So I win Bad Blogger of the Year Award for my silence over the past 10 days. I know, I know, I’m supposed to be banging out my every thought and movement on the blogosphere, but it’s just too busy around here to do that (as you can probably guess since I’m writing this on a Saturday morning when sensible mortals are out grocery shopping).

Last weekend was NESCBWI up in Fitchburg, Mass – a great 24-hour visit (including nearly 3 hours of plane delay) incorporating a bunch of manuscript critiques, even more query critiques, and a really enjoyable panel with old friend Ammi-Joan Paquette of Erin Murphy and new friend Edward Necarsulmer IV of McIntosh & Otis.  I love doing these events – meeting writers (many of whom I’ve now met on several occasions around the country) and faculty, which this time included Alexandra Cooper of S&S;, Caroline Abbey of Bloomsbury, and Molly O’Neill of Katherine Tegen Books, HarperCollins (+ lots more). The keynote from Cynthia Leitich Smith was to die for – she is such a funny, wise, pertinent speaker, so if you ever get a chance to hear her in person do grab it and go. And if you are one of the few US or UK writers not tuned in to her invaluable blog, take a look and sign up – you’ll learn so much about this business:  http://cynthialeitichsmith.blogspot.com/

Then straight on into an extraordinarily busy week in which, very weirdly, almost everything I’ve spent weeks/months awaiting arrived in the space of a few days.  Very exciting to have strong interest on a debut submission just 12 hours after it went out on Monday (now that’s what you dream of!) and Julia over in the UK is also awaiting a promised offer, so we may pull off the double.  But right now it’s back to pile-driving through the reading and editing – big, fat, challenging manuscripts lie around me and that’s when it all gets exciting!

So, let’s get on with Part 3 of my blogathon on HOW TO WRITE THE BREAKOUT NOVEL.  This week – A High Stakes Plot.  And oh, how dear this is to my heart. Because so often I see queries, partials and fulls where the writing is nice, but the story just doesn’t quite leap off the page because the plotting isn’t high-stakes enough.

In other words, what do your characters stand to win or lose?  Or let’s say that a little more emphatically because it is so important:

WHAT DO YOUR CHARACTERS STAND TO WIN OR LOSE??????

A novel isn’t always like real life. In real life things often meander along. Many of us don’t live hugely exciting lives. And yet – probably many of us DO know what it feels like to have something happen that is completely game-changing. A dilemma that leads to a forked path. A moral issue so tough to resolve that real anguish is involved. A question about who you love most and what that is going to mean. A choice between complacency and courage, hesitation and action, growth or stagnation.

There, I knew you would understand what I mean by high stakes!

I had one of my own brushes with high stakes a few years ago when confronted with a choice:  stay in London working my way up the corporate ladder in a place where I was secure, known and respected. Or take the leap to the USA and create a life, a business, a vision that would lead me to places I couldn’t even guess. Yes, I understand high stakes – and risk.

If you are a fiction writer your characters must also face high stakes – or I’d almost guarantee your story is going to be dull. As readers we – and children/teens even more so – want to be gripped. It is your job, dear author, to grip us!

So, think through the stakes of your story.  Work them out carefully, seed them into your subplots, and lay out those stakes in such a way that they escalate, building and building the tension, right through to your final denouement.

Writers take very different views on outlining. Personally, I think some kind of outline is invaluable. If you find a chapter breakdown useful, then do it – though I must confess that I hate reading them and can quite understand if you hate writing them. Look, it doesn’t have to be something that detailed.

What I’m talking about is some kind of structural route map, an A-Z in whatever form works for you, so you know just where you’re heading. And especially, so you have a fairly clear idea of what the climax and ending are going to be. A good outline will prevent your story from running out of steam or getting very confused.

Now, I can already hear some of you saying, ‘But Sarah, I am writing a LITERARY novel, it is LYRICAL and LUMINOUS, not some mass-market thriller – surely my characters don’t NEED all this drama in their lives?’

