Also, if you have a mother-in-law who once went to Australia and your wife has an urge to spend three thousand dollars on a mobile-phone-call to ask for directions rather than one dollar for a few minutes in an internet cafe on Roadmap.au.com, and your mother-in-law says, oh, it takes about an hour to get to Uncle Kenny’s from Sydney, wrestle the phone off your wife and ask your mother-in-law if A) she travelled to Uncle Kenny’s in a Ford Corolla with a top speed of fifty-six kilometres an hour or B) on a very fast train.Also, if your wife has insisted you spend a further fortune hiring Sat-Nav, and you’re about to drive from Sydney to a small place called Picton, check at least two things before you set off:

1: The little radial next to Avoid All Massively Expensive Toll-roads is checked.

2: The little radial next to Avoid All Major Highways and only direct me along un-surfaced B roads roamed by serial-killers and dingoes is unchecked.

For reasons that should now be obvious, things between Alison and I were a bit frosty by the time we got out of Sydney and got to grips with the Sat-Nav. Thank the Lord, then, for Australian radio. And, most importantly, the adverts.

In case you’ve never experienced the pleasure of an Australian radio advert, they all seem to be about how to maintain a longer and sturdier erection (for him), and how to achieve a deeper and sultrier orgasm (for her (or, perhaps, for him and for her; they were a bit vague on that one)). Thanks to the fact we were too busy listening to the radio to shout at each other, we were still just about on speaking terms by the time we sorted out the Sat-Nav, bounced back onto the tarmac, and began to make steady if unspectacular progress towards Picton, and Alison’s Uncle Kenny.

This was our first experience of driving in Australia, and, Sat-Nav aside, it was slightly surreal: Just like us, the Australians drive on the left, yet, obviously totally unlike us, they measure their speed in kilometres, which meant it constantly felt as if we were going too slow and yet looked as if we were going too fast (as Alison screamed at me each time she glanced at the speedo).

Another strange thing is that when they lose a lane – three lanes down to two, two lanes down to one, etc. – it’s the inside lane that disappears, which totally threw us every time it happened, and also seemed to give all the little old ladies we were forced to undertake an extra excuse to drive in the middle lane of the motorway even though the inside lane was totally free (nice to know little old ladies are the same the world over, though).

Road-signs are very un-English as well: YOU’VE GONE THE WRONG WAY, GO BACK, seemed essentially Australian to us, as did the anti-speeding bill-board that featured an attractive blonde holding up her little finger with the strap line, NO ONE THINKS YOU’RE BIG WHEN YOU’RE SPEEDING underneath her image.

There is one serious difference, though, but I can’t quite remember what it was. One of our guides told us later on in the trip, but we’d all been drinking, so it’s gone a bit hazy and vague – something about Australians only needing to insure themselves for third party damage to vehicles; i.e., not for any damage they do to you if they ever drive into you. It was either that or they don’t actually need to take a driving test before letting themselves loose on the roads. Or maybe it was both. I’m sorry. I can’t remember. And Virgin Internet is going too slow for me to Google it and find out at the moment. Whatever it was, though, once we’d been told, we always insured ourselves to the max and only ever went driving at night.*

When our Sat-Nav finally delivered us to our destination, Picton looked like a really nice town. At the risk of upsetting Pictish people the world over, I’m not sure it’s worth going out of your way to see it unless you’ve got a particular reason for going there – it’s a bit short on opera houses, Great Barrier Reefs, huge orange rock formations, etc., (I did do a Google search to try and find an interesting fact to give you on Picton, but all I could find was an entry that said Picton is a rural town in New South Wales, Australia: It has a railway station) – but it was really good to visit somewhere that doesn’t exist solely for tourists to wander around taking pictures: You know, a place where ‘real Australian people’ live.

Being honest, it was a bit like being back in Hedge End.

Not that Alison’s Uncle Kenny is Australian. He’s from Cardiff, originally, and he and his wife, Lorraine, and their two sons, Wayne and Shane (named long before they decided to emigrate, believe it or not) set out for Australia on the £10 assisted fares programme back in the early seventies, which was the last time Alison saw them. Thirty-five years on, Kenny’s a widower now, sadly, but still living in the same house Alison can remember getting phone-calls from each Christmas day as a child.

This was the first time I’d ever met him, but we soon discovered we shared a dislike of not knowing whether a bar served pint-glasses, schooners, midis or pots, and, I think, mutually warmed to each other once we worked out I wasn’t after his home-brew and he wasn’t after the lager I’d picked on from a bottle-shop on the way out.

Before the proper drinking could start, though, we decided to pop out to visit one of Kenny’s sons, who lives in a village just outside of Picton. Twelve days later, we arrived.

Wayne, like most working-class Australians who don’t live in cities, lives in a house with a back-garden twice the size of Hampshire. As soon as we got there he and Alison did the, ‘you were this big last time I saw you’ thing that all people who can’t remember the last time they saw each other do, then he and his wife and daughter did the thing all Australians love to do when they’re introduced to English people who haven’t been in their country for more than a week – tell us about all the things in Australia that can kill you. Alison’s Uncle Kenny, the woman who gave us our hire-car, and the receptionist at the hostel we’d stayed in, had already run through this list with us several times, but Wayne and his wife and daughter took it to a whole new different level, all three chipping in with examples at the same time: Sharks. Spiders. Snakes. Dingoes. Crocks. Stingers. Floods. People in the Outback. People in the cities. Swine-flu (virtually unheard of at that time (we thought they were making it up)). Rabid kangaroos. Wild Boar. Bar Bores. Getting your foot stuck in the cattle-grid over the male-toilets and slowly dying of thirst (think of the alternative – you’d rather die, wouldn’t you?). Drought. Forest fires. Little old ladies driving in the middle-lanes of motorways and refusing to let you over when your lane disappears without warning. Poison frogs. Killer toads. Rip-tides. Backpackers. Tour guides. Being temporarily blinded by the flash-gun on a Chinese person’s digital camera and stepping in front of a train because you can’t see where you’re going, various combinations of all of the above, all in different orders, not to mention quicksand, lightning, taking a wrong turn on a walk in the Blue Mountains, depression, diphtheria, scorpions, and the bloke playing a didgeridoo near Sydney Harbour (he won’t kill you, but after two hours of listening to him, you’ll want to do yourself in).

Seriously, if the English discovered Australia today, Social Services would have to burn the whole place to the ground before they could pass it fit for human inhabitation.

And that’s without the danger posed by possums.

