Silence is good, for once

It means I am working =)
Its been a while since I finished Book 2, but trust me, I have not been idle. Weighing in at nearly 350,000 words, The Keepers of the Fire, is no pamphlet, and giving it a genuine, thorough and constructive editing has been extremely time consuming.

So far, since I finally declared it complete, I have produced 3 pretty different drafts. Large sections were rewritten, new chapters were added, old ones were binned and a whole new ending to the book was crafted. After that, the whole thing needed to be read through to sense check it, then read through again at a much higher scrutiny level to pull out all the typos and check for grammar. By this point, however, I had hit my wall. After more than a few years of writing, followed by nearly half a year of editing, I was completely word blind, unable to find any more errors or do any more useful editing, and so it has been handed off to another.
As has been (every so slightly) ranted about by me before, there is simply no way I can get this professionally proofread, as it would cost well in excess of £10,000, so I am afraid there is no way this process could be sped up. That being said, though, the end is now officially in sight. A few more weeks of final editing are in order, and then it will take me a few days to apply all the marked changes and finalise the book, but after that, I am declaring it done, no matter what. There is simply nothing more I can do, so I shall just have to hope it is in a good enough state that you all don’t tear me apart! =)
I will keep you posted, but I would place money on this being out sometime in mid September.

Update about missing updates

So.  Yeah.  The WordPress Android app apparently let me down and did not in fact post the last two updates I wrote. Also, I cannot recall what they were actually about.

Helpful.

So, anyway… My next book, The Keepers of the Fire, is complete and is just going through some editing and proofreading.  I have 2 more small inserts to write and 2 chapters to rewrite (as they are, frankly, icky), but with that done, the book will be complete, and it will simply be a matter of giving it a last read through to make sure the worst of the typos are taken care of!

With any luck, Book 2 will be out to buy on Amazon within the next 4 – 6 weeks!  Huzzah!

The Trilogy Effect

Writing is turning out to be a never ending learning process it seems, and the fun fact for today is: Trilogies are damn hard!

It has been a little while since I finished the rewrite/second-edition of The Keepers of the Key and so I have set-to with working on its sequel.  After finishing writing Book 1, I thought that Book 2 would be an easier, more carefully thought out process and that I would not fall foul of all the pitfalls that I did first time.

Wrong.

Ever since I settled the plot for Book 1, many years ago now, I have had the “grand plot” reasonably straight in my head.  I knew what would happen in the next 2 books, what the over-arching themes would be and which of the characters would return where and for what purpose.  With all that in mind I finally got about 50% of the way through writing Book 2 when, thanks to the input of my unpaid, unofficial (though much loved!) editor, I realised that I was going nowhere.  My plots were riddled with holes and failings of logic, certain characters lacked any depth or real function within my world and were being tagged along simply out of habit and, generally, I was on a hiding to nowhere.

So, before Book 2 is even anywhere near complete, I am starting a rewrite.  About 50% of what I have so far written is being scrapped and I am now pitching at a very different set of themes with a  tweaked cast and rather different end-game.  How I came to be quite so lost in the wilderness is genuinely beyond me.  The notes I have made for this book are 5 times larger than those of Book 1 and while Book 2’s plot is far more complex, I really though I had a handle on it and would be able to just push through, but all that I had thought to be cut, dry and set in stone is rapidly coming undone once I get down to the actual writing.

I know Book 1’s legacy was going to leave me with work to do, as several of the “main” characters were under-formed due to there being simply not enough space to really give everyone their day in court, but I thought the familiarity of already known and liked characters would balance that out.  What it in fact has done is made everything ten times harder.  When brainstorming for Book 2, this familiarity has essentially bred laziness in me, leading me to conjure nebulous ideas that sound great in theory, but lack actual substance or depth when I came to write them.  It is as though I have written the trailer for a film without actually having any clue how the envisioned scenes link together.

To say that I am starting to see why so many writers bemoan series and complain about the difficulty of actually getting them done is a wild understatement.

Anyway, time to go and write chapter 10.  Again. =/

The Second Edition!