Aha, I am ready to answer you – because I believe there are different kinds of high stakes. Let’s take two Greenhouse novels (why would I not?  This may encourage you to buy and read them and I lose no opps to promote our authors):

Sarwat Chadda’s DEVIL’S KISS (Hyperion) is a big, blockbusting thriller so no surprise that its protagonist, 15-year-old Bill SanGreal, has a life completely littered with high stakes.  She’s fallen for a guy who turns out to be a lying, cheating fallen angel, after all.  It’s her job to save London from a reenactment of the tenth plague of Egypt.  To do that she must sacrifice the only boy she’s ever cared for – just as they’ve realized their love for each other.  For poor Billi, the stakes are whopping – love or the world? Evil or the good of humanity? Sheesh, Sarwat.

But then let’s take Val Patterson’s THE OTHER SIDE OF BLUE (Clarion) – jewel-like in language, acute in its perceptions. So much here is inward for Cyan, the book’s protagonist, as she struggles to find her way after her father’s mysterious death at sea.  There is a ‘gulf as wide as the Caribbean’ between her mother and herself, and unless she can bridge it she will never find emotional freedom, health, fulfillment and her path in life. The stakes are high and we can’t help but read on to the moment of breakthrough.  We know instinctively, in a quite different way to DEVIL’S KISS, that Cyan’s life is in great danger.

Wherever your work comes in the literary spectrum, I believe you need high stakes.  The high stakes of outward challenge and danger. Or the equally (but different) high stakes of emotional survival and growth.

Want to see your story grow in pace and tension? Start staking!

And next time:  HOW TO WRITE THE BREAKTHROUGH NOVEL: Part 4 – A Deeply Felt Theme.

Now I’ve got to dash – look, even literary agents need groceries!

Last week was monumentally insane for a variety of agently reasons, so sorry it’s taken longer than I hoped to write the second chapter of our masterclass series on Writing the Breakout Novel. 

Part 1, last week, was on AN INSPIRED CONCEPT. This second episode focuses on CHARACTER and is aptly portrayed by today’s image of a pile of Dachsunds. Dachsunds are wee beasties of immense character, and as I write the Wee Man is snoozing on my feet and Auntie Lucy (a fastidious and highly elegant former showdog) is snoring on the office couch.

Without great characters your fiction is going to be pretty much dead, so how do you create characters who will – as we editors like to put it – LEAP OFF THE PAGE?  Because your goal is to take your characters out of the black-and-white of two-dimensionality and into the vibrant 3D of your readers’ imaginations.  Simple, huh? Well, maybe not so much.

A major tip is to get to know your principle characters and their backstories so well BEFORE YOU START TO WRITE that you don’t need to explain them, or invent them, as you go along. Rather, you are so well acquainted with these people from the getgo that you can let them reveal themselves as you drip forth in measured and varied ways their personalities and their pasts.

What were the journeys your characters made up to the point where your story opens?  If you know them this well, you will be better able to ‘show and not tell’. And telling rather than showing is one of the major issues for new writers in particular.  What is the biggest problem we see in our submissions inbox?  Probably it is TELLING rather than SHOWING. 

What do I mean by TELLING?  I mean paragraphs, even pages, of exposition, in which your authorial voice (even if thinly disguised as your protagonist) gives an information dump about themselves, your other characters, and their world.  Telling may get the info down fast, but it sure is dull to read!

Logan Pearsall Smith said:  ‘What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.’ And there are lots of ways to whisper as you let your characters REVEAL themselves.

Take Greenhouse author Valerie Patterson’s debut, THE OTHER SIDE OF BLUE (Clarion, Fall 2009). A beautifully crafted, beautifully voiced story set on the island of Curacao in the Dutch Antilles, BLUE tells the story of Cyan who returns to the island one year after the mysterious death of her father at sea.  ‘Mother painted me blue,’ Cyan says. ‘But as I look out over the sea, I think about Dad and wonder what color I really am.  What is the color for lost?’

See how Valerie uses color (‘colour’ for British readers!) to whisper about her protagonist?

