Macmillan New Writers

Update

2012-01-30T22:17:00.008Z

I thought I would have a quick catch-up post on recent news.

First, the new Mammoth Book of Best British Crime (Best British Mysteries in the US version) is now out, featuring my short story A Fair Deal. It also has stories by Val McDermid, Peter James, RJ Ellory, Reginald Hill, Zoe Sharp, Simon Brett, Martin Edwards and (of course) a certain Brian McGilloway.

I recently saw the cover of the French edition of The Herring Seller’s Apprentice. I love the design and I think that the title is inspired - I wish I’d come up with that myself. It’s out this autumn (Sonatine Editions).

Wherever writers gather (pubs and bars usually) there is a general agreement that reviews in national dailies are becoming rarer and that [insert your genre here] is especially neglected. I was delighted therefore to see a review in the Daily Mail for Herring on the Nile. Coming some months after publication meant it was an added bonus.

And finally I have started to tweet under the alias of @lenctyler. (There’s already an @lctyler and @lentyler out there.) I have to admit I’ve been slightly sceptical of the value of Twitter, but it’s fun. I already have two followers - not a world record exactly, but it’s early days yet. And I’ve had my first reply to a tweet (thanks, Aliya!) I’m also following some interesting tweeters, including Aliya and Eliza - and check out Middle Class Nightmare if you haven’t heard of it. Which other MNWers are tweeting by the way?

Exerpt from The Birds, the Bees and Other Secrets

2012-01-23T21:12:00.005Z

It's really hard choosing an exerpt that sums up the spirit of a novel as well as giving a taster, but in the end, I decided on this one. The novel tells the story of Cass, growing up in a chaotic household under the dubious control of her eccentric mother. As her mother lies dying, the two of them reminisce about Cass's childhood. I chose this passage because it sums up my own mother, to whom the novel is dedicated. The primrose story is entirely true. I owe the cowpat idea to my own sons.

“We did have fun, didn’t we?” It’s as though she is reading my thoughts. “Do you remember the time I sent a note to school and we went picking primroses?”
“Oh yes!”
A blue and white spring day, a dapple of bright new leaves, and the primroses like stars in the chalky soil, their faces turned to the sun. We picked the slender pink stems, sniffing the perfume of the flowers, and filled a basket with them, then sat on our coats on the ground (“Don’t sit on the wet grass; you’ll get piles.” “Piles of what?” “Never you mind.”) to eat our picnic lunch of crisp rolls and ham and apples. It never occurred to me at the time to question what we were doing. My mother always reasoned that we were her children, and if she wanted us out of school for a day, then that was her right.
“What did you say in the note?”
“What note?”
“The note you wrote to the school on the primrose day.”
“I forget.” Her eyes start wandering again, then return with a snap. “On yes! I said you had your period!”
“Mum!” I was ten years old at the time, my chest as flat as a board, my body smooth and hairless as a plum.
“Well what did you expect me to say?” And of course, as usual, there is no answer to that.
“And Deirdre and the cowpat. Do you remember that?”
Blowing up cowpats with Lucas and his friends in the field behind our house, choosing a nice ripe one (“crisp on the top, with a squidgy middle,” advised Lucas, the expert); our excitement, watching the smouldering firework, waiting for the explosion; and the sheer joy when a particularly messy one erupted in a fountain of green sludge, splattering the blonde ringlets and nice clean frock of prissy Deirdre from next door. Oh, Deirdre! If you could see yourself! We rolled in the grass, kicking our heels, convulsed with mirth, while Deirdre, howling and outraged, ran home to tell her mummy what bad, bad children we all were.
“What’ll your mum say?” One of Lucas’s friends asked anxiously.
“Oh, Mum’ll laugh.”
Mum laughed. She tried to tell us off, but was so proud of the inventiveness of Lucas, and so entertained at the fate of prissy Deirdre, that she failed utterly. But she promised Deirdre's mother that we would all be “dealt with.”
“Whatever that means,” said Mum, dishing out chocolate biscuits and orange juice. “Poor child. She doesn’t stand a chance, with a mother like that. But I suppose she had it coming to her.”

Why my Heart Belongs to Samwise Gamgee

2012-01-19T10:37:00.001Z

Everyone knows that the true hero of Lord of the Rings is Samwise Gamgee, right? Frodo can be such a wet blanket, slouching around Mordor complaining that he can no longer remember the taste of strawberries. Sam is a hero for even putting up with him. Here's my thinking on it:

1. Frodo has an adventurous nature at the beginning of the trilogy, which is unusual for a hobbit. Samwise does not have an adventurous nature, but he goes with Frodo anyway, thereby already doing something he doesn't want to do. This trend then continues throughout the novel. Admittedly, Sam wanted to see the elves. But once he's seen an elf he still agrees to go to Mordor when he could just go home and marry Rosie Cotton. But no - off to Mordor. Bleuch.

2. And Frodo doesn't even want him to go to Mordor, which makes it even braver. Samwise nearly drowns trying to persuade Frodo to take him along. And Frodo looks in two minds about rescuing Sam, for which I can never forgive him. Horrible hobbit.

3. Sam knows Gollum is bad news and puts up with Frodo doubting him and eventually telling him to get lost. Then Sam single-handedly takes on the scariest evil creature of all Middle Earth to save Frodo, even though Frodo told him to nick off.

4. At this point Sam carries the ring himself and at no point does he moan about not being able to remember the taste of strawberries.

5. And when Frodo gives up like the little hairy nerk he is, Sam carries Frodo up the slopes of Mount Doom. Even though he's let Frodo eat all the lembas bread and drink all the water. So he's doing it without the aid of sustenance. And he carried the ring earlier too. Did I mention that?

6. So at Mount Doom Frodo decides to keep the ring. And Sam doesn't just push him in the lava and go home himself. I know I would have.

7. To top it all, after the whole thing is over, Frodo diminishes into the West with the elves for an easy eternity, while Sam stays, has kids, becomes Mayor for a seven consecutive seven year terms, then buries his beloved Rosie and only then takes a boat to the West. And I bet throughout that time he kept his garden beautifully.

Apparently Tolkien recognised that Samwise was the true hero of the novel, and in a private letter compared Sam to the English soldier during World War One, working so hard, so thanklessly, for those that he considers to be his betters. Tolkien saw this self-effacing bravery as the best characteristic of humanity.

For me, Samwise is the best thing about the Lord of the Ringstrilogy. Possibly this is because I do find Frodo to be a bit on the annoying side. I don't think I'm alone in this, am I?

Who is your ultimate literary hero?

Former MNW editor Will Atkins has sold a nonfiction title.

2012-01-17T15:23:00.005Z

I just saw this:

Faber has acquired a non-fiction title by former Pan Macmillan editorial director Will Atkins called Moor Land: The Landscape that Makes Britain.

Editorial director Lee Brackstone bought world rights in the title through Kirsty Mclachlan at David Godwin Associates, with plans to publish in 2014.

Follow the above link for more.

Congrats to Will.

Testament - changing history

2012-01-09T08:58:00.003Z

As last-but-one up in the post-an-excerpt list, I've been a bit dilatory about posting a piece from Testament. This is because I've found it so difficult to try and identify a passage which adequately reflects the book.

Finally, I've come to the conclusion that the best place to start must be at the beginning. So, I give you the opening paragraphs of Testament.

It was a small, almost insignificant fire, the smouldering consequences of wiring overdue for replacement a decade earlier, an irritating addition to the maintenance team's job-list rather than a major item of college news. But when the carpenters came to remove a small section of charred oak panelling they were confronted by an image that would change the history of Kineton and Dacre College.

There, on the newly-uncovered patch of wall behind the Tudor panelwork, a soot-blackened face stared ut, its mouth agape. And in that gaping mouth, a tiny figure writhed: an infant child, its arms outstretched.

The face belongs to a fourteenth century wall painting that has been hidden for centuries, a painting that raises all sorts of questions about the two very different men who founded and built the college. And the image does 'change the history of the college'. In the novel the real story of Kineton and Dacre College's foundation is finally uncovered and, as a consequence, its history going forward is transformed.

It was that notion - that history can change the future - that really intrigued me when I was writing the book. What started off as a story set solidly in the fourteenth century morphed, as I wrote, into a split time narrative because I wanted to look at the past from the point of view of the present and to show that, however much we think we've uncovered what happened, we can never really know the full truth because we weren't there.

That's what I love about historical novels - they let you go there.

She-writes Interview with Faye Booth

2012-01-08T12:58:00.001Z

A quickie - this is a nice little interview from Fiona Robyn by Macmillan New writer Faye Booth on writing real people in historical fiction. Why not pop over for a look. http://www.shewrites.com/profiles/blogs/fact-and-fiction-by-faye-l-booth

A Reluctant Betrothal - The Last Free City

2011-12-29T07:37:00.000Z

My latest novel, The Last Free City, returns us to the political intrigues and grand machinations of The Dog of the North. Such schemes invariably play out at the level of individual relationships. In the excerpt below, the perennially dissatisfied second son Malvazan arrives at the day of his betrothal in a less than constructive frame of mind...

Malvazan, who hadbeen watching from a place of concealment on the upstairs landing, felt a pangrun through him. Poor Sanoutë, he hadnever seen her so pale or subdued. Couldhe really reject her in front of all the houses of the Specchio? She had wanted to see him, it seemed. No doubt he could contrive a brief meeting,and Hissen take any bad luck!

He slipped down thestairs, whispered a message to one of the under-servants and made his way tothe kitchen garden, a place so lacking in glamour as to be wholly deserted onthis most auspicious of days. There heset himself to wait among the cabbages and tomatoes until Sanoutë shouldappear.

A caterpillar caughthis eye, munching its way determinedly through a thick leaf. What were the goals of such a creature, hewondered. It was probably absurd toimagine it having goals at all. And yet,a transformation awaited it, far beyond anything it could conceive. It need do nothing to achieve suchtranscendence: simply keep chewing away at its leaf. With a snort of sardonic amusement he thoughtof Dravadan, one day to be elevated to the head of the house—the DignifiedDravadan—with a beautiful and well-bred wife, heirs to follow. And like the caterpillar, he had done nothingto merit his elevation, and probably lacked the wit fully to understand it. He pursed his lips, lifted the caterpillarfrom its leaf: it squirmed, looked around to find meaning for its fate. Malvazan dropped it on the ground and crushedit under his boot. Would that Dravadancould be dealt with so easily.

