books

Should I thank that author? YES!

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Me, delighted by reader’s email

Fanmail. It’s an odd idea, when you start writing books, that someone might bother to write and thank you. But they do. And it is a delight, after a long day fiddling with edits or fettling plots, to find a little email in the inbox which just says ’thanks, I enjoyed your book’.

The creativity of writing is its own reward, of course it is. It is a privilege to have the time and the opportunity to make up stories. If people actually pay their hard-earned money to read them, I already feel hugely lucky.

If they subsequently take the trouble to write a thank you message, that’s hitting the jackpot. So I feel like a lottery winner this week with three thank yous – one from Norway (written, of course, in impeccable English).

They liked the books. They urged me to write more as soon as possible. They promised to buy them when I did.

It made my week!

It also reminded me that I should do the same – write to authors whose books I really enjoyed. Take the trouble. Leave a review. I don’t do it often enough myself.

At the local supermarket the checkout staff sometimes hand out little cards asking for feedback. I confess to having stuck them in my bag and forgotten them in the past. I shall make a point of going online and recommending Traci on checkout 9’s work this week. I hope it makes her as cheerful as my feedback has made me.

An Edwardian Christmas – mystery, murder, maths and Christmas pudding.

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And then there were three! The third Vita Carew mystery is a Christmas story. Vita is distracted from her studies by a mysterious patient in the hospital. He has been injured and lost his memory, and she decides to find out more. She is soon drawn into the strange happenings in Dr Potter’s rural medical practice.

Dr P cover
https://books2read.com/u/49NLVd

I had a great time with Dr Potter and the evil Miss Edith Finch. I was fascinated by the idea of a pair of (very) psychologically disordered characters who bring out the very worst in each other. An evil couple is a deliciously creepy idea. And of course a doctor who turns to the bad is deeply unsettling. We rely on our doctors. We want to trust and believe them.

I’ve just retired from teaching. Until now writing has always been an activity squeezed in around the day job. I often wrote at 5am for an hour or two, and at weekends and during holidays. Now I can write all day long! I am wallowing in time, binge writing to my heart’s content – a thousand stories jostling in my head and fingers that can hardly type fast enough.

New Book Alert!

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I’m very happy to announce that Poison at Pemberton Hall, book 1 in the Vita Carew series, is published as an ebook on Amazon tomorrow (paperback coming soon). Here’s the blurb:

December 1903. A glittering musical evening ends in catastrophe. Is the famous chef’s seafood really to blame or are the tangled secrets of Pemberton Hall about to unravel?

To Vita a grand gala occasion is nothing but a dull distraction from her studies. But when disaster strikes, she helps the stricken victims. She soon discovers a desperate governess, a scheming footman and an operatic diva with big ambitions all had good reason to disrupt the glamorous country house dinner. But who did, and why? And can she stop the poisoner before he or she strikes again?

I had fun with this one! It is my therapeutic escape from the pressures of 2020 – I hope it will distract you too.

Poison at Pemberton Hall is a prequel to A Thin Sharp Blade, which was published in April. The challenge was to introduce the characters and explain how Aunt Louisa came to have such a very distinguished chef working for her in her modest house in Eden Street.

A Bright Balloon

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It’s an odd position – judging and being judged simultaneously.

The village I live in is running a short story competition and I’m organising the judging. At the same time, my novel has just been longlisted for a national crime writing prize.

Of course, being listed for a prize is great. Someone read it! Someone liked it! Such moments of reward are so few in the writing world (in my writing world, anyway – yours may be crammed with awards) that they need to be savoured and rejoiced in for as long as possible. That small burst of optimism has to last for many long and lonely writing months into the future; a lovely bright balloon of encouragement bouncing joyfully about. Even as I admire it, I know it will drift away or turn wrinkly and flat soon enough.

