Amra Pajalic

We always call it “The Call.” You know, we’re waiting for The Call about getting published. Well I never got the call, I got an email, but the result is the same-my novel is going to be published.

So let me backtrack and tell you the whole tale. On the 4 July 2007 I signed with Curtis Brown as my agent. A couple of weeks later I received a call, which wasn’t The Call, but it did lead to “The Email” about publication. So the call was from Barry Scott who was organising the Victorian Premier’s Award and he told me that I was one of three people shortlisted.

I’d entered the Victorian Premier’s Awards and had been hoping for a while and given up by the time I received the call. I enter a lot of things. I’d entered The Vogel prize and didn’t get anywhere. Entered the Varuna Awards Awards for Manuscript Development with Harper Collins and made it to the second stage where I was shortlisted. So the point of the story is-enter everything. You never know what will happen.

So anyway I was shortlisted and as soon as I hung up I called Pippa, my agent, and told her. The official announcement was 10 August 2007 so she was going to start submitting close to the date to maximise on the publicity. When I attended the shortlist announcement I had Kirsty, the publicist from Text Publishing, approach me asking me to submit to them. I also received an email via Barry Scott from another publisher about submitting. I passed on both requests to Pippa and left it to her.

I think about a week later Pippa submitted The Wog Manual to five publishers. On the 3 September 2007, the night of the winner being announced at the Victorian Premier’s Awards, I had my first meeting with a publisher. I met with Penny Hueson and Michael Heyward from Text Publishing who are based right her in my hometown of Melbourne.

We had a great meeting and a wonderful rapport. During the meeting Text flagged that the novel would need extensive revisions, which I completely agreed with. I discussed some of my ideas for promotion and my plan for the series. The meeting was more of getting to know each other in order to see if we could work together. Kind of like a job interview which is how I approached it. Thankfully I’d had heaps of time from the writing of my novel to the submission process to think through a lot of things, so I could talk about the serious end of things instead of sitting there like a dodo.

I came home and called a friend telling her that I was in love. On the 10 September 2007 was the day. I received an offer from Text Publishing and breathed out a huge sigh of relief and sat stunned with shock. But we still had the novel out on submission with other publishers so we had to wait for responses.

On the 12 September I received my first rejection, but at least it was cushioned by having an offer. The rejection letter provided some constructive criticism that I agree with, it took a while of course. Even though I had an offer there was still a sting but this rejection made me face some hard truths about my novel and start thinking about strategies to make it better.

On the 19 September 2007 I went to Sydney to meet with two publishers regarding my novel. These meetings were amazing and freaky. They were back to back and each publisher had their own vision for the novel so I was feeling quite schizophrenic with all these different visions in my head. Then I had a meeting with Pippa after these meetings where we discussed who I liked, who I wanted to work with and ranked publishers in order of preference just in case I got another offer.

Out of everything that had happened up until this point, this conversation was the most freaky. I spent so many years writing in isolation and while off course I dreamt about publication I didn’t dare dream too hard, and suddenly there I was discussing options and opportunities, all this serious stuff that felt so surreal.

So then we had to wait. It took a while to get all of the responses. Of course there were a few more rejections there. On the 11 October 2007 it finally happened. We received the last response and it was an offer. I now had two offers on the table and I was shaking with shock.

From being scared to dream about publication to having two offers that I could weigh up was pretty confronting. I don’t know if you guys have noticed but I have trouble with stepping out of my comfort zone and with all this stuff happening it felt like I was being blasted out of it.

The decision was easy for me about who I wanted to go with so Pippa undertook negotiations and nutted out some contract points. A week later the negotiations were done and we accepted the offer from Text Publishing. It was real, I was going to get published. But I was still hedging my bets, until I received that contract and signed on it I wasn’t banking on it or making any public announcements.

I contacted Penny at Text and told her that I was working full time November and December and wouldn’t be able to undertake revisions until January 2008. In the meantime I spoke to my employer and told them what was happening and requested to work part time.

They agreed to letting me work part time and organised me to job share my current position which was fabulous for a few reasons. I love the people I work with and the job is very easy and secondly, I need my comfort zone. There were going to be all these changes happening so I’m relieved that one thing will remain stable.

The contract was drawn up slowly, which was I happy about. Once it was signed and the advance passed on, there was the expectation for me to hold up my end and start revision. Since I couldn’t do that I wasn’t fussed.

This week the contract was passed around. I was still unsure about whether to put up a blog post about this but then I clicked over to the Curtis Brown website and saw my bio had been updated, so I thought, hey it’s official.

I’ll be making contact with Penny in a few weeks and we’ll start discussing revision. There is a lot to discuss because while my novel has the raw power, it also has a lot of characters and stories and it feels a bit jumpy. So we need to smooth it out, make it more of a narrative arc. There is also some character inconsistency and we need to decide on what will stay, what will go, what needs to be expanded. So I’m expecting it to be a slightly different story.

I trust Penny as an editor and have a lot of respect for Text and their standard of publishing. They’re an independent publisher and believe in what they’re doing and they’ve been backing a lot of winners lately. They published Mr Pip by Lloyd Jones which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

And the best part is that we’re in the same city so it will be easier to discuss and plan things. While I know that this isn’t a requirement and there are a lot of authors and publishers who aren’t even on the same continent, this is one factor that definitely influenced my decision.