I’ve got to admit, I thought a possum was a catch-phrase invented by Dame Edna Everage, but apparently, they really do exist. They look like oversized domestic cats, or, to English people who’ve been drinking, Koala Bears; i.e., very adorable and cuddly and extremely pettable. Despite this cute and harmless appearance, though, possums have a little known defence mechanism – if a possum is spooked or feels threatened it lollops for the nearest tree and climbs it. The sight of a possum in a tree then attracts people towards the tree, where, invariably, they stand around pointing up at the possum going, look, it’s a possum, in a tree, who’d have thought it? This attracts even more people towards the tree. Which is when the possum invokes its little-known defence mechanism and sends jets of foul smelling urine down upon all those beneath it.

And, apparently, the reek of possum pee is almost impossible to get out of your clothes.

Which, when you’re backpacking, and only have one change of clothes to last you three months, is a bit of a disaster.

So be warned: If you ever see a possum in a tree, or if you ever hear someone shouting, Look, it’s a possum, in a tree, who’d have thought it? Don’t go running over. It’s only going to end in tears.

As we would discover later on in our journey.

*Alison thinks the thing with the driving is that there’s no obligation for Australians to take out any motor insurance at all. The very nice German who sorted out our hire-car for us in Cairns told us this, laughing, as we pulled off the forecourt. We have no idea if this information is true but I would like to retract the statement about us both being drunk at the time we were told.

Daniel Clay is the author of Broken – an utterly original, totally compelling debut novel, written in a fresh and distinctively British voice. Called ‘bold, prescient, engaging, and oddly touching’ by the Guardian, Broken was published to critical acclaim. The Harper Perennial paperback edition appeared earlier this year.

Our plan for Australia was a week in Sydney – including two nights staying with Alison’s uncle just outside – then a week driving up the Pacific Highway to Brisbane in a camper van, a couple of weeks in and around Brisbane followed by a flight to Cairns, then, three weeks later, a flight back to Brisbane for a connecting flight to Fiji.

The flights were all booked before we left the UK, but nothing else was, so we wasted our first afternoon in Sydney trying to hire a car and a camper-van. All the adverts we’d seen said car-hire prices could be as little as twenty dollars a day, so we’d budgeted accordingly. In reality, you have to book a car for at least a decade to get rates like that, and we only needed a car for two nights. Given the short length of the rental period, most places quoted us two hundred dollars a day. We ended up at No Birds Car Hire (honestly) and paid two hundred for a Corolla over three days. Then we went looking for a camper-van and started to realise it was going to cost us over a thousand dollars to do what we wanted to do, rather than the six hundred we’d budgeted. Then I had a nervous breakdown. Then we went for a drink.

I think we were in the Kings Cross area, which, at first glance, looks like a normal high street, but isn’t: One of the great things about Sydney is how varied it all is, and how easy everything is to find – in London, in some areas, it feels as if you can walk for miles without finding a decent bar, and, at midnight or one in the morning, you know there’s a good time to be had somewhere, it’s just impossible to find where it is. I don’t know if it’s because Sydney’s smaller, more modern, designed by people who weren’t born in 1712, or just whether we happened to be in the right district, but all the streets were packed with bars, hostels, sex-shops, restaurants, and dodgy looking Scandinavians intent on having a good time. It was as if the whole of London had morphed into Soho, and instead of struggling to find somewhere to start getting drunk in, we had problems choosing which bar to go into first.

Another great thing about Australia is the men’s urinals. Rather than the flooded quagmire of inch deep urine and cigarette butts that pass for floor-tiles in English, American, Canadian, and European bars, the Australians have a sort of cattle-grid system going on, so no matter how wet the pensioners and the drunk people get their own feet, the residue just goes straight through to the trough underneath. I think Australians have put more thought into this than the rest of the world because they all wear thongs on nights out (flip-flops to the rest of humanity) and have a terror of wet toes. Whatever, those cattle-grids are a definite improvement, which was a good job, really, because we spent our first night in Sydney staggering from one bar to another in an attempt to get drunk enough to forget about our budget. Then, once we were drunk enough to forget about our budget, we staggered back to our hostel for another row and some sleep.

Saturday. Our first full day. We kissed goodbye to our pensions and stumped up something like twelve-hundred dollars for a Britz camper-van we would pick up the following Saturday, and then, as I was still working on the first draft of Swap at that stage, I spent a few hours head-butting my laptop in the Starbucks by the harbour while Alison went window-shopping (and still bought three tops and a kettle (a kettle, I said. When we’re backpacking? Why?)). Then we hit the Opera House bar for the evening. While we were there, Alison doubled our mortgage on phone calls to her mum and sister telling them we were safe and gloating about the fact we were in a bar outside Sydney Opera House and they weren’t. They gloated back that their houses weren’t about to be repossessed, and ours was. I thought about texting my sister but I’d just discovered Coopers Light Ale and decided to devote the evening to that. Another great thing about Australia; when they sell ‘super-chilled’ lager, they have the temperature digitally displayed on the pump so you can see that it really is cold. In the UK, most times, even if the super-chilled lager is slightly cooler than room-temperature, they put it in the microwave before they give it to you. One thing they haven’t worked out down there, though, is glass sizes. It varies from bar to bar, so ordering a beer can be traumatic. A pot, for instance, is smaller than a half-pint (I ordered one by mistake and cried when the barman gave it to me); a midi is just bigger than a half-pint but still nowhere near big enough, and, occasionally, they also serve pint glasses as well. In the end, I stopped asking what measures they did and just started asking for their biggest, coldest glass of draught lager. If that turned out to be a pot, I ordered another half-dozen to keep me from thinking about how much money we were spending. And a half pint of white wine to keep Alison moderately agreeable as well.

Sunday morning was one of the highlights of our first stay in Sydney for me. Crunching hangover, had to be out of the hostel by ten, had to pick up the hire-car, had to get out to Ali’s uncle’s place in the suburbs by two in the afternoon (why does she tie us down to these things?), so we woke up early and decided to go for a run. I don’t think I’ll ever go for a jog again without thinking about what it was like to jog through the botanical gardens to Sydney Harbour; In England, when I go for a jog, I always feel as if the everyday folk are looking at me as if I’m a bit of a freak; does anyone else get the feeling passers-by think you’re a thief or a flasher when you’re out for a run? In Sydney, on a nice sunny bright Sunday morning, if you’re not jogging, you’re in the minority. We tried to finish up with a Rocky style sprint up the opera house steps, but age and alcohol consumption got the better of us. We did the first eight steps, collapsed for a quiet sob, then got a taxi back to our hostel. What with the four hour hike to the bathroom, we were getting a bit short on time.

