food, there will already have been a character munching on a sandwich. Such tiny details appear insignificant while they're happening – but then they suddenly have a bearing on the plot. When they're needed, they are in place – we don't get jolted out of the story by Pat announcing that he just conveniently happens to have a fishing line in the van.

The world of a novel doesn't have to be realistic either, and it could be argued that it shouldn't be. Real life, after all, doesn't have a plot – it's just one damn thing after another. Fiction is different. It needs a greater intricacy, and part of that intricacy involves making the reader look back and think – 'of course! That's the parcel that was on the sideboard in the first chapter!'

I find even unexpected events more satisfying if they evolve from what has gone before and aren't just parachuted in from nowhere. A surprise can be even more of a surprise if the reader is given a clue but doesn't pick up on it at the time. Children's TV writers know this, and there's a lot we can learn from them.

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With thanks to RottenLittlePony on Flickr for the image, reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.