I’ve been following the work of Gavin Aung Than, who is a freelance cartoonist based in Melbourne, Australia.
His Zen Pencils cartoon blog adapts inspirational quotes into comic stories and is well worth a look.
Try these two stories for inspiration in your work as an artist:
http://zenpencils.com/comic/calling/
http://zenpencils.com/comic/kevinsmith/
A new writers’ group has started to counter bias against older debut authors. As a sage if not entirely wise writer of 65, I welcome this development.
There have been some notable famous authors who started out late, including Penelope Fitzgerald, Mary Wesley, Henry Miller, George Elliot, Richard Adams, Raymond Chandler, Alex Haley, Charles Bukowski and Annie Proulx.
Prime Readers may be of interest to mature writers:
http://publishingperspectives.com/2015/07/uk-group-to-fight-bias-against-older-debut-authors/
It’s long annoyed me that so much attention is given to those under 40 when it comes to prizes, bursaries and competitions. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for encouraging young talent and it’s in my bones to pass on knowledge, but there comes a time in life when you start to feel like you’re invisible. A debut author of any age needs support, encouragement and recognition.
Anyone can write at any age. Mary Wesley is a shining example of someone who started out late, with her breakout novel The Camomile Lawn published when she was 72. Her last novel came when she was 85, and she was a very frisky woman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wesley
This report from the book section of the Guardian newspaper shows that we shouldn’t worry too much about our work being pirated :
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/24/ebook-pirate-uk-statistics-2015
It’s easy to worry about someone copying your plotline, or of having inadvertently borrowed key elements from a novel that you read ten years ago and had largely forgotten about. There are only so many stories under the sun, and it’s reckoned that there are only seven (or five) basic plots, so there’s bound to be some coincidences.
It’s quite likely that someone has written a thriller that contains elements of my first Cornish Detective novel, which is about a war-hardened mercenary who’s killing victims as part of some twisted role-play game. After all, there’s been much reporting on how computer games induce violent acts in real life, and more people are aware of the ongoing trauma of PTSD for veteran soldiers. I was more concerned that another author would get their book published before mine, with the same title of The Perfect Murderer.
I like catchy titles, and though there’s nothing crucial about my narrative that would prevent me from changing the title, I’d still be a bit miffed that someone beat me to it. Mind you, I was a bit surprised that a famous crime novelist, H.R.F. Keating had written his first Indian detective story featuring Inspector Ghote with the title The Perfect Murder. I probably read it when I was in my twenties, forgetting the story but storing a form of the title in my memory banks.
Some theft does occur with books. It’s impossible to take legal action against those who’ve stolen your entire story if it’s in the Far East – unless you’re a major corporation, and tough to do so even then. A writer friend who published a series of romance novels as ebooks in the U.K. went to visit friends in India. They’d read her books, and tentatively showed her some pirated versions of them, which had been printed as paperbacks with the Western names changed to Indian, along with other cultural details referring to clothing, food and religion.
There was absolutely nothing that she could do about it, and the supposed author looked to be a made-up identity for an online search found nothing about them. My friend moved on through Asia, as part of her post-retirement backpacking adventure, ending up in China. She wasn’t entirely surprised to find her romances were on sale in street markets, again altered to represent the country.
She hadn’t used Digital Rights Management for her ebooks, not thinking that such foreign piracy would ever occur. DRM is easily removed anyway.
We might be more widely read than we know…
After devoting most of 2014 to writing my first novel The Perfect Murderer, and having a few nightmares as a result of the gruesome research, I’ve planning to write something lighter and funnier next—a modern comedy of sexual manners, perhaps.
I was wondering how much I should include my own dating experiences over the last twenty-five years, which is about as long as I’ve been using online dating agencies. I’m no heart-breaking Lothario, and have had some happy relationships (and several troubled liaisons), making several close and long-term friends along the way. I’ve found it moving to see lonely hearts trying to begin again in their forties, fifties and sixties following unexpected bereavement or divorce.
I fretted a bit about a kinky sex activity that I’d put into my first Cornish Detective as a bit of light relief (no pun intended), thinking that the reader would associate me with this strange deviancy. I’m not the only writer who has been troubled by such concerns, as this article shows, where a young, Indian female author found people casting aspersions about her virginity—because that’s what her heroine was trying to lose:
Have any of you encountered any tricky situations, as a result of what you wrote?
