Of all the ways to make me snap my fingers and shout, ‘I know who you mean,’ telling me what car anyone drives is probably the least effective. I can recognise a Fiesta circa 1988, a BMW because it has that handy little round badge thing, and a Panda because I drive one. I simply cannot give a hoot about cars. When the husband starts pontificating about this one or that one, I mainly think ‘Get the smallest one possible,’ given that the man has many talents but would still find it a challenge to squeeze a Smart car into a space meant for a bus. Frankly, let’s just get a tiny one so I don’t have to shrink into the footwell every time he’s trying to park in Morrisons.

I don’t need a car to open itself when I stand within five yards of it, blow hot air on the daughter and cold air on the son (where would that leave my ‘JUST GET ON WITH IT’ parenting philosophy?) or anything that tells me I’m getting no miles per hour to my litre of petrol because I’m sitting stationary on the M25. I don’t need speakers that talk at me from different angles, making me think someone has climbed in the boot when I wasn’t watching. I don’t need a boot that could fit a pony in as per the car advert on Magic FM. On the other hand, a car that screams when the husband overtakes to save me the trouble or shouts, ‘Have you seen that motorbike?’ at every T-junction would be a welcome addition.

The son, who adores Jeremy Clarkson (believe me, if you had my parents’ evenings, you would understand why that doesn’t trouble me) is completely frustrated by my lack of interest. He brings up websites, pointing out this, that and the other four-wheeled thing in red, blue and black. I’d rather discuss pensions. Help out with the building of the Globe Theatre with matchsticks, elastic bands and homemade glue project. Descale the steam mop. Sit through a recorder concert. Be a passenger when the husband’s trying to park in the high street, causing a tailback to the traffic lights.

Well, perhaps not that.

*slinks down in seat and puts dog blanket over head*

Just for this one blog, I’m going to write about writing rather than the myriad of other interesting aspects of my life such as how I will padlock the loo so my family have to go in the compost heap if I EVER walk in and find a single sheet of paper clinging onto the cardboard roll again.

The time is right because it’s nearly a year since I self-published The Class Ceiling and that’s affected my life in so many ways. There are many opinions on self-publishing vs. traditional and I’m not going to join the drum banging for either. I will say, though, that I didn’t set out wanting to self-publish. I wanted the recognition of a publisher being prepared to pay for the words I wrote. I’m not sure how many rejections from agents The Class Ceiling received but suffice to say, it was the spotty teenager breakdancing in the hand-knitted cardie at the disco.

The husband was keen for me to self-publish on the grounds that it’s such a subjective industry and ‘all’ I needed to do was believe in myself. In his mind, overnight success was just a couple of Amazon clicks away. I, on the other hand, was paddling away aboard a raft of insecurities big enough to cross the Atlantic – ‘Who will buy it and how will they know about it?’ I dismissed the husband’s suggestion so often, he tried to persuade me to apply for a job with the National Trust as a shepherd. The pressure to swap the laptop for stumbling about the Surrey Hills gathering up my flock when I can barely get my kids to school on time seemed to galvanise me.

I found a designer for the cover, proofread until my eyeballs bled (note to everyone: if you possibly can, PAY for this step) and hit the publish button just before Christmas. In the first five months, I sold a few hundred books. Slowly, I started to get reviews from people who didn’t share my DNA or my dinner parties. People from Devon, Edinburgh, California – people I didn’t know – who loved the book. Who said things like, ‘I was told off for reading this on the ski lift’, ‘I’ve ignored the husband, the kids and the dog for a whole weekend’ or as one American put it, ‘So good I just about pee’d my pants’. Eventually, I stopped doing that ‘screwed up, about to eat a kangaroo penis’ face each time I saw a new review on Amazon.

Then it got really interesting. I went to the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s summer party where I chatted to Helen Bolton, editor at Avon, HarperCollins. We talked about one of her authors, Mhairi McFarlane, who wrote You Had Me At Hello. Not a word about my writing. Just a brief human chat about a book we both loved.

Afterwards, I kept thinking that Helen would like The Class Ceiling. I also knew that publishers didn’t accept unagented manuscripts. But the thought kept niggling away until the first five chapters wriggled their way into an envelope and yet another set of wasted stamps winged their way to rejection.

