Neil Spring's Blog - Posts Tagged "ghosts"
How I got my agent
They say that finding an agent to represent your work is more difficult than finding a publisher, and that’s probably true. Once you have an agent and your novel is ready to go, then assuming you are represented by a good agent, and your work is solid, finding a publisher shouldn’t take you too long at all. In my case, once my agent had sent out the manuscript, we had our first offer from a publisher within 5 days - and that was one of the happiest days of my life.
Sounds simple, right? Well, not quite. Because the hardest part was finding a wonderful literary agent in the first place. And I don’t just mean someone who has the skill, contacts and credibility to land the novel with a good editor. I wanted someone with passion, who would help me along that difficult road of crafting the novel into what it is today. And agents like that are, well, extremely difficult to find.
Once I had written 100 pages of the book, I sat down at my desk in front of my computer and thought, ‘All right, these folks must get dull manuscripts landing on their desks all the time, and over-written query letters they never read.’ And, there and then, decided I wouldn’t send any letters with flowery text and three chapters attached. Instead, I made a quick list of every agent I could find who represented writers in my genre, dropped their emails into a quickly sketched table, and fired out a series of short emails which read something like this:
Dear Agent,
I am a new author seeking representation for my debut novel, The Ghost Hunters. Drawing on historical records of the day, this is the true story of Borley Rectory, the most haunted house in England,’ and the enigmatic Harry Price, who investigated the case.
Please let me know if you would like to read the first three chapters and a synopsis.
Kind Regards
Neil Spring
I stared at the text. Not good enough. The agent, just like the publisher, wants to know that your novel will sell. Publishing fiction, after all, is a business like any other; whoever signs you as an author, wants to know that you can deliver the sales as well as the words. And here was the crux of my dilemma, which I am sure is common to other writers out there.
I had no experience. No books under my belt. No author awards. Nothing except my passion, 100 pages, and a query email that was failing spectacularly to reach out, grab you by the shoulders, and shake you with the cry, “read me!”
So I tried again. But this time, before re drafting that email, I went out to my friends and colleagues searching for someone, anyone, who knew anyone else working in publishing. One of them did: her best friend worked at Bloomsbury. ‘Will she have lunch with me?’ I asked. She would. Two weeks later, over a delicious lasagne in John Lewis, this lovely woman told me she thought my material was great, and worthy of publication. It wasn’t a book deal, but it was a start, and it was exactly what I needed to hook an agent’s attention.
I went back to the computer. The next version of my query letter went something like this:
Dear Agent,
I am a new author seeking representation for my debut novel, The Ghost Hunters. Drawing on historical records of the day, this is the true story of Borley Rectory, the most haunted house in England,’ and the enigmatic Harry Price, who investigated the case.
I have already shared the book informally with (nice lady’s name) at Bloomsbury and she think it is worthy of publication. A number of journalists, including X, have also said that they would be fascinated to review the book, and, given the success of recent films and novels in this genre, I feel strongly that it will find a receptive reading audience.
Please let me know if you would like to read the first three chapters and a synopsis.
Kind Regards
Neil Spring
That short query letter produced a flurry of interest. I emailed about nine agents and within the week, four had sent me a short email back expressing interest.
One of them said they loved the premise of my novel. Another admitted that he wasn’t taking on any further work at the moment. However, he thought The Ghost Hunters sounded so intriguing he absolutely had to read it. For all this, I had to wait a long time to hear anything. Days passed. Weeks. Every morning, I’d check my email feeling a knot of anxiety tightening in my stomach as I wondered: what if they hate it? What if?
No one hated it (thankfully). I think actually I was rather lucky to have a handful of agents interested. But only one agent made the telephone call: Cathryn at William Morris Endeavour. I told her about the interest my query email had provoked.
“We agents are a competitive bunch,” she said. It was three weeks before the London Book Fair. “How soon can you come into my office?”
The next day I was sitting on Cathryn’s sofa, high above Tottenham Court Road in a gleaming modern office, surrounded with Cathryn’s books all of them recognisable. I couldn’t quite believe this was happening to me. Honestly, I had dreamed about this moment for as long as I could remember. Suddenly, that dream of beginning the road to publication was becoming real.
Cathryn showed me the list of publishers to whom she would submit when we were ready as I pictured my novel sitting up there on the wall with the other success stories.
