News and no news

My agent sent my book to sixteen editors on the 14th June - that's seventy-six days ago. And seven hours and twenty-six minutes, but who's counting. Today, a ray of light from my agent, as she explained that five of them still have the book, it's not dead at all, but they still have people away on holiday. Also, reading between the lines, she's got a bit frustrated herself and sent it to two YA publishers (young adult for non-writers) and one was positive. 'Very good initial feedback' is nice to hear after...seventy-six days. You can see why I was losing heart.

Fortunately, I have resolved twenty-one post-it problems with the structure (I read it through and write post-its, very high tech) and went through the manuscript looking for words that I over-use. Like 'looked' and 'back', as revealed by the very useful 'Wordle'. Wow. It does make you step back from the story to work on the words. The idea is I send out the MS on Friday to my agent (oh, that still isn't getting old!) and then can write my rationale over the weekend ready for feedback from my tutor. It will be nice to get  back in contact with Secrets/Borrowed Time because it all seems very distant at the moment. If anything happens next week, at least I'll have read the book recently.

Meanwhile, the leaves are looking increasingly battered and brown, I have a mouse in the study somewhere, so autumn must be coming. My increasingly idle cats still bring things in from the garden, but tend to release them unharmed, so we do have a succession of bewildered rodents in the house. I just hope we don't have a rat, Harry Wooggo (tortoiseshell monster) has been know to tenderly relocate them from the compost heap to the house. Something to look forward to, then. I shall bait the live trap tonight - if we have one mouse we usually have a dozen.