Throughout the story, we can’t help but compare the rich, colorful sensuality of island food with the frozen repression of Cyan’s heart.  We’re not TOLD to relate the two, we are just gently, subliminally invited to do so.  Sea glass provides another powerful conduit: ‘Hope.  I think that’s what we have left, Mother and me.  I give it to both of us, cupping it in my hands like a piece of tumbled sea glass, holding it up to the light.’

Valerie Patterson is very, very good at whispering!

The same techniques also work, in different ways, in other genres.  See how Sarwat Chadda builds the personality of Billi in his powerful, dark, debut novel DEVIL’S KISS (Hyperion – B & N Top 20 YA Novels of 2009).  He doesn’t have to TELL us constantly what Billi is like – he reveals her in multitudinous ways as she responds to danger, fear or anger.

The sole purpose of description is really to reveal character – it has little value in and of itself. British author Malorie Blackman doesn’t even like to tell you whether her characters are black or white – that’s left up to you, the reader, and in what ways does it matter? Worth thinking about perhaps.

What does it tell you that a character’s jeans are ripped or that they wear scarlet lipgloss or that they push back their hair in a certain way? It’s all about character. Have you explored using description in that way?

And now the big one:
Character is revealed pre-eminently by conflict and dilemma – all of which must move us towards your big moment of revelation as the story reaches its climax.

Every scene you include should have a purpose in the greater scheme of your novel. Every scene you include should reveal more about your characters – and conflict is the anvil on which your characters are beaten into shape.

And then there’s dialogue – crucial to building character.

A bestselling author I met at a conference last year told me that he used to receive many rejections, all saying that his dialogue was flat.  Being a determined sort of chap he took two weeks off work and secretly recorded conversations at bus stops, in stores, and typed them out.  Apart from nearly going mad, he said it was revelation. 

What he learned was that people don’t address each other in long, carefully constructed sentences.  Rather, 90% of human conversation is extremely self-interested. He learned that what was UNSAID was at least as important as what was SAID.

So, another big one:
The external of conversation needs absolutely to reflect the internal agenda of your character. 

Wow, interesting! Do you know the difference between your characters’ internal and external agendas?  What they are thinking/feeling inside versus the message they are wanting to convey and portray?

So, that’s it for tonight.  Not exhaustive, but hopefully some ideas to be pondering as you craft your story and take it to the next level.

Next time:  WRITING A BREAKOUT NOVEL: Part 3 – A HIGH-STAKES STORY!

Take care, enjoy your writing – and watch out for the Dachsunds . . . . .

OK, enough messing around! It’s time to roll up our sleeves, sharpen our pencils, and get down to business. So have a strong cup of coffee standing by as we enter the classroom this week in the first of a series of (probably five) posts titled HOW TO WRITE THE BREAKOUT NOVEL.

These are based on a talk that I have given in various parts of the world, notably London, Los Angeles and Asilomar, California.  In each venue what I want to say develops and changes a little, but here I am going to distil what I think are the most useful points. This is what we’ll be covering, after a short introduction:  1) An inspired concept 2) Larger-than-life characters 3) A high-stakes story 4) A deeply felt theme and 5) A vivid setting . . . . Oh, and there will be a number 6) also – I wonder if you can guess what that might be?  At the end, you should have a set of notes that will enable you to heckle from the back of the room if you ever hear me give the talk in future – but also, I hope, notes that will be really useful.

Why do I want to talk about ‘writing the breakout novel’ and what do I mean by that?

Toni Morrison said: ‘If there’s a story you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.’

But HOW do you write it? Can there BE a recipe for writing a great novel or am I simply suggesting we manipulate a stupid marketplace?

Of course I am not. I am a lover of language and a lover of quality writing, whether that be what we might call ‘literary’ or ‘commercial’. So the last thing I’d propose is that you write something that isn’t authentic to you in the hopes of getting a deal.  That just won’t work!
However, I do believe there are certain common denominators to a great story, wherever it comes on the literary spectrum – and that that’s true whether you’re writing a plot-based novel full of action, or a quieter story where you’re primarily in the internal world of your protagonist. Does this apply to both young fiction and more sophisticated older fiction? I think so – test it out. But hopefully there will be some points at least that can be distilled even in a story aimed at younger kids.