And that was it. Our first few nights in Sydney were over. We got packed up and strapped our worldly possessions to our backs, which, for Alison, wasn’t as easy as it sounds. What with the hair-straighteners, the hair-dryers, the portable air-conditioning unit, the six pairs of high-heels, the ten pairs of flat-heels, the sandals, the espadrilles, the black boots, the tan boots, the trainers, the flip-flops, the wellingtons (in green with smiley sheep faces on them), the fluffy bunny slippers with the big ears, the three sets of carefully co-ordinated bikinis and military uniforms to go with each set of footwear, the cattle-prod to keep me away in the dead of the night, her rucksack was rather heavy, and she needed assistance to get it on: After she had re-packed it for the sixty-seventh time and announced she couldn’t understand why it was so heavy, I and five hostel staff levered it up onto the bed. She then sat down in front of it and got her arms through the straps. I and the five hostel staff then lifted her up to her feet. And then the complaining started. And continued. And got louder. So, a word of advice about back-packing. If you’re married, don’t. Or, if you really feel that you have to, go in different directions. We were definitely talking about divorce by the time we got to No Birds Car Hire and picked up our Corolla. And things were about to get worse. We were leaving Sydney. We were heading for Picton. We were going to stay with a real Australian family. And guess what? They could speak Welsh.

Australia’s great, isn’t it? Even without ever having been there, my wife and I have always known it should be where Europe is: Same language. Better climate. Better surf. How many fewer wars would there have been if Germany and France had been on the other side of the world, and Australia had been just on the other side of the channel? Definitely at least fifty-two.

In March of this year, being middle-aged and dispirited, we decided to spend the equivalent of an acrimonious divorce on a round-the-world trip. We didn’t have much of a clue where to head, we just knew it had to include Australia: My wife’s got an uncle who lives in Picton, just outside Sydney, who she’s not seen since she was three, and I’ve got relatives out there too (I have no idea where; I just know a few headed that way in the seventies on £10 assisted fares, never to be heard of again).

So, finally, at six a.m. on a cool Friday morning, via Singapore, a small Indonesian island called Langkawi, another small island called Hong Kong, and with a fifty/fifty chance our rucksacks were in the hold of the plane we were travelling on, we found ourselves looking out of the window and seeing the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House for the very first time: Sydney, the little old Chinese lady sitting next to me whispered. Sydney, I mumbled back. And that, me being English, was the only thing I could think to say to her during the entire eighty-six hour flight.

The first thing we realised when we touched down was that Oz isn’t quite the laid-back paradise Australians would have you believe. Even by British standards, airport security was ridiculous, and we spent two hours in a queue while customs officials interrogated the little old Chinese lady who’d been sitting quietly next to me, then waved us drunken Europeans through with a grin and a friendly G’day. The second thing that struck us was how organised things were. Rather than the cavalry charge that passes for a taxi-rank in most airports, there was an Alton Towers style barrier system going on, with a Fijian looking bloke wearing an all white suit, naval cap, white gloves — and, I think, a machine gun — waving people into various taxis. Once inside the cab, though, normal service was resumed: We have no idea if the driver was Australian or not, because all he did was grunt at us. He was definitely a fully paid up member of the union of taxi-drivers, though, because he didn’t know how to find where we were staying and got more and more annoyed with us because we didn’t know either. Some things are the same the world over. Sort of reassuring to know.

Not only was this our first time Down Under, it was our first time in hostels. Having stayed in quite a few now, we’d class this first one — Harbour City Backpackers, in the brilliantly named district of Woolloomooloo — as being in the upper end of the hostel-market. Because we hadn’t, our first impressions were that it was a dive: Waiting in line with ten or so other creased and crumpled sweaty people with their worldly possessions strapped to their backs was a bit of a come-down after three weeks in four-star hotels: When we were told our room wouldn’t be ready for another few days we stashed out stuff in the TV room with the obligatory teenage girl asleep on the floor in the corner and hit the city. We hadn’t slept for something like thirty hours by this time and were dangerously close to divorcing as we argued over which way we should head, but all that was forgotten once we stumbled upon the harbour: With the bridge and the opera house and a couple of liners in the port, blue sky, sparkling water, the obligatory Irish bloke dressed as an Aboriginee playing a didgeridoo, it has to be one of the coolest places on earth. We sat outside one of the many quayside restaurants and tried to take it all in: I tried to take it all in with a nice cold lager but, as it was only eight in the morning, Alison gave me that look and ordered me a latte instead.

Knowing we only had six weeks to do the entire east coast of Australia, we got sightseeing straight away. First things first, a harbour cruise. We joined a few hundred Chinese people with scary looking cameras on a catamaran and set off for a two hour cruise. It’s amazing how huge the harbour is, and how, once you’re away from the bridge and the opera house, it feels much more like a coast-line than a natural bay. It’s also amazing how loud the whirr of a few hundred digital cameras can be, and how high Chinese people can jump while doing a V for victory sign with both their hands. Every time either of us looked mildly awake we would be besieged by twenty-five thousand of them wanting us to take their pictures. Again. We had photo-fatigue by the time we got off and headed back to the hostel for a proper row and some sleep.

Our bags were still there, as was the sleeping girl, and our room was ready: After living together for almost twenty years, we’d decided to spare the dorm-dwellers our love-making rituals and splashed out on a private room. If you’re unlucky enough to be married and are thinking of doing the same, I wouldn’t bother. Hostels are only cheap if you’re in a dorm, and, as we discovered later, we could have had an apartment for the week we were in Sydney for much the same we paid out in hostels: At between sixty and ninety dollars for the two of us to have a room with a shared bathroom for one night, the hostel life isn’t always as cheap as it sounds. It’s always an experience, though, and quite often more entertaining than staying in a hotel: The hostel we were in was in an old brick colonial style building that really reminded me of my old primary school. Built in 1990, it’s one of the oldest buildings in Sydney. It felt a bit spit and sawdust but was really close to the botanical gardens and the harbour. Our bathroom was just a bit further away, about four hours down the corridor. I set off on the adventure of having a shower and grabbed the first empty cubicle I found.

The first thing I noticed was that someone had glued a razor-blade to the floor-tiles beneath the shower-head. I was so busy looking at that I didn’t realise someone had also stolen the shower-head. I turned the water on and nearly got decapitated by a high-powered jet of water angled at right where my head would have been if I hadn’t been staring at the razor-blade and wondering, Who put that there? Why? The next cubicle along was alright though, and my first shower Down Under ultimately turned out okay, although I did wonder what headlines it might have generated if I had been decapitated: Debut author loses head and cuts feet in kinky hostel sex game. Great career move, says agent. Wife devastated at early return home.

