Friday 27 July 2012

A rather angsty post

I am having a bit of wobble at the moment.  Technically, I should be all smiles.  Looking for Buttons is out in the world, selling fairly steadily.  I am A Published Writer, albeit a DIY one.

But.

But but but but but.

It's said that everyone has a book in them.  What if Looking for Buttons is the only one I have?

I want to write.  It's what I do, spinning yarns when I'm not knitting them.  That's the image I've always had of myself.  But when I sit down at the keyboard I can't string a coherent sentence together.  I've re-read what exists of the Difficult Second and Third Novels.  They seem to have been written by someone else.  It's like watching Bradley Wiggins win the Tour de France.  I can ride a bike but no way could I do that.  I get the same feeling as I run my eye along the bookcase.  I've lost my writing nerve and with it part of my identity.

I hope this is just a temporary blip.

Tuesday 24 July 2012

Such stuff that dreams are made on

My subconscious is a strange place.  I don't know if everyone does this, or it's just me, but I dream in narrative.  Several times I've woken in the night lunging for a pen before I lose whatever gem of a plot has just spooled before my mind's eye.  Occasionally it still holds up the next morning.  Once I got a half-decent opening scene for a thriller and on another maddening occasion I awoke knowing I'd just imagined an entire episode of Spooks.  It had been rather exciting (which perhaps should have alerted me to the fact that I was dreaming) but I couldn't remember anything else about it.

Now it seems the shadowy (and probably very dusty) recesses of what passes for my mind are dwelling on the world of e-books.  When I woke at half past three this morning I had been dreaming of reading an article on e-books.  There were two points that struck me:

  1. Any woman seen with an e-reader in public at the moment will be assumed to be reading porn.
  2. What are the long-term implications for charity shops?  Second-hand bookshops, too, although those seem to be like hen's teeth round my way.  If e-books come to dominate the market, donations to charity shops will dwindle.  I still haven't got an e-reader (hypocrite! I hear you cry) but I imagine that once you've read a book you don't want to read again it's just deleted.  If it was a paper book (I was going to write 'proper book', but that's surely opening up a can of worms best left undisturbed by an indie author) it would, I hope, end up being passed on rather than binned.  I don't have any statistics, but I should think books bring in a steady revenue for charities.  Even people who actively avoid manically over-familiar persons in aggressively bright tabards may end up handing over a fair bit of cash to charity in their thirst for reading matter.  What happens when they no longer have a reason to cross the threshold for a browse?

I was so struck by these points that, in my dream, I began to read the article aloud to my mother.  As is the way of dreams, at this point the article became one about market gardening, written phonetically in an obscure Scottish dialect, and as such became irrelevant to this post.

I'm still worried about what reading a Kindle on the train would do for my street cred, though.


Tuesday 17 July 2012

Heyer today...

When you find a writing style that works for you, it's very tempting to stick with it.  That's fair enough.  Developing a distinctive voice is part of maturing as a writer.  And perhaps one day your book will be published and you start to think about what comes next.  The question then is whether you've got more than one book in you.  Maybe you have, maybe you haven't.  But what if your readers just want the same book over and over again?

At the moment I am trying to read my way through my bookcase overflow pile, mainly for health and safety reasons as it's taller than I am.  I'm being very strict.  Once I've read a book it goes to charity, unless I have a compelling reason to keep it (i.e. it's written by Adam Hall, my hero - and yes, I'm aware that he might not be the obvious inspiration to a romance writer, but nevertheless, he was the guv'nor).  The last book but three was a Georgette Heyer.  I've read a fair few of her books over the years and time and again the same characters crop up: the sensible heroine, usually grey-eyed and on the verge of being left on the shelf; the semi-rakish hero, rich, titled and needing to be taken down a peg or two; the daffy ingenue; the young rascal; the bitchy socialite; the scheming in-law.  I need to be more scientific and read them in publication order, because I can't yet tell if she was writing to a formula or if she just got trapped by her own popularity.

I'm not necessarily complaining that the books sometimes seem a little formulaic.  The best ones are very good indeed and had me willing the hero and heroine to get together (I loved Sylvester).  They're well-written and entertaining, with an extensive lexicon of Regency slang (ever been "bosky as a wheelbarrow"?), and sometimes it's nice to know what you're getting.  But it's interesting all the same.  A little further down the now-teetering overflow pile is one of Heyer's crime novels.  I'm looking forward to seeing how she tackled that genre.

