I am a self-employed writer, which means I’m working for an idiot who doesn’t pay me enough – but the holidays are great.
I’m ex many occupations, from the respectable ‘career-ladder’ to disreputable “somebody’s- got-to-do-it”. All a good way of seeing someone else’s point-of-view. Best job, apart from writing, was dispatch-riding on a motorcycle in the 70s, though I’ve also enjoyed teaching, librarianship, counselling and helping to run a community-centre. Sometimes I’ve looked respectable in a suit, other times a bit more wild and woolly (though still stylish) as a biker. It’s strange how differently people treat you, depending on what you’re wearing. A suit means I’m sometimes addressed as ‘sir’, but in motorcycle leathers I’m always referred to as ‘mate.’
The worst job that I’ve done ? You really don’t want to know, but it was in a processed food manufacturer’s factory – put me off bacon, sausages and quiches for a long time, and made me look at pet food in a new way. I’m very glad that I don’t have any pictures.
I’ve been writing since I was eight, when I penned a story about a desert island and attempted to compile a dictionary – as Clarissa does in my short story ‘The Moon Is Out Tonight’. I’ve written for magazines under a variety of pen-names, ghost-written a couple of biographies and had a column in a local newspaper.
I used to concentrate on non-fiction of an informative, how-to instructional nature, as I’m a firm believer in the dissemination of knowledge to enable people to do things for themselves. Knowledge is power, and in these troubled times of economic downturn and increased intrusion into our lives by government agencies, its vital to know how to get through. My fictional stories also show people coping and finding ways to survive.
I’m based in a Celtic nation, the county of Cornwall or Kernow. I’ve been here for twenty years, and have lived all over the country, as well as abroad in France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and the U.S.A.
Two days after turning officially old, following my 65th birthday in February, I came across a writing competition that reassures me that I’m actually ‘Ageless’.
Mind you, there have been a few debut authors of mature years, such as Mary Wesley, 71, when her first adult novel was published), Tim Finch (debut at 51), Diana Athill (memoir published in her early 80s), Penelope Fitzgerald (60, when her first novel was published) and Kit de Waal was 56, when her award-winning novel My Name is Leonwas published.
In my latest querying campaign, I’ve approached 88 literary agencies and several indies and digital publishers, each time contacting specific agents best suited for my crime novels, none of whom are as old as me. A couple look young enough to be my grandchildren—I own belts older than them!
Researching the success stories of their recently-signed clients, I found just one 64-year-old debut novelist. Having said that, my new source of inspiration is James Oswald, who initially found success for his crime series by self-publishing, before signing to Penguin Books for a six-figure deal at the age of 45.
He still runs a cattle and sheep farm, and I enjoy reading the newsletters from his blog, telling of how he juggles tending livestock with writing and promoting his latest title. He comes across as a nice man, hard-working and humble.
If you’re of mature ageless years, there are a couple of writers’ groups of interest:
I finished reading Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage last night, in which a benign witch called Tilda Vasara makes a timely appearance. She casts a spell of invisibility that cloaks two child protagonists, and the baby they’re protecting, meaning their pursuers can’t see them. Tilda only sticks around for four pages, but her presence influenced my dreaming.
Trapped in a tedious dream about filing and form filling, undoubtedly caused by sending off four queries to fussy literary agents that evening, I was thrilled to see the witch from His Dark Materials trilogy, Serafina Pekkala fly into view. She appeared as played by actress Eva Green in the film adaptation, which was a bonus, but stayed for only a moment, saying “It’ll soon be over,” before zooming off on her broomstick. I presume she was referring to querying, which I should finish tonight.
It was nice to see one of my fictional crushes, and it made me think about which other fictional female characters I fancy.
Lisbeth Salander, from the Millennium series by Stieg Larsson is a wildly unconventional anti-hero, a mix of vulnerability and sociopathy. Not an easy person to be around, she might well scare the living daylights out of me!
Lastly and less frighteningly, is Bathsheba Everdene from Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd.
She’s passionate and spirited and beguiling. Her determined independence is attractive—not just to me—I’ve known several recently-divorced women who chose her as a role model.
As for my man crush, it’d be Aragorn, from The Lord Of The Rings, as played by Viggo Mortensen in the films. He’d better be gentle with me!
In my own writing, my crush would be for a character called Alice from a novella called Is It Her?, who only appears in retrospect, mainly through the memories of her husband who accompanied her to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland for an assisted suicide to end her suffering from cancer. She also makes herself felt through a loving and practical email she’d time-delayed to be delivered a month into her husband’s widowhood. I imagined her looking like the actress Patricia Clarkson.