Personally, I’m thick-skinned when it comes to what readers might think about anything I’ve written that could apply to me. To adapt something that Eleanor Roosevelt said about being made to feel inferior, I cleave to the notion that ‘ No one can make you feel embarrassed without your permission.’
On the other hand, I’m very circumspect in revealing any personal stories that people have told me about their lives. That would be manipulative and cruel.
Some writers have used their novels to wreak revenge on people, but the closest I’ve come is stealing a few unusual names and characteristics from folk I knew decades ago.
How about you? The pen is mightier than the sword, after all….
After doing masses of work getting my books ready to self-publish, considering things like the book cover design, formatting, blurb, plot line, characterisation, etc, etc, I’ve become adept at these structural components. I’ve read many experts’ advice on what a book needs to succeed, but all of such well-meaning tips don’t take into account how readers actually choose books.
I’ve been keeping an eye on how I select consumer goods, and why I reject them too. I tend to buy books on eBay, AbeBooks or Amazon, using cheap price and free postage as an imperative. Were I to be borrowing them from my local library, I might consider the weight of them too, choosing a paperback over a hardback – as I have to carry them home.
My decision on what to read is based on several things, including a liking of the author’s work, a good review and subject matter that interests me, which I’ll skim-read off the back of the book. I may admire the cover art, or not, but it doesn’t influence me greatly. I never read the opening of a book or sample passages from further in, to see if I like the style.
There definitely is an old boy network when it comes to reviews. It’s easy to check how an author who says something favourable about a new book, which is quoted on the cover, is signed to the same publisher. True Story: In 1977 I was working as a dispatch rider on a motorcycle in London. I’d trained as a librarian but decided that I wanted something with more variety and excitement, so donned my leathers. I was delivering packages for an art design studio at the time, which involved visiting magazine publishers, printers and publishers. Many of these documents would be transmitted over the internet these days, but at that time having a hard copy was vital. I was waiting for an executive to come out of a meeting to sign for a package, cooling my riding boot heels in a swanky publisher one day, when I recognised a celebrity sitting opposite me. It was a well-known lawyer and political adviser Lord Goodman, who regularly appeared on political discussion shows and in the newspapers – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Goodman,_Baron_Goodman
A publisher’s assistant went over to him, requesting that he sign-off that he recommended a new book, a guide to the law for a beginner. The Baron glanced at the book, declaring that he hadn’t read it, upon which the flunky stage-whispered that this writer had provided the blurb for his Lordship’s last book. “Do you happen to know if he even read it?” asked Lord Goodman. The assistant shook his head uncertainly while taking the signature. Lord Goodman noticed that I’d witnessed this hypocritical transaction, shrugging his shoulders in a dismissive ‘what-can-I-do-it’s-how-things-work’ way.
that’s how the system works, I thought, a little less naive than I’d been a few minutes before. All together now – it’s not what you know, but who you know that counts.
After overhearing a couple of readers talking to two librarians, saying that they chose what to read mainly be the title of a book, I’ve given more weight in my mind to coming up with catchy titles for my work, but I’ve never selected a book in this way. Again, I might admire the elegance and intrigue of a clever title, such as James Lee Burke’s In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead but it’s not an overriding factor.
I prefer American and Scandinavian crime thrillers, over those based in the U.K. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s something to do with liking the unfamiliar and wanting to get away from the plodding familiarity of British cop stories. I’m also more likely to choose a literary style novel about relationships that’s set in a foreign land.
How do you choose what to read?
The length of a manuscript influences whether it will be published traditionally. This is particularly true for new authors. I made a beginner’s mistake by not considering this when I wrote my first novel The Perfect Murderer. If I’d seen any advice about how long genre novels should be, my brain glossed over the figures.
I wasn’t consciously aiming for any particular length, for though I had a rough structure for the storyline I write in an organic way, allowing the action to evolve through what the characters would do in the circumstances. Sometimes they did things that I hadn’t anticipated, but it felt right to stay true to their natures.
I had a brief frisson of achievement when I passed the 100,000-word count, anticipating that I’d be finished at about 130,000 words. I was correct, though after reading through the manuscript several times, then leaving it alone for a week, a nagging feeling arose that it felt distinctly unfinished.