You may have come here from my redirect on Amazon.  If so, welcome.  Pull up a chair, grab a beer and make yourself at home.  Hopefully you have all now received your new, shiny, second edition copies of my book but I bet you have some questions right?  Right.  So then; why the second edition?  This is why:

A new version of an existing book might sound a little controversial, and I suppose it is, but there are a lot of factors at play here and many reasons why I think this new version is needed.  For starters, and most simply, this was my first book and I was, certainly at the beginning, a little out of my depth.  The book was written in two main stages, several years apart, and the work that comprises the first 40% or so of the book is in fact much older than the rest.  As a result, my lack of experience shows through far more starkly there as the earlier chapters meander around and are littered with slow, uninteresting sections that drag down the whole pace of the work.  This alone was enough for a new version, but it might have yielded less changes overall.

What has in fact changed in this new daft is as follows:

The book that Jonathan finds is gone.  The book, as a plot device, was never my first choice.  In my earliest drafts of this story, Tel had found a device, left in this world by Ashna, that led him to the first part of the Sword, thus triggering the story.  For reasons I do not fully remember, I could never get this mechanic to work however, so I abandoned it and came up with the idea of a Templar codebook, thus giving J and Dowd something physical and tangible to interact with and giving them something to do in the early chapters.  Unfortunately, this slowed the book down enormously and led to some very long, tedious chapters were they both waded through the encryption.  Moreover, the encryption was just tosh and would never have worked (and my use of the Mousehole in the picture bugged the hell out of me – mouse holes are a product of Tom and Jerry cartoons from the turn of the last century.  An 11^th century priest would never have heard of such a concept!)

Dowd and J both are developed more as characters.  Dowd is painted in a very, very bad light in the first edition.  He is miserably, reactionary and distant, constantly sniping and barking at everyone and this is not what I intended at all and it certainly is glaringly different to the kindly, gentle professor I paint him as in his flashback.  Dowd and J are now old friends from the start, speeding up all their conversations and giving them both a bit more time to shine.  J has stayed much the same but is just given more chance to show his talents.  As a friend said to me, there is no way someone as rich, handsome, successful and determined as J would spend a lot of time alone in bed!

The final change is regarding Alexander.  At the start of the book, Alexander is preaching to his companions about how they all must stay out of the way, not interfere and not tip the scales but not two minutes later, he is knocking on Dowd’s door and handing out cryptic clues and vague hints. Total nonsense.  With the code book gone, Alexander remains in the shadows, only appearing as our heroes exit Mousehole before whisking them off to Italy to tell them just what the hell is actually going on.

So, big changes but changes for the better.  The new plot device that replaces the book is fun and leads to some good comedy and solid interaction and has also allowed me to add back in some cut work, giving Larry a far bigger moment in the spotlight and letting the comic relationship between him and his flunky, Travis, shine through.  All in all, the book moves faster, is more engaging and, thanks to the device, ties better into what I had already written for the sequel, the Keepers of the Fire, which features Ashna’s work quite heavily.  I hope that those who have read the book will forgive me these changes and embrace the fact that they are genuine improvements that do not dramatically alter the structure or events of the book and that you will enjoy the coming two sequels as much as I am enjoying writing them.

Oh – a quick note for those who have found this blog from Amazon:  There appears to be some confusion regarding the process of getting your book onto the Kindle market.  A few people have pointed out that there a fair number of typos in this book, and rightly so.  Let me assure you that I am a more voracious grammar Nazi that any ten people I know and every single one of those errors a) annoys me more than it annoys you and b) is an actual error, not a confusion on my part.  Amazon offers no help whatsoever in the formatting and editing of your book, it is all down to you.  I am far from being a good typist and so, between fat fingers and an overly enthusiastic spellchecker, there were errors galore in the first, complete draft of this book.  I have done my best to correct them all but, at the end of the day, this book is nearly 200,000 words long and I am not a professional copy editor.  There comes a point where you are simply snow blind to your own work, so I would ask that you cut me and all the other hard working, amateur authors out there some slack.  I own books half the size of mine that have been republished 20+ times that still have errors in them, so that there are so few (comparative to its size) in mine is a miracle.

All that said, I hope you guys enjoy the new version.  With that done, I can get around to writing the second part and hopefully get it published before you all stop caring.  Speak to you all soon!

Stylistic choices – The horror!

This is one of those times, one of those things, where being a writer utterly goes against my nature.  At my core, I am run through with the words “EVERYTHING SHOULD BE LOGICAL”, like a stick of cheap Brighton rock.  I am one of nature’s mathematicians, coders or scientists, fully aware that the universe around me is governed by unbreakable, definitive and logical laws, any of which I am free to look up at any time, simply to check that reality is ticking along as I expect.  I approach every task with a raging amount of common sense and basic logic, safe in the knowledge that, as long as I follow the rules, I will at least be competent at it.

