I’m thrilled to announce that my manuscript, “Los peces del Guaire” (loosely translated as “Fish food!” in English) will be published with Editions Intervalles, in 2024!
Finding a publishing house willing to work with me was a grueling, frustrating and infuriating process. I’d rather not do the exact math because it’s depressing, but all in all, I think we’re looking at 3 to 4 years after the manuscript was ready to finally find an adequate publishing house.
I must say, the Spanish-speaking publishing landscape is in shambles. A shell of what it used to be, I was very disappointed with the answers I got in Spain, Mexico and even Argentina (no idea why I tried there). You’ve probably guessed by now that “Los peces del Guaire” was not written in French. So how did we get here?
The manuscript itself was hard enough to get done. I wrote a thing, then another thing, then I read a thing and decided to re-write the first two things… You know how that goes. After nerve-wracking 6am writing sessions (to avoid distraction from my kids, etc), I finished the darn thing and was pretty happy. It worked. It clicked. It had a certain je ne sais quoi. Nobody around me was writing like this, so at a bare minimum, “Los peces del Guaire” was radically original and innovative. Or so I thought…
I must have sent it to at least 150 publishing houses, mostly in Spain but also in Mexico and a couple in Buenos Aires when I had run out of options. The process was simple: create an Excel file, find a list of publishing houses and send them a teaser with a letter, one by one.
Nobody answered. Like, literally. Some houses wrote me right back saying they didn’t have money or weren’t taking on new authors - fair enough. But you can imagine how frustrating it is when you finish something you think isn’t that bad, send it and get… Crickets. I even lost two writing contests I thought were right down my alley because they declared the prize deserted, i.e., nobody won. Now, I’m willing to concede my book might not be as good as Heart of darkness or whatnot, but are you really telling me out of the +300 manuscripts you received for your shitty literary contest with a measly 500€ in prize money, absolutely no one deserved to win? I repeat: this happened TWICE. In different contests, in different regions of Spain.
So what does a writer do when he faces rejection at this level? He drinks whiskey, obviously. So I did only that for a while.
Completely frustrated and wondering if it might just be better to dump the darn thing on the net and be done with it, I reached out to writer friends I admire, who have had relative success with publishing. They all applauded my work and encouraged me to go on; that was a great help. However, I learned most of them were on their own, having lost their publishing houses or contacts. Amazing, talented writers who have won multiple writing contests and were in the same spot as me! Pass the whiskey.
Then I came up with an idea: let me translate the manuscript into English and send it to people in the US and the UK. New plan, new title (“Fish food!”), new Excel file: with the help of a dear friend of mine in Atlanta, we contacted everyone we could find.
I didn’t get an answer for a while, but then, an agent in New York said he liked my synopsis (that’s the other thing: looking for publishers in Spain or the US is very different. I had to make a synopsis, plot line and summaries in 600 words, etc). I was happy: let’s see what happens!
COVID happened. Can you believe the agent went AWOL? Frankly, I don’t even know if he’s dead. Might as well be: it’s like he fell off the face of the earth.
Back to square one, nobody is answering, but sometimes I get a generic letter about how my work has “a lot of potential” but “unfortunately, isn’t what we’re interested in right now”. Where’s the whiskey?
A very good French friend of mine, a brilliant writer with whom I talk about Proust (I don’t know anybody else who’s read old Marcel) wanted to read the manuscript, so I thought I’d just translate it on Deepl. And that’s exactly what I did: copy - pasted the darn thing, page by page, reread it and corrected the mistakes.
I thought, well, if I’m going to send it to my friend, I might as well send it to publishing houses over here, right?
I sent it to… 6 publishing houses. Only six. A month later, I wrote a follow-up email and the director of Editions Intervalles answered, asking to meet. I was skeptical at first, especially because I’d been approached by “vanity publishing” houses that expected me to front 3K € to “help split the risk of publishing a new author”. Yeah, right. Advice to young writers: NEVER pay to publish your work. You’ve already paid: the sleepless nights and the whiskey-infused rage is more than enough.
The director was exactly whom I was looking for. We talked about my work and agreed on the angles and messages I was trying to put forward, and we have the same vision for the project. He didn’t want money - he actually offered an advance (which is standard practice, kids) and we ironed out the clauses in the contract over a couple of weeks.