From behind him camea soft voice. “You wanted to see me?”

Malvazanturned. Sanoutë’s hair was curled in anelaborate confection, swept back off her face on one side, draping across hereye on the other.

“I was upstairs,” hesaid. “I heard you looking for me, andthought to oblige you.”

For a brief secondher face twitched into a smile. “Youcannot imagine how long I have yearned for this day. But you know that.”

He reached out, puta hand on her arm. “Then why are you nothappy?”

Her blue eyes werelarge and moist. “Because you have notyearned for it. You are accepting mebecause your father told you to.”

“Do you think Ilisten to him any more? I am my ownman.”

She pushed ahair back out of her eye. “They say youkilled someone,” she said, looking away.

Malvazanshrugged. “You make it sound sosordid. It was a duel, a question ofhonour. It is regrettable that Flarijodied, but that is the risk of the duel. Quietus Est, as they say.”

There was a catch inher voice. “Malvazan, I remember us aschildren. Once we went on a picnic toSang Saraille, do you remember? There were fish in the stream, and it seemed wesat and watched them all afternoon.”

Malvazannodded. “I remember,” he said.

“That was four yearsago, Malvazan, four years. It seems asif it was another lifetime. Now you aretalking about killing someone as if it was nothing.”

“It is somethingthat men do,” he said. “I was a childthen; I am a man now.”

She turned andwalked slowly towards the wall marking the edge of the garden. “When we were children, everyone knew that wewould be betrothed. Neither of us seemedto mind.”

“No,” saidMalvazan. “Of course not.”

“But we weredifferent people: children. Yet we arebound by those conversations.”

Malvazan followedher, put a hand on her shoulder and turned her to face him. “Are you saying you no longer want us tomarry?”

Her eyes welled withtears. “Don’t you understand anything!”she sobbed. “It is what I want. It what I have always wanted! It is you who have changed, from the dearsweet boy who sat by the stream with me; changed into a man who fights duels,who proposes to Monichoë. I do not knowyou, Malvazan: you who were my dearest friend!”

“Sanoutë—”

“This is the day setfor our betrothal, Malvazan.” Her voicedropped to a whisper. “Can you say tome, from your heart, that you would marry me above all other women in theworld?”

Malvazan looked intoher face. The clear answer to thequestion was ‘no’, but the question she should have asked: Will you put aside any reservations you have, and marry me nonetheless,was more difficult to answer. But an answerwas needed, and immediately. Cursinghimself for his weakness and vacillation, he said: “Yes.”

He kissed her on thecheek, turned and walked from the garden with a heavy step, never looking backonce at the woman he left behind him.

A paragraph (or two) - Herring in the Library

2011-12-16T09:36:00.007Z

Dee has provided us with an introduction to one of her less sympathetic characters. I thought, in view of the topicality of all matters financial, I would give you a banker. Sir Robert “Shagger” Muntham is regrettably unavailable for future novels, but he manages to annoy a number of people before being found strangled in his own locked study - thus giving Ethelred and Elsie a chance to investigate a seemingly impossible murder.

Here is Sir Robert making his entrance in all senses of the word:
　
It must have been almost three months before that when I had run into Rob Muntham coming out of the village post office. I had literally bumped into a tall, slightly stooped, grey-haired figure, who was attempting to enter as I attempted to leave. I was just framing a muttered apology when the man addressed me.
“Ethelred?” he said.
I must have looked blank because he repeated himself.
“Ethelred Tressider, isn’t it? You don’t recognise me, do you? I’m Robert Muntham.”
“Rob Muntham?” I said. I had a horrible feeling that I had sounded as though I was correcting him on the subject of his own name, but at university he had never been called “Robert” – he had been “Rob” or, more usually, “Shagger”. The new, fuller version of his name seemed to come with the gravitas that he had acquired from somewhere during the thirty-odd years since I had last seen him. And, thinking about it, he had also sobered up a bit since that last occasion, standing in the middle of the quad singing a song apparently addressed to a Zulu warrior.
He gave me a tight-lipped smile in response to my mode of address. “These days I am, for my sins, Sir Robert Muntham.”
“Ah, yes,” I said. “Congratulations. I read about it in the College magazine.”
“For services to banking,” he added.
“Ah, yes,” I said again. I wondered if he had really been given a knighthood for his sins. It seemed unlikely, even for a banker. Still, Sir Robert Muntham …
It’s strange how some of your contemporaries show wholly illusory promise, while others emerge unreasonably and gloriously triumphant. Shagger Muntham was unquestionably in the latter category. He captained the College rugby team and had narrowly missed a boxing Blue. His capacity for beer qualified him as some sort of minor alcoholic deity. He knew all of the words to “Eskimo Nell”. These things were held, in the College, to be much to his credit. On the other hand, even his closest friends never claimed to know what subject he was reading. He was the only person I know who was wildly congratulated on achieving a Third Class degree. The party lasted several days and ended with him standing in the quad .... no, I think I’ve mentioned that already.
Then, for while, we heard nothing of him at all. Only later did his apotheosis become apparent. He had descended on the City when the main academic requirements were a pair of red braces and brash confidence. One he had already. The other he had bought, presumably, at a tailor’s in Docklands. As time went by, we sometimes caught a brief mention of him in the national press. The College newsletter increasingly called upon him for short articles on life after university or to encourage us to give generously to some appeal for a new boathouse or scholarships for overseas students – each successive accompanying photograph showed him slightly plumper, slightly greyer, distinctly more pleased with himself. The articles on life after university at least showed no false modesty. If the Queen had been hoping to surprise Shagger, she would have needed to give him a lot more than a knighthood.

‘Tyler juggles characters, story, wit and clever one-liners with perfect balance’ THE TIMES

An important paragraph - The Lady's Slipper

2011-12-11T21:08:00.008Z

I thought I would post a paragraph featuring Ella Appleby, the housemaid in The Lady's Slipper. Although she is not the main character she is the cause of much of the strife in the novel, and the person I have received most mail about. Although most of the feedback has been that she is a 'nasty piece of work' (to quote one letter) I take this to be a good omen for she has become the lead character in the next book, The Gilded Lily, and at least she is creating some reaction!

As a character she is brazen and manipulative and not very likeable, so in The Gilded Lily I get the chance to show what incident in her past made her that way, and to give her space for some sort of redemption or atonement. One of the difficulties in writing her was that in The Lady's Slipper she is the engine of the story and so her motivations were of necessity hidden from the reader. One of the reasons I think she works in her role as antagonist is because she appears to have no moral compass. This made her a challenge to write a whole book about, but one I enjoyed tackling. She had to grow both in depth and in humanity if The Gilded Lily was to succeed. In the second book we see much more of her relationship with Sadie, her younger sister. This allowed me to examine how Ella had constructed her family memories to suit herself and that these were at odds with how her life really was. Sadie enables Ella to see herself a lot more clearly and thus begin to change into a different person. The Gilded Lily will be published by Pan Macmillan in September 2012.

The paragraph I have chosen is the one where things have begun to go wrong for Ella, and the one where I suddenly knew I had to write another book to finish her story......

Still clutching the bolster to her chest, as if holding it would somehow hold her together, Ella moved to the window. Outside there was a glow on the horizon. Dawn. She felt nothing. It surprised her. No sorrow for his passing. But she knew there would be a hue and cry as soon as they knew he was dead, and that there would be no place for her when his brother arrived, except as the butt of his boot.

She must get away from here. She started for the door, but then turned back. She would need some things to sell. In a panic she lunged for the silver candlesticks on the dressing table, but in the dark she knocked one over and it clattered to the ground.The noise of it startled her and she realized she was trembling.

‘Get a grip, girl,’ she said to herself. ‘Think. Just think.’ It was as if her thoughts were tangled like brambles; she could not unravel them. She plucked the one thought that made sense. She had to go somewhere far away, where they could never catch up with her. The devil was on her heels, searching for her soul, and he already had hold of her skirts.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ she groaned. ‘Sadie.’ Her heart heaved.

She could not leave her sister behind.

The Lady's Slipper - Available on Kindle and in Paperback

'Top Pick!' RT Book Reviews

'Women's Fiction at its best' History and Women

'Brilliant saga' Romance Reviews today

'Rich and haunting' Reading the Past

'Utterly captivating' Karen Maitland, author of The Owl Killers

'Riveting narrative' For the Love of Books

2011-12-03T17:00:00.000Z

My third novel, Jubilee, was published eighteen months ago. It was the first book I set locally and it meant a lot to me to be able to research by simply walking out of the front door. I remember one particularly glorious early June afternoon spent on a bicycle up on the Ridgeway itself. But in Jubilee I was trying to do more than write a homage to the countryside; I wanted to try something a little more unsettling.

The Ridgeway above the Vale of White Horse

Here is the opening scene of Jubilee.

By the time the kitchen clock struck seven I knew that my cousin wouldn’t be coming back. I abandoned my rehearsal of the cool response I’d planned for her return: I always knew you were just mucking about, Jess . . .

While we waited for the men to ﬁnish searching the hedgerows and the white snaky curve of the Ridgeway path above us, I watched my aunt. Evie sat at the kitchen table twisting the fabric belt of her new dress as though she was trying to wring the anxiety out of herself. She caught me staring at her and managed to twist her features into something halfway to a smile. This attempt to reassure me made me feel even more frightened. ‘Come back!’ I shouted silently at my cousin. ‘It’s not a game any more.’

Jubilee is available in paperback and Kindle format.

My Favourite Moment - Three Things About Me

2011-12-01T12:45:00.000Z

For the Christmas build-up we MNWers have decided to post some of our favourite moments from our own books on the blog.