What do I mean by ‘breakout novel’? Well, that’s my shorthand for saying – the story that gets you a deal, that creates a buzz in the marketplace, that enables you to go on writing for a career; the story that is passed from hand to hand.  And this is important because we are in a time of ongoing turbulence in the industry; editors are under pressure to cut lists, focus on the biggest brands (authors), and acquisition processes are even tougher and risk-averse.

Amid all this, the one great growth area is . . . the numbers of people wanting to write. And especially write for children/young adults, the sector of the market which has shown itself to be most recession-proof and such a dynamic force within the publishing world over the last 10+ years.  Record numbers attended the national SCBWI conferences in the past year; record numbers applied for the prestigious MFA in Children’s Writing program at Vermont College of the Fine Arts. Everyone wants to write! So how can YOU break through – get published and, just as importantly, STAY published?

Here is my recipe for success based on the books I acquired and published during my 25+ years as a senior London children’s publisher, and my 2+ years as a literary agent, reading hundreds of queries each month. 

The first ingredient of your breakout novel must be:

AN INSPIRED CONCEPT

I can’t tell you exactly how to unearth your concept, but I CAN tell you that it needs to be great!  And I know that keeping your eyes and ears open to the stories going on all around you, in real life, is one good way of tracking down a strong idea.

Once you have a theme, is there a way of portraying/developing that theme that is unexpected, unusual, different? Some of you will know that the book I like to mention at this point is THIRTEEN REASONS WHY, because I think Jay Asher was remarkably clever in taking a subject that has been written about before (a girl’s death by her own hand) and doing something completely different with it – structurally, conceptually, so that it is turned into a tense, compressed thriller.  This is just one example of a clever concept.  Other stories won’t be quite so ‘high-concept’ necessarily, but this idea of doing something fresh is one to work with.

OK, moving on - get to know your area of the market and what is working, the diversity within it, the parameters. In other words, educate yourself about the world you are trying to enter. But then set some of that aside, because you need to discover the story that fills YOU with passion and excitement. The story that you really can’t wait to tell.

Be aware of the risk of being derivative of current bestsellers.  Even if you get a deal today your book probably wouldn’t now be published until 2012, by which time the market will have moved on.  We see a lot of very similar stories, so be aware that we love to see something that’s fresh and different. Think big. Think bold. Think . . . . what if?  Always a great way to start plotting because it encourages you to think out of the box.

Try to be very clear about WHO you are writing for. There are stories that never find an audience because they’re not sufficiently clearly targeted for any particular section of the market. Is your story for boys or girls or both? What age group?

What is the Unique Selling Point of your story? Marketeers in any industry seek the USP of a product (ever watched Dragon’s Den on TV? If so you’ll know what I mean), and it’s great if your story has a USP that can be articulated. What sets it apart from other books? Look along your shelves and see if you can pinpoint a USP in your favourite titles. Publishers considering your manuscript will be looking for something that picks it out from all the others on their desks – a special way in which they can present your work to their sales team, to retailers, to the world. Why this manuscript rather than all the others?

Don’t start writing until you know you have a really, really great idea. Work out your pitch BEFORE you start writing. (Wow, radical for all you guys who like to start at the beginning and just WRITE according to where the wind blows you!) This can be a very good idea – it will help to start you off with focus, sure of the story you are really intending to tell, and more-or-less sure of where it is going to lead you.  Perhaps you don’t need this approach if you are an incredibly accomplished and experienced writer, but if you’re just setting out, formulating your pitch before you write the first page might be a real help. 

Then you could try condensing that pitch further – into a couple of lines. Like the shoutline on a movie poster. Can you do that? If not, it may mean your story doesn’t have quite enough focus.  Focus is a good word; I like it! What is the focus of your story? When you’re sure of it, keep your eye on it. It will help you to rein yourself in a bit if everything starts falling apart and losing momentum.

A final point?  This is all just suggestions.  If you find another way of working that gets the result you want, then stick with it. One size doesn’t necessarily fit all when it comes to writing, though these are hints that are pretty tried and tested.