Except this time, I received an email directly from Helen saying ‘Send the rest’. Then, ‘Send your next book’. Then ‘Come and meet me’. Me, little old me, on the steps at HarperCollins HQ! The excitement was clearly too much for me, so minutes before Helen glided elegantly down to greet me, I had the nose bleed to end all nose bleeds and sat through the whole meeting wondering whether I had crusty red rings round my nostrils.

I left HarperCollins HQ thinking Helen would be someone I would absolutely love to work with.  I also knew that it was one thing for her to like the book, but quite another to translate that over the many hurdles into a publishing deal. So, no dancing, no chicken counting, just a determination not to squander the opportunity and a little rush of fear and hope every time I looked at my emails.

In the meantime, The Class Ceiling sales really started to pick up as though the whole wheel of fortune had turned in my favour. With Avon interested, I thought I might be able to entice agents into reading The Class Ceiling. I researched a few who would be a good fit for my writing (in the tiny minority who hadn’t rejected me before!). Discreetly, I asked their authors what they were like to work with and received some very generous responses. Then I sent out some submissions. It was an odd time of year as it was holiday season but Clare Wallace at Darley Anderson came back to me very promptly and I went to London to meet her.

I don’t do corporate, smart or schmoozy very well so I was delighted to see that the agency had the cosy, eclectic feel of a place where people love books and dogs come to work. My meeting with Clare felt ‘right’ – professional, detailed, honest, warm, with a clear plan of what the next step would be if Avon didn’t buy The Class Ceiling.

I left with an offer of representation. My immediate reaction was to accept straightaway because I knew I could work with Clare. There hadn’t been any point in our meeting when I’d thought, ‘Hmm. Not sure about that,’ or worse, ‘I’m going to be terrified of you’. But I also knew that it was crucial to make the right decision, so I asked for some time to think about it without backflipping and cartwheeling clouding my judgment.

In the event, I had about four hours. That evening, Helen Bolton’s name popped up in my inbox. I guessed it was dream over. End of my little fantasy, of approaching agents with a confident ‘the Avon imprint of HarperCollins is currently considering The Class Ceiling’. I fed the dog. The email was still there. I clicked, waiting for the heart sink that had greeted me so many times before. A two book deal was snuggling in there, waving its little wand, glittering and gorgeous. Heart hop!

I phoned Clare the next morning – feeling rather silly because I’d made such a hoo-ha about wanting to time to consider – but she set to work straightawahttp://www.kerryfisherauthor.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/school-gate-resized-130jpeg.jpegy, sorting out my contracts with Avon. I know I made the right decision because I feel that we could resolve anything, however awkward. She’s already sold The Class Ceiling – soon to become The School Gate Survival Guide – at auction in Germany. Can’t help wondering what the Germans will make of cutting the nose off the Brie…

I’ve probably made that sound a bit easy. It wasn’t – took me five years from writing a novel to getting published – but I think if I go into any more detail, everyone will be going, ‘Crikey, we don’t actually need to know the colour of your bra.’

If anyone has read to the end, I’d be delighted to answer any writing questions on Twitter – https://twitter.com/KerryFSwayne or at http://www.kerryfisherauthor.com

The School Gate Survival Guide will be published as an ebook on 3 July and a paperback on 11 September

 

 

In my next life, I am going to be someone who plays my cards so close to my chest that you’ll be able to see the imprint of the seven of spades on my right boob.  No one is even going to know what I had for breakfast, let alone where I went for dinner and with whom. Not for me a line of dirty laundry flapping in the wind, greying bloomers for all to see. No one is ever going to raise their eyebrows at me and say, ‘Really?’ again, or suddenly scurry off in the middle of a convivial conversation because I’ve revealed some unappealing gem about the Fisher family.

I’ve noticed the nosiest people are those who hang onto every whisper of information about themselves. They feel quite free to ask ‘How much did you pay for your curtains?’, ‘Why didn’t you send your children to the same school as my child?’, ‘What did you vote?’, while blocking simple enquiries about where they went on holiday with an obfuscation worthy of a politician.