This is in the hope of persuading you to consider buying these books as excellent pressies, but also just because it feels good to look back and remember what you liked about your own work; it's easy to get wrapped up in negativity about previously published novels, but the truth is - these novels are good. They're great, in fact. They have something special, something that makes them unique and interesting and, well, publishable.

I'm going to start the ball rolling by returning to my first full-length novel, Three Things About Me. It dealt with seven people, each with a secret, trying to make a new life in the strange seaside town of Allcombe. The novel shared three months of their lives, from each character in turn, as they fell in love, fell to pieces, or fell off the side of the cliff.

Three Things About Me breaks a lot of rules. It doesn't have one main character, and all the characters are, in some ways, grotesques. And yet I felt it really worked, and drew together, and culminated in some joyous moments of revelation and retribution. It also allowed me a freedom to explore reality and fantasy at the same time - superheroes mingle with business executives, bullied teenagers deal with cultists. Looking back at it now, I'm very proud of it.

So here's the first moment where, in the writing, the book absolutely grabbed me and I knew I had to finish writing it. In chapter five, Alma (once a Hollywood superstar but now an overweight alcoholic trying to learn to be an administrator) is walking along Allcombe pier when she sees a little old lady standing in the top window of an old people's home. The old lady is holding up a sign of one word - HELP.

Alma enters the home and creeps up the stairs. Here's what she finds:

There was no light-shade to cover the naked bulb that hung from the high, artexed ceiling. A single bed with a bed rail had been pushed into the corner behind the door, and next to it stood a small chest of drawers in a plain style with an oval mirror fixed above it, a fine layer of dust sprinkled evenly over it. Cheap perfume and face lotion in dated bottles sat upon it, along with a plastic navy blue brush that was caked with grey hairs in a thick, tangled pelt. A brown armchair with a worn-through seat was pushed up against the window and a crumpled ball of white paper lay on the floor next to it.

The only colour in the room was supplied by a crocheted blanket that lay over the lower half of the single bed. It was huge and ugly, made of a thousand different colours from blood red to privet hedge green, whatever wool the maker could get their hands on she presumed, and it must have taken years to complete.

‘I saw your sign,’ Alma said, just to have something to say. ‘Are you okay?’ She turned back to the door and looked at the old woman who was listening at it. She was tiny, with a slight hump and long blue fingernails that looked greasy, along with her squashed up skin. Her grey straw hair was cut short and was thinning on the crown.

‘They’re killing us,’ the old woman said.

"Three Things About Me is available in Hardback and for the Kindle.

Guilty Consciences

2011-11-28T10:28:00.004Z

The arrival of my author copy a few days ago reminded me that I ought to post on the subject of my latest publication - a short story entitled “Conned” in the new Crime Writers’ Association anthology “Guilty Consciences”.

The CWA anthologies have been an annual event for a few years now and this one, like the last, is edited by Martin Edwards, who writes two excellent crime series, one set in Liverpool and one in the Lake District. This year’s stories include (other than mine) contributions by Robert Barnard, Ann Cleeves, HRF Keating, Peter James, Jane Finnis and by Martin himself.

Martin very generously described me in the introduction as being amongst “the most gifted members of the new generation of crime writers”. It is of course always an honour to be invited to contribute to the anthology and to join the very distinguished list of those who have had stories included in the past.

The cover has the names of the contributors in the shape of a dagger. I, it transpires, am the sharp bit at the end, which I also rather like.

The anthology is available at bookshops and on Amazon

Macmillan New Writers Book optioned for a film

2011-11-24T12:27:00.002Z

We are lucky to have Ann Weisgarber - double Orange nominee among our ranks. In case you hadn't noticed, she's on a blog tour at the moment with "The Personal History of Rachel DuPree". It has just been optioned for film by Viola Davis, star of The Help. What great news, hope it gets made, it would be a great film.

About the Book:

Winner of the Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction and the Texas Institute of Letters’ Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First Fiction

Longlisted for the Orange Prize (alongside books by Toni Morrison and Marilynne Robinson), and shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers.

Her new novel "Galveston" is in the pipeline too, so I'm looking forward to another great read.

Ann Weisgarber’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:

Tuesday, November 1st: nomadreader

Wednesday, November 2nd: Peeking Between the Pages

Thursday, November 3rd: Linus’s Blanket - author Q&A

Monday, November 7th: A Bookish Libraria

Tuesday, November 8th: Man of La Book

Thursday, November 10th: Unabridged Chick

Monday, November 14th: Book Dilettante

Tuesday, November 15th: Book Chatter

Wednesday, November 16th: She is Too Fond of Books- Spotlight on Bookstores guest post

Thursday, November 17th: Book Club Classics

Friday, November 18th: Historical Tapestry - guest post

Monday, November 21st: Raging Bibliomania

Tuesday, November 22nd: The Brain Lair

Wednesday, November 23rd: Broken Teepee

Friday, November 25th: Historical Tapestry

Monday, November 28th: A Bookworm’s World

Tuesday, November 29th: My Bookshelf

Wednesday, November 30th: Elle Lit.

Seven Ways in Which Writing is Like Yoghurt-Making

2011-11-23T09:56:00.000Z

- There are many different ways to make yoghurt. People argue about the best way to make yoghurt, but really, there is no best way. There's just your own way. You can make yoghurt in the sunshine, or standing in the kitchen. You can use machines to help you make yoghurt, or you can do it the old-fashioned way, with your two hands. (And a bowl and a spoon, but that part of the analogy obviously doesn't fit so well, so we'll gloss over that.) Another person's way of making yoghurt will never work as well for you. You have to perfect your own yoghurt-making.

- Yoghurt can be all things to all people. Sometimes people want exciting, adventurous yoghurt. Sometimes people want soothing, soft yoghurt. Sometimes people even want Greek Yoghurt, which explains why Captain Corelli's Mandolin was such a success.

- Commercial yoghurt is looked down upon by yoghurt purists. Yoghurt with chunkier fruit pieces is usually considered to be harder to get through, but more rewarding when you reach the end of the pot.

- Celebrities should be stopped from making yoghurt. They foist their horrible yoghurt upon the rest of us. That, or they lie, and get a professional yoghurt maker to secretly make their yoghurt for them. This is despicable. Everyone please stop buying these celebrity yoghurts before all the old-school yoghurt-makers go out of business.

- In modern times, yoghurts come with accoutrements, such as little corner helpings of crunchy flakes. Or yoghurt comes in over-processed tubes, to be sucked down and instantly discarded. We are dressing up our yoghurts, but surely traditional yoghurt is the best? However, it is good to be open to changes in the yoghurt industry. Eventually yoghurt-makers will no longer need packaging and will simply squirt their yoghurts directly into the consumers' mouths. This is to be desired. Apron sales will also go up.

- Yoghurt buyers are very susceptible to yoghurt packaging. Women yoghurt buyers like pink pots. Men yoghurt buyers like manly pots in bigger sizes. It used to be true that nobody over the age of twelve wanted to be caught eating a child yoghurt in a ridiculous brightly-coloured little pot in public, but nowadays it's much more acceptable to say you like child yoghurt. Getting in touch with your inner toddler, or some such rubbish. Still, child yoghurts are lots of fun, aren't they? That Harry Potter yoghurt was excellent.

- But, however you take your yoghurt, it will always be a very cultured thing to do.

The Three Authors You Meet in Heaven

2011-11-16T09:28:00.003Z

All art is theft, right? I'm thinking it's better to steal off a dead person than a living one, although my moral compass isn't exactly clear about it.

Anyway, the other day on the blog I was musing about how the five people I'd meet in heaven would probably be the people I least wanted to see (forgive me for coming over all Sartre there). And that made me think - what if I could choose? On the basis of wanting to learn something about how they did what they did? So I could become a better writer? Although, obviously, I'd be dead myself at this point and probably not likely to pick up a pen again.

Hang on, that raises another question - would it be heaven if I couldn't write in it? Or would it be heaven if the desire to write was taken away? Blimey. Too many questions. So here's the game.

Name the three authors you'd like to meet in heaven. I'm going for three because I can't spend all day on this. I'm writing a new book, you know.

Rule out Shakespeare. Shakespeare meets you at the gate, okay? In writer heaven, he's Saint Peter. So can you name three dead writers that you think could teach you something about your craft? Who would they be? Here's mine:

1. George Eliot. Because although I'm writing surreal crazy stuff at the moment, and have written crime before, all I actually want to write someday is Middlemarch. How did she create that town, and sustain it, and make us care for every single person in it? I have trouble making the reader really care for one.

2. Dylan Thomas. Because he had the gift of putting music in his poetry. And because Under Milk Wood has the best opening monologue of any play, and I include Henry V in that assessment. How do you write something that makes the readers hold their breath?

3. Graham Greene. Because he made the moral processes of the mind so clear to his readers, when I just get tangled up in a sticky web of emotion when I attempt that. Writing a clear psychological intent through a character without making it obvious, and without deviation - that's real skill.

So there you have it. Who would you like to learn from? And would it be heaven for you with or without the desire and the equipment to write?

The Writerly Lunch at Brown's

2011-11-15T10:19:00.010Z

Six Macmillan New Writers met for lunch at Brown's in Covent Garden last week. It was lovely to see Frances, Tim, Alis, Aliya and Len. It strikes me that the expression "New" probably doesn't apply to us any more as all of us are entrenched in the writing life, and most of our books have been out for a while.

What was really nice, and proves beyond a doubt that we are all balanced people, was that the conversation was not all about writing. We also managed to cover the ins and outs of Downton Abbey, French condolence letters, and the trials of ageing dogs - all this in amongst ordering our bargain lunch, courtesy of vouchers from Eliza.

We had a great waiter who exemplified service with a smile, he would have fitted nicely into the kitchens of Downton Abbey and helped the miniscule staff of six to run that enormous stately pile.

Here's what I gleaned about fellow MNWer's. Out of the six of us, four of us are writing historicals - me, Len, Alis and Tim. Tim had even brought his research with him and seemed totally fired up with excitement. Len and I have been exploring the same ground, so it was interesting to hear that our visions of 17th century England mostly coincide. Alis is embracing historical crime in between her playwriting. Frances is writing a non-fiction and Aliya is writing speculative fiction/fantasy. I have avoided saying too much about these projects because I don't know how much of it they want made public!