How about you?
Who’s your crush?
If they’ve appeared in a film adaptation, were they well cast?
After going through a fallow period with reading matter borrowed from my local library, I recently hit pay dirt by finding some of my favourite authors’ books just sitting there on the shelf, waiting for me to come along!
Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvageand the latest story in Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano series The Overnight Kidnapperare like settling down to catch up with old friends. I was also fortunate to find a novelist new to me, Amanda Coplin, whose debut The Orchardistis superbly written—likely to be one of my favourite reads of 2019.
Thus furnished with good reading, I’m time travelling to an alternative Oxford, 21st-century Sicily and the Pacific Northwest in the early 20th-century. It makes me feel sorry for people who don’t read.
Laying abed last night, I wondered who’d influenced the authors I was reading and if they’d had a writing mentor. Mentorship requires a good match of personalities, some reciprocity where the guidance is given in an appropriate manner. All the same, you might learn some harsh lessons, so it would be wise to pick someone whose wisdom you trust.
For the purposes of this fantasy, I’ve chosen mentors who I esteem, but also who I think I’d get on with; there are some authors I like who I’d probably fall out with if I met them—for all sorts of reasons, including morality, drug use and politics.
I recently re-read John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, and apart from being surprised at how short it is (163 Pages), what struck me about it, was the structure. Each chapter is virtually a self-contained short story. Some chapters feature characters who don’t appear anywhere else in the story. There’s some overlap from chapter to chapter, such as towards the end, when the hoboes plan a surprise party for Doc, but wind up destroying his laboratory then find ways to make amends
A novel composed of a series of individual short stories with interconnected characters is properly called a short story cycle.
Cannery Row isn’t really a short story cycle, but the loosely connected vignettes offering an overview of the myriad picaresque characters makes the reader guess how they’ll interact when they meet the next time.
A noted example of the style is Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, in which the characters are linked by location but don’t form a cohesive novel. Published 100 years ago, in 1919, it’s oddly prescient in how it describes the continuing problem of individuals trying to overcome loneliness caused by living in a modern town.
Its twenty-two stories are disconcerting to read, as you briefly enter the lives of characters who express thoughts about identity and fitting into society that we all have.
More recently, Quentin Tarantino created a popular short story cycle with the Hollywood film Pulp Fiction, in which several stories intertwine even though they’re out of chronological order.
I read Elizabeth Strout’sOlive Kitteridge last year, in which the title character, a retired school teacher, is the axis around which the residents of a coastal town in Maine revolve. Her presence is always felt, even if she doesn’t feature very much in each chapter which functions as a self-contained story.
Such influences made me consider how I organise my own novels. In the latest, completed last autumn, there are several chapters featuring only one character going about their business, with plenty of internal dialogue: my protagonist detective takes time out from a murder investigation, to decompress by visiting the Tate Saint Ives; an ageing prostitute contemplates her clients, while wondering how to move on a stolen painting for enough money to retire; a cat burglar has similar dreams, as he cases a mansion he intends to rob, while imagining life as a charter fisherman in the Mediterranean.
I wanted to convey how, when lives collide, the characters’ motivations aren’t what they appear to be on the surface. A reader empathising with a character is more engaged than with a cardboard cut-out figure going through the motions in a predictable way.
Multiple points-of-view in a novel usually allows a writer to show different characters’ perspective on a story that unites them, but there’s something about penning a short story cycle which creates a disorienting effect in the reader (and maybe the writer) as the characters can be looking in different directions and are not necessarily there to serve a central theme.
I imagine this vagueness could annoy some readers, who prefer a focused approach to storytelling, but when writing a series of novels featuring the same principal characters, with minor support characters passing through, detailing individual tales could add to the impact.
I might try this approach with my next novel.
What do you think?
Plotter or pantser, how do you string a story together?
Crowdfunding for all sorts of projects has been around for a long time. Two of the best-known companies are Kickstarterand Indiegogo.
For getting books into print, the main player is Unbound.
One thing I’ve noticed about Unbound, is that the proposals that achieve their target funding are often peculiar and rather esoteric—unlikely to excite thousands of readers.
I’ve considered approaching them a couple of times but figured that my crime genre novels were too conformist and mainstream. Having said that, I’ve been querying recently, using the fifth story in the series, whose plot one agent rejected as being “too outlandish.” Maybe I should put some spin on it, exaggerating the sex scenes, bizarre murders and opium taking to entice sponsors of kinky books.