So now it’s called “Les poissons de Caracas”, or “Caracas’ fishes” or something like that. If I haven’t been publishing more regularly here, it’s because I’ve been focusing any spare time on fixing the manuscript, going over it obsessively and checking every detail.
My book is a Spring / Summer novel. It’s meant to be fun and fast-paced, keeping the reader glued to the book. We’re going to work hard in 2023 to come up with the best version possible and publish in Spring 2024.
Here’s a couple of paragraphs in English, so you can get a feel of the tone. The writing was extremely therapeutic, as you can see in the second quote. As for the context: An old Venezuelan high school teacher, expert in Greek mythology, Enrique Dàvila, has become a cop working at Caracas’ C.I.C.P.C. police division, investigating murders. Since teachers in Venezuela earn one of the lowest salaries in the world, he had to quit and find another job. Now, he uses mythology to solve crimes. It’s written in the first person, from Enrique’s POV. Enjoy:
1st page :
“There’s no better place in the world to get rid of a body than the Guaire river in Venezuela. These waters, thick and dark like the petrol that feeds the country, swallow all of Caracas’ waste. It’s a foul whirlpool stretching from East to West, rumbling under our highway. Its stench is unbearable; it’s slopes, unwalkable.
Here, men disappear forever. They’re wiped off the map when submerged in this Caribbean Styx. But Venezuela isn’t Greece. We don’t have a Charon sailing this stinking maelstrom in exchange for a handful of coins. We’re not that lucky. We have no myths, heroic deeds or stories of redemption. People are murdered, their remains are dumped here and, after a couple of weeks, the missing person case is filed. We stop looking for them and go on to the next murder.
This is what pisses me off with these goddam amateurs: they make me waste my time. They must have been lazy street thugs incapable of getting the job done properly, I thought, when I saw the torso floating amidst the excrement and waste. It ain’t rocket science: you have to dismember the body to make it sink. The whole thing demands a little bit of precision and discipline, but it’s not complicated. Mafias specializing in murder have a fool-proof system: You have to remove the entrails. This is the most important detail. It’s the gas lodged inside the intestines that make the body float. A small incision on the side, and you can remove the guts and belly. If you throw these away separately, the fish will gobble them up. Then, the bones, muscles and skin remaining will sink to the bottom of the Guaire, never to be seen again.
I thought about all of this as the special team of the crime police, C.I.C.P.C., dragged the body to the shore. The reeking sewer stink still managed to attack my nose, even though we were parked above the river, on Avenue Río de Janeiro. Uncomfortable, I coughed. Miguel turned towards me with a cheeky grin painted all over his face.
-What’s up, Ricky. Let us know if you’re gonna puke, pussy.
Miguel’s face was only half lit, since many of the lightbulbs on the highway had been stolen. We’d been partners for five years, so we liked to poke fun at each other, like most of the C.I.C.P.C. detectives. We’d just seen too many people get killed. Some of them we’d killed ourselves; this added to the camaraderie. Caracas was a city that bathed in the blood of its inhabitants”.
(…)
“Caracas was corroding my insides. I could feel all the city’s evil gathering under my feet, luring me towards it, trying to swallow me like quicksand. In this country, we’re born from petrol, and we die as such. We bury our dead thinking they’ll rest in peace, but the truth is nobody here, dead or alive, has a moment of peace. We should liquefy the bodies, melt their entrails and bones, and mix it all into the heavy crude we export every day. Shake all the citizens until the pennies have fallen from their pockets, squeeze them until we’ve extracted every last cent. Reduce them to a dry, empty carcass. Maybe that was the plan at the morgue: leave the bodies out to rot until the muscles slide off the bones and dissolve into the earth, going back to the depths where the Devil gave birth to this accursed country called Venezuela”.
The good news is: you have about a year to polish up on your French to be able to read the rest of it! Trust me, it’s fire…
guaire, gaire, gayre, guayre. (Voz prehispánica). m. Entre los aborígenes canarios: Noble, y especialmente el consejero del guanarteme. V. guayresa.
Espero la novela en castellano también