Folks, if you're out there please add more in the comments to tell people what you are working on.

It was great to see everyone. I have tried to do the social network thing via facebook and twitter, and although this breeds contacts, it is definitely not the same as a proper social when you can actually pass someone their drink and see their body language as they talk. Brown's lunch was very good and it would be really nice to see more Macmillan New Writers next time we do this. Just to remind you, here are all our books, now available on Kindle and in print!

The future of MNW

2011-08-05T20:31:00.000+01:00

Did anyone else see this article on the Bookseller website today?

Herring on the Nile - interview

2011-08-02T16:31:00.004+01:00

I was interviewed the other week by the nice people from Book Fiend's Kingdom (now shortened to BFKBooks) on the publication of Herring on the Nile. If you would like to listen to it, you can do so here.

People's Book Prize

2011-07-20T18:27:00.000+01:00

If any of you, over there in the UK, hear any word about the winners of the People's Book Prize, which are being awarded tonight, please share your knowledge. Some of us harbor naive hopes regarding the outcome.

Thanks!

doug worgul

Salt Lake Public Library Readers Choice Award

2011-07-05T09:43:00.005+01:00

Two Macmillan New Writers Books have been nominated for the Reader's Choice Award in Salt Lake Public Library System.The Salt Lake County Library System is the largest in Utah, serving over 650,000 residents, through 18 libraries. Twice a year, the Reader's Choice Committee selects twenty or more recently published books that have been recommended by other staff or customers. They say, 'We want to include those titles that are not a "best-sellers" but are so good you just can't put them down--- and when you do finish, you have to tell all your friends!' These books are purchased in multiples and placed on display at each Salt Lake County Library for a four-month period. After reading any of the books on the Reader's Choice list, customers may rate the books using one of our ballot forms.

So I was delighted when I looked at the list to see Ann Weisgarber's The Personal History of Rachel Du Pree on the list of books along with mine, The Lady's Slipper. The full list of nominees can be seen here http://www.slcreaderschoice.blogspot.com

Herring on the Nile

2011-07-02T18:35:00.023+01:00

The latest in the Ethelred and Elsie series was published yesterday. This instalment takes them (as the title cunningly suggests) to Egypt. Though I have parodied Christie titles before (Ten Little Herrings, The Herring in the Library) previous books have not really had plots that noticably paralleled Christie’s originals. This time however Elsie and Ethelred board a paddle steamer that is more or less recognisable from Death on the Nile - or as Elsie puts it, "the general picture I’m getting here is the Ritz with a paddle attached to the back". Of course the characters, the motives, most of the action and the solution to the mystery are totally different from Christie's – but then there is such a thing as copyright. And as Elsie herself observes: “how likely is that you’ll get a bunch of murders, spies, writers and other disreputable people on board one small boat? And, if you did, why would you choose to shoot somebody in a place you couldn’t make a decent get-away from?”

It has already received some very nice reviews on It’s a Crime, Milo’s Rambles and Shots Magazine

The formal launch will take place at Goldsboro Books on 5 July.

The Herring in the Library is now also out in paperback, with a new cover to tie in with Herring on the Nile. It was recently reviewed on Lizzie Hayes’ Promoting Crime blog.

"All Paths Lead (to New Wharf Road)"

2011-07-01T15:28:00.001+01:00

I guess this blog post is timely considering the recent news of Will's departure from Macmillan, but it's something I was threatening to do last year and something I want to get rolling now in order to get it all published before Christmas.

If you might remember last year, I mooted a Macmillan New Writers' anthology, noting that there are a fair few of us who are short story writers. My initial thoughts were to publish a themed anthology, but I'm eschewing this for more of a showcase format, in effect to show off the writers here and the different genres covered. Then the unifying theme across the anthology will be our link with Macmillan New Writing.

This is how I think it will work:

Each writer wishing to submit a story will also submit an approx. 200 word brief on how they got here (i.e. published by Macmillan New Writing) and what genre they are writing in and why. This will accompany their short story (which has no word limit, but preferably below novella size) and their writer's biog with a publicity photo. The short story can be in any genre, any topic, and it can be previously published as long as you have permission to publish it in this anthology.

The deadline for the short stories will be 1st November. I'm offering this not just to the Macmillan New Writers here, but past writers too (I'll be getting in touch with Roger Morris and Michael Stephen Fuchs to see if they want to join in - if there are any others I've missed please tell me or contact them direct). The anthology has a working title of "All Paths Lead (to New Wharf Road)" and will be offered for free on Amazon through a e-publisher I'll set-up called "Thirst-e-ditions". If I get the chance, I'll build a website to advertise the book too.

I'll then bring together the stories, the briefs, the biogs and photos and create the anthology in a Kindle format (and later a format for iBooks and Epub). I'll also get the cover sorted out unless anyone wants to volunteer.

What I would really like as well as the stories, are two volunteer editors, to make sure it all hangs together. Are there any takers?

This might be a fair sized book at the end of the day, if everyone contributes. Like I've said above, the stories can be about anything, and in fact the more varied the better. I want it to appeal to everyone, something all readers can dip into, and if it costs nothing then that's all the better. I'll drum up some publicity through various sites I have contacts with, to ensure it gets a few reviews, and then it's just a case of self-promotion when you're able. The only down-side is that we cannot use Macmillan New Writing in the publicity. This is our anthology, and will be advertised as a new writers collection (without the Macmillan). We can mention the publisher in the biogs and briefs, and I will mention them in the "forward" for the collection, but that's about it. But I'd like to show that we are all still indebted to Macmillan New Writing for getting us on this road in the first place (as well as a big thank you to the likes of Will and Mike who put so much into that venture).

So… Anyone interested?

news

2011-06-29T15:53:00.000+01:00

Will Atkins wrote me this morning to inform me that he is leaving Macmillan. Will's support and guidance has been life changing for me, as I suspect it has for many of you. For me, it has been a long-distance relationship, but a once-in-a lifetime relationship nonetheless.

Godspeed, Will.

doug worgul

At Long Last!

2011-06-20T15:42:00.000+01:00

After many frustrations and delays, The Last Free City is available to buy

Although I am a lover of my Kindle, I don't view a book as having been published for real until you can hold a physical copy in your hands. By that definition, The Last Free City is published today--more than two years after I finished it.

The book is only available through online retailers - £12.32 from amazon.co.uk (where Amazon tempts the wavering buyer with a 3p discount off RRP) or $19.99 from amazon.com (US readers are less fickle and need no discount to persude them to buy).

The Kindle edition is still available for those who have no more space in their house (or who baulk at paying the prices quoted for a paperback) although these readers miss out on the splendid Bellotto artwork cannibalised for my cover.

National Crime Writing Week

2011-06-13T10:13:00.002+01:00

This week is National Crime Writing Week, beginning today and running until 19 June. During the week, members of the Crime Writers Association will take part in readings, discussions, readers’ group events and workshops in bookshops, libraries, arts centres and other venues all over the country - all with the aim of raising the profile of crime writing.

My own small contribution to the festivities is a panel discussion at Islington Central Library at 6.30 on Thursday 16 June, with two other local crime writers - Laura Wilson and Christopher Fowler. We'll be talking about our favourite crime fiction, the audience's favourite crime fiction and anything else that seems relevant at the time.

For details of this event click here

For details of other events this week click here

Ask a Macmillan New Writer!

2011-06-08T10:21:00.004+01:00

From time to time we get the occasional question on "Ask a Macmillan New Writer" and I thought this would be one we could all answer:

"Bev Morley has left a new comment on your post "Ask a Macmillan New Writer":

Hello everyone.

I have a question which I am guessing could be answered differently by every other writer, but could really do with hearing what has to be said on the subject...

The question is on the subject of time. Time, that is, for writing.

It is only in recent months that I have taken the plunge into "full time" writing - with some minor successes - and a lot of frustrations!

I consider my available time for writing to be Tuesdays to Fridays, from 9am to 3pm (the only time the house is quiet enough for me to write). The world and the laundry basket, however, seem desperate to conspire against me! My family see no difference in my "routine" as I am still at home, therefore lists of things I can do to fill my day still find their way onto the fridge door - a hazard, I suppose, of being a home based writer.

I would love to know how other writers manage their time, especially with the demands of family life still very much in the fore. "

Acts of Violence Comes to the States

2011-06-07T18:56:00.003+01:00

Ryan David Jahn's Acts of Violence, winner of the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award, was published and released last week in the States. I was in a bookstore on Sunday and there it was, on a display table by the check-out counter. It has a new title, Good Neighbors, and the cover is different, but it's still the fast-paced, gripping story of people who fail to act.

Congratulations, Ryan, on being published in your home country!

still another self-serving post (there seems to be no end)

2011-06-03T02:20:00.000+01:00

Friends, last summer Thin Blue Smoke was chosen as a finalist for the 2010/2011 People's Book Prize (fiction), there in the UK. As of yesterday voting is now open to choose a winner from among the finalists. I'd be deeply grateful for your support. Click here to vote. Registration is required, but it's quick and painless.

drw

Another shot, another goal...

2011-06-02T17:22:00.004+01:00

...This time from our newest member, David Jackson, who has landed himself a two book deal with Pan Mac. This from the Bookseller:

"Pan Mac has acquired two titles from Pariah author David Jackson.

Will Atkins, Pan Macmillan editorial director for fiction, bought world rights direct from Jackson for a "good five-figure sum”. The first title, The Helper, follows Callum Doyle, the NYPD detective introduced in Jackson’s debut Pariah, as he investigates a series of murders triggered by the killing of a young woman in a New York bookshop.

Atkins said: "Few thriller writers, let alone relative newcomers, are able to combine wit, pace and explosive set pieces with such sheer style. "Callum Doyle is shaping up to be one of the great flawed heroes of the genre.’"

The Helper is lined up for February 2012."

Brilliant news, David, and we'll be looking forward to The Helper come 2012...

He shoots, he scores...