This was mainly because there were so many questions left unanswered, to do with the fates of my two killers and their victims. I’ve read thousands of cop stories, mysteries and thrillers in the last fifty years, and it’s always rather bothered me when I find myself thinking “but what happened to?” at the end of a story. There can be good reasons for leaving things unresolved, of course, such as the planned reappearance of a character in a sequel. Sometimes vagueness is a result of savage editing or even forgetfulness. Raymond Chandler forgot to identify who’d killed a character in The Big Sleep.
The end of my novel felt snapped-off, full of rough edges, so I smoothed things off by writing an afterword, explaining what became of the corpses of my goodies, innocents and baddies. I also set my lead detective up for a sequel, while not ruling out that the serial killer hadn’t perished and could return. This took my manuscript up to 160,000 words.
My beta-reader, who’s just finished reading the novel, loved that I’d written an afterword and that there was a feeling of optimism after what had been a rather harrowing tale. But the length of my novel is a no-no for a first thriller by an unknown author, as the guideline is 80,000 to 100,000, with most published first books being at the lower end of those figures. Other genres vary in what is expected for a word count, with science-fiction and fantasy novels the longest at up to 150,000 words, followed by historical at 100,000+ and bringing up the rear are westerns, which can be as short as 45,000 words.
I expect that we’ve all read novels much longer than this. I forced myself through the 1,267,069 words of Marcel Proust’s A La Rechcherche Du Temps Perdu, as a teenager – I didn’t have a social life! The last 69 words were the best… I’ve since read many other long novels by Thomas Wolfe, Iris Murdoch, John Irving, Victor Hugo and Tolstoy, enjoying them all. Sometimes it takes that long to narrate a story, and also there’s a challenge to the reader to last the course. Hence the phrase “I like a nice long read.”
2015 turned into the year of the long novel. After the success of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch at 784 pages and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries at 864 pages, which became the longest novel to win the Booker Prize, several other novelists have cracked the 1,000 page barrier.
http://www.vulture.com/2015/05/year-of-the-very-long-novel.html
I decided not to rewrite my novel, as taking an editorial chainsaw to it to halve its length would have been a travesty. I don’t expect a literary agent, or publisher with an open submission policy, to take the risk of publishing something that long by an unknown author, but that’s OK. One needs to be an established and successful writer to have long novels accepted. It’s amazing to me that J.K. Rowling got away with such lengthy books, particularly as they were aimed at young readers who supposedly have limited attention spans. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was 896 pages and 257,045 words! Something tells me that her publisher didn’t want to edit the goose that was laying so many golden eggs…
Instead, I wrote a prequel to The Perfect Murderer, called Who Kills A Nudist? which introduced my detective and forensic pathologist characters. This second first novel was a comparative doddle, by limiting it to 80,000 words, and I’ve got the enthralling sequel all lined up to publish afterwards – hurrah!
How long are your novels?
Have any of you experienced similar problems of conforming to what is expected for word counts? Or have you had the opposite problem of feeling like you’re padding the narrative out to reach a nice size?
I must admit that I’ve had the wicked thought of doing this with a couple of my novellas, which are about 30,000 words long.
After my previous post on eye dominance, I’m at risk of sounding like I’m obsessed with eyes by talking about them again. I must admit that my greatest fear is losing my eyesight, for, after all, any other part of the anatomy can be replaced with a man-made prosthesis, but not one’s eyes…
Spending a long time staring at a backlit laptop screen is not good for my eyes, I know that, so I take precautions such as adjusting the brightness and contrast of the screen in the settings. It helps to alter my focus from time to time, rather than staring intently at something that’s only two feet away non-stop. Looking around the room and out of the window at sights nearby and on the horizon gives my eyes a workout. This article in WebMD sums up the problem and the solutions very well: http://www.webmd.com/eye-health/computer-vision-syndrome
I came across some empirical proof that Computer Vision Syndrome affects techies, nerds and geeks when I lived in Atlanta. My ex-wife was a network administrator for a multi-national telecommunications company, and her office was located on a site alongside lots of other technological and research firms. When people left for home, the roads became gridlocked – Atlanta is famed for its smog and traffic jams, and drivers become expert at driving very slowly.