Then I had the wise idea of being a writer.

Bloody hellfire, but this stuff is made up as writers go along!  While the English language has a plethora of rules and regulations as to what words mean, how they are used in conjunction with each other and what ordering provides what effect, there is nothing at all standardised about punctuation in the world of publishing – they are literally doing whatever they fancy!

Don’t believe me?  Fine: go to your bookshelf right now and grab five books.  Go on, I’ll wait.   Got them?  Right.  Open one to a random page and find some dialogue.  Look at how the author has formatted it.  What character have they used to surround the text?  How have they separated different lines of text?  How have they handled long pieces of speech?  How have they handled a single piece of speech split by narrative?  See they way all that is done?  Now open another one of the books and do the same.  Do any of the conventions of the first book match the second?  I bet they don’t, especially if you grabbed books from different genres and especially if you grabbed anything highly contemporary like Pratchett.

For those that have no clue what I am yammering about, allow me to illustrate.  I will type a small piece of dialogue below and then format in several different ways:

1. “Bob, you snivelling rodent,” she yelled as she threw a newspaper at her husband “what the hell did you do that for?”
2. ‘Bob, you snivelling rodent,’ she yelled as she threw a newspaper at her husband ‘What the hell did you do that for?’
3. “Bob, you snivelling rodent.” She yelled as she threw a newspaper at her husband.  “What the hell did you do that for?”

See the differences?  Now: which one is correct?  The answer?  All of them, apparently, depending on which books you pick up.  For my money, I am sticking with version 1 but trying to ensure you stay true to a given format throughout an entire book is infuriatingly hard, especially when you get to the editing stage.

To add even more crazy to a bowl already filled with confusion, we then have the wonder that is the ePub encoding software.  While I have been trawling through my first book these past weeks, furiously highlighting every last typo and misplaced comma, it wasn’t until I came to edit the list of correction into the book that I realised something: a lot of the mistakes in The Keepers of the Key are not actually there!  My master document, from which the ePubbed versions are made, has far, far less typos and bad punctuation in it than the book that is actually on sale.  The software used to transform my word document into other forms is actually adding errors as it goes!

At this point I just want to smack the coders of said software upside the head.  If you step out side on any given day and heave a keyboard in a random direction, you will likely hit 5 coders in the head and yet when it comes time to get a piece of software written, everyone always seems to hire the guy that is not just terrible at his job, but really just does not care.

177,781 – Part 3

A further pause in activity due to a week away followed by a birthday, all woven through with a massive amount of editing and some writing.

The new draft of The Keepers of the Key is about 50% done and I will have it finalised come the end of this week.  It contains no changes to the writing, just a brush and polish of what was already there (commas – why must you torment me so?!).  I’ll get it uploaded to Amazon and to smashwords so if anyone is mid-read, grab the new copy.

With that done, I will be diving back into the task of attracting a  publisher.  New synopsis is written, sample chapters are ready: I just need to draw up a list of prospective agencies and have at it again and nag the living hell our of everyone that bought the book to get a review written for me to add more fuel to my fire.  So few people have actually rated the book or left a review it is slightly worrying.  I am, however, choosing to believe that they simply forget and will leap eagerly to the task once I remind them!  Yes…

Masochism

Yea gods – why am I doing this?  Why must I torture myself so?  Is life not filled with enough trouble and strife that I must actively seek out more, just to ensure that levels of misery are constantly at their maximum?

And yet I’ve done it.  It has been requested – paid for no less – and it has arrived and now here it sits, staring at me.  The source of a year’s worth of frustration, simultaneously a concentrated pool of genuinely useful information and a seemingly endless supply of despair.  Never has something that caused me so much excitement when I first received it, that filled me with such hope, that taunted me with such dreams and aspirations turned out to be something I would literally despise and cringe at the sight of

And yet, here it sits: The latest edition of the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook.

Why is it here?  That’s right, boys and girls, it is here because I am going to try once again to get a publisher interested in my work.  Over a year has passed since my last attempt at this and in that time I have published my book through two digital distributers, produced an even more error free edition and secured artwork for both it and its sequel.  Does this raise my chances?  Probably not.  The publishing industry is still in its death throes and the UK is in the middle of a financial depression: hardly a sterling time to be getting people to spend money.

