Ribblehead and a Retreat

I thought it was about time I posted something here, especially as this weekend marks a minor landmark. I guessed it had been a month since the last. It turns out it's almost two! How did that happen?

This is the Ribblehead Viaduct, taken on the way back from a week long
writing retreat I've just with done with E and six other very talented writers, in Garsdale, here, hosted by the wonderful Hamish and Rebecca. The idea is that you have nothing else to think about other than the project you've come to work on. The food was totally fabulous and mostly vegan. The company at mealtimes was fabulously stimulating. It's amazing how much food you need when you're working your brain hard! The format worked very well for me, the day divided into highly focussed two hour sessions with breaks for coffee, lunch and afternoon tea in between the amazing breakfasts and dinners. 

Now having a complete first draft, my objective was to create my query letter, my pitch for the novel, to be sent in the first instance to agents. I'd tried this before without getting anywhere. This retreat was the perfect environment, helping me to concentrate on something I've struggled with for a long time. I now have the basis for an answer when someone asks me what my novel is about!

Even the weather was perfect - in that it rained pretty much non-stop for the whole time we were there, mostly with strong winds too. As I kept saying, the universe is telling us to crack on and not get distracted by the beautiful countryside!

I'm going to post my pitch here, to see how it lands with you guys. Any feedback would be very welcome. Sorry to be so absent. I will return when things calm down.

...

The Strange Talent of Madeleine Mallarkey is a high-concept and intricately-plotted work of contemporary literary fiction.

Madeleine Mallarkey is a self-possessed young woman from the north-west coast of Ireland. After escaping her native Donegal at the age of seventeen, she’s spent the last six years leading a peripatetic existence as a digital nomad, her only baggage a tragic past, an unconventional morality, and an unshakeable sense of destiny in knowing exactly when she’s going to die. She’s absolutely certain of this date and time, down to the very minute. It’s a matter of her own personal, highly idiosyncratic faith.

Culminating in a couple of unfortunate incidents just before she flees—the first involving an elderly priest and then a local young lout who meets a grisly end on the spike of a railing—Maddy is provided with the final irrefutable proof of her long-held suspicion that she can discover when other people are going to die too. Through the act of kissing. This is Maddy’s strange talent and the novel’s central conceit.

Set during the course of a single week between Donegal and Yorkshire, Maddy is the antagonist in the stories of the novel’s five male protagonists, each of whom is at a different stage of life. Two were involved in relationships with Maddy during her last few years in Ireland. The other three form new, quite different relationships with her as the narrative unfolds. Both directly and indirectly, she introduces layer upon layer of jeopardy as each of her new acquaintances are challenged by her unorthodoxy. The stakes are raised further when she kisses one of them, Ryan, and discovers that he has only a few days left to live. Conspiring to set all five on a path to meet just before Ryan’s number is up, can anything be done to prevent his destiny colliding with his fate?

Maddy suggests that when we fall in love with someone, what’s really happening is that we fall in love with how they make us feel. We fall in love with the person we become in their presence. She claims that an understanding of that changes everything. For each of the five men, in different ways, it does.

In summary, the novel is a quirky meditation on the themes of love, sex, art, faith and the nature of our reality, by turn both poignant and darkly comic. At this point in the pitch it would be normal practice to narrow down the genre and point out similar kinds of novels. Not being able to do so is probably to commit the same cardinal sin as those idiots who go on Dragon’s Den without knowing their financial numbers. My best shot is to describe it as John Irving’s A Prayer For Owen Meany meets David Szalay’s All That Man Is. It’s in the genre of genre-busting.