2011-05-22T19:51:00.000+01:00

Len Tyler has just secured his place in the premier league of authors by winning the Last Laugh award at Crimefest for The Herring in the Library. Heartfelt congratulations, Len! You deserve it.

Interview with David Jackson

2011-05-14T10:34:00.007+01:00

David Jackson's debut novel, Pariah, was published to great critical acclaim in March. Len Tyler caught up with him to ask him a few searching questions.

1 Your website already carries an interview asking most of the questions I wanted to ask! Maybe I could begin anyway by asking you a bit about yourself. What do you do when you're not writing?

I breed computer programs! That’s not a flippant answer, by the way. Like most debut authors, I’m a long way from the point at which my writing could support me financially, and so I also have a day job. I work as a university lecturer, which involves teaching and a lot of administration, but also research. In my research I create populations of software programs, I get them to breed, I tinker with their ‘genes’, and then I see what evolves. If that all sounds a bit science fiction/horror/downright freaky, don’t worry: none of my creations have yet escaped into the wild (he says, staring madly and rubbing his hands in glee as he commands Igor to pull the switch).

2 And you also write an excellent blog offering great advice for new authors (and old ones for that matter). How do you find the time to do it all? Are you a very disciplined writer, or are you just like the rest of us?

The day job (see above) takes up a lot of time, and then there’s the family of course – the helping out with homework, taxi service for the kids – plus all the chores that need doing around the house, and then there’s... But I’m not unique, right? We all have lives to lead, but if we’re serious about writing, we find the time. And if we can’t find the time, we make the time. Sometimes that has to mean making sacrifices elsewhere, like not watching that TV programme, or making do with an hour’s less sleep.

As for the blog: maybe it’s the teacher in me, but I wanted the blog to be about more than just random thoughts or self-promotion; I wanted to pass on some of what I’ve learned and experienced to others. Although I’m a new author, I have read and absorbed a lot about process, and I think there’s an audience out there for that kind of thing. I’m passionate about encouraging aspiring authors.

3 Like R J Ellory (and others), you live in the UK but set your books in the US. Why did you decide to do that?

They say ‘write what you know.’ Now this time my answer is slightly flippant because I actually hate that phrase. It’s far too confining. We’re writers. We have imaginations. We can go where we want do what we wish – at least on the page. I think that more useful advice is ‘write what you read.’ If you read only westerns, then you might find it difficult to write a successful teen vampire novel (or have they done vampire cowboys yet?) And what I read and enjoy most are US-based crime thrillers. That doesn’t mean, by the way, that I don’t like any UK authors – I like lots of them.

Why do I prefer the US novels? If you were to put me on the psychiatrist’s couch I’d say it probably has something to do with my childhood. To me at that time, the most exciting programmes and movies were the ones with the gunfights and the car chases and the explosions, and they all came out of Hollywood. I guess I’m still a big kid at heart.

4 Writers are always asked whether their books are autobiographical. In this case, I hope most of it isn't! Did you draw on any real-life experiences though? Or did you base any character on yourself?

Pariah borrows from the Hollywood of my youth, so it has all the violence and gunplay as mentioned earlier, but made much darker for today’s audience. I can’t tell you the number of people who have said what a great movie it would make. Where it draws more directly on my own experiences, however, is in the characterisation. By that, I don’t mean that the characters are based on people I know (I am definitely not Doyle!), but that they have all the flaws and foibles of real people. Doyle is certainly not superhuman, but neither is he absurdly encumbered by physical or mental problems. He is an ordinary guy with a wife and a child. He makes mistakes, he can be hurt (both physically and emotionally) and sometimes he does things for which he hates himself. But don’t we all? I try to give life to all the characters in my books – even the minor ones – but most of it is still made up. The exceptions are in snatches of conversation I may have heard elsewhere. Some of the dialogue in the Doyle household – especially with the daughter – has come straight from my own family.

5 You say you're working on a sequel. Would you see this becoming a series or do you have other plans?

I knew from the outset that I wanted Doyle to last for longer than one book, so yes there is a sequel. In fact it has been written and is currently with Will (for those who don’t know, Will Atkins is the editor for Len, myself and all the other Macmillan New Writers). I’m hoping to be able to reveal some exciting news about this very soon.

6 You've had some great reviews. Are there any comments on the book that you particularly treasure?

The best comment (which I didn’t even know about until Ryan Jahn tweeted me) has to be the one that was in the Guardian review, which likened my work to that of Harlan Coben but then went on to say that I was the better writer! To be so favourably compared to a luminary such as Coben is praise indeed. But, to be honest, the comments that touch me the most are the ones that come from ordinary readers – the ones who tell me that they read it in one sitting or had to stay up all night to finish it. After all, they’re the people for whom we write, and so it’s their opinions that count the most.

7 And finally, how would you sum up the experience of being published so far?

Weird, but in a nice way. It’s a life-changing event that is impossible to prepare for. And it’s not just the interviews and the fan-mail and the negotiating and the networking. Everyone I know seems to look at me in a different light now. Maybe they’re just wondering how I ended up with such a warped mind.

The Stolen Child

2011-05-07T21:03:00.004+01:00

As part of the promotion of Little Girl Lost, which was released yesterday, Macmillan have produced a free e-version of The Stolen Child, a Devlin short story commissioned by Radio 4. The edition also includes the first two chapters of Little Girl Lost. You can get the Kindle edition at Amazon.co.uk.

Mac users and others who couldn't view the video previously posted

2011-05-06T15:10:00.000+01:00

Try this: YouTube version of interview with Doug re: Thin Blue Smoke

By the way, this coincides with the U.S. release of the novel this month (finally).

Thank you all for your kind words.

drw

Len Does it Again

2011-05-03T11:39:00.000+01:00

Yet again, Len Tyler hits the awards shortlists, this time for the Crimefest Last Laugh Award for the best humorous crime novel. Details at http://www.thebookseller.com/news/orion-scores-five-crimefest-shortlists.html. Well done, Len!

A discussion of Thin Blue Smoke

2011-05-02T18:17:00.000+01:00

Taped at Johnson County Community College on April 26.

Little Girl Lost Launch

2011-04-18T22:29:00.004+01:00

Hi folks.

I hope you don't mind my posting details here about the upcoming launch of Little Girl Lost
at Goldsboro Books on 16th May at 6.30pm.

If any of you are about and free and fancy dropping by, it would be lovely to see you.

Len Tyler, in the Library, with a dagger (we hope),,,

2011-04-12T22:19:00.003+01:00

In the best tradition of Professor Farnsworth (of Futurama for the uninitiated!):

"Good news everyone, our very own Len Tyler has been long-listed for the CWA Dagger in the Library... Voted for by librarians with a short-list to be announced on 20th May!"

A huge congratulations to Mr Tyler, for a very deserved nomination, and we have everything crossed that you go short on the 20th May, and success follows soon after!

And a special thanks to our newest member of the flock, David Jackson, who alerted me to this news (I've added David to the list of bloggers here so he can blog to his heart's content...)

Where is David?

2011-04-02T21:12:00.002+01:00

Does anyone know where/how David (Isaak) is? Regular contributor, faithful MNWer and blogger...he seems to have vanished.

Where are you, David? Tell us your news!

News of a Blockbuster (but not mine)

2011-03-29T11:08:00.007+01:00

Filming is currently under way for the new (Columbia/Sony) version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and a small part of it has just been filmed right on our doorstep. A couple of months ago letters started to drop through our letterboxes saying that filming would take place in Lonsdale Square in late March. Last week notices went up suspending parking and then, yesterday, large white vans rolled into the square (and surrounding streets) bearing flood-lights, portable loos, catering and miles and miles of cable. Of course, round our way we are not the sort of people to go and gawp in the hope of catching a two second glimpse of Daniel Craig, but a surprising number of local residents decided to walk their dogs very slowly round the square while the film people were arriving and setting up.

As ever, I was impressed by just how many people are needed to make a motion picture – most of whom stand around a lot of the time looking cold and slightly bored. It can’t be efficient and I did wonder whether perhaps it wouldn’t be possible to train the electricians to be extras (or vice versa) or whether Daniel Craig couldn’t give the catering or make-up people a hand when he wasn’t needed on set. Filming began as night fell. Sadly we were not allowed to take pictures during the action, so I can’t provide you with a shot of anyone famous, though I got a good one of the door that Daniel Craig walks up to and rings the bell – a scene that we got to see many times, as re-take followed re-take far into the night. Those watching tried to remember which bit of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo took place in Islington. The consensus was that the scene we were watching had originally been set in St Albans, but had been switched to London. It may be clearer when we see the finished product!

Today everything was being dismantled. A whole day’s work then for what will be a couple of minutes (or probably much less) of actual film. The general view of the local residents was that the whole thing had been rather fun, in spite of losing our parking for a day. The Sony/Columbia people were invariably polite and considerate, even when our dogs tried to get into a shot. For those who want to catch a fleeting glimpse of Lonsdale Square on film (and some other stuff set in Sweden) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is due for release in December.

Introducing David Jackson.

2011-03-29T03:22:00.002+01:00

I just wanted to take a minute to let folks know that another first novel, Pariah, has been published by Macmillan. I'm not quite certain whether it's been published by MNW or the main Macmillan imprint. I've corresponded some with its author, David Jackson, and he tells me he submitted to MNW, but according to Amazon, and to the copyright page of the galleys I got, it's simply a Macmillan book.

Either way, his book is out, it's a first novel, and it's a good one.

He has a website here.

And a blog here.

That's all I got.

Oops!

2011-03-15T16:05:00.001Z

Apologies for taking up space for the post I have jsut deleted - I managed to duplicate it from my own blog. It certainly wasn't worthy of a place on the MNW blog (and apologies also to Len, who's comment has been deleted with it!).

Out today! "The Last Free City" on the Kindle!

2011-03-03T07:32:00.001Z

Forgive the lazy cross-posting from my own blog, but publication day--even for an e-edition--is always worth trumpeting!

