The Axe and the Scalpel

From the Graft of Editing to the Dream of Publication

Against the backdrop of snot and coughing, as Covid rears its ugly head once more in my life, I try and hold the golden thread back to my work. Last weekend, I was part of the Hastings Book Fair, selling books and in conversation with many friendly individuals keen to hear about my work. This is my happy place, though I am experiencing devastation that the virus has ruined the rest of my week, which should have included Hastings Book Festival networking and a live appearance at part of the complimentary Hastings (Lit) Fringe, where I would have spoken on my career as a published, agented writer.

But even so, I’m still dreaming in lines and words, places and dramas, structures and forms, off-centre realities, as I work on the third draft of my current novel.

I have an axe, and it’s quite heavy to wield. Often this is because I’m too frightened. When the chop is made, isn’t it too final? Sometimes I resort to a lighter approach, though at this point in proceedings, it is not time for the lightest scalpel.

If I say I’m chopping out pages, deleting characters, annihilating chapters, you will know I am talking about the hardest, deepest graft for a writer – the edit. And when you’ve written a novel that in this case, came in initially at over 90,000 words, I know you will understand.

As I recently celebrated my 64th birthday (yes, WTF?), I can truly say I’ve done this for most of my life. Even if I know that I’m a little born before my time – stubbornly writing the disability narrative since my mid-teens, and repeatedly finding myself up against resistance to present stories about the full-bodied disability experience within the context, the transformative power, of fiction.

This has meant that, while I love to celebrate my achievements, and even with a supportive agent, I’ve still to publish a novel – despite having written several. 

The first two were classic juvenilia. The first that I can call a novel, The Isis Promise, reflected an obsession that has been lifelong. These days it would probably come under the genre folk horror, and perhaps speculative. Such novels were written against a backdrop of seclusion and difficult family life. Before the internet, when communication was handwritten and posted, and the telephone – the landline – was an alluring yet treacherous money-gobbling monster.

Like many young disabled women of my generation and my class, my mother was my carer. There was no support for her role, and no access to leave my home. Reading – and the need to write that seemed wired into my DNA – offered me the only consolation in a somewhat culturally desolate life. Thank goodness we still had libraries, and as soon as I was put on an ‘invalidity’ allowance (yes, it really was called that!), I signed up to postal book clubs. This meant I quickly became reasonably well-read, but lacked any lived experience. The Isis Promise is a mishmash reflecting a passing obsession with ancient Egypt and a somewhat bizarre love triangle, with an ancient curse thrown in for good measure. Yes, I was a nerdy girl, lots of horror and SF anthologies regularly devoured alongside feminist classics, such as Anaïs Nin’s diaries and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room.

Alas, concerning The Isis Promise, I only have notes of this tome, and believe I threw the novel away when I sunk into a pit of darkest depression – a troublesome companion for all my life. 

I partnered in deep friendship and passion for writing with my friend K (much more about her in my memoir First In the World Somewhere), at around the age of 20, which led to us co-writing a novel called The Parallel Trap. Our friendship, beginning on a hospital ward, was the making of me, and also took me to another level as a writer. Not to mention the slightly late explosion of teenage hormones set free by meeting such a comrade in the fight for equality and, quite frankly, for lots of sex.

The next novel, partly an effort to write a ‘60s memoir-ish piece, was called The Twisted Rainbow. I was by then the classical bedroom punk, seeking out black clothes via my long-suffering mother and her trips to charity shops. The tugs of activism were pulling me in hopeful new directions, and I already burned with the desire to tell stories – real stories – featuring the disability experience.

Feverishly reading every classic of that era, from Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying to Anaïs Nin’s female-centred erotica collection Delta of Venus, plus every vibrant feminist publication we could get our hands on, it resulted in an exuberant and messy novel where we created characters of pure fantasy. Absorbing what we saw on TV, our favourite films, our favourite types, both men and women, and set fire to them on the page in a conflagration of explicit yet virginal imagination spuming around the central characters – Charlotte Tigre Dubois, and Lydia Murielle Oliver.

None of this novel survives, only a few rejection letters referring to it – one saying that if there was less purple prose and less disability, it may have merit as a Mills & Boon! This was within the early-‘80s and that particular imprint was an anathema to our punk sensibilities, as was the notion of cutting out disability.

There is one chapter from The Twisted Rainbow still in existence, and which actually made it into print in a collection called Mustn’t Grumble, published by The Women’s Press in 1994. The title of my piece, ‘Prue Shows Her Knickers’, could be said to represent the path that lay ahead, but perhaps that should come in another Substack (as could the fact that I used the pen name Emily Oxford, a family name).

But the publication of this piece in the anthology was a breakthrough. It was the real deal, and while the payment was negligible it was a significant moment. And I still have the cheque in my personal archives, to the princely sum of £5!

As progress with my writing moved at glacial speed, I found myself occupied within the burgeoning disability arts movement and also the earlier times of nothing about us without us, which meant that terms like ‘user-led, user-controlled’ began to be recognised. This was the era when I wrote a booklet via a campaign organisation for younger people with my impairment: Our Relationships, Our Bodies. This was a sex and relationship guide by and for disabled people – I’m proud to say it was one of the first with this approach. It was through this that I ended up writing in more anthologies and being commissioned by others.