I set off on the four hour trek back to our room and discovered Alison still hadn’t stopped moaning about the lack of air-conditioning, en-suite, mini-bar, plug-sockets for the three types of hair-straighteners she had in her back-pack, and all the other major disappointments in her life that had somehow been caused by marrying me. I put head-phones on while we got ready to go out for the rest of our first day in Sydney and reflected on how strange life was, really: We were further away from England than we’d ever been, and it was just like being at home.

Daniel Clay is the author of Broken – an utterly original, totally compelling debut novel, written in a fresh and distinctively British voice. Called ‘bold, prescient, engaging, and oddly touching’ by the Guardian, Broken was published to critical acclaim. The Harper Perennial paperback edition appeared earlier this year. 

Still, though, the programme was printed, and I’d already submitted my invoice, so I went and fetched all the beer from the fridge and started to plan what to say. I decided to run through what a slush-pile is, the most accepted format of sending a submission in to one, the best places to get the names and addresses of agents and editors who might be accepting unsolicited submissions, and give out the names of all the agents who hadn’t rejected me out of hand between two and five years ago, when I was busy making submissions myself.

As per usual, I was a total nervous wreck when it came to giving my talk and garbled incoherently at everyone in front of me. If you were there, I apologise, and here’s what I was trying to say:

A slush-pile is the place where a publishing house or literary agent stacks all the unsolicited submissions they’ve been sent until someone can find the time to look through them, and, more often than not, reject them.

Some people have different ideas on the best format for a slush-pile submission. I always went with the following. Although I got plenty of rejections, I never had any negative comments about presentation or not knowing what I was doing; just a few saying I couldn’t write…

A covering letter to the editor or agent you’re sending in to. This letter should be in an accepted business letter format with your name and address, the editor or agent’s name and address, date, title of your novel, a little bit about your novel and the market/genre you see it sitting in, plus a little bit about you.

A title page, including your name and address, your novel’s title, and the word-count.

The first three chapters of your novel, double-spaced, with only one side of the page printed on, and each page containing your name, the title of your novel, plus the relevant page number in a header or footer. (If the first three chapters of your novel are massively long, I wouldn’t send any more than the first twenty pages; Broken didn’t have any chapters, so I sent the first seventeen pages whenever I submitted it to slush-piles).

A synopsis of your novel. This should be no longer than two pages long. If you can keep it to one page, all the better. Most people hate writing them and not many people are sure what makes a good synopsis, and I’m not confident either. I always went for the ‘blurb’ style approach that set the scenario rather than a hard and fast list of characters and events. Just do what seems right for you and your book, but keep it brief. Also, keep in mind that many agents and editors won’t look at the synopsis until they’ve read your opening chapters, so if your opening is fantastic, your synopsis might not be such a critical thing, and if your opening is useless, they’ll probably never read your synopsis anyway, so it’s best not to worry too much.

A stamped addressed envelope for your submission’s eventual return.

All of the above should be loose-leaf (no staples, no paper-clips, no fancy binders). Also, though this is just my personal opinion, your font should be very plain throughout, with no fancy borders for title pages, no gimmicky twenty-point capital letters for the first word of the first page, no changes in font colour, etc. The thinking behind this is that you want an editor or agent to read the start of your novel and, hopefully, get in touch with you and ask to see the rest. That is the only point of making a slush-pile submission, so the plainer and slicker your presentation is, the less chance there is they’ll be fed up with you before they’ve even got to page 1 of what you’ve sent in. With this in mind, my covering letter was always very short and I always put my synopsis at the back of my opening chapter. All I wanted to do was move the agent to the opening pages of my novel as quickly as possible; I told them as little as I could about myself and what I thought of the quality of my writing (for anyone who’s interested, the covering letter and synopsis I used when submitting Broken to slush-piles are posted at the foot of this article here.

Once your slush-pile submission is ready, the best place to get relevant names and addresses of where to send it is from either The Writers’ And Artists’ Yearbook or The Writers’ Handbook. Both are published annually and have thorough listings of agents and publishing houses, whether or not they accept unsolicited manuscripts, and what sort of markets and genres they are/are not interested in: Unless someone’s entry specifically said they weren’t interested in the markets I was writing for, I would submit to them. The only exception I made to this was to avoid anyone who charged a reading fee; there are more than enough people out there willing to reject you for nothing, so don’t feel obliged to pay for the privilege of being told you can’t write. Also, these days, there are plenty of internet sites that give out information on who’s accepting unsolicited submissions, plus the vast majority of agents and publishers have their own websites, and these tend to have thorough submission guidelines on them, plus who to send submissions to. This site here actually rates different agents on their submission record and seems really up to date and thorough, so you might want to check it out: http://www.litmatch.net.

One thing I began to do was multiple submissions. Many agents and editors believe you shouldn’t send in more than one slush-pile submission at a time, and I think that would be fair if we were guaranteed an answer within seven to ten days, but, in many cases, it’s seven to ten months, and, occasionally, the reply just never comes. Rather than waste five years submitting one novel, I always tried to make sure I had at least three submissions out there at a time; as soon as one came back, I sent a new one off to the next agent on my list.

Also, don’t forget sites such as www.authonomy.com and www.youwriteon.com, both of which are sort of automated slush-piles where writers rate each others’ submissions and the top-rated novels go through to editors for review. Harper Collins have recently published their first author in this way (The Reaper, by Stephen Dunne) and youwriteon.com has an established record for helping writers get into print. As well as giving you that all important chance of making a breakthrough, both also give you access to feedback on your work, plus the chance to comment on the work of other writers going through the same process, which can only be a good thing; critically reading other peoples’ work is, for me, one of the best ways to improve yourself as a writer.

Other than that, I didn’t garble about too much else, except I really tried to ram home the fact that a rejection on a slush-pile shouldn’t be taken as a sign that your novel is rubbish or that you can’t write. I think I’ve said elsewhere on this site that making a slush-pile submission is like entering a lottery that rarely pays out, but, like a lottery, if you don’t buy a ticket, you’re never going to win, and the more tickets you buy, the more chance you have of winning. I think this is where most of us fall down when it comes to slush-pile submissions. We’re too sporadic and we give up too easily. There were times when I went months without submitting my fiction to slush-piles, and there were a few novels where I gave up submitting after five or so rejections. Broken picked up well over thirty standard rejections before Curtis Brown offered representation, but I’d made up my mind I wasn’t going to stop submitting it until there was no one left in the UK to submit it to; irrespective of how many rejections I got, whether the feedback was good, bad, indifferent, I was determined to give it the best chance it could possibly have of ending up in front of the right person. In terms of a winning strategy, I genuinely believe this is the only one there is: If you think it’s good enough, don’t give up until your options are exhausted.