I'm delighted to announce that, after a series of delays and setbacks which would make a novel in themselves, The Last Free City is published today. At the moment we have only the Kindle edition; the paperback will be along in a few weeks' time; its production is subject to considerably more bureaucracy.

Click here to buy from Amazon.co.uk -- and don't forget that both The Dog of the North and Dragonchaser are also available for the Kindle. One of the impressive features of the Kindle is the facility to download the first chapter as a free sample, and in a like spirit of generosity here is another sample - our introduction to the contentious teenager Malvazan, who will accompany the reader through much of the novel:

Malvazan had selected his outfit with care the previous night; scurrying around in the dawn gloom to find appropriate attire might suit Dravadan but such haphazardness was not the way to success. He performed a brisk ablution in the ewer by his bed—fortunately he needed to shave only a couple of times a week—and ten minutes later made his way down the stairs into the dining room where the table was laid for an early breakfast.
To his surprise and contempt, his parents and brother were already at the table.
“Ah, the sluggard!” cried Dravadan, his dark fringe hanging into his eyes. “The boy who lies abed till noon!” He spread some honey on a slice of bread and conveyed it to his mouth with more enthusiasm than delicacy. “You would think—”
“Dravadan!” said his mother Flinteska sharply. “If you must bait your brother, at least do not speak with your mouth full.”
Dravadan rammed the rest of the slice into his mouth and, for the moment at least, devoted his full attention to subduing it.
Malvazan’s father Crostadan, head of House Umbinzia, raised his hands in a mollificatory gesture. “Can we not have peace at the breakfast table on a day like today?” he asked. “Malvazan, there is some minor amusement in such a habitually early riser being last among us. It would do you no harm to display a little levity.”
Malvazan sat heavily as far from the rest of the family as the table allowed and reached for a slice of bread. “I am glad to be such a source of amusement,” he said. “It is good to know that a second son has some purpose.”
Dravadan let out a belch which escaped explicit reproof, accompanied by a smirk towards Malvazan.
Flinteska slapped her napkin down on the table. “Enough, both of you. Dravadan, as the eldest son you should show greater decorum; Malvazan, your invincible surliness oppresses us all. Today we meet the King and Queen of Gammerling: a pleasant demeanour is required.”

Goldsboro Bookshop on the Move

2011-02-12T22:24:00.003Z

During this era of bookshops going belly up, Goldsboro Books is not only thriving but is doubling its space. On March 1, David and Daniel are moving to 23-25 Cecil Court.

The guys were some of the early supporters of Macmillan New Writing, hosting the release parties. For me, nothing comes close to the thrill of sitting on the stool behind the counter at Goldsboro and signing fifty copies of Rachel DuPree.

Congratulations, Goldsboro!

Congratulations to L.C. Tyler.

2011-01-19T22:13:00.004Z

Ten Little Herrings has been nominated for Best Paperback Original by the MWA [pdf].

The Home Stretch

2011-01-19T10:05:00.002Z

And so we reach the end of the MNW Round Robin. Sob. I’ll try to hold myself together for these final questions from Suroopa to me.

You are a fairly prolific and well published short story writer. Do you write them as and when a story idea strikes you or do you write many of them together with a common theme in mind? Are they linked to your novels? Do they remain a secondary form that nevertheless occupies a distinct imaginative landscape?

I get less and less short story ideas now. They all seem to get sucked into the novels, and that’s fine, but I do wish I could bash out a shortie once a week, as I used to. Quite often I don’t have an idea of what’s going to happen when I start writing a short story (or a novel, for that matter) so I wing it, and sometimes it works. I usually have a voice in mind, and that’s the only starting point. There’s never a theme or a planned collection.

The good thing about short stories is the amount of freedom they give me to make mistakes, and to write in other genres and styles. I can’t sustain anything very serious for too long, but I have written some literary short stories that I’m quite proud of. It’s also an excuse to push comedic elements to their limit, into slapstick sometimes, as with a piece like Spitting Wasps. And that story directly led to the character of Pru from Light Reading. But, you’re right, short stories are a secondary form to me, and they fit in around the novels, or not at all. And I have written a few short stories set in my seaside town of Allcombe but they never seem quite right. So yes, they must flow from a very different place, and that’s probably why I write them. They allow me to be a horror/sci-fi/slapstick,serious writer, which suits me very well. Talking of which…

Your novels do not seem to fit a distinct genre. Is that by choice? Does it work to your advantage? Do you write with sequels in mind?

It’s absolutely not by choice. I would love to fit, to be honest, because then I’d be more marketable. But the moment I try to write with a genre specifically in mind it all goes flat and boring for me. I think I’m constantly trying to entertain myself when I write. I aim to take myself, let alone the reader, by surprise. This is not conducive to how modern bookselling works. Publishers want a synopsis before you’ve begun writing, and they want you to fit on a certain shelf. I can understand that. I just can’t do it.

Here’s a snippet of a conversation I once had with a publisher:

Pub: I want you to go free! I see you as genreless! Just use that quirky, imaginative style of yours and don’t be concerned about where it leads, okay?

Me: So can my characters go into space, then?

Pub: No.

This kind of sums up my writing career so far.

How do you relate to your characters? Do you visualise them in their entirety or do they take you by surprise? I find that you portray strong and rather intriguing women. You also have a strong sense of place. How instinctive are you as a writer? How do you research a place? What sort of readership do you want for the women you create?

For me it’s all about the characters, but they’re like real people in that no matter how well you think you know them, there’s always something new up their sleeves. And they are all products of place. I mainly research a place by living there. Luckily, I’ve lived in a lot of places so I have a few to choose from. They are never exactly the same in my imagination; you couldn’t draw a street map from my version and have a clue where you were standing if you took a day trip there. But I like the pretend and the real version to sit side by side. I don’t see why I have to be accurate.

I don’t tend to think about a certain type of person reading my books. Right now my offspring, the Munchie, is obsessed with what girls like to do and what boys like to do. I keep telling her that it’s perfectly okay to like Spiderman and fairies, but she’s not having it. I hope that anyone could enjoy my books, not just girls or boys. I’m not really a big fan of the whole ‘books for women by women’ thing. Or that only men should like Michael Moorcock or Iain M Banks. If you like it, you like it. If you don’t, I didn’t write it with you in mind.

And finally, what is it about veggies that fascinates you?

I have to admit I don’t find vegetables that fascinating. I needed something to blog about, so I started listing the contents of my veggie box, and people seemed to enjoy it so I carried on doing it. Then, when Neil Ayres (ex-blog-buddy) redesigned our blog, he called it The Veggiebox. I felt I had to deliver more vegetable-based articles, so I started looking for vegetables in novels that I read, and I began to feel that all the novels I really liked had vegetables in them. And the ones that weren’t so good showed a distinct lack of veg. I don’t know why that is; maybe it’s indicative of a level of detail that I prefer in writing. I like to know what characters are eating and growing and placing in their fruit bowls and lunchboxes.

Vegetables (or fruit) make for a better novel. It’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.

Thanks Suroopa for the excellent questions, and thank you to everyone who took part or read along. Phew! And now we can slump back into our writerly slouches over our keyboards and get on with those novels. Chop chop everyone. There are onions out there to be sautéed, metaphorically speaking.

Ann Weisgarber wins Langum Prize for Historical Fiction

2011-01-13T22:20:00.000Z

The Langum Charitable Trust has just announced the winner and other highly commended novels for the 2010 Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction.
The prize is awarded annually to the "best book in American historical fiction that is both excellent fiction and excellent history."

And the winner is Macmillan New Writer Ann Weisgarber with "The Personal History of Rachel DuPree."

Congratulations Ann,
thoroughly well-deserved.

Don't forget today's Twitterview!

2011-01-13T13:00:00.000Z

... which is at 4pm EST, 9pm UK time. Search on #emlyn to take part in real time, or visit Emlyn's blog tomorrow for the transcript.

A link.

2011-01-12T17:30:00.003Z

Frequent commenter C.N. Nevets has a series of guest posts on his own blog in which writers discuss low moments on their way to success. The most recent guest post is by Roger Morris, so I thought it might be of interest to folks here. (It also happens to be a good piece.)

2011-01-11T11:50:00.003Z

Thanks Len, for the questions. They deserve in-depth answers. I will try my best.

You write not only fiction for adults, but also non-fiction and books for children. Your most recent work (I think) is a book describing the experiences of the survivors of the terrible tragedy at Bhopal. Which type of writing do you get most satisfaction from?

Yes, I have tried my hand at everything and found publishers in all three areas of writing, which is atrangely satisfying. If I have to say which has remained an abiding interest, I am almost hesitant to choose. I began writing for children in 1998 with a work of non-fiction based on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. It was an unlikely topic, but once I plunged into research I knew I was going to return to it some day. Since I was dealing with a man-made tragedy that impacted the lives of people I was collecting stories or oral narratives. It drew me to fiction writing, and all through the year 2000 to 2005, I wrote novels and short stories for both children and adults. From 2005-2008 I was on a fellowship in a research institute to work on oral history of women survivors of the Bhopal disaster. My research findings resulted in an academic book that was published last year. Now I am re-working on a novel and a compendium of shortstories after feedback from the editor of Picador (India), giving final touches to an article that will be part of an academic book on Fieldwork and Ethnographic Research from Oxford University Press (India) and writing a short story for a children's anthology to be brought out by Scholastic (India). Clearly, my writings over-lap, and I have the satisfaction of saying that I have dug my roots deep in all three areas of writing!

Do you feel that your non-fiction work impacts on how you write fiction – and indeed vice versa?

My inspiration is strictly through non-fiction; I begin with issues and then choose the form. Usually my writing and research happens simultaneously and my ideas are polemical and philosophical in nature and my characters embody ideas. My Picador editor puts it rather shrewdly. She says, "You are an instinctive story teller, but you never leave your characters alone! Fiction writing has very different rules from writing non-fiction. Once you have let your characters live their own lives, come back to me!" At the moment, I have brought my characters home and they are leading an independent life, which I am dutifully transcribing. I try to be disengaged and do most of my readings on politics, third world problems...and so on...

