Yes, as the title suggests I found this mythical beast, admittedly entirely by accident. Some sleuthing after another YA fantasy author's agent (Kate O'Hearn) accidentally led me to Roald Dahl's agent...David Higham Associates. A coincidence you won't hear me complaining about. Added to Agent Book; I'm repressing the manic urge to contact them next (Roald Dahl's agent! OMG!!), but I found all those other agents first, so it wouldn't be fair. (I'm very British about my policies on queue jumping, dontcha know.)
The H3 (that sounds curiously scientific o__O) editing is going smoothly; up to chapter 20 now. With any luck it might be done by christmas! Good, because new projects keep poking at my subconscious and asking when they'll get their turn.
In other news! The reading of Twilight, done solely for the academic purpose (even I'm not that much of a masochist to read it for the lulz) of a feminist critique is also going well. I've read up to halfway through New Moon and have been merrily sticking post-its in whenever I spot something disgustingly misogynistic (in other words, every other paragraph ). The colour code is pink for 'Bella is a bland, whiny idiot singlehandedly setting feminism back 100 years', and blue for 'Edward is a patronising dick'. Yes, as you may have guessed, I'm on team Twilight is shit.
On the other hand, it has made me feel better about my own female characters and story lines (I think Meyer has that effect on every budding writer...it's called the 'if this crap can become a bestseller, my crap can too' mentality). When I originally posted some of the first draft of Hades on a fanfiction site, half of the readers hailed from the HP camp (fine, brilliant, what more could I ask for than the attention of fellow Rowling lovers?) but half of the readers were from the Twilight camp. And after I found out what Twilight was, that worried me. That worried me greatly. I should be grateful for any readers, and I am, but a hideous part of me was just wailing 'does this mean I'm as bad as Meyer??!!' Fair enough, there are similarities between Hades and Twilight that will inevitably attract similar readers. They are both dark supernatural romances involving a 17 year old human girl and an immortal guy, and all the trials and troubles that ensue when they fall in love...but I like to think that's where the similarities end. If my protagonist was as vacuous and irritating as the perfeckt, speshul Twilight heroine, I'd have killed her off in the first book. Quickly. In a magnificently violent way. And if Hades had even remotely resembled Sparkles the 100Year Old Virgin...dear gods, I'd have left him to rot in the chasms of my imagination, never to see the light. I like to think that my women are strong and smart and butt-kicking; not all Buffys (no-one I create will ever be THAT awesome), but certainly no Bellas among them.
And those Harry Potter fans who found something to like about my book...they give me hope, because they clearly have great taste in literature. It's for them that I keep at it, and hopefully I will steadily get better and won't let them down.
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