The only other thing I tried to do in my talk was convince people that there are agents and editors out there looking through their slush-piles for undiscovered talent. I’ve met plenty of unpublished writers in the past who don’t believe it’s the case, but I’ve always been lucky in that respect — although I’ve picked up a huge amount of rejections over the years, I’ve also had a few agents and editors ask to see an entire manuscript following a slush-pile submission. With that in mind, the following agents either asked to see the whole of one of my novels or said they would be interested in seeing something else of mine if it was written more specifically for the markets they represented:

Jane Conway-Gordon, Dinah Wiener, Luigi Bonomi, Christine Green, Peter Buckman (at The Ampersand Agency), Judith Chilcote, Sheil Land Associates, and, of course, Curtis Brown.

Good luck if you decide to approach them. If not, fingers crossed you’ll have success with editors and agents more suitable to the markets you’re writing for. 

This is why I was so keen for Broken to be involved in Amazon’s Project Vine, a scheme where pre-publication copies of selected novels are made available to Amazon’s most consistent reviewers in the hope they’ll post positive reviews and create a word of mouth buzz.

Like everything else, there are risks involved in being selected for Vine. Once Amazon make a title available, they exert no influence over the reviews that get posted — good, bad or indifferent all get equal billing. It’s the same for the publishing house and the writer. Once you’ve agreed to be featured, you have no power of veto unless a review is deemed offensive. It’s as above board and honest as that. So although I was delighted when Broken was selected, I was nervous as well.

My first review came through in the third week of January. I was skiing in France at the time it was posted, so only found out when an e-mail from a friend came through on my phone. Helpfully, my friend didn’t tell me what sort of review I’d had, just that I’d had my first one. Suspecting browsing to Amazon’s site on my mobile would cost me more than I’d been paid in advances, I immediately ditched my wife and friends and skied off in search of an internet café. As it hadn’t been the best day’s skiing I’ve ever had in my life — hung-over, terrible weather, and our ski-instructor kept sending me down black runs I had no wish to go down — I was fully expecting a one star slating to top the day off. It was a pleasant surprise, then, to get my first ever five-star. The skiing improved after that.

Somehow resisting the urge to spend the rest of the holiday in internet cafés waiting for more reviews to come through, I popped back once in a while to see how things were going. Luckily, my expectations were realistic. I’ve always enjoyed reading reviews on Amazon and, not belonging to a book club, have often gone on there after reading a novel to see what other people have thought of it, so already knew opinions and ratings could vary and that some reviewers could be scathing about novels other reviewers had loved. Two days after my first five star, and following a three and a four star, I received my first ever one star. It had just been a matter of time, and it was a relief to get it out of the way.

Getting feedback — good and bad — is part and parcel of being a writer, whether you manage to get published or not, so although it felt quite strange seeing Broken dissected on the internet by total strangers, it didn’t feel like a completely new experience. Possibly the strangest thing was seeing myself referred to in the third person: Daniel Clay this, Daniel Clay that, took a bit of getting used to at first.

Another strange thing is that a couple of reviewers referred to Broken as reflecting life on a modern sink estate, whereas it’s really a novel about people in a relatively affluent area trying to cope with one set of unsociable neighbours. Given the fictional setting is around the corner from the street I actually live in, it felt very bizarre to see that. Another strange — and brilliant — thing is how one person won’t like a certain aspect, yet another will pick it out as a favourite theme. As an example of this, my first five star reviewer’s only criticism was that she couldn’t see a loving father calling his daughter Skunk. A few days later, however, a four star reviewer asked how you could fail to love a novel where the main character was named after an obscure nineties pop-group.

Over the last two months, reviews have flooded in from Amazon’s Vine readers. What’s it been like to read them? Sometimes brilliant, sometimes nerve-racking, but always interesting (and, yes, addictive as well). I’m not going to quote any specific reviews here as they’re all available to browse on Amazon but, at the time of writing, I’ve had 81, including 39 four stars and 21 five stars (and, in the interests of a balanced article, 2 one stars as well). My editor will kick me for saying this, but knowing how fierce Amazon reviewers can be, I expected much harsher treatment than this. So far, I’m relieved and delighted.

Has being part of Project Vine worked though? Has it translated through into sales? I don’t know, is the honest answer. I haven’t asked and suspect it’s too early to tell. But given some reviewers have included phrases such as ‘this isn’t normally the type of novel I read but…” I think it’s definitely been worthwhile, if only to have gained these readers alone.

While everyone else rushed to get scissors and glue and crayons, I got on with writing my novel, a multi-layered psychological thriller about a dinosaur eating all the kids in the playground.

As ever, the writing process took longer than I’d imagined and all I’d produced by the end of the lesson was a ten page story called ‘Run’. I did try to put a cover together at the last minute, but as I’d never been any good at folding, the front ended up three inches longer than the back, which detracted from the quality of the writing (I can still remember the teacher’s sigh now).

Everyone else in the class, on the other hand, had perfectly bound manuscripts with colour drawings on the front to go with their two or three paragraph stories. Needless to say, even though mine was the better novel, I didn’t win the five stars. The injustice still haunts me today.

So I don’t have a great track record with covers. I’ve never picked up a novel because I liked the look of a cover and, in many cases, the cover has put me off reading novels I’ve gone on to enjoy. For me, the magic of a novel lies in the strength of the story, the writing, not the way it’s been packaged, and I’d be happy if they all came in black.

Which is a pity, because I’ve had every opportunity to be involved in the decision making process for Broken’s front cover, and haven’t been able to come up with a single useful idea. The publishers have had to do all the thinking themselves.

The first idea, in the UK, was to commission an illustrator to draw Broken’s main character, an eleven year old girl named Skunk, spelling out BROKEN with objects that feature in the novel. They had an illustrator in mind and e-mailed a couple of examples of the illustrator’s work through for me to look at. Straight away, I thought the idea was completely original, loved the illustrator’s style, and couldn’t wait to see the finished product. Several weeks later, this came through.

I saw it in e-mail format first, and can still remember watching it roll out on screen. Despite my general apathy towards covers, it was brilliant to think someone had produced this off the back of something I’d written, and I fell in love with it straight away.

