“If my life was a fish,” I used to think, “I’d throw it back.” Note the used to. Note, also, that this used to doesn’t refer to some romantic bygone era, but in fact the dog-end of last week. I’ve less than two weeks left here and last week I was panicking. I’m going back to London homeless, penniless, wifeless, jobless, unfit, addicted to alcohol and cigarettes, and sometimes over-reliant on prescription tranquilisers. Troubling stuff, it would seem.
But that was last week. This week things are different. “If my life was a fish”, I think this week, “I’d take it out for dinner, show it a good time, then try and have sex with it in a park on the way home.” Because although I might be penniless, jobless, homeless and so on, I’m not gutless. And I’m not spineless. I’ve got a spine and I’ve got guts. A better writer than I wrote: “The worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing’s worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.” And Pitching the World at one point did look as if it could fuck up my whole life. Arguably it nearly did (see above paragraph. In fact, see practically any paragraph of the last fourteen months).
Yet it hasn’t. Over the last few days my whole opinion of Pitching the World has changed. If Pitching the World was a fish, I’d skip dinner and just take it to the park and bang the hell out of it. Why the sudden enthusiasm for this award-winning fucker? First, it’s afforded me the opportunity to work on this book in Dubai – a book that I think could be remarkable. Second, it’s got me an agent. I’ve always wanted an agent, and on Friday I got one. And not only do I have an agent, but I have an agent who is pretty much the best agent in the country working for what I reckon is about the best agency. He came on here after a copywriting friend of his told him, “This is the blog I wish I had written.” He told me that and I buckled. I wanted to kiss my agent. I wanted to hug my agent. I wanted to take my agent out for dinner, show him a good time, then – well, you can guess the rest.
So, some good news. But will my agent actually prompt me into pitching the world? Will – after 14 months – those 642 magazines get pitched? Will my readers learn something about journalism? Probably not, but you never know.
Pitching the World 