The Tooth Fairy

 

So far, I have two complete unpublished manuscripts (I'm open to offers). Here's a tiny excerpt from the work currently under construction:-

Let me tell you about the Tooth Fairy. 

Long ago, in Mediaeval Europe, to be gay was a terrible, terrible thing. It meant certain torture and death. So all the Men's-Men made sure they looked as masculine as possible, they worked out and developed huge muscles which they proudly displayed as evidence of their straightness by wearing that most masculine of clothing: outfits made basically out of straps of leather, that left almost nothing to the imagination.

They also got themselves the most butch jobs they could find: things like the artistic side of masonry (sculpture, often carving statues of naked men), and jobs like ... you guessed it ... blacksmithy.

Now, in Mediaeval Europe, dentistry was terribly primitive. The village herb-wife could give you a poultice of numbing herbs to bite down on, but if your dental issues were at all serious, that just didn't hack it. Often there was nothing for it but to have the tooth pulled. And usually it was the village blacksmith who owned the only pair of pliers in town, plus the only set of muscles big enough to give him the strength to yank a tooth out of a screaming patient's mouth.

 So, when your teeth were bad enough, you went to the gay blacksmith, the local puller-of-teeth, the ... Tooth Fairy.

Endings, Beginnings, Endings, Beginnings ...

 A few days before the end of October, I finally finished the book whose working-title was "Under the Sign of the Raven", which was completely relevant to the book but somehow unsatisfying. I did quite a bit of editing, and tucked it away so that I could scrub my characters out of my mind. After a year constantly in their company, I needed a break.

The first of November came along, and on a whim I decided to work on another idea I had for NaNoWriMo. By the end of November, I had over 70,000 words. From there it was a straight-sprint to the finish-line, and over the last several days I've been editing rather than writing new material. Over a year to write one book, under six weeks to write the next. And I have three more novel-length ideas in my head, jumping up and down and waving their arms and screaming, trying to get my attention. Okay, possibly four, but I'm trying not to listen to that one.

I went back to "Under the Sign", and suddenly it was patently obvious it should be called "The Raven's Nest", which also works well for the structure of the book. I read it over again, glad to have a bit of a distance. It reads really, really well - better than many books I've paid money for. My chosen beta-reader is a young bookseller in Perth, and I've sent it to her. She is both my honorary second daughter and my birthday-sister, and has known me since she was eight. In all that time, she hasn't read a word I've written, which is handy, because she can come at me fresh, like an unknown author.

Having sent that to her, it was time to edit the other manuscript. I discarded its working-title, and now I'm groping about for a new one. I'm also groping about for a literary agent, because the whole idea of hunting publishers seems exhausting to me: someone who covers quite a lot of literary genres, and verse, and memoire/biography, because ... I ... Have ... Plans. I think I've found one. Let's hope she thinks she's found me!