So - an inspired concept. The first thing you really need when writing your very own Breakout Novel!

That’s it for now. The hour is late, the day was long, the words were many. Time to stop and rub the tired eyes.

Next time:  HOW TO WRITE THE BREAKOUT NOVEL:  Part 2 – Larger-than-life characters.

See you in a few days.  Oh, and do come and find us on Facebook - the Greenhouse Literary Agency has its very own fan page and we’d love to see you there.

Take care and happy writing!

Ah, so a note has just appeared in the mail saying it’s that time again. Time to make an appointment with the eye doctor. Perfect – I’ve been having some problems with my baby-blues for a while now, so not a bad idea to get them checked out.

You see, I have a bit of a problem with eye-rolling. Always have, and it’s got quite bad recently. The problem began at school.  Lacking the nerve to be honestly and openly BAD, I simply became an eye-roller – master of the swift, fleeting head swivel, the sardonic lip curl, the rebellious flaring of the nostril. And yes, that eye-roll, just out of sight of the teacher.

I blame others for my descent into eye-rolling virtuosity.  People like Miss Eyre, leader of the woodwind ensemble during my teenage years.  A lady of stout ankles and formidable shoes who would peer through her spectacles as a waggle of her flute led us into a honking decimation of Mozart.

‘No, girls, we DON’T tap our whole foot in time to the beat. We only tap our TOES inside our SHOES.’

Eyes start to swivel.

‘Modern music? No, girls, at St Helen’s School we are not interested in music composed after 1850.’

Eyes rolling so fast I can practically see my brain.

And really, eye-rolling has stood me in good stead ever since – during dreary speeches, endless meetings (at which publishers excel), pomposity and frustration of every kind. Try it and see.  If you can get really skilled, no one will even spot it!

Agenting has introduced me to a new kind of eye-roll. The submission-related kind that makes my eyeballs spin – not in response to the writing (on which you will hopefully find me quite kind), but to various other triggers.

Here is a handy guide to Sarah’s Eye-Rolling Hall of Fame, courtesy of her inbox – and with only a modicum of poetic licence in order to protect identities:

Roll 1:
‘Dear Ms Davies, I am an extraordinary and potentially very famous person. My writing is a cross between that of Charles Dickens, Philip Pullman and Tolkien. You’d better sign me up FAST while you still can.’

Roll 2:
‘Dear Ms Davies, You don’t want to represent me? Your loss.’

Roll 3:
‘Dear Ms Davies, I have written a series of 46 books and I’m sending you now 5 pages from the middle of Book 7.’

Roll 4:
‘Dear Ms Davies, My daughter is a star of stage and screen, and has her own show on MTV, though she is only 4 years old. She has written a fictional story book with a heroine looking remarkably like herself. It will change the world. I advise you to take up this opportunity soonest.’

Roll 5:
‘Dear Ms Davies, My book is an urban paranormal romance, which comes in at 365,000 words and 623 pages, single spaced. I am happy to send it over in a Humvee.’

Roll 6:
‘Dear Dan Lazar of Writers House . . . . .’

Roll 7:
‘Dear Ms Davies, I am resending my query because I sent it to you originally on Christmas Day, the day before yesterday, and you still have not got back to me.’

Roll 8:
‘Dear Ms Davies, This is the third query I have sent you today, in separate emails . . . ‘

Roll 9:
‘Dear Ms Davies, sorry I can’t be bothered to send you an actual query, but here are the pages anyway.’

Roll 10:
‘Dear Ms Davies, Can you please publish my book in your publishing house?’

Roll 11:
‘Dear Ms Sara Davis . . .’

Roll 12:
‘Dear Ms Davies, I am delighted to send you some pages of my novel, complete with endorsement from bestselling author Fred Snooks, whose book CHAINSAWS OF THE WESTERN WORLD has made him a sensation in Pig Hollow, South Dakota.’

Roll 13:
‘Dear Ms Davies, If you can help to get my book published, my cousin says he will promote it in his grocery store.’

Roll 14:
‘Dear Ms Davies, I have studied your website and acquainted myself with your tastes. I am therefore delighted to send you my novel, which is a thriller about rape and incest in Soviet Russia, aimed at readers of John Grisham.

