Thanks to an old friend in a high place I manage to get one of London’s hottest literary agents to read the first 10,000 words of my novel 'The French House' overnight. The response is unequivocally enthusiastic: ‘... it is very readable, very funny, with a strong narrative voice, you are really onto something here. I would like to read the rest,’ she says.
As I read her email I am bouncing off the beams of my maison de bourg. In my head, I have already spent the six-figure advance on Roger Vivier shoes and a summer house on the Ile de Ré [the one pictured above will do just fine]. I have also planned the launch party in a friend’s boutique in Notting Hill and ordered the pink champagne. All imaginary, I hasten to add, for when I email back to say that er.... actually, the book isn’t quite finished, the response is not so enthusiastic.
I tell her it can be finished in roughly a month, as thanks to my newspaper training, I write very fast. [I’ve done the sums and a 75,000 word book, with 20,000 already in the bag, is roughly equivalent to 2,000 words a day - ‘do-able’ when you are trained to knock out 850 words on Victoria Beckham's new bob within the hour.]
So, no book deal dropping into my lap yet. But even if no-one is waiting - massive cheque at the ready - to publish it, I plan to have polished off 75,000 words by the summer solstice. I have even thought of a new genre: now that chick-lit is dead, I am calling it ‘new-life lit’ - for all those who dream of trading in their old life for a brand spanking new one. You read it here first!
Two years ago I hung up my high heels, put the Prada handbags into storage and left behind my fashionable West London life to renovate an old village house in rural France. Et voila. This blog is about what happened next....
Book deals and tax avoidance
Ooh, keep writing. At least in another month or so you'll have a finished tome to peddle. and remember, JK Rowling's famous saga was turned down by the first publishers before some clever editor at another firm picked it up and said 'this might be good'.
Love the dig at Top Shop boss. Absolutely spot on. Perhaps our current 'canny' Chancellor should also be reading this blog.
Looking forward to seeing you welcome me from London tomorrow. Crikey though, for the first time I'm travelling in 'standard', and I just don't have anything to wear in that class. Thankfully my return next week is in First. what's a boy to do? And is my carbon footprint lower if I'm not travelling in First?
Mx