I’d sent a synopsis and first three chapters of my novel “A Prawn’s Heart is in in Head” to a small women’s publishing house in the US. They sent me an email saying they didn’t want to publish me and that I hadn’t sent enough postage, when I’d sent them NZ$50 in coupons, which is about three times the amount they quoted me in US$. I then had to go through the whole post office drama again to get $20 worth of more stamps. International reply coupons are a complete rip-off: somebody please invent a better system! No one in NZ seems to understand how they work; or rather, we do understand, but how are we supposed to know how much it costs to post something from another country?
I was waiting in the queue, praying not to get the horrible lady I had before. Luckily I didn’t, I got a nice young American man at the next counter instead, who was very helpful but also couldn’t work out how the vouchers correspond to stamps. I got the stamps and sent them off, and a few weeks later received that dreaded thing, a big padded envelope addresed to me in my own writing. Oh no, I know what THAT is… smells like rejection! If it costs me $70 per rejection, I hope I don’t get too many! Oh well, time to be brave, submit the novel somewhere else and venture into that tardis, the post office again…sigh…
It occured to me the other day that as well as humming the theme tune to “Henry and June” constantly to myself and wishing there was a soundtrack for the film, I could actually search the internet to try and find it. Honestly, what am I like! I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before, but then all this new-fangled technology is a bit alien to my real self which feels as though it belongs in the 1900s-1930s. So I searched that behemoth Medusa.com (as Alison Bechdel calls it) and lo and behold, there it was: Henry and June soundtrack CD: fantastic, amazing, incredible!
Of course, this means that I will have NO excuse not to continue my Anaïs chapter once I have that wonderful music. I did send a version of it to an anthology, but they haven’t told me yet if they want it or not. The thing is you can only submit the same story to one place at a time (at least, that’s my understanding), so it can take a long time for a story to be accepted. I actually have two short story versions of the Anaïs chapter, featuring different erm… different body parts, if that isn’t too polite to be understood… but it is essentially the same story, so I can’t send them both out. Which version should I send? And would it be better for me to enter it into a competition, or for an anthology? There is so much to decide! Deep breaths, calm thoughts, now what was that lovely tune again?