As with any commercial enterprise, there are some dodgy dealers around, claiming to be what they’re really not. I came across this troubling report about Publishizer, who boast they’re the first Crowdfunding Literary Agency.
As the old adage goes:‘If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.’
The longevity of our books is something that few of us think about, in the dispiriting scrabble to get published in the here and now. As William Saroyan observed:
Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.
Contemplating which successful and influential books published in the last thirty years will become classics, revered through the ages, it’s easy to be swayed by titles that sold in their millions, but surely there should be more to a book’s worth than earning money. J. K. Rowling’s books contain life lessons that will be relevant through time, whereas E. L. James output will swirl down the plughole.
A classic is a book that has never finished what it has to say.
A salutary thought is, that many books that are lauded as classics probably wouldn’t get published these days, initially rejected by literary agents, the gatekeepers of publishing, for being too slow to start, too long, too wordy with a confusing plot populated by unbelievable characters.
What made me think of this post, was researching the life of a forgotten mid-20th-century writer called Robin Hyde. I came across one of her poems in a newsletter, which prompted me to order her only book in Cornwall’s library system. It’s a novel called Check To Your King, which was first published in 1936. It hadn’t been borrowed from the reserve stock at library headquarters since 1996. Robin Hyde had a sad life, but was productive as a writer, until she ended things when the struggle became intolerable.
She wasn’t as successful as she should have been for the huge effort she put into her writing, but even wildly popular authors disappear into the mists of time:
Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a sombre graveyard of dead books.
With my own writing, any ambition I have is confined to maybe making a few quid, while entertaining crime fiction fans and making them think a bit about the issues I raise about life in the early 21st-century. The idea of writing for posterity, of being mentioned in the same breath as masters of the crime genre, such as Raymond Chandler, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, James Lee Burke and Elmore Leonard, is laughable to me.
How about you?
Will your gravestone become a place of pilgrimage for legions of loyal fans?
How do you feel about having your biography written by some nosy journalist?
Will your family be squabbling over the rights to your work, after you pass?
It’s a fascinating topic, as for one thing, while the body rests during sleep, the brain remains active, getting recharged, but monitoring functions such as breathing, cramp and how full your bladder is! It also thinks.
It’s said that sleep has two phases: shallow non-REM and a deeper REM period, when dreams occur. In the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to gain useful meaning from lucid dreaming. I mainly do so in the hour before getting up, when my grey cells are tussling between a desire to stay asleep in dreamland and getting up to do essential writerly tasks.
I haven’t done much creative writing for four months, after deciding to devote my energies to self-promotion, including blogging and querying literary agents. I feel the lack. To me, writing a story is like creating a garden, while editing is more of a weeding chore, but querying is as unrewarding as unloading a lorry full of paving slabs—tiring, repetitive and with no visible improvement—but, which might lead somewhere someday.
Thus frustrated, my noddle has seemingly been rummaging through European encyclopedias, which I didn’t know were shelved somewhere, as I’ve recently woke with some improbable names on my lips. I don’t know quite know who Terenjé Sesterciné will become in a future story, but I’ve added his name to a folder of character names on my desktop. Last week, I got out of bed thinking about Tezzarini’s Scorchers—who could be an elite squadron of space-age attack ships—or maybe, a red-hot chilli pastry devised by a sadistic Italian cook!
Wondering if I’d read these names somewhere online and forgotten them, I ran a search which confirmed it’s my sleeping imagination that invented them. I shouldn’t be surprised, as the brain is an astonishing thinking machine; that it’s not entirely under our control is intimidating.
Some famous stories were inspired by dreams, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, E. B. White’s Stuart Little and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stephen King stepped into a nightmare on a flight to London, which became Misery.
Have you had any peculiar dreams, which proved useful for your writing?
I’ve completed a third campaign of querying agents and I sort of got into it, in a masochistic way.
Initially, I fired off a salvo of 13 submissions, including a couple to newly promoted agents who are looking to add to their roster of clients. To my great surprise, one answered within 48 hours, which is the second fastest response I’ve had from 650 queries made in the last three years! It’s also only the fifth personalised reply I’ve received, the rest being form letters or nothing at all.
Her reply was polite, though contained a strange choice of words:
I’m afraid this isn’t for me. The writing didn’t quite pull me in and the plot seems a little too outlandish, for my tastes.