This has made me so acutely aware of the feelings of the writers being judged in the short story competition that I can hardly bear to choose one over the other. There is genuinely something to be admired in every story. And the range of them is huge; some profound and philosophical, others surreal, others hilariously funny. It’s not just comparing apples and pears; it’s more like comparing apples, Liquorice All Sorts and Chicken Vindaloo.

We’ll get there in the end, because that’s what judges do: compromise.

Fingers crossed, please.

Little sticks over the ravine

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img_1067.jpgToday it seemed to me that writing a novel was like constructing a bridge over a deep ravine. There is only one place on the opposite cliff  where the bridge can safely attach; that narrow spot must be aimed for with precision.

The problem is that the bridge must be constructed out of tongue depressors or lolly sticks and you, the builder, have to built it whilst standing on it over the ravine, so it needs to be as solid as such little pieces of wood can make it. The beginning is extremely difficult, but with patient practice you eventually find a construction method of sorts and find a way to build something strong enough to stand on. You get used to the height and the crosswinds and a certain compulsive rhythm keeps you at it.

But then there is issue of direction. What keeps happening is that because of a few lolly sticks misplaced early on, the bridge veers to one side, away from the safe landing place on the opposing bank. This means dismantling all the lolly sticks back to the place where the wrong direction began, then reassembling them all – thousands upon thousands of them – until they head in the right direction, or seem to, because it is terribly easy to misplace one or two and very gradually lose the right line again.

I have several times, according to this metaphor, managed to build the bridge right over the gorge, almost to jumping-across point before realising that there is a dreadful mistake way back behind and a huge amount of work to do before the leap will be possible.

For some reason I never think of abandoning the tongue depressor bridge, or of throwing myself into the ravine, or even of staying on the other bank and not bothering to cross at all.

Strangely addictive, this bridge building.

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one stick at a time

On patient plot listeners

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Plot listening comes way before external editing or beta reading. It comes around draft 4 for me, but it depends how you count and everybody’s different. PLs don’t even need to read the draft, they just have to be patient enough to listen as you mangle and chunter your way haphazardly through the ill-formed ragbag of half-formed ideas and rough-hewn, lumpy characters that is the early draft of a book. You can be repetitive and vague, over-specific, longwinded and forgetful about names (Did I say Aberdeen? I meant Nairobi.) yet somehow this patient person sits through it.

With crime writing it seems especially important because the twists and clues and red herrings the genre must have are too much for the ordinary (at least the fairly sane ordinary) human brain to contain all at once. It’s only when you run it past a listener that the awful omission of X or the impossible condition of Y suddenly becomes clear.

The PL sits up and asks something like, ‘But isn’t B in Moscow?/Where did you say he left the grenade?/Shouldn’t A have left with V after Fritz found the envelope, not before?’ and they’re right, and you, the shambolic writer, until then bitter and apathetic, are electrified by this helpful observation and leave your coffee to grow cold on the table, so swiftly do you sprint off in the direct of the laptop.

Hurrah for the patient plot listener! Find one immediately if you can. And reward them well. Jam is good for this, or pizza, but beer and sex* are fine too.

If they write things too, you probably owe them some PL time in return. But sex is obviously quicker*.

*only in certain circumstances, obviously

Stay away from that café!

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I’ve been giggling this week about a tick I noticed in my own writing and other people’s – the tendency to sit down too much!

I don’t mean the authors; I mean their characters. In the half dozen books and manuscripts I’ve read in the past three days the characters spend an awful lot of time sitting about.

It’s not that the books are without action, there is plenty elsewhere, it’s just that between vivid scenes they all tend to sit down and (this being England, my dears) they often have a nice cup of tea!

As soon as you spot something like this, of course, it jumps out at you whichever book you pick up. Plots need pauses and a cafe or pub is a handy place for characters to meet and share vital information. People do chat over coffee and meet in tea shops – it’s perfectly realistic – but my resolution for Nanowrimo and beyond  is to put a stop to all this comfort and get my characters moving.

