This passes for a thought process, apparently

I was going to write something terribly interesting (or perhaps merely terrible) about writing and technology but that can wait.  I'm going to rave about someone else's book instead.

There are many ways I choose what to read, ranging from browsing idly to discovering something by an author whose work I've enjoyed before to a sudden craving for an old favourite.  And then there's the method which is more me than any other: going off at a tangent.

In the past this has led to some fantastic finds, particiularly when I've applied the priniciple to music (an interest in David Bowie's more obscure work leading to Iggy Pop singing Belgian jazz, for example).  The book I'm reading now is one I came across originally as part of a gift set when I was a student, which I suppose comes under idle browsing because I liked the look of the set but couldn't get to the blurb.  And it's an old favourite, establishing itself as such on first reading as one of the books I wish I'd written (although to have done so I'd have to been a) much older and b) deceased by now, which would make this blog marginally more interesting).  But I've come back to it through a classic piece of tangentery.  I shall take you through it in stages so you can tell if you too choose books by this method.

1. Over the Christmas holiday, the 1983 film Wargames was on TV.  I knew I'd loved it as a kid but couldn't remember enough about it to know why.  About ninety minutes in, John Wood turned up and I realised that was why, he'd made a huge impression on me when I was about nine.

2. So after the film I tried to think what else I'd seen him in, which meant a browse on the Internet Movie Database, very useful for settling 'oh, it's whatersname from thingy, oh you know, no, not her, you fool' arguments in our house.

3. And I saw that in the 1960s he'd been in an adaptation of Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop, playing the poet Richard Cadogan.

4. Richard Cadogan is one of my Fictional Men For Whom I Have A Soft Spot.

5. John Wood would have been excellent in the role.

6. The series does not seem available to watch now.

7. Therefore I am rereading The Moving Toyshop and it is every bit as good as I remembered - and it's been a while since I read it so a lot of it is coming to me almost as new and it is a huge treat.

So, in a roundabout way that is no kind of useful review at all, I recommend that you try Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen novels, solving Oxford crimes decades before Inspector Morse while wearing an extraordinary hat.  Except Swan Song because that wasn't as good as the others.

Which brings me back, in a tortuously roundabout way, to my original question.  How do you choose your books?  Do tell...

Pottering on

I feel sorry for J.K. Rowling.

Writing a book is hard.  It takes time and effort and a lot of emotional investment.  I should think every author worries if anyone will want to read their book, let alone actually like it.  Now imagine the pressure of being so famous and so successful.  Either people will be desperate to read your book and vocal in their disappointment if it doesn't meet their impossibly high expectations, or they'll be desperate for you to be seen to fail just because you're so famous and so successful.

There is no way Rowling will get an unbiased review.  Every reader who has heard of Rowling or of Harry Potter will come to The Casual Vacancy with some sort of agenda.  So, yes, I feel sorry for a very successful author.

There's a moral here for us minnows: be careful what you wish for.

Literary networking the Lucie Parish way

One of my biggest regrets about my undergraduate life (apart from studying a subject I didn't much care for in the deluded hope that it would improve my employment prospects, says she, laughing hollowly) was that I avoided Jilly Cooper.

I was shopping with a friend one Saturday.  We drifted into W.H. Smith.  There was Jilly Cooper, PR lady at her side, sitting at a table piled high with copies of her latest novel.  My friend, a great fan, was very excited and decided to get a signed book for her mum's birthday present.  At the time, I had never read any of her novels (this was at the peak of my Alistair MacLean phase).  I felt so ashamed at the thought of coming face to face with a very famous author and admitting I'd never even read so much as a blurb that I bolted out of the shop and lurked outside until my friend reappeared, clutching her trophy.

Since then I've read and enjoyed Mrs Cooper's books (I can't call her Jilly, that would be presumptous, given my behaviour).  Flatteringly, but ludicrously, Looking for Buttons has been compared to her early novels.  Yesterday I read an interview with her in the Times (to which I can't link as it's a subscription-only site) in which she championed character and good writing and generally came across as a thoroughly good egg.  I've been kicking myself about the W.H. Smith incident ever since.

Some years later, I saw Joanna Trollope sitting alone at a signing in my local Waterstone's.  I'd read and enjoyed her books.  I was too skint to buy one and too shy to approach her to say I loved her work, so I just scuttled off instead.

I am so very, very bad at treating published authors as human beings.  It's just as well that Looking for Buttons is only available as an e-book.  If I had a signing I'd be too embarrassed to turn up.




[This weekend, it's a Bank Holiday Bonanza!  Get Looking for Buttons FREE from Amazon from Saturday 25th to Monday 27th August!  It's the last giveaway I'll be holding for a while so make the most of it.]

Facing up to the publicity game

Life gets slightly weird when you publish a book.  Today I was invited to make a guest appearance on a website to promote Looking for Buttons.  Fabulous.  Except I need to provide an author photo.

Ah.

As I've said before, I'm not photogenic.  It's been over a year since I last had my picture taken, unawares, and when I saw it posted on Facebook I wailed about my Cold War-era Eastern Bloc shotputter's arms and pleaded for it to be taken down.  I can only think of one set of recent(ish) photos I can bear to look at, and then I was wearing a furry lion suit to entertain small children at my local library.

I started to wonder when this image-hungry world started to drag an author's mugshot into prominence.   Surely it's a modern phenomenon.  If I looked along my bookcase (or in fact gingerly peered at the teetering overflow pile in front of it, currently nearing six feet high), surely I would find faceless authors.

A random selection:  Terry Pratchett - photo inside cover.  John Buchan - photo on back cover.  Ngaio Marsh - photo on back cover.  Adam Hall - photo on inside flap of dustjacket.  Mervyn Peake - wonderful artist, self-portraits.  OK, maybe it's a twentieth century phenomenon.  Go back further.  Charlotte Bronte - painting by her brother.  Charles Dickens - used to be on a banknote.   Further still.  Christopher Marlowe - the Corpus Christi portait, might be him, might not, great image anyhow so who cares?  I can put a face to almost every author in my collection.  People like to know who they're reading.  I'm no different, so I really can't deny that an author photo is going to become necessary at some point.

But will anybody accept a lion who writes romantic comedies?

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.

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.

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.