Sadly, there are so many things that have to be taken into account for a cover — who it will appeal to, what sort of age bracket it suggests the novel is aimed at, what it’s saying about the type of novel it is — that getting an image is often the starting point of the debate, not the end. There are also so many people who need to agree — the editor, the artist, the art director, the writer, the agent, sales and marketing, the buyers for the book-stores who will be involved in promoting the novel — that it’s a miracle any decisions ever get made. The more this image was discussed, the more it was felt that it wasn’t quite right.

Which led to attempt number two:

Again, I fell in love with this straight away, mainly because the girl in the photo looks exactly as I’ve always imagined Skunk. I also really like the grittiness of the background, and the fact Skunk’s dressed in contemporary clothing. Unlike the split opinions on the first cover, everyone seemed delighted with this one, so it looked like our decision was made.

Then, as more feedback came in, doubts were raised that the image was again not quite the right look – and it was back to the drawing board once again.

While all this was going on in England, I’d also been getting e-mails from the US and Canada asking for my thoughts on the cover for their markets. Again, I didn’t have any, so I left them to do their own thing. My editor in Canada said they were thinking along the lines of an illustration and my editor in the US said their art director wanted to do something contemporary and edgy, maybe using cigarettes as part of the image.

What the Americans actually came up with was this:

The moment I saw it, I knew. Even though it’s not contemporary, it’s got an edge of mystery, an edge of danger, and the girl, to me, looks really scared. I want to know what she’s thinking, I want to know that she’ll be ok. This, for me, is the essence of Broken. The reader knows from the first page that the narrator is in a coma, and the drive of the book is to find out what’s happened to her and if she’ll decide to pull through. This was the cover I wanted.

Happily, I wasn’t the only one to think this, as the UK and Canada have decided to go with it as well. Given it will go on sale here this month, it’s going to be a strange experience to go into a bookstore and actually look out for the cover of a novel.

It’s going to be even stranger — thirty-two years after my last disastrous attempts at creating a novel — to get my hands on something I’ve written that’s been so beautifully produced.

Several years ago he was in London discussing the novel he’d just finished over lunch with his editor, getting feedback and agreeing what work still needed to be done. The writer had the feeling his editor wasn’t entirely enthused with this particular novel but felt nothing had been raised that couldn’t be put right.

As an aside, however, his editor asked what he was working on at the moment, a conversation that resulted in the writer handing over a computer disk containing the first hundred pages of an as yet unfinished novel…

Two days later, the writer gets a phone call from his editor: scrap the novel we were discussing. I want to publish this one instead. And it needs to be done in five weeks. So that’s what the writer did.

Another writer, Chandler McGrew, explained how his elation at getting a six figure contract for his debut novel soured somewhat when his new editor said, in a throwaway manner, Could you add a second killer?

Welcome to the world of the edit: if you think the hard work’s done when you finally get offered your contract, it’s time to start thinking again.

Between your novel selling and being signed off to go to print, there are three stages it has to go through — an edit where you liase with your editor to get the writing, plot, characterisation and themes as highly polished as possible, an edit where a copy-editor goes through your manuscript for continuity, grammar, plus any of the above they feel still needs to be addressed, and, finally, page-proof sign-off — your last chance to spot any mistakes.

For me, with Broken selling in the UK, the US and Canada, I had three editors giving me feedback during the first of these stages, so ended up with a page of notes from Canada, a marked up manuscript plus four or five pages of notes from the UK, and another marked up manuscript (plus another four or fives pages of notes) from the US.

Once all this feedback was in, I redrafted until I felt I’d addressed everything I wanted to address, then e-mailed the revised manuscript back to my editors. We then had two or three months where we continued to question everything in the novel in an attempt to get it as good as it could possibly be.

The points raised at this stage typically included typos, queries on what was motivating characters to do certain things, questions on localisms in the novel (Housing Association properties alongside private residencies, for instance, are quite common where the novel is set, but not so elsewhere), and requests for confirmation that I’d researched police procedures and other events in the text.

Once this stage was complete, things went quiet for a few weeks while the copy-editor got to work. Then there were more notes and another marked up manuscript to go through before, finally, we reached the page proof stage, and a last chance to spot any mistakes.

All in all, from the editors first seeing the manuscript to giving final sign off took about six months. I’m not sure how typical this is, but I’ve read somewhere that eight months is the standard period of time set aside.
If you’re ever lucky enough to go through this process, I’d say have an open mind to any suggestions your editors make. I’ve heard some writers talk about editors as if they’re the enemy, and I’ve heard plenty of unpublished writers swear they’ll never make changes to their manuscripts, but I think a writer is always going to be too close to a manuscript to have a completely objective view.

I also think, once you’ve written your novel, the more feedback you can get, the better — it’s amazing how one small query can lead you off in a completely different direction, and by the time the edit was finished, Broken had grown in length by eight thousand words, the fates of two major characters had changed, and the strength of the novel — the ending in particular — had gone up several notches. Although it was stressful to have my writing put under such scrutiny by three people who were total strangers to me at the start of the process, it was also extremely rewarding, and an experience I’ll never forget.

Funnily enough, the most stressful part wasn’t the redrafting, it was the page proofs. No matter how often I looked through the manuscript, I never felt I’d checked it enough. Even now, with the novel being physically printed at a factory somewhere in Devon, I’m convinced it’s riddled with mistakes. I’ve even got a photocopy of the page-proofs on my desk. Several times a day, I go to a random page and look for the typos I’ve missed. A few times, over the past few weeks, I’ve even woke up from dreams where I’ve found them, and have had to get up and come in here to check it’s not true.

Sad? Natural? I’ve no idea, but if any other writers out there have been through this, it would be nice to know I’m not insane or completely alone…

For some reason, I always dreamed it would happen with a phone call out of the blue. Something like this happened to a friend of mine who was a member of the writer’s group I’m involved with. Her name was Virginia Warbey and the novel in question was The Ropemaker’s Daughter.

As well as writing novels, Virginia was an extremely gifted poet. The custom in the group is to bring a bottle of champagne along whenever you’ve had a success, so when Virginia turned up with a bottle one Thursday evening we all assumed she’d won yet another poetry competition. In reality, she’d been sitting at home working on a poem when an editor she’d made a slush-pile submission to had phoned up out of nowhere and offered her a deal. All in a matter of minutes, Virginia had gone from being an unpublished novelist to a published one.

Someone else I know of wasn’t even trying to get a novel published when he made his breakthrough. He’s a Doctor Who enthusiast and was asked to write a Doctor Who novel through his involvement with fan clubs and conventions. He’s still writing novels for Doctor Who and Torchwood now.

