Now I'm accountable

Well, one of the reasons I set up this podcast, Voice Notes To The World, is to share work in progress when it doesn’t feel ready enough, doesn’t feel finished.

Recently I recorded an episode about sending an edited rewrite of a magazine article to The Guardian, who are kindly planning to run a piece about my breakdown book at the beginning of January.

So that’s one part of the package. Another part, that I’ve allowed to stand still for a long time – treading water is basically what I was doing all summer – is the book itself, A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown.

Partly, I had cash flow problems in the summer. I didn’t want to order lots of expensive hardbacks and then have all the hoo-ha of telling people they were available, and going on about it, and talking about my breakdown, in order to shift a few more copies of the hardback. Even though I have been astonished by how relatively successful that seems to have been.

Hello, by the way. This is John-Paul Flintoff, and this is my informal podcast, Voice Notes To The World, in which I do this kind of thing: talking out loud, often about my work in progress.

So we’re coming to the end of October, and in November I’m running a month-long course for people who want to publish a short book in a month. That’s partly based on a course I’ve done before, and which I did myself in March, when I put together A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown.

So it’s in my mind a lot right now. There’s the book. I’ve written an article for The Guardian about it. I’ve agreed to deliver a talk at a major global organisation, which is also, rather wonderfully, buying a special edition of the book, which I’ll have to get printed just for them. Which is great. I’m very happy.

What I have not done anything about is getting the book out to big commercial trade publishers, even though I said I was going to.

One of the people who encouraged me strongly to do that is Jo, who originally got me in to talk at a law firm when I was still pretty vulnerable, using the pictures that are in the book.

She got me in to do that talk and it was a big success. That was in 2018 or 2019, I don’t know. And then those pictures and that talk more or less turned into the book.

Then I wrote this article for The Guardian, and it’s going to be published in January. So I’m feeling a salutary ticking clock, making me want to get on with things.

So I’ve put together an outline for my agent, suggesting ways to go ahead. Obviously he’s got lots of ideas – he’s the agent – but I thought it would help if I brainstormed in advance and gave him ideas for what might happen to the book, where it might go, what to say about it, in order to find a publisher.

And I wanted to take a tiny risk, that someone might hear this podcast, and hold myself accountable in a semi-public way.

So I’ve got the submission thingy ready to send to Jaime. And now that I’ve recorded this, I’ll send it by cunning technology to have the sound levels corrected, and upload it to my website, so it goes out as a podcast episode.

Yes, I’ll do that, because now I’m accountable.

Thank you for listening, and holding me accountable.

If you want to read a transcript of this recording, you can find it on my website, with links to other episodes. And by the time I’ve posted the transcript, it will probably have links in the text, so you can jump around to related topics on my website.

Thanks for listening. Until next time, bye.