 

But you know what? To hell with all that.  I still believe in my work, more strongly now than ever in fact.  During my (seemingly endless) stretches of editing, I have actually come to appreciate what I have created.  Enough time has passed since I finished writing it for the work to become unfamiliar, allowing me to view it through the eyes of its audience instead of its author, and you know what? It turns out I don’t suck.

So, with one book out and selling, another in the pipeline and a further 8 planned novels, I feel I have as good a chance as any to tickle some publishers particular fancy.

Time to print out lots and lots of sample chapters and write a fantastic cover letter.  Like I said in my first post here to a chap who made a comment: we can’t let the bastards get us down!

177,781 – Part 2

My first post here touched on an issue that has baffled me for some time now and I’d be interested to hear what others have to say about the matter.

When did books get so damned tiny?

Or at least, when did people start thinking that books were tiny?

As soon as I began the process of writing my book, I started to be assailed by people telling me how I should go about my task.  They badgered me with rules and regulations on what one should and should not do when writing.  Some of this advice was helpful – most of it was not.  But one thing that struck out above the rest was this: people – publishers, readers and writers alike – are obsessed with word count in a book.

“Don’t make your book too long, no one will read it.”

“Don’t make your book too short, it wont be taken seriously.”

“Don’t spend to much time on narrative – people prefer characters.”

“Don’t spend too much time on characters – people prefer narrative.”

As with 99.999% of the advice I was given, all four of those statements are totally incorrect.  As far as I am concerned – and if you think about it, I am certain that you all, writers and readers alike, agree with me – a book should be as long as it needs to be.  You need to take a sensible amount of page-space to tell the story you are trying to tell.  Padding it our with fluff to make it longer can lead to a bored reader who is starting to worry that you have lost your way while truncating your story by missing out narrative, explanations or plot-lines can leave your reader bewildered and thinking that maybe they skipped pages in error.  This is not to say that sections should not be trimmed to remove things that are impeding your flow nor that it is not worth elaborating on important sections so as to increase your readers immersion and enjoyment.  Both of these things are very different from what I am talking about.

The problem is that publishing industry does not agree with this.  They think that books are a standardised thing that should be churned out via a standardised mould.  To be even more annoying, that standard changes depending if this is your first novel or a subsequent one.

Why?!

I can see an amount of logic there if you look into the cost of printing books and consider the risk/reward issue of trying to get a first time author to sell.  A publisher may well like your work and be interested in representing it but they will understandably be twitchy about publishing a half-million word epic.  If, heaven forfend, your masterpiece fails to shift all its copies, the publisher is bound by contract to buy back the unsold copies, thus sending them into debt.  I get that and I can see why the word count of a book is relevant.

My concern is why the industry has settled on such a tiny figure as its “recommended book length”.  Wikipedia has some horrifying figures regarding the length of fiction writing.  40,000+ words, it says, is the length of a novel.  Most publishers will recommend that your novel, especially if it is a first novel, should be around 70 – 100,000 words.  While that is certainly more realistic as I simply could call anything around the 40,000 word mark a “novel”, it is still very, very short as far as I am concerned.

Upon hearing these figures, I took an interest in the matter and began to examine the book collection that myself and my partner have.  Taking rough estimates for word count (no. of pages * lines per page * average words per line) yielded some interesting results.  Of the 500+ books we have, I would estimate that the average word count is something in the region of 150,000 to 220,000, considerably more than is apparently “average”.  Let me be clear too that ours is a not a collection stuffed full of nothing but Tolkien, Tolstoy and Proust and that when I made this estimate I also ignored the vast, groaning weight of words that is my partners historical biographies.  Sure, there are short books in there but they are mostly things like Pratchett and my odd collection of 70’s paperback Sci-Fi (Harry Harrison, E E Doc Smith, T J Bass, James Tiptree Jr. and so on) but these are essentially strings of jokes and sociological observations (Pratchett) or expanded “Tales of the Unexpected” style, single twist books that have nowhere really to go.

What I am looking at is a wall of books from the likes of Banks, Larsson, Stephenson, Bear, May, Zelazny, Novik, Kostova et al.  These are all popular books, often from first time authors, that can still be found now, adorning the shelves of your local Waterstones.  Sure, there is a preponderance of the more fantastical end of the “fiction” section, but these are not tiny, niche books that struggled to see a profit.

So my point is, from where do publishers get their ideals?  Is it the case that they let the books that sell the best – chick-lit, romance, tweenage targeted vampire/wizard/werewolf nonsense – dictate what they think will sell?  Sure, the old Mills & Boon still flies off the shelf at a staggering rate, but can all fiction really be contained within the same boundaries as genres that, with the best will in the world and with full acknowledgement that they sell better than anything I will ever write, have no plot at all?

