Your hedgehog has got his spiny little bottom into gear again, I'm glad to say. In between finishing one load of Open University marking, and starting another (soon), he's picked up on the creative writing again.
Once again, the crime novel Destroying Angel is being sent off to an agent, in the hope that they'll like it. The variation in agent requirements is both astonishing and strange. Some will be happy with a chapter or two and a short letter, whereas others demand chapters, a synopsis, a covering letter and an author cv. If I were an established author already I could see the point of the cv, but why my other job is important to them is a puzzle.
My own suspicion is that it's simply a way of filtering down the applications to a manageable quantitity: if they can't be bothered to send all of this in, then we we'll just read the work of the ones who can. Who knows---if agents feel really swamped, we'll have to compose an intoductory symphony for novels, and send in a video clip of us juggling lighted chainsaws.
The good news is that novel 2 (provisionally The Killer Section) is now getting off the ground and is getting written. Plots, subplots and characters are even now brewing and bubbling in the hedgehog's little cauldron of a brain. Cave lector!