I’ve heard countless other writers talk about their breakthrough experiences at conferences or on TV, and the only common denominator seems to be that everyone’s experience is different. Alex Keegan, a novelist and prize-winning short story writer, met the editor who bought his first novel in a one-to-one at the Winchester Writers’ Conference. Lisa Jewell, whose breakthrough came with the novel Ralph’s Party, made contact with an agent while she was writing it, kept in touch, and won her first contract like that. Slightly more hair-raising, I read somewhere that William Boyd sent a few chapters of his first novel, A Good Man In Africa, to a publishing house while he was still writing it, then had to finish in a hurry when they phoned up and begged for the rest.

Some writers win deals through competitions — the annual Debut Dagger competition seems to have an especially good track record for this. Another writer I heard talk at a conference simply turned up at a publishing house with the first three chapters of her novel, got hold of a commissioning editor, took her out to lunch, and got her first deal that way. Someone, somewhere, at some stage this year, is going to get a phone call from an editor such as Scott Pack at The Friday Project, and that’s how it will happen for them. Although it’s incredibly hard to get noticed, there are people out there constantly looking for those of us trying to make the breakthrough, and new writers come through every year: Joe Stretch (Friction), Richard T. Kelly (Crusaders), and Carol Topolski (Monster Love) are all tipped for great things with their debut novels this year.

For me, the breakthrough happened in a series of stages rather than the bolt out of the blue I’d always dreamed of. Between making my slush pile submission to Curtis Brown and Jonny Geller sending my novel out to publishing houses, about three months went by: I was on holiday when Jonny first e-mailed to say he’d like to see the whole novel, then Jonny was on holiday when I sent it in to him, then it took us a couple of weeks before we were able to meet up and discuss the next steps. I then spent a further three weeks making changes to Broken before we felt it was in the good enough shape to submit.

Again, I’ve heard different stories about the agent-to-publishing house submission process. There’s the dream scenario where a deal is done within twenty four hours, then there’s the nightmare scenario where no one wants to buy your novel even though it’s being submitted by an agent. I’ve just read an interview with one editor who gets as many as ten submissions from agents in any given week, and buys maybe four in a year. Before Virginia won through with that sudden phone call, she’d had an experience like this, and I think it must be the most heartbreaking thing for an unpublished writer to cope with. All the time Broken was under submission, I tried not to get my hopes up. Although I knew I was closer than I’d ever been to a publishing contract, I also knew there was just as much chance it might come to nothing, and I’d have to start over again.

While I was waiting, Broken was being looked at by editors in various publishing houses. We knew there was interest within twenty four hours of it being submitted, but Jonny was then away for two weeks, so it wasn’t until he returned that I found out an offer had been made. In terms of trying to make it as a writer, these were the worst few weeks of my life.

In the end, two UK publishing houses bid for Broken before HarperCollins clinched the deal. All in all, from slush pile submission to agreeing a deal, the process took nearly five months. It was hardly the bolt out of the blue I’d always dreamed of. That’s writing, though. It’s a long game. You take a year or more to write your novel, you win a deal if you’re lucky, then ten to fifteen months later, your book finally appears on the shelves: Broken’s release date in the UK is 3rd March, and that’s virtually three years to the day since I first sat down to write it. Compared to Danny Scheinmann, who spent six years writing his best-selling debut novel Random Acts Of Heroic Love before he even considered trying to sell it, I guess the process for me was quite quick.

Virginia Warbey died in a car accident in 2004 at the age of 35. Her two novels, The Ropemaker’s Daughter and The Carradine Diary, were published by Diva under her married name, Virginia Smith. To keep Virginia’s memory alive, the annual Virginia Warbey Poetry Prize is now in its third year. This year’s judge is Gillian Clarke and the first prize is £800. The closing date for entries is Monday, May 19th 2008. For any Fifth Estate readers who are poets, entry forms can be downloaded here

Dear Daniel,
I work with Jonny and have just picked this out of a pile of reading and really enjoyed it. Jonny’s away on holiday but just to let you know we’ll be in touch as soon as possible on our decision.

I’d already had an e-mail from Jonny two weeks before saying he’d enjoyed the sample chapters I’d sent him so please could I send him the rest. As I’d been at this stage with other agents several times before I hadn’t got all that excited, but Alice’s e-mail finally seemed to hint at something different.

Then, two weeks later, this arrived from Jonny himself:

Dear Daniel,
I’ve just finished your terrific, powerful, novel and would love to meet you. I was really bowled over by the discipline and maturity of the writing as well as the story being funny, appalling and terrifying. Congrats. I’m at the London book fair today but please contact Alice to fix a time for us to meet soon.

The meeting took place towards the end of the following week at Curtis Brown’s offices in Haymarket, central London. I tried not to think about it too much beforehand because the implications were too huge to contemplate: Curtis Brown is one of the biggest literary agencies in the world and Jonny Geller has a superb reputation for discovering unknown writers. Being represented by him would be a massive opportunity for me — possibly even life changing.

However, something about his e-mail suggested things weren’t at that stage: there had been no offer of representation, just an invitation to come up and meet him, and if he’d been that keen on what I’d sent him I felt he would have phoned me up and got the ball rolling there and then, so I suspected he either had problems with some of the plot elements in Broken or didn’t feel it was a commercially viable novel and wanted to discuss what I planned to write next.

This was why, despite the very positive e-mails, I travelled to London expecting a cup of tea and a kick in the teeth rather than a glass of champagne and a chat about six-figure advances.

I was right to be concerned. As soon as the meeting got started it became clear Jonny felt Broken was only sixty percent there. Although this was obviously difficult for me to hear, his feedback was extremely constructive and he was very precise about what he felt the problems were.

My main character was an eight year old girl, which he felt was too young by several years, and the whole novel was written in the first person from her viewpoint, which he felt was too much to ask readers to cope with in places. One plot element towards the end of the novel was too dark and took away from the central thrust of the novel, and another plot element stretched credibility too far. On top of these major problems I’d also strayed from the main story in certain areas and hadn’t emphasised it enough in others.

Also, why did I have five year old children and fifteen year old children running around the same school playground when primary and secondary schools were always separate, how was it possible for certain characters to get into this strange hybrid school playground when the majority of schools have security gates on them these days and, finally, would I be willing to consider a re-write as the rest of it was fantastic?

I’m sure a lot of writers would have said no to such a major re-write or dug their heels in and looked for some sort of compromise, but it never occurred to me not to go for it. For a start, I’d already known there were problems with the novel and agreed with most of what Jonny was saying. Secondly, he wasn’t telling me how to do the re-write, he was giving me a very honest opinion on where he felt the problems were — how I went about putting them right was totally up to me.

