“It is, in some ways, a horrible moment. A writer’s manuscript is a totemic object. Wafting from those few hundred pages, or from that digital file, is the heady aroma of dreams and hope and ambition – and sheer hour-upon-hour and month-upon-month of lonely graft.
And then to be standing on the brink: to be about to drop it into the postbox, or press send on the email, and transmit this precious thing, this part of your imaginative and therefore best self, to an agent or publisher who will look at it gimlet-eyed and calculating in the cold light of day and professional judgment and tell you without remorse or compunction whether it is the masterpiece you secretly hope and believe it to be, or instead a lifeless thing, derivative, weak, uninteresting…”
Will le Fleming, author of Central Reservation
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