Introduction

Welcome to the Blog. I hope to describe all the effort that's required to get a novel published once you've finished what you thought was the hardest part - namely writing the damn thing.

A little introduction. I'm a bit of a split personality - Marshall Buckley is two people, divided by 2,500 miles but united by one idea: to have a book published. I won't go into the details of who we are, that's largely irrelevant (and can be found elsewhere, if you're that interested, it's no secret).

In March 2009 the most basic idea was raised for the first novel - called The Long Second. After a surprisingly short amount of time - about 2 months - it was finished, apart from proof-reading, editting and polishing, of course. It runs to about 115,000 words and is a Sci-Fi novel with themes of Time-Travel but in the current world.

With the writing complete, the search for an agent or publisher began, and this is where it gets tough. You might, like me, have never really come across anybody who has written a book. Sure, you almost definitely know a whole host of people who plan to write one sometime, but most of those people will never actually get around to it. Actually, I thought I was going to be one of those people too, I'd certainly started a few but had trashed them when I realised how bad they were.

The Long Second isn't like that. It's good. Of course, I'm a little biased, but I've had enough people tell me that - people with no inherent need to be nice, people who could have pretended to have liked it but have actually really enthused about it and discussed their favourite parts - to actually believe it. Of course, these people have no relevance in the grand scheme of things, you don't go to an agent and say "I've had 10 independent people tell me it's good" - that would be too easy.

As I was saying, with no reference point, nobody who'd been there before, you really have to make it up as you go along (a bit like the writing part, I suppose). Sure, there's plenty of research on the Internet, you can find agents and publishers, learn what makes a good query letter and synopsis, even get some replies from prospective agent, but if you think, for even a moment, that it's a walk in the park, think again.

We were slightly lucky in having some contacts to get us started and mistakenly thought that would be all we needed. So far, that hasn't been the case.

So, in this blog, from here on in, I'm going to update when anything happens - when I send queries, when I get replies or rejections, when I find interesting information (and where) and - hopefully - when I finally get an acceptance and an offer.

Hold on to your hats. It could well be a long, scary, bumpy ride.