They can talk plot lines and establish character out in the fresh air. They can reinforce their conflicts or mention that crucial detail  whilst driving, walking, riding, break dancing, roasting an ox, drying their hair, shark wrestling or getting a tattoo, but they will definitely not be doing it sitting in a café.

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Content marketing for Grannies (don’t worry this won’t hurt a bit).

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Good morning from the shed. I recommend a shed.

Dear GWB-ers,
Many writers of all ages are aghast at the idea that not only do we have write a book, we also have to use social media to promote and sell it. Just when we thought we could sit down with a nice cup of tea, a biscuit, and possibly even the tiniest bit of self-congratulation, there turns out to be a whole new world to be conquered. And it’s a new world full of jargon, conventions and more tricky etiquette than the court of Louis XIV.

But I bring comfort. I have looked into this a little, and although you won’t hear many people say this, content marketing – it seems this is the term for using social media to promote your book/play/range of fetching teatowels – is a doddle, once you get the hang of it. (I’m not saying I have got the hang of it yet, but I’m doing what I recommend to all, I’m having a go.)

There is a natural progress that anyone born around the middle of the last century has to go through in order to see what I mean. It goes:
1 Ridicule and wry scepticism: What on earth do people want to do a thing like that for? Who cares what sort of coffee you like, or whether you are visiting an Inca monument or stuck on the 7.12 between Holburn and King’s Cross?
2 Grudging curiosity: You get a following of 50,000 people when all you seem to do is tweet pictures of your kittens, or your legs looking a bit like hot dogs? Why?
3 Outright cynicism: there will always be idiots in this world with nothing better to do than re-tweet pictures of people whose underwear misbehaves at a crucial moment; I am not one of them!
5 Defeatism: even if I fancied having a go, it’s all too techie and I could never get the hang of it.
6 Blundering into the deep end of technology: I have just spend three hours reading about search engine optimisation; I still don’t know what any of it means, but I’m pretty sure it means I’m not up to any of this.
7 Secretive experimentation: actually, I did tweet a picture of my newly-invented marrow and salmon lasagne last night, but my followers are mostly in Richmond, Ohio or New Delhi, so if I did it wrong, they’re not very likely to accost me in the queue in the Post Office.
8 Overt adoption blending into bossy evangelism: Oh come on, Celia, anyone can tweet their blog posts!

I’m closer to 8 now, thanks to a real, live, Californian e-marketing expert called Michael Newman. His blog is here, if you want a look. What Michael explained, in the consultation I shared with other authors, was this: if you can write, you are head and shoulders above the other poor saps who are trying to market their stuff on the internet. If you can write, you can put together a blog post, a tweet or a Facebook post, whichever you fancy, and it will have a decent chance of sounding right and attracting the right readers. If you can’t write for toffee, you’re going to find this lots harder.

His other tip was this: do what you feel like doing on the social media scene. Maybe you like Facebook, or hate Instagram or fancy a go at blogging. Try them all, but stick to what feels best for you and set to work properly on that. Experiment; take your time. You should aim to create an online presence (a platform, in the jargon) which truly represents you, your book and your take on things. It should do this so well that you like it, you are at home with it, it’s fun to add to it and you like the views of the people who share it. The best social media posts reflect one person’s view. They may be aiming to sell you something, but they’re entertaining or informing you at the same time, which feels like a fair deal.

“If it feels like selling, you’re not doing it right!” (Nick Cook, author of Cloud Riders, who has a big Twitter following)

Social media, I think, is difficult for generations who were brought up on the “Sunday best” philosophy. You had china and clothes and shoes that were only for best and when company was coming round, you were on your best behaviour. Quirkiness was not really encouraged. In social media it is. Forget your best behaviour; keep up your standards (check your spelling, keep an eye on that grammar, choose photos that look good), but it doesn’t have to be slick or over-professional, it just has to be interesting and in some way genuine. It shouldn’t feel like being inspected in your Sunday best; it should feel like playing with your friends.

Keep on writing!

Fran

Next time: How to get help (free help, obviously).