‘You’re sure it will sell?’ I asked, still craving reassurance.
She stared me in the eye and nodded. ‘I have no doubt, Neil.’ Then, over coffee, she told me about all the scenes in my novel she “loved”. And in that moment, I knew…this was the one.
Cathryn had the passion.
And I, finally, had my agent.
The Ghost Hunters is published by Quercus on October 24th, you can preorder a copy today from http://amzn.to/14DhzZFThe Ghost Hunters
Sounds simple, right? Well, not quite. Because the hardest part was finding a wonderful literary agent in the first place. And I don’t just mean someone who has the skill, contacts and credibility to land the novel with a good editor. I wanted someone with passion, who would help me along that difficult road of crafting the novel into what it is today. And agents like that are, well, extremely difficult to find.
Once I had written 100 pages of the book, I sat down at my desk in front of my computer and thought, ‘All right, these folks must get dull manuscripts landing on their desks all the time, and over-written query letters they never read.’ And, there and then, decided I wouldn’t send any letters with flowery text and three chapters attached. Instead, I made a quick list of every agent I could find who represented writers in my genre, dropped their emails into a quickly sketched table, and fired out a series of short emails which read something like this:
Dear Agent,
I am a new author seeking representation for my debut novel, The Ghost Hunters. Drawing on historical records of the day, this is the true story of Borley Rectory, the most haunted house in England,’ and the enigmatic Harry Price, who investigated the case.
Please let me know if you would like to read the first three chapters and a synopsis.
Kind Regards
Neil Spring
I stared at the text. Not good enough. The agent, just like the publisher, wants to know that your novel will sell. Publishing fiction, after all, is a business like any other; whoever signs you as an author, wants to know that you can deliver the sales as well as the words. And here was the crux of my dilemma, which I am sure is common to other writers out there.
I had no experience. No books under my belt. No author awards. Nothing except my passion, 100 pages, and a query email that was failing spectacularly to reach out, grab you by the shoulders, and shake you with the cry, “read me!”
So I tried again. But this time, before re drafting that email, I went out to my friends and colleagues searching for someone, anyone, who knew anyone else working in publishing. One of them did: her best friend worked at Bloomsbury. ‘Will she have lunch with me?’ I asked. She would. Two weeks later, over a delicious lasagne in John Lewis, this lovely woman told me she thought my material was great, and worthy of publication. It wasn’t a book deal, but it was a start, and it was exactly what I needed to hook an agent’s attention.
I went back to the computer. The next version of my query letter went something like this:
Dear Agent,
I am a new author seeking representation for my debut novel, The Ghost Hunters. Drawing on historical records of the day, this is the true story of Borley Rectory, the most haunted house in England,’ and the enigmatic Harry Price, who investigated the case.
I have already shared the book informally with (nice lady’s name) at Bloomsbury and she think it is worthy of publication. A number of journalists, including X, have also said that they would be fascinated to review the book, and, given the success of recent films and novels in this genre, I feel strongly that it will find a receptive reading audience.
Please let me know if you would like to read the first three chapters and a synopsis.
Kind Regards
Neil Spring
That short query letter produced a flurry of interest. I emailed about nine agents and within the week, four had sent me a short email back expressing interest.
One of them said they loved the premise of my novel. Another admitted that he wasn’t taking on any further work at the moment. However, he thought The Ghost Hunters sounded so intriguing he absolutely had to read it. For all this, I had to wait a long time to hear anything. Days passed. Weeks. Every morning, I’d check my email feeling a knot of anxiety tightening in my stomach as I wondered: what if they hate it? What if?
No one hated it (thankfully). I think actually I was rather lucky to have a handful of agents interested. But only one agent made the telephone call: Cathryn at William Morris Endeavour. I told her about the interest my query email had provoked.
“We agents are a competitive bunch,” she said. It was three weeks before the London Book Fair. “How soon can you come into my office?”
The next day I was sitting on Cathryn’s sofa, high above Tottenham Court Road in a gleaming modern office, surrounded with Cathryn’s books all of them recognisable. I couldn’t quite believe this was happening to me. Honestly, I had dreamed about this moment for as long as I could remember. Suddenly, that dream of beginning the road to publication was becoming real.
Cathryn showed me the list of publishers to whom she would submit when we were ready as I pictured my novel sitting up there on the wall with the other success stories.
