It’s probably best if I update now. George and I are off to Canada on Monday for ten days, to stay with my Aunt (she lives a couple of hours outside of Toronto) and while I may get the chance to blog while I’m there, I’ll either end up doing loads of entries, or you won’t hear from me for ten days. So, it’s update time.

It has, to be honest, been a funny old week.

First of all, thank you to everyone who left congratulations messages on the last post. Each one of them was appreciated- I just spent most of the last week boggling in astonishment, and couldn’t think of any reply other than “Thanks!” and “Gosh!” over and again. So, thanks very much.

I’ve got an agent. It still doesn’t feel quite real.

One of the main reasons for this is that I was preparing myself for a long road to getting an agent – a friend of mine, who’s been a gigantic help with the novel and given me plenty of advice that’s been utterly indispensible, is also an author, and has been looking for an agent for the past two and a half years. She’s finally found one who is interested in her second book- but has asked for a major rewrite before they’ll take it on, and she’s currently waiting to hear back whether the rewrite she did as a result of that was successful. I know how these things work and how painful the process can be. I was ready to buckle down, do serious mail outs, and win through in the end after a long battle.

Instead, I sent my book out on Monday– and I had an agent by lunchtime Wednesday. I feel like I blinked, and the world changed, and it’s still taking me a while to get used to it. All the way through writing the book, I had a bizarre, unshakeable (and possibly slightly psychotic) conviction that if I got it right, something would happen. I didn’t know what, and I knew it was likely it wouldn’t be something I expected, but I felt that something would be sparked off by doing this. I just wasn’t expecting it to actually happen. Certain sections of the last week have given me the overwhelming desire to hide, and I’m also telling myself that it doesn’t matter if the next phase takes ages to actually happen– but the possibilities have expanded massively. And, to be honest, the fact that someone not only enjoyed the book, but enjoyed the book this much, is making me very happy. It’s reassuring me that maybe I wasn’t totally insane for rewriting and rewriting it until my forehead bled (metaphorically speaking, of course)…

The situation is that I spent most of today doing some tidying up and queries that John had on the book- nothing major, and some of which have ended up being genuine improvements that I’m happy are there. I’ll be sending the final ‘approved’ version of the manuscript tomorrow morning– and then, fairly soon after that, it’s going to start going out to publishers. At the least, I’ve got heaps of work between now and then to occupy me over the weekend, and then I’ll be in the snowy wilds of Canada for ten days, which is probably the best thing for me.

Life is feeling good. Odd, but good…