Roll 15:
[Scroll down immense list of agent addressees. I don’t get as far as Ms Davies.]

Roll 16:
‘Dear Ms Davies, my story about a race of little people called Weeeeneez would make an excellent movie (probably by Disney) and I have already designed a range of merchandise. Please click through the 7 links below to read a sample of my screenplay. Then call me to set up a phone call on Thursday.’

Roll 17:
‘Dear Ms Davies, I think we are a match made in heaven; shall we make sweet music together?’

I could continue but my eyeballs seem to have pivoted so far they’ve got stuck, so I’m off to that nice eye doctor for a little R&R;.  Oh, and some drops.

See you soon (I hope!). 

So, it was wonderful. It was better than wonderful – it was full-on, fabulous, up-to-the-brim great, from day one of the Bologna Book Fair through to the final moment of my subsequent Tuscan mini-vacation.  In fact, you can see just how great it all was from this photo of me at the fair . . . .

Oh no! Seems that the wrong picture has somehow been inserted here.  This isn’t a shot of me at the fair – it’s the Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna from Florence’s Loggia de Lanzi. Ooops, sorry about that terrible slip of the mouse!

I’m clearly all awry. Because Italy has made me think, as it always does.

I am a lover of small things.  The exact word (where no other will do), the correctly placed comma, the minutely timed glance. The perfection of precision underpins any great work of art, and the best writers know it.

But I also love the immense.  The stupendous idea, the theme that stretches to infinity, the question to which there are a million answers; the vastness of time and history.  And I love stories that carry a whisper of that.

For me, Italy is about both the great and the small. The endless, and yet the angel dancing on the pinhead.

When you stand in the tiny church where Dante first saw his Beatrice, or in the chapel where Boccaccio set part of the Decameron, his masterwork, your feet are set on the dawn of western literature. When your face is two feet away from the still-vibrant colours of a fresco painted on stone in the first half of the fourteenth century, or when you look up at the graceful poise of Donatello’s statue of David, you find yourself breathless before such ancient beauty.

In our time we think we know everything, but the truth is we are in danger of forgetting so much.  Italy pulls me back to the heart of things.

The Bologna Book Fair nudges me to remember that behind the daily tasks there lies a huge and international industry. The wonderful friends I meet again in the halls, and the new ones I make at the fair, bring home to me that personal relationships underpin so much of what goes on between agents and editors, between publishers from very different cultures; that the sharing of ideas, the passing of information, the word on the street is as real and dynamic as it has always been.  Bologna is so much more than just ‘a bit of jolly’; it’s one of the engine rooms of business, and a microcosm of how trade has always been done, right back to those medieval merchants scurrying down cobbled streets, their dark cloaks swishing behind them. 

Art and money; the heavenly and the mercantile; the grand vision and the detail necessary to carry it off.  The polarities always exist together, and no place makes me more aware of that than Italy. I see it in the extraordinary engineering of Brunelleschi’s massive dome, constructed more than 600 years ago (http://www.brunelleschisdome.com). I see it in the brush strokes of Botticelli’s gorgeous ‘Primavera’ (http://www.mystudios.com/treasure/1/primavera-review.html). And I see it in the magnificence of Florence’s San Lorenzo Church, where the bones of Cosimo de Medici, the founder of one of history’s greatest and wealthiest dynasties, lie crumbled beneath inlaid marble. 

If we want to make and love art we move between times – the past, present and future.  The continuous line is awe-inspiring and humbling, but we all share this sense of beauty and value. And we walk in the footsteps of so many who knew what it means to strive to be great at their craft.

As the great Renaissance painters and architects understood, every detail is crucial in supporting great structures - every plank of wood, every touch of the brush; and every detail of a story. And the greatest art is generally underpinned by the necessity of business.

We may never end up painting the Sistine Chapel or chiselling a flawless Pieta, and we may never be remembered for writing the Divine Comedy. But we can still aspire to greatness in whatever we do. And that goes for agents as well as writers. 

I love Italy. It sets me straight.