‘You’re sure it will sell?’ I asked, still craving reassurance.
She stared me in the eye and nodded. ‘I have no doubt, Neil.’ Then, over coffee, she told me about all the scenes in my novel she “loved”. And in that moment, I knew…this was the one.
Cathryn had the passion.
And I, finally, had my agent.
The Ghost Hunters is published by Quercus on October 24th, you can preorder a copy today from http://amzn.to/14DhzZFThe Ghost Hunters
GHOST HUNTERS: BORLEY RECTORY – THE MOST HAUNTED HOUSE IN ENGLAND
My Blog for Quercus yesterday about Borley Rectory:
On Halloween night this month, police will gather in an isolated hamlet on the Essex Suffolk border to turn away crowds of fascinated spectators.
The watchers will come in their droves and in nervous anticipation from miles away, all of them searching for the one thing that has always attracted strangers to these parts.
They will come looking for ghosts.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the construction of Borley Rectory, a rambling Victorian mansion that gained fame in 1929 as “the most haunted house in England,” when the Daily Mirror called in the famous ghost hunter and arch sceptic Harry Price, to investigate.
Price’s arrival at the Rectory on 12 June 1929 coincided with a range of unusual happenings – stones and mothballs were thrown, bells rang, a candlestick came hurtling down the stairs and a brick crashed through the verandah roof. The rector and his wife soon departed, leaving Price to write a book on the affair which fixated the nation: Borley Rectory – The Most Haunted House in England.
But was it quite right to describe the house as most haunted, or even haunted at all?
That is the question I have sought to examine in my debut novel THE GHOST HUNTERS, which is published later this month. This novel is certainly not a faithful retelling of Harry Price’s association with the house, which stood on a hill overlooking the windswept Essex marshes, but a fictional representation of what might have happened, based on historical reports and witness testimonies. I trawled newspaper archives, dug deep into Price’s private files, left no stone unturned to weave the most famous haunting of our age into a chilling historical novel.
Many will remember how the tale began. According to the legend of a Benedictine monastery built in 1362, a monk was in a relationship with a nun from a nearby convent. Once their affair becomes public news, the monk is executed and the nun bricked up alive in the convent walls.
Soon, stories about the spectral nun walking near the rectory started doing the rounds, as did tales of a phantom coach and horses, inexplicable footsteps, voices, touchings, smells, fires, movement of objects, written messages and poltergeist activity.
But what is it about that red-bricked monstrosity of a building that still keeps us talking about it after 150 years? Just a few months ago I met a lady who remembered visiting the place as a child. She, like many of the locals, still find something odd about Borley. As a local taxi man put it to me: “I genuinely think there is fear in the village, still -fear at whatever is up there.’
It’s a journey I have made often, retracing Harry Price’s footsteps. If you take the road from Sudbury towards Long Melford, about a mile before that town you’ll spot a turning – Rodbridge Corner; and if you take that turning, crossing an old disused railway line, you’ll come to Hall Lane. Here, taking the hill, you might glimpse the spire of Borley Church in the distance. In winter, it can appear a very austere place indeed.
An old friend who accompanied me to Borley revealed in confidence that he had heard strange noises as we approached the churchyard. In his words: “the sound of a coach and horses pounding the road.”
The odd thing was: we hadn’t seen any coach or horses. And when I mentioned this to an elderly woman living close to the site of the old Rectory, she became curiously serious and said quietly, ‘Yes, people do keep reporting that… But if strange things do still happen here, I’m hardly likely to tell you. Don’t expect anyone else here to discuss it, either.’
What’s interesting to me, isn’t what the story tells us about spirituality and life after death, but rather, what it tells us about the living. The era of Harry Price was a grieving nation, in some ways a desperate nation, that needed something to believe in. A pre war world as remote as Borley itself.
So come with me, if you will, back into the 1920s. An era where war injured servicemen stood in the cold and the fog on London streets selling bootlaces and copies of the Daily Worker; an era of longing and despair and a little hope.
It’s January 1929 and a renegade writer and researcher, has announced in the Times the gala opening of a new laboratory in South Kensington where spiritualist mediums will be put to the test. Everyone is speculating about its work, including a young woman recently returned from Paris. Sarah Grey. She is lost, without purpose, until she witnesses the marvels of the Laboratory – where the floors are made of cork, where wooden shutters keep rooms devoid of light, and where mediums are strapped into devices that resemble the electric chair.
