Changing agents

On Monday I took the tube to St Pancras - wonderful, clean, spacious, great coffee and highly expensive boutiquey shops - and the train up to Leicester, a brilliant journey which took just an hour and five minutes. The purpose was to meet up with my old literary agent. I left her because she only handled children's books and I had loads of ideas for books for adults.

Unfortunately, the new agent I went with wasn't hands-on. I'm the sort who needs feedback and encouragement. If I send up some ideas, I want to be told which has the best potential for commercial success, not a vague 'write whichever you like', which is what I got. I also got soundly flayed for having a 'commercial approach to writing' - which, I was told, meant I wasn't a proper writer, only a hack journalist. Proper writers, according to agent no. 2, wrote the literary words that they felt impelled to write, regardless of whether there was a market for them. This was 'real writing', as opposed to my desire not to start until I knew if I was writing the right kind of thing or not. What he didn't seem to take on board was that, with my arthritic hands, a couple of hundred thousand wasted words would bring me even closer to claw-hand crippledom.

So now I am back with agent no. 1 and will hopefully be able to sell some children's books again. Pity my head is still full of ideas for grown-ups. I suppose I will just have to write them and try and sell them myself. Though I am under strict instructions to use a different name so that kiddiwinks won't pull a book full of steamy rumpy-pumpy off the library shelf in mistake for Cows Say Moo!