I’m unsure what she means by “a little too outlandish”—would slightly outlandish work? Or should I go for the opposite of outlandish, which is conventional? And, what’s a conventional crime plot anyway? Do readers want something predictable? Strangely enough, although the book I’m querying The Dead Need Nobody contains some strange incidents, they’re mostly based on real-life crimes that have occurred in Cornwall in the last five years. I worried that I was being too humdrum, not too weird!
I almost didn’t query this particular agent, as of her seven clients, only one has written a crime novel, but she said she was looking for “crime or thrillers driven by a compelling lead“, so I thought I’d offer her my mesmeric Cornish Detective.
This rejection had me wondering if there was some form of coded language used by literary agents, so did an online search, finding this amusing article, which ranks replies from agents on a scale of 0-10.
Digital publishers look to be more open-minded and flexible in their approach than conventional agents and publishers, who come across as hidebound. Ebook publishers are more hit and run in their marketing, whereas approaching a conventional operation somehow makes me feel like I’m a raw recruit trying to join an army who’ll slowly manoeuvre their ranks into a campaign to capture readers. I used to be dubious about digital publishing—why give away 50% of your royalties when you can self-publish and keep most of it? But, I’m coming around to their maverick ways.
Whatever option I choose, including self-publishing, I remain undaunted.
Have you ever received any peculiarly worded rejection letters?
This article in The Economist surprised me a lot, for when they analysed the ratings given to books by readers on Goodreads, there was a bias towards long tomes.
It could be argued, that in a recession people go for items that appear to offer greater value. Perhaps, when the economy is prospering, there’s an upsurge in consumption of highly priced ‘fun-sized’ disposable items, including short books. Remember thePenguin Mini Modern Classics?
A couple of years ago, writing gurus predicted that there’d be an increase in sales of flash fiction, short stories and novellas, as so many readers consumed writing on handheld devices while commuting or on work breaks. In the last few months, publishing industry experts have noted a decline in the sale of novellas. This explains why so many novella-length books are being called novels—hoodwinking readers into thinking they’ve achieved something worthy.
The worst example of this I’ve read is the highly-praisedThe End We Start From by Megan Hunter, which at 160 widely spaced pages and 48,800 words is hardly long enough to be described as a novel.
Having said that, recently, I’ve been re-reading old favourites not looked at for decades, which have through time been labelled as classics. I borrowed a copy of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row from my local library, surprised that the Penguin paperback edition is only 163 pages long. Looking on the Reading Length website, it’s 46,110 words, which is little more than novella length.
I’ve been targetting my Cornish Detective novels at about 80,000 words, based on widespread advice that this is a sensible compromise between content and length for a debut author. I chafe at the bit a little, for I’d be able to do more characterisation with 100,000 words.
I’m not sure what it means, but in my recent campaign of querying literary agents—88, so far, and counting—three of them stipulated that the finished novel should be at least 60,000 words long. Perhaps they’ve received lots of undersized manuscripts.
When looking at long books for reading matter, I tend to be influenced more by subject matter and whether I’ve read the author before, than by the thought that it might take me several weeks to finish. I’ve read several very long novels in recent years, including Neal Stephenson’s Reamde at 1,056 pages and 322,080 words and at a bit more than half that length, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History which clocks in at 576 pages and 192,705 words.
If readers see long books as better value for money than normal length offerings of 300-350 pages, then they’d be delighted to acquire Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Quartet for 25p, as I just did in my local charity shop. I haven’t read it before, so I’m looking forward to getting lost in another world. At 691 pages long, it will keep me occupied for a while.
How long are the books you write?
What’s the longest book you’ve read?
If you favour audiobooks, do you listen to long books that way?
Jane Friedman reports on a new social media network in her Electric Speed newsletter.
Are.na claims to be: A visual platform that helps you think.Spend less time “liking” and more time thinking. Are.na frees your mind from distraction and lets you organize your internet more mindfully.
Jane Friedman describes Are.na as a mashup of Pinterest, Scrivener and Pocket. At first glance, it looks a bit like Pinterest, with the feature of being able to add files to help organise and publicise writing projects. It’s free to use with up to 100 of what are called private ‘blocks’, with unlimited public blocks. A Premium Package at $45 a year offers additional features.
I’ve opened a free account and will be exploring the site.
Hmm, in the sinister way of modern cyber life, I noticed just now when I logged onto Are.na, that although I haven’t filled in any personal details or made any posts, the profile picture I have on the Gmail address I used for contact has been added to Are.na—without my say-so—social media really is watching me!