It’s gradually coming back.  I can feel it approaching.

My mojo is just around the corner!

Mojo – aka zest, energy, life force etc etc – and I parted company about a week ago in a storm of sneezing, tissues, DayQuil and thumping headache, mixed with all the dreariness of jetlag after my London visit. Here I sat this week, squinting at my monitor through red, running eyes, trying to deal with all the volumes of stuff needing urgent attention at this extremely busy time of the year.

Why so busy?  Because there’s something else that’s just around the corner, over the horizon, and that is . . . . .

BOLOGNA!

If you’re an old salt in this children’s books world you’ll know that the Bologna Book Fair is the annual trade event/selling opportunity/networking convocation/bonding extravaganza/gossip-fest/eating marathon/sleep-deprivation test/jamboree of the international children’s books industry. Held every year in the ancient and beautiful university city of Bologna in northern Italy, it is always an exciting few days – presenting and pitching your wares (if you’re a seller rather than buyer), reuniting with old friends and making new ones, spotting emerging trends, catching up with who’s arrived and who’s gone, who’s doing something new . . . . and generally reaping all the benefits of almost every publishing enterprise in the world being represented in one place at one time. Top international editors, audio publishers, movie scouts, artists, bestselling writers, apps experts, agents . . . they’re all at the fair, sipping tiny cups of espresso in the halls or laughing around enormous dining tables in the city’s fabulous restaurants and bars. You never know who you might bump into when you visit the restroom!

Best of all this year?  Both the Americans and the Brits seem to be back in strength, after a bleak fair last year when so many companies didn’t send people.  Why is this good? It means there’s a sense of buoyancy and optimism in the business. And that has to be positive news for us all. 

But before I touch down at the actual fair, I’ll be in Bologna a little early for the annual SCBWI Bologna symposium, along with other agents such as Rosemary Stimola, Kristin Nelson and Marcia Wernick.  Take a look at this link and you can see more about it – and also interviews with all of us: http://www.scbwibologna.org/presenters/agents.php. My contribution is simply a first-pages panel on Monday morning, but I’ll also be dining with the faculty on Sunday and the delegates on Monday night.

So it’s all go here. Our author/books list for the fair (ie, the rights we have on offer) is all prepared and printed out, and includes a number of new authors and titles, which is really exciting! We only talk about manuscripts which we’ll be able to send out within a couple of months of the fair, but we have some great new work to present, as well as rights to sell in different territories on our more backlist books. You learn a lot about how to pitch a work (and if it really has a hook) when you sit across the table from a different publisher every half-hour for two days without a break.  What catches their attention and what doesn’t? Does this story have legs – or not?  It’s all in their eyes as they listen to you, and you’d best beware because some publishers will make it abundantly clear if they’ve switched off!

Now it’s a countdown till I leave Saturday evening, flying all night via Paris. Now we’re on to the really vital things. The ritual pre-Bologna haircut tomorrow. Pulling copious garments out of the closet, trying them on (why the heck don’t these trousers fit like last year???), throwing them in a pile, searching for tangled leads to all manner of gadgets and adaptors, muttering as I realize I’ll NEVER get all this in that suitcase if I add all the ARCs I’ve promised Rights People I’d take . . . .  AND WHAT ABOUT EUROS???

Did I mention that I loathe packing? Way too much stuff or way too little – will I ever get it right?

Power-load the Sudafed.  Pack the Kleenex. Stuff the Kindle in the carry-on. We’re off to the fair. And Spring is here – the bulbs are sprouting, the temperature outside is gorgeous, and everything is bursting into life.

Of course, Spring is Bologna time! And after the fair I’m excited to say I’m taking few days’ vacation in gorgeous Italy. Bye-bye Blackberry.  So if you have a submission up your sleeve, either prepare for a bit of a wait to hear from me, or perhaps delay sending it until the very end of March. 

Oh, and by the way – the photo is of our stand at Bologna last year.  Alex Webb and Caroline Hill-Trevor of Rights People. And, of course, big signs saying GREENHOUSE!

Wish Julia and I luck! Go Greenhouse!