In parallel, short fiction came from me in a flood, only staunched by poor health and tedious hospital visits – not that much was successful in terms of publication. I tried to be sneaky, using devices to present disability within a speculative framework in order to challenge clichés. It very rarely worked, and I was often asked if I would write something with disability completely expunged – something I could not do.

This brings me onto Strangeness and Charm, a soft science-fiction novel where the central character, KC Speares, is a cultural ambassador on a doomed mission with a very motley crew supposedly taking her to a newly-discovered nonhuman species on a beautiful planet ruled by sea creatures. KC is naturally a disabled protagonist, and I will say I did quite well in this ‘90s novel predicting the future. KC has something akin to an automated exoskeleton that in fact gives her more strength and manoeuvrability than any of her crew. But more importantly, she understands what it is the othered; to be alienated amongst those supposedly your own kin. 

I received decent feedback on this novel from other writers I had befriended who felt that it had promise. It baffled most UK publishers, but almost made it with famous SF publisher DAW in the US. It wasn’t picked up, but for once its refusal wasn’t due to the disability trope. It was because it was too British! I still have that rejection letter in my personal archives, too. I don’t know if I still have a copy of the novel, though I believe one of my very bestie friends since the ‘80s might have one hidden away. With some reflection, I realise that it’s likely I have a copy on some dusty floppy disc.

I had planned a series of three novels featuring KC Speares, but the heavy rejection naturally stopped me, and other opportunities drew me in new directions. I learned a good trade as a jobbing commentator journalist, and did a two-year stint as a paid publications officer at a campaigning charity. I learned how to collaborate with others in a team, how to edit myself and other writers, and also upped my game by the hard graft of learning a house style. These skills are important, with or without tech backup. I was also encouraged to enter an Arts Council programme called Innovate, which is how I came to publish my own collected disability erotica, Desires, in 2003 – the revised anniversary edition, Desires Reborn, published March 2024.

Then my joy, my delight, my torment and even now my hope – the novel once known as Fancy Nancy, now Nancy Jones and the Show of Wonders. It has travelled a journey as complicated as it was slow. The first draft was completed by the early-2000s, it is a long, picaresque time-travelling, genre-hopping feast of freakshows and contemporary disability activism, explicit sex and folklore, a journey along the ancient ridgeway of southern England with a climax at the Avebury stone circle, dark melodramatic villains and heroes in different time-lines. What’s not to love?

Not much, it seems, apart from, of course, my stalwart friends, and occasional tiny encouragements from agents who were intrigued by its subject matter.

Nancy was thrown away. 

Re-written. Discarded. Resurrected. 

By the fourth draft, I decided to keep her, even if she lived on only via computers, on CDRs and even as a home-printed MS. She was a force I could not ignore, a character I could never forsake. Even if a few years might pass when I could not stand the bland rejections, the insulting rebukes. 

Still, I came back to her.

As is often the case, and after many years of effort, running in tandem with my refusal to lessen my integrity as a writer of the untold stories of the disability experience, glimpses of light showed a way forward. I won the odd competition with short fiction, and linked up with individuals who had some agency to open doors. Outside of discrimination, and the challenges of chronic illness, I took every opportunity I could. 

Alongside my burgeoning career as a spoken word poet, I applied for every mentoring scheme that would fit me, and after meeting an agent through a friend who worked in publishing, I decided it was time to look into doing a memoir based around my years arriving in London – how I got there, and what I did as a young punky woman in a wheelchair – who fell in love and lust, who drank too much, who made a vinyl LP that now sells on Discogs for lots of money (that I don’t get!).

This was how First in the World Somewhere came into being – with substantial support from beautiful human being, the late Becky Swift of The Literary Consultancy, who introduced me to Unbound. That journey, as they say, is history, though as an addition, I can reveal that, in recent years, the book was optioned for a TV series. A lot of hard work achieved, yet, as is the way of things in this crazy business, still no outcome.

First in the World Somewhere (2017) did set off events that led to me finding an agent – again, through that strange networking process that often goes on in this world, and something that you can never plan, or expect. Someone picked up on my anger, via social media posts, that my work was often rejected on the basis that apparently readers would not be interested in reading about disabled people. This person ran an agency, and through connections within connections, I finally signed to be looked after by my current agent, Abi Fellows, now of DHH.

It is through Abi that, firstly, Nancy went through a vigorous editorial process, and was reborn under the new title to fly out into the world. I often joke with Abi that she is my warrior woman, agent-style, as we have fought through so much over the past few years, through hard slog and disappointment to awaken the publishing industry to my disability narrative, facing rejection after rejection. I know that Nancy has been considered too cross-genre, with suggestions made at opposing extremes: cut out the Victorian storyline. Cut out the contemporary storyline. Make it YA. Lessen disability.

So it goes.

Concurrently, my debut poetry collection, Come Home Alive came out in 2019 and I won a Hemingway Shorts Anthology place in 2021. News magazine Byline Times took me on as a monthly columnist. All these things have been exciting and satisfying, and I have much appreciation for those who helped me get there.

But, of course, my passion is fiction, and there is another novel, now on its third draft, as I wield that axe and scalpel. Soon, Abi will take this to the world, and like most writers, I’ll be holding my breath. But also, like most writers, I cannot give up, and each year sees a tiny chip in that discrimination that blocks our stories.

Besides, I’ve already planned out the basis for the next novel, because, in the end, that’s all I can do.