All the same, there were hundreds of fender benders, or low speed collisions, in the proximity of the business park. The police and insurance companies issued a statement after examining drivers’ statements about what caused the accidents. They were blamed on drivers not being able to shift their focus from the instruments and dashboard after spending hours staring at their computer monitors. Their spatial awareness was poor too, as their brains had become attuned to tunnel vision. The advice was issued that people recalibrate their eyes by having a good look around them, before stepping into their cars and driving off like a robot.
I’ve been wearing spectacles for about nineteen years. I discovered that I needed them in an unusual way. I used to help to manage a community centre, which rented out rooms for various activities and that had a free-to-use computer suite. So far as I knew, my vision was fine. One Christmas I was asked to stand in for the man who usually played Father Christmas, as he was recovering from knee surgery. Although my beard was turning white, I had no idea that I was sufficiently ancient, portly and trustworthy to play Santa Claus, but was honoured to be asked.
A red and white costume was provided, along with a fake cotton-wool beard, but I decided that I’d look more convincing wearing some grampa/John Lennon style glasses. I acquired a pair at a charity/thrift shop for a mere 50 pence. They didn’t look like they had strong lenses, but I tried them out by looking at a newspaper—thinking that the print would be blurred. Instead, the words jumped into sharp focus! D’oh – I needed to wear glasses after all, as my brain had been working in overdrive to compensate for the deterioration of my cornea.
Any spectacles wearer will know what a pain they are to clean. I don’t like the idea of using contact lenses, and the thought of laser eye surgery makes me queasy, so I’ve stuck with glasses. I clean them each morning and have tried a number of different ways, including commercial glass cleaner sprays, vinegar and lemon juice. I’d try rubbing alcohol, which is freely available in America but hard to source in the U.K. (no idea why) unless bought online.
All of these methods kind-of worked, but the lenses soon became smeared, as if I’d wiped them over with a greasy rag. Looking online, I found that the best way to remove marks is washing-up liquid or dish soap. Rubbing a dab of it between forefinger and thumb on each side of the lens, followed by rinsing off beneath a running tap and polishing with paper towel sees the glass gleaming. It works better than anything else that I’ve tried.
ADDENDUM:
This is encouraging news. I recall an experimental surgical technique from a few years ago, where a lens was inserted into a tooth, which was then located in the eye socket – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1197256/Blind-man-sees-wife-time-having-TOOTH-implanted-eye.html
It makes me think of the amusing question, Where would you have a third eye? The end of a finger would be quite useful, provided it came with a reinforced eyelid to protect it from harm. Just think of the things you could see! At the very least, it would make finding things in a pocket easier.
Some of you may have seen reports in the press earlier this year, which picked up on a report in the journal Stroke—which reports news on strokes and cardiovascular diseases.
This report highlighted the importance of being able to balance on one leg, and its relevance to the information that’s sent to the brain. Unsteadiness could indicate problems, which might lead to strokes and falls in old age.
I have a particular interest in this area of health, for I had a minor stroke in 1995, at the age of 41. In a way I wasn’t surprised that it happened, for 1995 was an extremely stressful year, what with the end of a long-term relationship, business failure, homelessness and all round nastiness and sadness. Having a stroke almost felt like my brain telling me it had had enough of this rubbish, and to clean up my act!
I was fortunate to get away with only a few after-effects. The main one was a strange and erratic tendency to miss out certain letters when I wrote something. Some days I would omit the letter ‘b’, the next day the letter ‘g’ would be missing from a page of writing. I didn’t notice that I wasn’t penning them while I was writing – it was only when I read things out. This was in pre-computer days, without the intervention of a spell-checker to highlight mistakes, when I wrote everything in longhand.
To retrain my brain, I copied out hundreds of pages from novels and non-fiction books, reaching a point where all of the necessary letters were there.
My balance is OK, which may be partly helped by having ridden hundreds of thousands of miles on motorcycles and bicycles.
Try the tests in this article – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2956179/Can-standing-balance-one-leg-help-young-balance-offers-insight-general-health.html
N.B. CAUTION! Do these balancing tests in a clear area, especially if you’re going to close your eyes. Having a bed or a sofa to fall onto nearby is a good idea – I don’t want you putting an arm through your television or computer screen.