I have a bet with myself that the heroine will have grey eyes.

Monday 16 July 2012

Romance: the proof is in the reading

Writing a romance should be easy.  You take a man and a woman, throw in a few complications, shake it about a bit et voila!  Only I don't think it works like that.

I've read books that have made me swoon.  I've read a fair few more that have led me to consider lobbying for book-throwing to be considered an Olympic sport.  In almost every case, the problem was the same.  The protagonists were annoying.  In the far off days when I made a point of finishing every book I started, Wuthering Heights nearly brought on apoplexy.  Now I recognise that it is regarded as a classic, but Cathy and Heathcliffe irritated me beyond endurance (I was nineteen at the time, an age when I would have expected star-crossed lovers to appeal).  On the other hand, I've rooted all the way through an Alistair MacLean thriller for the hero to get the girl and had my heartstrings well and truly yanked when she didn't make it to the final page in one piece.

So is it just a matter of taste in the reader or is there something more to it?  What makes one pairing iconic and another moronic?

Anybody want to share their favourite couples here?

Thursday 12 July 2012

A spell of casting

These days, if you ask a writer whether they've given any thought to the casting of a film or TV adaptation of their book and they say no, they're probably lying.

I've played the game with Looking for Buttons, bouncing various actors off friends (not literally, I must add, however much my friends would wish it otherwise).  And no, I'm not going to tell you who plays who.  But in my head the characters are real.  They don't look or sound like anyone else.

With the Difficult Second Novel, things are a little different.  Being bogged down with the plot, I've tried various ways of getting back on track.  One of these has been reworking the text as a script for radio or film.  It helps a little, in as much as adaptations have to leave a lot out so I have to cut to the bare bones of the story.  In theory this means I should have a clearer idea of which sub-plots are complicating matters needlessly.  In practice I'm still a little confused, but at least I know why.

The casting was proving problematic when I tried to replay these scripts in my head.  No-one seemed quite right.  Then the other night I had a minor revelation.  The DSN is set round about 1978 so (insert fanfare here) I need to cast it as it would have been done in 1978.

So I've done a preliminary casting (all those hours spent watching 1970s anthology box sets have not been wasted) and now when I work through the early parts of the book the pictures in my head have that slightly washed out look of seventies film.  It's not like Life On Mars.  This is a proper seventies production, possibly preceded by the Thames TV logo.  The soundtrack relies perhaps a little too much on wah-wah guitar and a hyperactive brass section.  The cast all have iffy hairstyles and there is a lot of brown floral wallpaper.  It is, in short, my idea of heaven and I can't wait to watch it.

So now all I've got to do is get on and write the damn thing.  And then build a time machine.

Wednesday 11 July 2012

The pros and cons of sticking with what you know

I have a confession to make: I haven't actually written anything new since last year.  I'd lost confidence and had pretty much decided to call it a day.  However, the same compulsion that has been known to find me scribbling by torchlight at three in the morning led me to have one last try.  I'd put Looking for Buttons on Amazon as a Kindle e-book and if no-one bought it, that would be the end of my writing career.  To my delighted surprise, people are buying it.  (Thank you!)

And suddenly I've started writing again.  There's this blog and random appearances on Twitter as looking4buttons, and then, very late last night, I dug out part of the Difficult Second Novel.  I read it with a little difficulty, as the only reason the laptop was still on was that I'd been lying in the dark to catch up with the fabulously titled Before the Screaming Begins on BBC iPlayer and hadn't got my glasses on.  Even so, as I squinted at the screen, I realised it wasn't as bad as I'd thought.  It was written so long ago I was coming to it fresh and I found I wanted to know what happens next (it would help considerably if I've got to write it).  Better still, the narrator's voice was completely distinct from Looking for Buttons's Kate Harper.  The book seems to be a runner after all.

Which puts me in a dilemma.  Should I dust off the first ten chapters of the Difficult Second Novel and try to produce the rest of the book, or should I keep it on the back burner and carry on with the Difficult Third Novel, currently standing at a chapter and a half?  The DTN is probably going to end up falling broadly into the romance genre, meaning I could pitch it to the Looking for Buttons audience, hopefully resulting in a book that sells.  The DSN, however, is a thriller set in the 1970s, requiring a different pseudonym and a lot of research (watching re-runs of The Professionals is research, really it is, not an obsession at all, no).

