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It all began with the title. Nine-Thirty Thursday was originally the title of a song I wrote as an aspiring musician more years ago than I care to remember. It was inspired by a rather traumatic episode in my life where for the first time ever I suddenly found myself unemployed, and not of my own volition!
I won't go into this in any great depth, let it suffice to say that it was an appalling example of 1980s decade-of-greed mismanagement. Just about everybody I worked with were fired, at the same time on the same day: 9:30 AM Thursday March 3 1988. Our jobs were immediately re-filled by a pack of incompetent fools that somebody had had waiting in the wings, and the company soon went under in a most spectacular fashion!
Later the following year, after many personal upheavals I bought my first PC, a mighty XT clone with a 12MHz clock speed, 640K RAM, 20M Hard Drive and twin 360K Floppy Drives!
It may sound laughable now, but at the time it made what I'd been using up till then seem even more laughable!
And it still did the job. Well most of it. The novel went through several re-writes and some severe pruning crossing various DOS and Windows platforms as it did so. Eventually, some years back, I pronounced it FINISHED! It was a 1 megabyte MS Word 6 file, so it fiited easily on a single floppy.
Then it was submission time. Oh dear. If only I'd had some idea of what I was in for! I had this clever notion of using Word to turn my manuscript file into an actual prototype A5-sized novel, since that would save an enormous amount in postage, and hopefully expedite my chances of getting someone to actually look at it, since it would read and handle like a real novel.
I checked with the few publishers I could locate that still accept unsolicited manuscripts, whether this was acceptable, and they all seemed to think it was a fine idea.
So, (following one publisher's instructions) I packed up my novel/manuscript, a covering letter, a synopsis, a postcard for verifying receipt and a self addressed envelope for any rejection slip, international reply coupons for the postage and instructions to dispose of the book rather than sending it back to me if it wasn't accepted, and packed it all off to a certain well-known SF publisher.
And the last I saw of it! Neither of the self-addressed items came back, and they ignored several e-mails and a couple of letters.
Exactly the same thing happened with two other publishers, and somebody else who claimed to have SF publishing contacts in the US.
I can't believe my novel is that bad that they couldn't even be bothered officially rejecting it! Later somebody told me that whoever handles the incoming mail probably thought that they were self-published books that I was trying to sell to the publisher. I did go to some trouble to indicate that they were simply manuscripts, but possibly not enough!
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