Yes, fiction impacts my scholarly writing. I am always lapsing into the anecdotal; I want the layman to understand what I am writing. I do not like the idea of my books merely circulating in university libraries and read by fellow academics. Oral history takes me to people's voices and each of the women I have interviewed in Surviving Bhopal...are as quizzical and finely etched as any of my fictional characters.

One further point that intrigues me is this: how does it feel to be writing in English in India today? Does English-language writing in India feel well-connected to the rest of the English-speaking world – and what is its place within contemporary Indian literature? And finally (of course) what are you working on at the moment and when can we buy it?

This is the most difficult part. Yes, I write in the colonial language and like most Indians I am well-versed in my mother tongue, Bengali, and the national language, Hindi, but I have never tried my hand at writing in any one of them. So in India my readership is limited to the urban, city-centric and elite readership. Happily for me, the Bhopal book for children has been translated into Malayalam and Hindi, so it is now read and recognised more widely. Writing in English catapults you into the international scenario, gets you more reviews, but till you win big awards, gives you less sales and visibility. But since India is seen as a potential market by publishers, an Indian writing in English has the added advantage of drawing the attention of major publishers. To the more political question of whether I write with an western audience in mind, my honest answer is yes and no. I have naturalised English and made it part of my post-colonial and indigeneous cultural heritage, but my novels have a local setting, my characters think and speak the Indian dialect and are very rooted in our sensibility and way of living.

For Aliya: You are a fairly prolific and well published short story writer. Do you write them as and when a story idea strikes you or do you write many of them together with a common theme in mind? Are they linked to your novels? Do they remain a secondary form that nevertheless occupies a distinct imaginative landscape?

Your novels do not seem to fit a distinct genre. Is that by choice? Does it work to your advantage? Do you write with sequels in mind?

How do you relate to your characters? Do you visualise them in their entirety or do they take you by surprise? I find that you portray strong and rather intriguing women. You also have a strong sense of place. How instinctive are you as a writer? How do you research a place? What sort of readership do you want for the women you create?

And finally, what is it about veggies that fascinates you?

Twitterview update

2011-01-10T14:58:00.000Z

Thursday's twitterview will start at 22:00 UK time (that's 17:00 US Eastern Standard Time). Just search on #emlyn.

What do you call an interview on Twitter?

2011-01-10T07:00:00.000Z

A "Twitterview", of course, and I will be a twitterviewee on Thursday 13 January (time to be announced, but probably mid-evening GMT). Prolific writer and web maven Emlyn Chand will be asking the questions, and I'll be responding in 140 characters or fewer (tough for a fantasy writer!). Search #emlyn on Twitter to find the twitterview and ask questions of your own.

I've no idea quite how this work in practice but it promises to be a lively, if necessarily terse, occasion!

Keyboard Monday

2011-01-09T20:42:00.002Z

Though looking forward to Suroopa's post, I thought you might like another brief interlude in the round robin.

In researching the seventeenth century, one of the more interesting customs that I have come across is Plough Monday - still celebrated in many part of this country, though not so much in Islington these days. Plough Monday is the first Monday after Twelfth Night, when traditionally the farm workers would return to the plough (or other fine agricultural implement of their choice) after the Christmas festivities. Of course, it was also an excuse for a last round of celebrations, including dancing, dressing up, parading a decorated plough round the village and collecting money for some vaguely defined cause. In some places it seems to have resembled trick or treating (you can do quite a lot of damage with a plough, if somebody declines to pay up).

Of course, not many of us plough these days, but office work does follow a similar pattern. London has been fairly quiet since Christmas - you can still actually get a seat on the tube. From Monday though things will be largely back to normal. And for us writers too, I guess. It's been easy for the past couple of weeks to find reasons for not getting down to the w.i.p. - the Sales have to be visited, the tax forms have to be filled in and the Christmas tree has to come down - but from Monday there can be no further excuses. In the absence of a plough to decorate (and I've promised my family never to do Morris Dancing again) I think we need to come up with a few suitable customs for Keyboard Monday. Any ideas?

Round Robin: L C Tyler

2010-12-26T15:53:00.004Z

We now seem to be on the home run for the round robin, having had some great discussions about our own writing and writing generally. Anyway thanks again, Brian, for my questions, which I have answered or evaded as follows:

Q: I think that all our characters are parts or versions of ourselves in some way (in the same way everyone in your dreams is a version of you). Which of your two protagonists is most like you and which of the two voices do you most enjoy writing in? I agree with your general premise. I’ve said before somewhere that I think all of my characters carry at least a small part of my DNA. Martin Edwards has recently explored the same theme on his excellent blog Do You Write Under your Own Name – see: http://doyouwriteunderyourownname.blogspot.com/2010/12/autobiographical-crime-fiction.html

Of course, the characteristics you give to your characters are not necessarily the ones you want to own up to. I’ve made Ethelred morose, self-pitying and (at the same time) a hopeless optimist. Elsie is small and stroppy and never misses the chance of a sarcastic remark. Not surprisingly, I’ve probably enjoyed writing Elsie more, and she quickly became an equal partner in the narration rather than just being a foil for Ethelred. It’s fun writing Ethelred too though. I think he is basically a lost character from A Dance to the Music of Time – certainly early on, when I was trying to work out what Ethelred sounded like, I re-read Anthony Powell to get the rhythm of his speech. My family would probably tell you which one I really resemble. As for me, I’m pleading the fifth ….

Q: Secondly, you’re working on an historical novel at the moment, is that right? Care to share some details about it? Yes, that’s right. Its provisional title is “1658” – or possibly “1658!” Anyway, it’s set in the dying days of the Commonwealth, just before the restoration of Charles II and, well, somebody gets murdered. I assume that tells you as much as you’d like to know? That’s all I’m saying anyway. Like most writers I find it difficult to talk in any detail about what I’m working on, because a) it may never happen and b) if it does, it may look very different from what it does now – it could even end up being called “1659”. This might look like a new departure for me, but my earliest published work of fiction was a short story set in the twelfth century. It won a well-endowed short story prize and hence, I think, it’s possibly earned me more per word than anything else I’ve ever written.

Q: Finally, comic crime is notoriously difficult to write well whilst maintaining the right balance between darkness and light – yet you manage it perfectly. What was the appeal of it? Would you ever write only the darker side, or do you find yourself naturally looking at events from a more humorous or satirical angle? Thank you. I think comic crime is difficult both from the point of view that people can rarely agree on what is funny and there is a danger of seeming to laugh at something (crime) which isn’t a joking matter. The answer to the second point is that I am making jokes about detection, not about crime. Sadly there is no real answer when somebody says that you just don’t make them laugh.

Strangely I hadn’t read a great deal of comic crime before I started to write my own, so (unlike a lot of authors) I can’t claim that I had always wanted to write exactly like X or Y. The Herring Seller’s Apprentice was something of a journey into the unknown – at the end of which I discovered I’d written a comic crime novel. I’ve often wondered whether I could write like Val McDermid (say) or RJ Ellory. I’m certainly keen to try lots of different things, so I wouldn’t rule out going over to the Dark Side – but I’d probably want to do it under a different name.

And now questions for Suroopa: You write not only fiction for adults, but also non-fiction and books for children. Your most recent work (I think) is a book describing the experiences of the survivors of the terrible tragedy at Bhopal. Which type of writing do you get most satisfaction from? Do you feel that your non-fiction work impacts on how you write fiction – and indeed vice versa? One further point that intrigues me is this: how does it feel to be writing in English in India today? Does English-language writing in India feel well-connected to the rest of the English-speaking world – and what is its place within contemporary Indian literature? And finally (of course) what are you working on at the moment and when can we buy it?

Round Robin: Brian McGilloway

2010-12-18T21:37:00.006Z

Thanks to Frances for my questions. Hope the answers make sense.
How do you manage to fit a steady output of novels with a day job and young family?
The short answer to this is ‘with increasing difficulty.’ I found with the earlier books that I was completing them about 18 months before publication so I always felt I had breathing space. Now, though, I tend to be writing closer to deadline and am keen to be doing other writing work as well, so it is getting harder. I suppose the one good thing is that I am quite a fast writer once I get started – I tend to write for about an hour and a half at a time and I manage around 1000 – 1500 words in that time, sometimes more. If I can maintain that pace every day, then in three or four months I have a complete first draft. I also redraft as I write, stopping at natural pauses and going back through what I’ve done which possibly helps speed the process too. I work best with some form of deadline – if I had all the time in the world I’d check e-mails and play Angry Birds rather than writing. If I know I only have an hour, then I’ll write solid for that hour. It can be frustrating, though, to have to stop when your inclination is to keep going…

Of course it also helps a lot that I love writing and would feel compelled to do it regardless – as we all did before we were published anyway. That sense of compulsion – the need to write – drives the books forwards. I also think that working a day job that requires you to talk to other people a lot (as teaching does), there is something wonderful (and anti-social) about then being able to disappear into a story for an hour a day in complete isolation. I listen to music when I write, so it’s a chance to really get my own space in a day.

Secondly, do you plan? ie do you know exactly what's going to happen in a novel before you start writing it (I have always imagined that this is essential in crime writing, although I now there are crime writers who still don't know "who dunnit" until halfway through)?

I do plan a bit – normally about eight chapters ahead. I know the first chunk of the book before I start, but don’t always know how it will end. The planning develops then as the book progresses. I find it’s useful for me in helping keep to the process I mention above – to write significant sections in each sitting, it’s good to sit down with a fair idea about what you’re going to write. That said, the best plans have to be flexible. In next year’s book, Little Girl Lost, the first draft was split into two concatenating narratives which ran alongside each other – one following the detective and the other a child for whom she was searching. One informed the second and offered alternate angles on the patterns of the first. I worked really hard on the child’s narrative, developing patterns and working on the tone of the child appropriate to her age. In the end, after two months on it, I had to accept it wasn’t working right and cut the entire thing – around 30,000 words. I believe the finished book is the better for the cut having been made. Still, I think I needed to write it, even if I didn’t use it, to help propel the other main narrative along and to give me a sense of what was happening off page, so to speak.

