Radio Ga Ga

Writing's a funny pastime.  You'd think all types (if you'll forgive the pun) of story would be the same, but it doesn't work like that.  At least, it doesn't for me.  Some come out as prose, others don't want to work that way and insist on attempting to be drama, and some are amenable enough to let me try them out in different ways.

A confession: I have had a lifelong love affair with the spoken word.  As a child I listened to my favourite stories over and over again on LP and cassette (oh, just google them, young people, I'm not going to digress now).  I spent teenage illnesses in bed listening to Journey Into Space (a repeat, I hasten to add - I'm not quite that old).  And had BBC Radio 7 (now Radio 4 Extra) not launched when it did, I'd have finished my thesis a year earlier instead of losing hours pretending to study simulation results while listening agog to Fatherland and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, headphones clamped over my unkempt studenty hair.  Which is why, despite its stubborn refusal to turn into anything coherent, I have persisted with the Difficult Second Novel.  It may not be working as a book, went my reasoning, but perhaps it would work for radio.  Perhaps the problem was that I was trying to tell the story in the wrong way.

So I'd poke and I'd prod and I'd try to work out the casting and play it in my head and still the damn thing wouldn't come.  And then last night I pulled at the threads again after a gap of nearly a year, expecting the knots to bite harder, becoming more intractable and impossible to resolve than ever, only this time I tugged from a slightly different angle and suddenly there I was, standing in a windswept garden near midnight (I'm not being poetical, I was out in all that rotten weather) with an armful of yarn that needs knitting into a workable narrative (yeah, that was the poetic bit).  And I think it's going to be a novel after all, not a radio play.

Which is a Good Thing, of course, but I've been so set on hearing this one rather than reading it that I'll have to get it published, just so I can have it as an audiobook.  Can I have Anton Lesser reading it, please?

Probably nothing sinister

I thought that once the book was out there that would be it.  Looking for Buttons is finished, there is nothing more for me to glean.

Then this evening I realised that Fergus is left-handed.  I can't understand why I hadn't noticed before.  This is bugging me.

Honestly, you think you know someone so well and then you find they've been holding out on you...

[Adding the labels to this post, as I clicked on 'fictional characters' I distinctly heard a Scottish voice shout, "Oi!"  I think this is the point where I have a strong cup of tea and a little lie down.]

Turning back at the last minute

I stopped writing a while ago.  Nothing was coming together and sales of Looking for Buttons have not been particularly encouraging (yes, I know admitting this is not good PR but I am nothing if not a realist) so I was pretty much ready to call it a day.

And then today, I wrote a poem.  It was a peculiar experience.  Past attempts at poetry have been jolly fripperies, pastiches of childhood favourites.  I did go through the adolescent angst-poet phase twenty years ago, but that - I hope - left no evidence to condemn me.  But today was something else entirely.  I wasn't trying to do anything writerly, in fact it was as crushingly mundane as brushing my teeth prior to getting one of them filled (I have a kamikaze wisdom tooth).  And there, without warning, was the poem, nebulous at first but clearer by the second, like wiping grime from a railway carriage window with the hem of my sleeve to catch a fleeting glimpse of something true.  It wasn't writing, it was more the process of remembering something I didn't know I knew.

I'm not going to publish the poem here, not now.  I need to live with it for a while and I suspect it might be more personal than I realise.  Showing it to other people might be like flashing my knickers at the Archbishop of Canterbury: perfectly feasible in this day and age but not terribly wise.  But it seems that although I've given up writing, my subconscious hasn't.

And so on I plod...

Why I'm choosing to self-censor

When I started writing Looking for Buttons seven years ago (I know, I know), it was just a throwaway line, one that would mean little to anyone not growing up in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s.

When I published the Kindle e-book on Amazon in June, it was still just a throwaway line that would mean little to anyone not growing up in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s.

Then the Jimmy Savile scandal broke and suddenly a fleeting reference to Jim'll Fix It no longer seemed right for a lighthearted book meant to entertain.

I've edited the text and uploaded the amended version to Amazon this evening (would have done it sooner but life was a bit medical for a while).  I think Amazon will let those who have a copy download the updated version; not having a Kindle myself I'm not a hundred per cent sure on this.  Either way, I'll be having another free download day before long, which I'll flag up here, and anyone who wants the new version can get it then.

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.

Making a guest appearance

Yes, I know I haven't updated for weeks.  While my writing persona spends her days wearing impractical shoes and reclining on a chaise longue, dictating the latest page-turner to a dapper and handsome secretary clad in an immaculate tweed suit, the rest of me has to deal with day-to-day crises.  Suffice it to say that several hit at once, resulting in no time or inclination to use a computer.

Anyway, this is just a quick update before I return to the World of Worry.  The lovely Jane Wenham-Jones was kind enough to invite me to contribute to the Guest Room of her Wannabe A Writer? website.  You can read my bit here.

Just because you think they're out to get you...

As Lexi Revellian wrote recently, Writer's Angst is a well-documented complaint.  I've moved up a gear.  I have Writer's Paranoia.

It's been coming on for a while.  I had a week where Looking for Buttons sold pretty well.  Then I had a week with no sales at all.  I panicked and held a three-day free promotion over the Bank Holiday weekend, which saw it climb to number 7 in Amazon's UK humour chart and number 29 (I think) in their US humor chart.  I waited, with the obligatory clichéd bated breath, to see how this would affect sales.

It didn't.  Nothing happened for a few days, then today, glory be, I had a five star review on Amazon UK (thank you, whoever you are!) and sold a respectable handful of copies.  When I checked a little later (compulsive checking of ranking and sales figures is an early symptom of Writer's Paranoia), two of these had been returned for a refund.

Well, that was it.  Crushed does not even begin to describe it.  While the calm-eyed scientist part of me was pointing out that it may not be that they actively disliked it, it may even have been an inadvertent multiple purchase caused by wobbly fingers, and anyway, does it really matter, the rest of me, the stressed majority that is already gibbering because I start a new job next week, is obsessing over those two returns.  Did they buy the book expecting haberdashery tips?  Fifty Shades-esque squelchiness?  Did they hate the prose?  The characters?  The plot?

I've taken some deep breaths and listened to my inner dispassionate scientist.  Sometimes you buy something and it's not what you expect so you return it.  I'm sure M&S don't weep because I've returned a jacket that makes me look like I'm wearing a cardboard box underneath it.  Why should I react any differently when someone returns my book?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to check my sale figures again...