She doesn’t know it yet, but Sarah Grey is destined to come face to face with arch sceptic, Harry Price. And her whole life is about to change…
The Ghost Hunters is published by Quercus on October 24th, you can pre-order your copy today at http://amzn.to/18am4OT
On Halloween night this month, police will gather in an isolated hamlet on the Essex Suffolk border to turn away crowds of fascinated spectators.
The watchers will come in their droves and in nervous anticipation from miles away, all of them searching for the one thing that has always attracted strangers to these parts.
They will come looking for ghosts.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the construction of Borley Rectory, a rambling Victorian mansion that gained fame in 1929 as “the most haunted house in England,” when the Daily Mirror called in the famous ghost hunter and arch sceptic Harry Price, to investigate.
Price’s arrival at the Rectory on 12 June 1929 coincided with a range of unusual happenings – stones and mothballs were thrown, bells rang, a candlestick came hurtling down the stairs and a brick crashed through the verandah roof. The rector and his wife soon departed, leaving Price to write a book on the affair which fixated the nation: Borley Rectory – The Most Haunted House in England.
But was it quite right to describe the house as most haunted, or even haunted at all?
That is the question I have sought to examine in my debut novel THE GHOST HUNTERS, which is published later this month. This novel is certainly not a faithful retelling of Harry Price’s association with the house, which stood on a hill overlooking the windswept Essex marshes, but a fictional representation of what might have happened, based on historical reports and witness testimonies. I trawled newspaper archives, dug deep into Price’s private files, left no stone unturned to weave the most famous haunting of our age into a chilling historical novel.
Many will remember how the tale began. According to the legend of a Benedictine monastery built in 1362, a monk was in a relationship with a nun from a nearby convent. Once their affair becomes public news, the monk is executed and the nun bricked up alive in the convent walls.
Soon, stories about the spectral nun walking near the rectory started doing the rounds, as did tales of a phantom coach and horses, inexplicable footsteps, voices, touchings, smells, fires, movement of objects, written messages and poltergeist activity.
But what is it about that red-bricked monstrosity of a building that still keeps us talking about it after 150 years? Just a few months ago I met a lady who remembered visiting the place as a child. She, like many of the locals, still find something odd about Borley. As a local taxi man put it to me: “I genuinely think there is fear in the village, still -fear at whatever is up there.’
It’s a journey I have made often, retracing Harry Price’s footsteps. If you take the road from Sudbury towards Long Melford, about a mile before that town you’ll spot a turning – Rodbridge Corner; and if you take that turning, crossing an old disused railway line, you’ll come to Hall Lane. Here, taking the hill, you might glimpse the spire of Borley Church in the distance. In winter, it can appear a very austere place indeed.
An old friend who accompanied me to Borley revealed in confidence that he had heard strange noises as we approached the churchyard. In his words: “the sound of a coach and horses pounding the road.”
The odd thing was: we hadn’t seen any coach or horses. And when I mentioned this to an elderly woman living close to the site of the old Rectory, she became curiously serious and said quietly, ‘Yes, people do keep reporting that… But if strange things do still happen here, I’m hardly likely to tell you. Don’t expect anyone else here to discuss it, either.’
What’s interesting to me, isn’t what the story tells us about spirituality and life after death, but rather, what it tells us about the living. The era of Harry Price was a grieving nation, in some ways a desperate nation, that needed something to believe in. A pre war world as remote as Borley itself.
So come with me, if you will, back into the 1920s. An era where war injured servicemen stood in the cold and the fog on London streets selling bootlaces and copies of the Daily Worker; an era of longing and despair and a little hope.
It’s January 1929 and a renegade writer and researcher, has announced in the Times the gala opening of a new laboratory in South Kensington where spiritualist mediums will be put to the test. Everyone is speculating about its work, including a young woman recently returned from Paris. Sarah Grey. She is lost, without purpose, until she witnesses the marvels of the Laboratory – where the floors are made of cork, where wooden shutters keep rooms devoid of light, and where mediums are strapped into devices that resemble the electric chair.
