Alice in Wonderland and the Vomitous Blanket

Safe in the knowledge that I won’t get a reply for at least three months, I nonetheless rush to polish my manuscript and bolt to the Post Office just before closing so I can send the latest version of my children’s story to a potential publisher in the UK. A slimmer, easier to read version of the story has already been rejected by Penguin but with sufficient praise to inspire me to rework it and try elsewhere.

I had a day of excitement when an agency in New York replied to me after an impulsive late night email about my story. There was something so 'Sex and the City' about it all. It sounds so much more exciting if your stories are going to an agent in New York rather than Crows Nest or Artarmon. They actually wanted to read the entire manuscript. They wanted a bio about me and was I available for book signings and promotional work? I thought I might fit it into my schedule.

I told all my friends and, like Hyacinth Bucket in ‘Keeping Up Appearances’, I didn’t stint on the references to a ‘New York Literary Agent’. I have learned the hard way that it’s best to check up on the agent before you tell your mates. Disbelief was quickly succeeded by dismay as I read the comments on my New York agent online. If the postings were true, the agents were little short of crooks, inviting writers to submit their work so they could suck them in to spending money on editing with almost no hope of ever seeing their work published. Humiliation that they had so deftly stroked the writer’s ego, my ego, was followed by a determination to find a publisher for my book without an agent at all.

I spent a day researching potential publishers and combing book lists to find comparable stories to mine. Once I had targeted a publisher, I spent the weekend re-writing my book to conform to a new set of Writers’ Guidelines. Today was the day I planned to do my final edit, polish my letter and hone my synopsis. Fortified with a few skinny lattes with my girlfriends, I came home and pulled out my laptop only to feel a faint buzzing in my chest. It wasn't from the caffeine, it was my phone vibrating in my pocket.

Now wasn’t the time for taking calls, but I answered anyway because my daughter had discovered a tick in her scalp this morning and hadn’t been feeling the best when I dropped her at school. Having determined that today was The Day I was posting my manuscript, I gave her Panadol and sent her despite my misgivings and I was about to pay the maternal price. The faintly judgmental tone in the secretary’s voice when she told me that Grace was sick, ‘and says she felt sick this morning before school’, (I already knew that, I was there wasn’t I?) was enough to project me from my office and into my car in an instant.

So while I fervently prayed to the God of being Sick in Cars for protection from vomit on the short drive home, my daughter shivered and swallowed ominously. Once home, she curled up on the lounge and watched ‘Alice in Wonderland’, for the eleventy-hundredth time, dozing occasionally. It was perhaps fitting that I typed my synopsis of the children’s book to the sounds of Alice defeating the ‘Bloody Big Head’, Red Queen. Perhaps the final version had a few more puns and a little more word play because of the literary story playing in the background.  

Grace saved her vomit for the five minutes flat it took me to fly to the shops and post off my manuscript. Dad got to deal with the sick coated blanket and spattered bowl while I sent my little piggy (Bridget the Piglet) off to market. Now I just have to wait until next year before I begin my paranoid checking of the letterbox for the ominously familiar envelope that signals the return of my manuscript. Meanwhile, like the Red Queen, I will keep a closer eye on the size of my head.