I’m going to keep secrets about things that I didn’t know were supposed to be secrets, like which maths set my son is in and his stunning failure in the art exam. I’ll become a match for the parents whose offspring regularly provide a sweep of A*s across the board but seal themselves up like a thermos flask the second a B-minus in embroidery darkens their door.

When I go to the doctor, the optician or the hairdresser, I’m going to be all mysterious with my friends and talk darkly about arriving a bit late to meet them because I have ‘an appointment’. God forbid anyone should know that I sit in a hairdresser’s chair and have all that grey dyed brown. Will they like me less if they know? So far they don’t seem to.

Other people trap stories about spousal disagreement, children’s misdemeanours and family skeletons like wasps under a glass. I manage, barely, to draw the line at things that might make people start looking at their watches and back away with their hands in the air, possibly retching as they go.

Maybe it’s just a lack of filter, allowing words out into the air before I’ve weighed up whether the audience really needs to know the gory details of my family life.

Or maybe when I’m actually saying the words, I don’t care what people think, though I do seem to mind more at four in the morning. By seven o’clock though, I’ve usually convinced myself that I’m not as important as I think I am, and if I provide everyone with a topic of conversation for ten minutes, I’ve done them all a favour.

Even if I could rein myself in, turn myself into one of those tight-lipped people whose children apparently clap their hands with glee when asked to empty the dishwasher, whose husband has to be torn away from the dusting, who have their Christmas presents wrapped by Hallowe’en, with sprinkles and bows and bells…would I be able to gag the rest of the family?

It’s not looking hopeful. When my daughter was asked to write an essay about her family as part of her entrance exam, she wrote ‘My mum is so naughty that I simply daren’t write any examples here.’

You decide…

The son is heading off on a 20km trek. Three weeks ago, we got a letter with the essential kit, which didn’t come to the top of my volcano of priorities until the end of last week, leaving a mere five days to find the compromise between the ‘nooooooo’ trainers which will enable the son to walk 20km without his feet rubbing up a storm and the must-have plimsolls with all the foot support factor of a Ryvita. This resulted in an Addams Family ding-dong in the shop in front of a bored assistant who would rather have been texting ‘KK’ to her friends or pulling blowfish faces on FaceTime than trying to help the mother with nine and half minutes left on the parking ticket corral the ‘whatever’ son into a suitable pair of shoes. Six more precious minutes tick by while the son carries on arguing that he won’t get anything, he’ll wear his ‘pastries’, which, in turn, inflames me further as I have no idea what ‘pastries’ are and can only imagine that something with lard as an ingredient is not going to be the pinnacle of sporting support.

With approximately thirty seconds to go until the traffic warden appears, the son – with the most hard done by face in the world – agrees to the most expensive trainers in the world in such a sulky manner that it is tempting to enjoy my own tiny moment of tantrum by refusing to buy anything at all and make him spend the day doing Latin translation, rather than walking with his friends. Manage to be marginally more grown up than the thirteen-year-old. Until we get to the till. Which isn’t working.

The manager slumps out from the stock room, prods a couple of buttons and disappears off to count insoles without bothering to wait to see if the till has actually come back to life. Which it hasn’t. Car park ticket overdue. Calculate the cost of car parking fine, plus the cost of trainers that the son doesn’t even want, versus the hideousness of walking out and having to go through the whole thing again. Leave, resolving that if this sports shop is the last sports shop on the planet, we will trek on bits of old tyres tied on with string rather than darken its door again. Hiss at son. (Still feel a bit hissy by the time we have to repeat the performance a couple of days later but owing to the shop assistant being young, trendy and interested, all is accomplished with minimal teeth marks.)

In the meantime, we need to make Saturn. With guilt in my heart, I decide that sports day (all day affair), plus end of term concert (last time my ability to turf children out with polished shoes will come under scrutiny – hurrah!), plus French Day (let me just grow some garlic, paint some stripes on a T-shirt and find a beret) equals no time for papier mache and just enough seconds to order a polystyrene ball from Amazon that we can paint. Except the polystyrene ball didn’t arrive until the day after it was required so we had to do papier mache in a big rush the night before, but without any of the things we needed…

So if any mother out there is reading this and feeling smug…please don’t leave a comment. On the other hand, if you need to knock up Mars or Jupiter…I’ve got a pristine polystyrene ball looking for a new home…