So, firstly, congratulations to the England team for beating Spain to win the U17 World Cup. From being down 2-0 to come back and beat such a strong team 5-2 in the final is a fine achievement.
Secondly, my beloved Liverpool got back to winning ways today with a 3-0 win in the English Premier League. Long may that trend continue - although if you know Liverpool that is certainly a long shot and, some might say, simply fanciful optimism. Ah well.
My everyday life is hectic. A full-time career, a part-time one, a son with autism, trying to stay in half decent shape, a busy home life, and in those nooks and crannies of spare time, I write books. Yes, I am a fiction writer. As it happens, I'm at the querying stage of my second full novel The Warrior Gene. If you don't know what querying is, it's when you send out a query to a prospective literary agent, pitching them your book in the hope of gaining representation and, eventually, scoring a publishing deal. Querying is a daunting and confidence sucking process. It's taken more time to query as many agents as I have thus far as it did to write the book. Every single agent that has responded so far has done so with a, 'Thank you for submitting your book, but at this time...' type of thing. Thankfully, my skin has grown exponentially thicker after years of graphic design work, critique, sarcasm, dismissals and revisions, and so I'm neither worried, nor bothered, by the flood of rejections. I've also learned that it very much matters on what day you query an agent, what mood they happen to be in at the time of reading your query, and what side of the bed they got up on that morning. I also had to write an author bio - in the third person - so that was weird.
I will continue sending queries out into the literary world. Never surrender!