I need to make a decision and soon.  Inside my head I can hear Gladys Knight and the Pips singing Come Back And Finish What You Started.  I can't decide if that's a sign that I need to take up the Difficult Second Novel once more or if my subconscious is desperate to hear a bit of Motown.

Tuesday 10 July 2012

Keeping reality at bay

One of the joys of fiction is that it can transport you utterly to another place, another time, even inside the mind of another person.  However, the alchemy is a fragile process and it doesn't take much to shatter it.  Sometimes all it takes is a tiny reminder of the outside world.

The means of communication used by the characters in Looking for Buttons may strike some readers as a little behind the times: they text and e-mail and sometimes (heaven forfend!) actually talk to each other.  No-one tweets or posts status updates to Facebook.  This was deliberate.  It is not just that I am a dinosaur (an eleanorbrontesaurus, perhaps).  As I wrote, I was aware that techonology moves on apace and using the wrong gadget would date it far more than the actions of the characters.  (One of my guinea pigs was quick to point out that at one point Kate Harper, the narrator, was watching a video rather than a DVD.  I didn't even consider bringing Blu-Ray into it.)  Even so, I'd far rather that someone thought I was a little old-fashioned than be jolted out of the book completely by something being so odd that it made them question the workings of the world within the book.

And what prompted this post?  It wasn't even a book I've read.  No, it's the behemoth that is Fifty Shade of Grey (again).  And the thought that is going to prevent me ever being able to buy into the story, should I read it, is this:

What does Christian Grey's cleaner think of it all?  Or does he dust his dungeon himself?

It never does to have a practical nature when dealing with escapist fiction.

Sunday 8 July 2012

Portrait of the author

When I was getting ready to publish Looking for Buttons (yes, she's going on about that again), one of the many gems of wisdom from the fabulous indie author Lexi Revellian was that I needed an author page on Amazon.  With a photo.

Ah.

I don't do photos.  Not in a diva-ish, sunglasses on, hand-over-the-lens sort of manner.  More in an oh-sorry-did-I-just-break-your-camera-by-looking-at-it? way.  A few (okay, more than a few) years back, I had vague hopes that eventually I might mature into Eleanor Bron-esque elegance.  All I've managed is brontosaurus.

But in this image-conscious world the look is all, and I can't possibly go on blogging facelessly.  I'm not going to do all the work for you, though.  I'll give you a thumbnail sketch and your imagination can fill in the rest.  This is what I look like:

The secret love child of Nana Mouskouri and Harry Palmer.

Just something I lashed up

Today I'm going to write about Fifty Shades of Grey.  I haven't read it, but everyone else seems to have an opinion so I'd better jump onto the bandwagon while it's in town.

So here's my take on the female population's sudden desire to read about being tied down while a capable man does all manner of things to them:

For the past however many years, women have been trying to Have It All.  They're knackered.  It's no wonder their ultimate fantasy is to lie down while someone else does all the work.

Monday 2 July 2012

If the shoe fits...

I spent Saturday morning shopping in Cloisterham.  (Not the cathedral city Dickens called by that name.  Another one.)  Proper shopping, not window shopping, because this time I had a decent excuse.  The recent inclement weather revealed that I had worn a hole in the sole of my plimsoll, which became irredeemably manky soon afterwards.  And so off I went on my mission to buy new plimsolls.  I came back with caramel leather high heels with ribbon ties.

And this set me thinking about the link between shoes and fairy tales.  There is something about a rack of right-footed shoes that compels me to try them on.  Perhaps on some level their cry to be reunited with their left-footed partner draws me close.  Or perhaps it's just that I've no self-control.  But there is something very Cinderella about shoe shops.  The solitary shoe looking for its other half.  The promise of transformation into someone else.  The chance to swap everydayness for impossible glamour.  The potential for disaster (in the form of a badly twisted ankle, rather than discovery by the wicked stepmother).  The potential to attract Prince Charming.

Do shoe shops set out deliberately to tap into this folk memory or is it just a coincidence that, for so many women, new shoes mean a new you?

So now I have my beribboned heels, the accoutrements of a glamorous author (you know I wasn't going to manage a whole post without plugging the book).  All I've got to do now is walk the walk.

And to do that without falling over I really must buy some new plimsolls...