I’m looking forward to the revision process because it’s an opportunity for me to learn some important skills and get my writing up to the next level. I’m thinking a lot about promotion, marketing and future directions and it’s pretty cool because now there’s a point to it.

So that’s my story so far.

I used to be a huge fan of romance fiction. In my teens I used to get Mills and Boon novels by the armful and just read them back to back. At that time I disagreed with people who said romance had no value. I’d come back to Australia after living in what was then known as Yugoslavia for four years. My English had rusted and I had to read the romance novels with a dictionary by my side. Non-romance readers probably think I’m bullshitting, but fans of the genre will tell you that romance novelists love nothing more than to use obscure words which then end up being copied from one book to the next, until the next new word comes along.

Anyway I battled this addiction for a long time. Sometime in my early twenties I defiantly gave away my whole collection of romance novels, including the full set of the Johanna Lindsay novels that I’d painstakinly collected since I was 14 years old. Fuck I regret this. Now I’d love to have that collection on my bookshelf so I could re-trace my adolecence by remembering how I’d acquired each book.

So I battled this addiction over the years, but I always reached for a romance novel when I needed some comfort and escapism. I even attempted writing one novel and after spending three years torturing myself, I kind of finished, slapped on an ending and hid it in my bottom drawer.

And then one day the addiction dissapeared as if it had never been. It happend sometime during the period when I took on my university studies. For a while I thought that it was because I’d transformed during study. And while there was some truth to that, it was also because I then discovered the young adult genre. I had the escapist juvenille fantasy I needed, but now it was well written, plausible and I didn’t face ridicule by everyone.

The other day I went to the library and found a new edition of a book by Iris Johansen. Iris is dear to my heart. When I first started reading romance novels there was one romance line I loved the best, Bantam’s loveswept. It published authors like Tami Hoag, Kay Hooper and Iris Johansen with original romance stories. These authors transcended the romance genre and developed careers beyond the usual scope.

I still love Tami Hoag, haven’t read anything new of Kay Hooper’s for a few years now and now I’m officially saying goodbye to Iris Johansen. Reading her novel I got pissed off at the thin romance plot to set up the supposed intrigue, at the pages and pages of introspection to fill in the action. As I closed the book and made a mental note not to borrow any more of her books I felt sad.

When you say goodbye to an author it feels like you’re saying goodbye to an old friend. Someone who’s seen you through the bad times. Who always had a shoulder for you to cry on and never let you down. And then one day, their shoulder wasn’t as broad as you thought and they didn’t give you what you needed anymore. So you say goodbye.

While I’ll always remember the joy that Johansen gave me, the years of feeling pleasure and anticipation when I saw her books on the shelf, it’s time to let go and move forward. It’s part of growing as a person. You let go of old friendships so you can open the door for new ones.

Better than to watch a Christmas movie, but it was Vince Vaughn and Paul Giamatti, some of my favourite actors and it looked funny on the previews. As usual all the funny bits were used for previews so I already saw them coming. Damn.

Have developed an addiction for You Tube. Current obsession is Bill Hicks and the issue of whether Denis Leary stole his work. After countless hours watching each of them on You Tube I have determined that the answer is an affirmative, as much as it pained me because I’m a huge fan of Leary. I fought the realisation until could fight no longer.

If you’re bored just look for Bill Hicks. He’s an amazing comedian. His story is tragic. He died at 32 years of age from Pancreatic cancer, which is still the most lethal cancer today. My father passed away from it so I’ve read up on it and my father and Bill never had a chance.

Still continuing my ebay addiction. Bought some amazingly cool pieces of furniture and am counting down to my annual leave (three weeks to go) where I shall spend a couple of days painting them all.

Just counted how many books I read this year so far. I have read 67 books. I want to do an end of year blog post about them but realise I shall have to split it up.

One of my New Year’s goals next year will be to blog more about the books I read. I just get lazy and I’m always rushing into reading another one (can’t spend more than a few days without a book to sustain me) so I’ll hopefully be able to work on that more.

Tracked down Dead Lovely by Helen Fitzgerald after attending a session at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival that featured her. The book is described as a crime thriller and it was absolutely amazing. There were lots of laugh out loud moments. If you’re a girl I’d recommend a panty liner if you’re in public because you will come close to pissing your pants laughing.

I found out that Dead Lovely is the beginning of a series and I’m so wrapped. Can’t wait to see more of this character and her adventures.

This is Fitzgerald describing Chrissy’s pregnancy:

“It started when I was walking up the stairs of my Gardner Street close, eighty steps in total, breathing more loudly that I have ever breathed in my life. My face was raw, like a blind pimple that has been left to ripen the perfect amount of time and, if any pressure is applied, will pop a most satisfactory core. I had suffered the indignities of a vaginal probe when I bled at week twenty-two, of peeing in my pants at week thirty-three when the check-out chick in Sainsbury’s cracked a very funny joke, of farting in front of my ‘Ms Has-No-Body-Functions’ colleague when I bent over at work to pick up a case file, and of fainting during a ‘cervical sweep.’”

Can’t recommend this book enough. Loved it and will be reading anything Fitzgerald writes.