At the end of the day, word count made me paranoid.  I had a damned good tale to tell but with every 1000 words that I got down, I became more and more frightened.  I began heavily editing my book and drastically changing my style.  This resulted in the Keepers of the Key being written slightly oddly, relying heavily on plot exposition to be expedited by character conversation rather than by a narrator.  I started to shrink everything I was writing, cramming as much as I could into as few words as I could. If truth be told, I actually cut out a number of chapters that could have easily added another 40,000 words and that was before my first, heavy-handed edit that removed a further17,000 words I had already written.  In an ideal world, the Keepers of the Key would have been roughly 250,000 – a length that is apparently considered just ludicrous, but one that would have made the story that much more rich in my opinion.

Assuming a writer knows the difference between interesting writing and waffling for the sake of hearing his own voice, is having more words not a good thing?  I have tried to discuss this with some people and have been surprised by their answers.  I have argued that character development can be great fun in and of itself.  The sections in Look to Windward by Iain banks where its main characters wander off to have fun on a massive cable-car system are without doubt some of my favorite parts of that book.  No plot is moved along and nothing hinges on anything they do or say there: its simply fun to hear them talk.  Others don’t agree, telling me that if it is not moving the plot along, they don’t want to hear about it.  I think these people are just insane.  They make reading sound like a chore, that they just want to march through in a straight line from first to last chapter and not bother with any asides.  How deliriously dull.

So, to restate my point: are books too small and plot light these days?  Have we managed to  refine the art of storytelling so much that it takes up less space or are publishers forcing writers to pander to ever shrinking attention spans?  I personally think its the latter and I will continue to pour scorn on books that are little more than overly elaborate pamphlets but what does anyone else think?

ePubli…wait! Not yet.

So the next step was ePublishing.  The companies I should have been able to turn to, to market and promote my book were…otherwise engaged, so it was down to me to get my product out there.  Cue: Amazon.

But it is not that simple, is it?  While you may have worked hard – damned hard – on your manuscript, it will not yet have  received a good editing.  No one has sat down and crossed the T’s, dotted the I’s and pointed out that your spell-check is, in fact, quite, quite insane.

Trouble is, editing is job numero uno  for the publisher that takes you on.  They pay an army of little nitpickers to take your beloved work apart, word by word, sifting through each and every page with the mother of all red pens.

Problem is YOU are your publisher now, kiddo, so break out your own red pen.

So I did.  I bought a cheap laser printer and ran out a 2-pages-per-page copy of my book.  Sitting down, red pen in hand, I thought it would be quite nice to see my own work as a reader for once.  It would be enjoyable.  I’m pretty handy with a word processor and I’m already that guy who annoys his friends by correcting their grammar and telling them when they use commas incorrectly.  This will be a breeze!

First run through was a breeze.  I just looked out for the really obvious stuff: problems with speech-marks, extra spaces, duplicate words, capitalisation and so on.  No worries.  The red marks grew at an alarming rate but, well, that’s to be expected, right?  I may know how grammar works but I’m a lousy typist.  It’s all good, right?

Wrong.  To cut a very long story short, I was astonished – nay, appalled – by the sheer volume of errors I found. Mistakes related just to typing must have numbered close to 500 – and those were the ones I managed to find.  It was the other mistakes, the ones you only spotted by slowly and carefully reading and digesting every single word in every single sentence.  You have to grasp each tiny section of the story in its entirety and not only make sure that it makes sense, but that is also makes sense in relation to everything around it.

You see the thing is, as I learned very quickly, it is deeply, deeply difficult to edit your own work.  Not only are you snow-blind to the text as you have done nothing but stare at it for 18 months, but you know what it is supposed to say.  Your brain tricks you, filling in missed words, overlooking swapped words (I swear, form rather than from) and in fact Spackling merrily over huge holes in logic.  It wasn’t until the third full read-through of the book that I realised there were 3 glaring timeline errors buried in here, with characters either doing things impossibly fast or ludicrously slow and it wasn’t until the eighth read-through that I realised I was calling a character by 2 different names!  In the end I stopped, 12 read-throughs later, as I was really quite certain my eyes were going to explode and that I was on the verge of loathing my own characters.

