Being on Submission is a Funny Old Thing

It really is, you know. Being on submission is a funny mix of patiently waiting and endlessly hoping. An intrepid author can easily drive themselves mad given a spare five minutes on the Internet, some searching around, and enough will power. There are articles about a million pound advance for a celebrity nobody turned children's author. Articles about the award winning book that took years to be discovered. Articles about the death of publishing, and the rebirth of publishing, and the fact publishing never changed, or that is has to or it will die.

Poor publishing. No one will leave it alone.

And as for the writer - there's stalking to be done. Editors, newly signed authors, new agents on the block, established authors ... Twitter and blog interviews and company websites give so many morsels of information. Enough to drive a writer mad - and they don't tend to be the sanest bunch to begin with.

What's to be done when your book is out and you have to behave?

The obvious answer is write. But who wants to be obvious? We're the dreamers of dreams, aren't we? And books can do so many things beside drive you mad.

Take book sculptures, for instance. Stunning, intricate, and if you live in Scotland, also kind of secretive. Some book are for reading. Some are for so much more. Those hours of waiting for your answer have gotta be used for something, right?

You could start planning for the future - a future when your books are multitude and require quite a lot of awesome shelf space. Stacks and piles? Sure. But why not seesaws, swings, or even this rather fetching walk in shelf. Heh. Geddit? Walk in! Because he's ... he's ... oh, never mind. Just look at the pretty thing:

What else can you do in the lonely waiting times? Eat, of course. Eat while you can still afford food. Want to be literary? Fine. How about some of these pretty awesome book cakes (bookakes? No.) Make cakes of your favourite books and eat them up. Make cakes of your most hated books and slice them up. The key word here - as with so many other times, friends - is cake.

Yes, book are versatile things, whether you're reading, writing, eating, storing or artifying them. 

Being on submission's a great rite of passage for professional writers - so have some fun while you can, eh?