Letter to Wiz

This week, our radio telescopes picked up a signal from the further, darker reaches of the galaxy, apparently from an author in distress.

We had our cryptographers analyse the data and they extracted what seems to have been a genuine signal. Their reconstruction of that signal can be found here.

As far as we understand it, an author (“Wiz”) has two manuscripts currently out on submission (that is, lost on Planet Agent) and is complaining about a feeling that she refers to only as “angst”.

She says she needs to get herself “a Hemingway” which we think may refer either to a cocktail favoured in Jazz Age Florida, or to possibly an American writer.

Support for the latter possibility is supplied by Wiz’s inclusion of a page of manuscript in her signal. The page seems to be a letter sent by “Hemingway” to a person known only as “Scott” and who appears to have authored something referred to only as “Gatsby.”

The gist of that letter is supportive. A crucial passage in it reads:

“You can write twice as well now as you ever could. All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is. Go on and write.”

And –

Damn right.

Hemingway is damn right. Pretty much any writer who has huffed and puffed their way through the JW steam engine is twice the writer they used to be. Or five times. Ten times.

Think back, any of you, to the way you wrote a few years back. Haven’t you got better? Haven’t you (at times, not always) absolutely loved the act of creation? Haven’t you also loved editing your manuscript – seeing the way the thing starts to tighten and strengthen and gain motion?

These are things that feed your soul. That decorate your life.

And yes, yes, yes: family, kids, relationships. Those things, of course, first and always.

But after that? Isn’t it the writing that matters? These things you’ve made. These creatures of ink who shouldn’t be alive, because they’re just marks on a screen, but who are alive, dammit.

And, if you’ve made those things right, they make the world just a tiny bit more beautiful. They make you slightly more human, a little bit better today than you were the day before.

All this matters.

Planet Agent has its own dark logic. A logic made up of slushpiles and prosecco and the smell of new books and (yes) rejection emails and (yes, yes, yes) also book contracts and royalty cheques.

I’m a massive believer in Planet Agent. If you can figure out its twisting paths, you can (will!) unlock the doors to Paradise. (Well, a book deal, at any rate.)

But all that is a secondary blessing.

The first is that you are a writer now. A writer blessed by this act of creation. A writer who wrote badly once, and better now, and better again tomorrow.

So go and write. And edit. And send your books out. And keep your fingers crossed, your cats black, and your candles lit.

I hope that more luck comes your way. But, no matter what, you’ve already won.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Triumph

250 words please – and words that speak of a triumph or success. That success may be fleeting (perhaps your character is about to tumble into a very large pot of boiling glue), but we want what’s on the page to be sunny and bright.

As ever, title please, and genre, and an explanation of context.

Also, you win this competition completely and forever, if the passage you select is in fact followed by one involving your character falling into a cauldron of hot glue.

When you are ready, post in the Townhouse forum.

Til soon.

Harry