Saltburn - A Publishing Journey

Saltburn.

 

I started Saltburn here on ABCTales in the first week of 2020. In February 2025 it’s going to be published. This is the story.

 

I’m usually terrible at remembering dates. But in 2019 I was writing Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel, also posting it here, and I remember I wanted to finish it so it’d be done in time for me to post my Christmas story, MovieLand, in time for Christmas. Why it mattered? Who knows, except I’m always setting myself targets, not success targets, but just ‘doing stuff’ targets. I’m happier at the end of the day if I can list what I’ve done.

 

I didn’t think Flamingo Hotel would be published. I wrote about that here but it was and went on to be something of a success selling out 3 or 4 print runs. Better than that it got the best reviews I’ve ever had. People saw the sadness in it.

 

I was planning to take a break after Flamingo Hotel but around that time I read Camilla Grudova’s The Doll’s Alphabet. It’s a weird collection of short stories, focusing on losers, the detritus of modern life. It struck a chord. I thought, I could do something like that.

 

And I started Saltburn.

 

I had no plan. I wrote one story and then another. Until there were six in total. Well almost six. I didn’t finish the last one until years later.

 

I can’t talk about the creative process. Except to say the stories become what they are about in the rewriting. I’ve rewritten them again and again in the intervening years, often leaving them for months, a year at a time.

 

I still never expected them to be published. My next book was going to be Kuper’s Tube. With Bearded Badger who had done Flamingo Hotel. But then Paul, the Bearded Badger himself, took the decision to put his publishing journey on a hiatus. It’s a brutal economic climate for publishing. It is. But we’d had a blast with Flamingo Hotel. I felt like a success after giving up for 10 years.

 

I put out a Tweet about Flamingo being out of print, Kuper’s not appearing and I got an amazing response. One writer sent my book to his agent. A couple of other writers recommended me to a publisher and I had 3 or 4 publishers contact me directly. What did I have? Anything to send them?

 

One thing I did have was Saltburn. Which I’d been working on off and on over the years. So I sent that off.

 

And then nothing. Publishing is 90% waiting. I’m good at that. I don’t feel I deserve to be published. I hate myself. Can I say that here? I’m not looking for anyone to say the opposite. So I don’t mind the waiting. The rejection. It’s affirming.

 

But then months later, January 2024, one of the publishers who had reached out contacted me. It was Will Dady, from Renard Press. He was setting up a new imprint Haywood Books.

 

 

 

Did I want to be one of the launch titles? Haywood was for books that slipped through the cracks of traditional publishing. It would comprise of traditionally published books, like mine, but also offered hybrid services.

 

Reader, I said yes.

 

And here we are. I’ve spent this Summer editing Saltburn. They’ve become something different to what they originally were. They are six queer love stories. They are happy. Each and every one made me cry. Can I say that? The stories have become what they wanted to be.

 

 

This is the blurb:

 

May the residents of the real Saltburn-by-the-Sea and neighbouring towns forgive my mermaids, my nuclear power stations, my foetus museums and so on and so on. They were written with love.

 

Welcome to Saltburn, an extraordinary town on the English coast with sweeping poverty and nuclear fallout, where young lovers, radioactive and lusty, fall in love, and sea creatures work at the local penny arcade. 

 

In a series of interconnected short stories a young orphan is taken in by an alchemist, and falls in love with a mermaid. The son of a glove manufacturer is sent to Paris on business, where he falls for a deep-sea diver. One schoolboy bites another, gains psychic abilities and realises they will one day be in love. A rock salesman exposes a cover-up by big business and frees kidnapped women.

 

In startling prose that could have been concocted by a hallucinating Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski, Saltburn is a town – and a book – like no other.

 

 

If you want you can preorder a copy here.

 

 

 

 

Preorders are important. They help these small publishers survive. And they help me. If this book does ok hopefully I’ll be able to do another. Actually it’s already written just waiting to be edited. That Cruise Book. Twenty stories based on Tom Cruise films. All featuring the love story of P and K, P and K being variously gay, straight, lesbian, bi, alien, android.

 

Watch this space.

 

 

Thanks for reading.  

 

Drew.