The title of this thread isn’t meant to imply that any readers of this blog have pen names which conceal their true gender. Rather, I’m referring to creating the fictional thoughts of a character in the first person, though a second or third person viewpoint could require adopting a different way of expressing their behaviour if they’re of the opposite gender.
I’ve written twenty short stories and novellas, five novels and about 500 poems and song lyrics. Five of the stories are seen through the eyes of my female protagonist, and there are multiple viewpoints too, including those of women. I try to avoid any of my characters behaving in stereotypical ways that are meant to show their gender – men who can’t cook, women who don’t know how to top-up the oil of their car engine, that sort of thing. I dislike this hackneyed and sexist shorthand, which is lazy, demeaning and doesn’t work anyway.
I think that I’ve done OK in representing my female characters well, and my beta-readers who are all women, have commented that they found them believable. I may have an advantage from my upbringing, which was primarily in female company – sisters, mother, aunts and grandmothers. I’ve also worked in jobs that are dominated by women – teaching, librarianship and counselling. I have eight close friends, and seven of them are women. From all of this, I may have picked up on female attitudes, strengths, worries and, for want of a catch-all term, traits, better than some male writers.
I can’t say that I noticed inhabiting my female character’s persona affected me greatly, though it certainly altered novelist Elizabeth Day’s writing and behaviour when she penned a novel, Paradise City, that has an alpha-male as the protagonist.
I’m not trying to start a war between the sexes with this post. I’m tempted to have one of the characters in my next Cornish Detective novel be transitioning from one sex to the other, which would certainly throw open different points of view.
I avoid writing anything sexist, unless it’s to show some flaw in a character, but there’s a lot of casual reverse sexism in advertising and even in the routines of supposedly politically correct comedians. I saw a book advertised recently, by Bridget Christie, which is called A Book For Her and which has the tag line beneath the title *And for him, if he can read
http://www.bridgetchristie.co.uk/
Imagine the outrage that cover would cause had the book been written by a male comedian, and the disparaging remark was made about women being illiterate….
Many famous authors have used one or more pen names, and there can be all sorts of good reasons for the subterfuge – not the least, evading the taxman!
I used several noms-de-plume when I was writing magazine articles back in the 20th century, and sometimes these were provided by the journal involved, where various writers penned articles as a columnist with an established identity. One of the strangest gigs I had was as an Agony Aunt for a women’s magazine. I got the job through having I’d trained as a marriage guidance counsellor and volunteered as a Samaritan, and from growing up surrounded by women knew more about the medicinal use of yoghurt than most men…
When I started writing fiction again in 2013, I cast around for what to call myself. I have nothing against my own name of Paul Whybrow but wasn’t sure how memorable it is. There are a couple of other Whybrows who are writers, though they’re not related to me – one is Ian, a children’s author, the other Marian and she concentrates on art books.
I chose something that I thought would distinguish me from the norm, and which might stick in people’s minds. I had a couple of eccentric great-uncles when I was a child. One was called Edgar, which I didn’t fancy as a name, the other was Augustus, which I liked partly because of my favourite Roman emperor. I have ancestors who came over in the Norman invasion of 1066. Their family crest featured various elements, including a strange red heart shape with a devil’s forked tail looping upwards from the pointed base.
I’d used this shape as a mascot on crash helmets for years, and for signing artwork, so Augustus Devilheart I became (stop laughing at the back!), which I thought worked OK. After slow sales for my ebooks, several female friends advised me that some readers might be finding my pen name intimidating, thinking that I was a devil worshipper—so why not try my real name? I did, and it helped, though it was a real pain to have to change all the manuscripts, deleting them from the online sales sites and uploading the new version.
In trying to establish Augustus Devilheart as a creative entity, I’d joined various social media sites using that name. Some of these were easier to alter than others, and I found to my consternation that Goodreads would hold onto my nom-de-plume forever. They don’t allow authors to delete books published using a pen name. This made me think of them as more intelligence-hungry than the FBI, KGB, CIA and MI5 combined.
I was assiduous in saying that a book had been previously published using the pen name, by adding a note to the frontispiece and on my blog and social media site profiles. I rather thought that I’d left my former identity behind, until I received a spooky contact update from LinkedIn on my Paul Whybrow Gmail account, asking me if I knew Augustus Devilheart? Well, do I?
Have any of you had problems with pen names?