She doesn’t know it yet, but Sarah Grey is destined to come face to face with arch sceptic, Harry Price. And her whole life is about to change…
The Ghost Hunters is published by Quercus on October 24th, you can pre-order your copy today at http://amzn.to/18am4OT
TimeOut: Monsters in the closet
Featured in TimeOut London 29th October 2013
With his acclaimed debut novel, 'The Ghost Hunters', riding high in the horror chart, gay author Neil Spring picks five popular films where homosexuality and horror collide.
1. ‘The Haunting’ - 1963
Based on a novel by Shirley Jackson, this classic 1963 British film follows a team of investigators as they spend the night in a haunted house. Theodora, a fashionable clairvoyant, is an explicitly (and refreshingly) feminine lesbian character, played by Claire Bloom.
2. ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ - 1968
Mr James, the author of this much-loved ghost story was himself homosexual. And the clues are in the story, which has been adapted for film and television. ‘I expect a friend of mine soon, by the way – a gentleman from Cambridge – to come for a night or two,’ our protagonist remarks. ‘That will be all right, I suppose, won’t it?’
3. ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 2’ - 1985
The repressed bisexuality of the male lead character, Jesse, is the driving theme of the second film in the franchise, which also features a gay leather bar and naked male showering scenes. According to Krueger actor Robert Englund, the film is symbolic of Aids paranoia, with the lead character’s sexual desires and internal struggle manifested in the danger posed by Freddy.
4. ‘The Lost Boys’ - 1987
The modern vampires of ‘True Blood’ and ‘Twilight’ have built a solid gay fan base with their buff bodies and frequent gay references. But nowhere is the homoerotic threat of vampire sexuality more evident than in the ’80s classic, ‘The Lost Boys’. Directed by Joel Schumacher, (the man who gave Batman nipples and a codpiece), the film features Corey Haim wearing a ‘Born to Shop’ T-shirt and singing falsetto in the bath, ‘Ain’t got a man!’.
5. ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ - 1991
The serial killer Buffalo Bill caused outrage in the gay community in 1991, with many criticising the character as negative and homophobic. Not only does the film give us a ‘monster queer’ character, but like Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ and Brian De Palma’s ‘Dressed to Kill’, it treads the well-worn path of using transgender people to terrify audiences.
Enter the Halloween giveway to win a copy here: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
The Ghost Hunters is published by Quercus available now: Order your copy here: http://amzn.to/14kcK3e
With his acclaimed debut novel, 'The Ghost Hunters', riding high in the horror chart, gay author Neil Spring picks five popular films where homosexuality and horror collide.
1. ‘The Haunting’ - 1963
Based on a novel by Shirley Jackson, this classic 1963 British film follows a team of investigators as they spend the night in a haunted house. Theodora, a fashionable clairvoyant, is an explicitly (and refreshingly) feminine lesbian character, played by Claire Bloom.
2. ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ - 1968
Mr James, the author of this much-loved ghost story was himself homosexual. And the clues are in the story, which has been adapted for film and television. ‘I expect a friend of mine soon, by the way – a gentleman from Cambridge – to come for a night or two,’ our protagonist remarks. ‘That will be all right, I suppose, won’t it?’
3. ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 2’ - 1985
The repressed bisexuality of the male lead character, Jesse, is the driving theme of the second film in the franchise, which also features a gay leather bar and naked male showering scenes. According to Krueger actor Robert Englund, the film is symbolic of Aids paranoia, with the lead character’s sexual desires and internal struggle manifested in the danger posed by Freddy.
4. ‘The Lost Boys’ - 1987
The modern vampires of ‘True Blood’ and ‘Twilight’ have built a solid gay fan base with their buff bodies and frequent gay references. But nowhere is the homoerotic threat of vampire sexuality more evident than in the ’80s classic, ‘The Lost Boys’. Directed by Joel Schumacher, (the man who gave Batman nipples and a codpiece), the film features Corey Haim wearing a ‘Born to Shop’ T-shirt and singing falsetto in the bath, ‘Ain’t got a man!’.
5. ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ - 1991
The serial killer Buffalo Bill caused outrage in the gay community in 1991, with many criticising the character as negative and homophobic. Not only does the film give us a ‘monster queer’ character, but like Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ and Brian De Palma’s ‘Dressed to Kill’, it treads the well-worn path of using transgender people to terrify audiences.
Enter the Halloween giveway to win a copy here: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
The Ghost Hunters is published by Quercus available now: Order your copy here: http://amzn.to/14kcK3e