Safe to say that my respect for those who proof-read professionally has gone up exponentially.  The sheer determination and unflinching focus it must take to read through so much text, pulling it apart and making sense of it, staggers my brain.  Even now, now the book has been on sale for some months, I still find errors!  I know that, as books go, mine is not short, but it is not War & Peace either.  How on earth one would go about editing a genuinely massive work (again, looking at you Neal Stephenson) is simply beyond me.

So: did I learn anything?  Hells yes.  The two most important things I have taken on-board as I write the sequel are:

1) Planning is paramount, especially when your plot gets complex or convoluted.  I planned a great deal for the first book but never with enough detail to stop me running fowl of my own attention span.

2) While writing, don’t walk away mid-section or at least, if you have to stop, make notes about where your thoughts are.  Having looked back through the book to see where the worst mistakes were (track changes – gotta love it), I notice that they seem to occur right in the middle of a chapter or a sequence.  My best guess is that I will have stalled or become frustrated and simply got up to do something else, possibly not returning to write for days at a time.  By then, of course, the buzzing cloud of plot ideas and character actions will have quietened and I will have gone on to finish the section differently than I originally planned.

Hopefully this will make a difference when I am at the point of editing the second book but, to be frank, given that this book is looking to be much longer, with more characters and a more complex plot, I cannot say I am that convinced.  I guess we shall see…

So…what’s next?

Well, with the writing done (some time ago if we are brutally honest – editing is quite possibly the most time consuming task the world has ever known – again: more later) what was next?

I foolishly assumed that the hard part was over.  While writing I had kept reading, kept my ear to the ground with what was popular and what was selling and kept a keen eye on what genres and styles had vanished like so mush Scotch Mist.  I thought I was well informed, clued into what the public wanted, ready to sell my work to a publisher safe in the knowledge that I had written something that was fresh, that was relevant, that ticked all the little boxes on their retirement plans.  I was convinced that, given my work was written well enough (Tolkien or Banks I am not – of this I am painfully aware – but I at least know how to use words, how to build sentences, how to create atmosphere and how to define interesting and engaging characters), formatted nicely and neither a million word Neal Stephenson epic (bless him – I’d love to spend 10 minutes in his head – it must be the most fascinating place in the world) nor an over-inflated short story, that I was in with a real chance.

Unfortunately in the few years I had been writing 2 things had happened:

1) eBooks

2) Certain online and high-street stores had taken the legs out from under the publishing industry.

Grasping my freshly printed samples with one hand a huge wedge of self-addressed envelopes in the other, I threw myself into the Writers and Artist’s Yearbook with glee, expecting lively discussion on the merits of my work, a huge wave of rebuttals (either because their ledgers were full, they do not publish work like mine or maybe even ‘cos they found me downright offensive!) and then, eventually, after many tries, maybe a glimmer of interest.

What I actually got was apathy.  Speaking to publishers is entirely akin to trying to have a lively conversation with a co-worker who just got fired and is busily stuffing their personal belongings into a small cardboard box.  My packages were sent back unopened, my carefully chosen (and might I add, cheery and fun) postcards which I dispatched with each manuscript (so that they could bung them in the post, letting me know they had received my work) were “misplaced” and generally all my hard work was casually filed under B1N.

In fact, apathy turned out to be the good response on occasion.  More than once I get a reply from a publisher berating me for even daring to send them my work!

“We don’t deal in such matters here, Mr Howard, and if you had even bothered to read our website, we are certain you would know this.”

Regrettably I am not the kind of person to take stupidity on the chin so I found myself in heated debates with such people, carefully and in painful detail explaining to them that I am not bloody psychic and that if they are going to have ludicrously finickity rules about the types of work they are interested in then it would help if they actually told some bugger about them!

Yes.  Fun.  The upshot was that after sending out to every last publisher in the mighty tome that is the Writers and Artist’s Yearbook who might even have a passing interest in my work (just over 50), I received a grand total of 7 returned postcards, 5 nicely worded rejections (predominantly “sorry, we have too many clients, but good luck to you”), 3 flame-bait emails and 1 utterly heart warming letter from some poor chap down in a forgotten basement of some large publishing corporation who actually took the time to climb out from under the landslide of submissions he was being paid to wade through and say that he loved my work and really wished he could have passed it up the line but that their ledgers were full and they simply would not consider any new authors at this time.

I sent that guy a thank you card.  I like to believe he got it and it made him smile.

18 months well spent then.  So.  Next step: ePublishing!