Finally, and most importantly, I could tell he wasn’t messing me around. He wasn’t saying ‘go away and do this and maybe I’ll have another look’, he was saying ‘if you go away and get this right, I think I can sell this novel for you’.

Another thing that really impressed me was that Jonny had a fixed timescale for when he wanted things to happen: so long as I could do the rewrite within the next three weeks my novel would be on submission in London within the next month and, if things went well, in Canada and New York soon after.

Other than the fact I had to re-write forty percent of a seventy three thousand word novel in roughly twenty one days while still holding down a full-time day-job, he was telling me everything I’d ever wanted to hear.

Which just goes to show that you do need to be careful what you wish for, because sometimes it’s an absolute nightmare to realise the only thing standing between you and something you’ve always dreamed of is whether you’re good enough to achieve it or not: without a shadow of a doubt, the next three weeks were going to be among the most stressful of my life.

In case you submit to slush-piles yourself and would like to see the submission that finally got me noticed, I’m attaching the covering letter and synopsis I was sending out for Broken at the foot of this post.

I admit I feel insecure about doing this because I followed an extremely dull format with my slush pile submissions, so doubt I’m giving anyone any great insights. Also, I’m not sure the fact I got an agent from this particular submission qualifies it as a success: if I’d taken a different approach, maybe one of the agents who turned it down wouldn’t have been so dismissive.

As with any format, there’s always different ideas on the best approach for slush-pile submissions. Some people like to send random chapters rather than the first three, but I’ve always believed the more coherent your submission, the more chance you have of getting an agent involved in the flow of your novel, which, for me, is the whole point of any submission.

Synopsis wise, some people like to do detailed chapter plans and others like to provide character descriptions as well. I just tried to be clear and brief — more of a blurb than a synopsis — in the hope an agent would move on to the opening pages of my novel as soon as possible.

When deciding who to submit to, I always checked in the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook or Writers’ Handbook that the agent was interested in whatever market I was aiming for. If their entries left me in any doubt, though, I submitted to them anyway — I always felt it was better to waste postage rather than the chance of getting representation.

Other than the covering letter, synopsis, and the double-spaced opening chapters of whatever novel I was trying to sell, all I ever put in with my submission was a stamped addressed envelope for its eventual return.

One area where I might have differed to other writers is that I did multiple submissions. There’s an argument that you should only ever submit to one agent or publishing house at a time, but I became frustrated with waiting up to six months for a standard rejection and eventually started to submit to three agents at once.

Whenever a rejection came back, another submission went in the post, keeping my running total at three. If anyone ever asked to see the whole novel, I stopped sending out other submissions until I’d heard back from the interested agent, then got my running total back up to three once again.

By the time I sent Broken to Jonny Geller, however, I’d completely lost patience and had about thirty submissions on the go, some for Broken, others for a novel I’d written a couple of years before. The day I got the first e-mail from Jonny saying he’d like to see the rest of Broken, I’d just returned from holiday and had something like sixteen rejections on the doormat, and I was still getting rejections for both novels weeks after Broken had sold.

Despite the fact I managed to get a publishing deal with Broken, I think it’s important not to hide from the fact it was rejected by more than thirty agents. I also think it’s important to be honest about the fact I’ve had countless other rejections for novels written before and after Broken.

Part of this is because I started submitting very young and had a lot to learn as a writer. Part of it, though, is because submitting unsolicited manuscripts to the slush-pile is like buying a ticket for a lottery that rarely pays out. Sometimes, even having the winning ticket doesn’t guarantee you a prize: Broken’s now sold in five different territories, but what if Jonny Geller had just sold a similar novel for one of his existing clients and felt he couldn’t take me on, or if he’d simply thought, well, how many clients do I need to keep myself busy? Is this completely unknown writer really worth my time? I could still be sending Broken out to other agents now, or I might have given up altogether. Better writers than me must have done this.

If you’ve been thinking of giving up yourself, try to remember it’s not just a thin line between success and failure on the slush-pile, it’s an almost non-existent one, and whether you fall the right or wrong side of that line often depends on the mood and skill of the person reading your submission as much as the quality of your submission itself.

Even more importantly, always try to remember that every now and then, despite the odds, someone does come out the other side of a slush-pile submission with a publishing contract in their hands. As long as you keep writing what you believe in and never let the rejections stop you submitting, one day it might just be you.

Here’s the one that did it for me.

BROKEN SUBMISSION LETTER

Dear Mr Geller,

Please find enclosed the first seventeen pages, plus a very brief synopsis, of Broken, a novel I have recently completed. It tells the story of an eight year old girl who is in a coma. As her family sit waiting for her to either regain consciousness or die, she debates her options and reflects upon the chain of events that have led her to death’s door.

Written in a similar style to Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, I think anyone who enjoyed Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones would get a lot out of this book: although it’s an entirely different read, the mood and emotions provoked are similar.

On a personal note, I am thirty six years old and have had short stories and poetry published in various collections. Broken is my fourth novel.

If you want to see the whole novel, I’d be delighted to send it to you.

With best wishes

Daniel Clay

ACCOMPANYING SYNOPSIS

Broken tells the story of Skunk Cunningham, an eight year old girl who is in a coma, trying to make sense of it all – from the very first time she saw Bob Oswald being violent to the very moment she decides whether to live or whether to die.

In-between, she tells the story of her life; beating Jed on X-Box, trying to work out what Broken Buckley’s been doing in his box-room, and falling in love with Dillon, the orphaned gypsy boy who lives in Halford’s car-park with his Romany Aunt and Uncle.

Skunk doesn’t just tell her own story. She tells the story of Juanita, the au-pair her father loves more than his children, and Mr Jeffries, the man Juanita loves almost enough to overlook the fact he’s an impoverished school-teacher who can’t give her all the things Skunk’s father can.

She tells the story of Mr and Mrs Buckley, and their schizophrenic son, Arthur, who Skunk and Jed and Dillon soon start referring to as Broken. As Mr Buckley tends corpses in the mortuary he manages, and as Broken slips further and further into madness, can this family survive?

She tells the story of Bob Oswald and his five delinquent daughters. In their Housing Association property, without the stress of a mortgage or the day to day restrictions of social responsibility, the Oswalds’ lot is a happy one.

Until Susan, Bob’s fifteen year old nymphomaniac daughter, accuses Broken Buckley of rape.

And everything starts to go wrong.

Been enjoying Daniel’s account of his road to publication? We’ve five advance proof copies of Broken to give away to anyone who who’d like an early read of this great debut. First five e-mails to editor@fifthestate.co.uk take the spoils!