And no, I don’t always know who dunnit at the start, though I normally have an idea of what form justice will take at the end, even if not who will be on the receiving end of it.

And lastly, was it always going to be crime for you, or have you considered writing in any other genre?

The first thing I ever wrote (beyond Protestant /Catholic love affairs stuff that is a prerequisite of growing up in Northern Ireland) was a book called One So High about two physiatrists, one of whom is interviewing the other to establish whether he is really mad or just pretending to be to avoid prison over a crime he committed. (I’d been studying Hamlet at the time, if that helps explain it) Even in that, crime played a fairly big role, and that was before I really started reading crime. I love crime novels and the way in which a detective is able to access all levels of society in a single day and often as part of the same case. In a way, it allows me as a writer to look at how things connect and how the actions of those at the top generally create victims at the bottom. Of course The Moonstone, the first English crime novel did just that – it was ground breaking in that the criminals (both accidental and deliberate) are upper class and the victims of the book poor. That’s not to say I would rule out trying to write other types of novel at some stage, but at the moment all the ideas I have and the themes I want to explore are probably best served through a crime narrative.

Thanks for the questions, Frances. I enjoyed answering them. Now Len, for yours – I think that all our characters are parts or versions of ourselves in some way (in the same way everyone in your dreams is a version of you). Which of your two protagonists is most like you and which of the two voices do you most enjoy writing in? Secondly, you’re working on an historical novel at the moment, is that right? Care to share some details about it? Finally, comic crime is notoriously difficult to write well whilst maintaining the right balance between darkness and light – yet you manage it perfectly. What was the appeal of it? Would you ever write only the darker side, or do you find yourself naturally looking at events from a more humorous or satirical angle?

Finally, a very Merry Christmas and best wishes to you all for 2011.

Round Robin: Frances Garrood

2010-12-13T15:30:00.002Z

Frances, your books have been praised (by Andrew Davies, no less) for their beautifully drawn and endearing characters. How do you go about creating your fictional people? And when you start a new book are the people the first thing to fill your imagination; or does the theme of the novel come first?

Thank you, Eliza. Difficult questions, but I'll try to anwer them as briefly as I can.

First question. I don't think I conciously set about "creating" characters; they just seem to arrive. Some of them are bits of people I've known; others come from my own imagination. If I think about my characters, I can see that there are recurring themes (mad old women, for one. I've known a lot of mad old women), but on the whole it's an unconscious process. I am incapable of creating someone who is wholly bad. I think my work as a nurse and a counsellor has made me very conscious of the fact that there really is good in everyone (how trite that sounds!), and even my worst character, who I suppose is the eponymous Ernest of my first novel, has reasons for his appalling behaviour, and there are glimpses of good among the bad (thoughI have to admit, not many). However I do it, it's a gradual processs. The characters arrive unformed, and they develop with the novels. Some of them just appear uninvited; others are half-expected. But because I don't usually know what's going to happen next, I often don't know who's going to happen next, either.

Second question. I think I probably start with a very vague idea rather than a particular theme, but once the characters arrive, they make the idea into a story, like characters acting out a play. Dead Ernest began with an idea - widowhood - because it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, and I suppose I almost needed to write about it. Initially, there were three widows, one of them being the youngish one that was once me, but the mad old widow (inevitably) took over, and she was actually rather pleased that Ernest had died, so the original idea went out of the window and it became her story. I like being surprised by what happens; I love the way characters take over. I suspect that only a fellow writer understands the great joy when a character comes alive and does its own thing, almost without any help from the writer. My latest novel does have a structure, which is a first for me, and a theme, but it was still initially very vague, and the characters continued to surprise me right up until the end.

And now I'd just like to say to all MNWers that I hope you have a wonderful Christmas, and a really successful 2011. This year has had its triumphs; Ryan's award (a first for MNW), the Kindling of Aliya, Tim, David and others, American rights for Faye, a deal with Macmillan for Dee, and Brian, Eliza and Len continuing to turn out successful novels at an amazing rate (I know that's not all, but it's pretty impressive!). May next year (our fifth birthday) be even better!

And now for Brian McGilloway's questions. Brian, you have been one of Macmillan New Writing's big success stories. Firstly, how do you manage to fit a steady output of novels with a day job and young family? Secondly, do you plan? ie do you know exactly what's going to happen in a novel before you start writing it (I have always imagined that this is essential in crime writing, although I now there are crime writers who still don't know "who dunnit" until halfway through)? And lastly, was it always going to be crime for you, or have you considered writing in any other genre?

Still to Come

2010-12-06T08:59:00.003Z

Another quick reminder of the Round Robin order. So far we've had:

Dee Swift
MFW Curran
Tim Stretton
Faye L Booth
Alis Hawkins
Ciara Hegarty
Doug Worgul
David Isaak
Ryan David Jahn
Eliza Graham

Still to come:

Frances Garrood
Brian McGilloway
LC Tyler
Suroopa Mukherjee
Aliya Whiteley

Round Robin: Eliza Graham

2010-12-02T07:55:00.011Z

Thanks for the questions, Ryan. (And congratulations, by the way, on your wonderful success. It's good to 'meet' you on the blog.)

1. Each of your novels, unless I’m mistaken, is written from a first-person point of view, or else a combination of first and third -- what is it about first-person narration that appeals to you as a writer?

Generally, as you say, it happens to be first. In Restitution, however, a large part of the book was written in third. And I use third as well as first in all my novels.

I love the immersion in the fictional world first person provides. I remember sitting in a classroom when I was about fourteen with an English teacher reading us Jane Eyre. The 'I' of Jane was so gripping. I remember the thirty chatty, fidgety, girls sitting back in their seats and listening to every word. Each of us was Jane. Later on, when I read Great Expectations, I loved Pip's take on life.

But first person limits you to what that protagonist perceives or discovers. Sometimes I need to step round an object and see it from another person's perspective. So I switch to third. Restitution, as I said earlier, had one first person and two, possibly three, third-person points of view as it wasn't possible for the main protagonist, a girl of seventeen, to experience everything I needed her to. Technically it was a very hard novel to write, especially as there were jumps in time and location that had to work as well. When I'd finished writing it I reread Bleak House, which uses a first person narrative (Esther's) with multiple (numerous, in fact,) inter-woven third-person narratives. I can't imagine how anyone apart from Dickens could pull such a complex novel together.

I've recently read all Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels and was intrigued to see that Child writes some of the novels in first person (Jack) and others in third person, because there are things essential to the plot of a particular book that Jack wouldn't or shouldn't know.

The other three novels (I'm just finishing the fourth, The History Room) are simpler. Generally there are just two points of view: one first and one third. The third usually provides the historical context for the novel. The principal first person narrator hits upon a mystery and the third person narrator provides the clues. Hey, I've just worked out how my novels operate.

Which is all a very round-about way of saying that I use whichever POV seems appropriate for the book.

2. You’ve now written a couple books while under contract with Macmillan. Do you think that’s affected how you approach the writing process in any way? Or what stories you choose to tell?

Having a time frame to deliver certainly affects the writing process. On the whole I find it helpful to know when something is due. It seems to put me back into undergraduate mode and I switch on the kettle, brew up the tea, buy lots of chocolate and generally revert to being nineteen again, with an eye on the deadline date. On the other hand, writing a novel like Restitution that required years of research and drafting would be very, very hard on a fourteen-month deadline. The two books I've written under contract (Jubilee and The History Room) have been set locally, which saves a lot of time. Again, this has probably been positive as my surroundings are beautiful and historically rich, so it would be a shame to have overlooked them in favour of more distant locations.

I enjoyed answering these questions. I hope I can provide something for the next MNW author and near(ish) neighbour, Frances Garrood, to get her writer's teeth into.

Round robin: crime fiction and screenwriting.

2010-12-02T07:00:00.003Z

First, thanks to David for asking questions I had answers to -- or at least questions I could make up answers to. Now, on with it.

David I: Acts of Violence is certainly as noir as the books by your Californian predecessors (Chandler, Hammett, MacDonald, et al), but it employs a very different literary toolkit (and isn't a detective novel anyway). Did you always want to write crime novels, or were you drawn to other genres as well? Have you written or started novels in other genres? How do you think writers in other genres, or literary fiction, have influenced your approach?

RDJ: I think if I’d discovered crime fiction sooner as a reader, I’d have knowingly written in the genre sooner. As it was, I stumbled upon it. The first novel I wrote, back in '94 or '95, I think, was called The Dreaming, and was a horror-crime novel about a sixteen-year-old kid stuck in prison for killing his abusive father. The kid dreams of vengeance and his dreams come true, one by one people who wronged him die, and police detectives are trying to uncover the nature of his crimes ... and then must stop him before his dreams catch up with them, as one of them testified against him in trial, which is how he ended up in prison to begin with. (I wouldn’t write that story now, but when I was a teenager writing it I thought it was genius.)

Aside from the one supernatural element, it’s clearly a crime story. But when I wrote it, I’d yet to read even Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, forget David Goodis or Dorothy B. Hughes.

I loved science, was heavily into Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins and Isaac Asimov’s non-fiction. I was reading Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg and mostly trying to write that kind of fiction. Until I discovered Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo … and started trying to write pretentious literary science fiction, employing as many large words as I could manage. (Not the fault Pynchon or DeLillo, both of whom I still enjoy.)

But as I continued to write, it became clear that, while I could occasionally come up with a decent horror-type premise, I was no science fiction writer. My mind just didn’t work that way. And more, the genre wasn’t really ideal for exploring my obsessions, which were already emerging, despite my best efforts to write other things.

I continued reading literary fiction, as well as capital-L literature (Faulkner, Hemingway, lots of Dostoevsky), which meant, of course, that I started trying to write capital-L literature. Books for the ages! But what I ended up with, once more, was crime fiction. I didn’t know it at the time. I hadn’t yet discovered crime fiction. But guns appeared, bodies ended up in trunks, revenge was had.

Finally I stumbled upon crime novels as a reader -- Lawrence Block and Donald Westlake at first, and then I moved out from there in ever widening circles -- and knew I’d found something. Here was a genre which made a habit of exploring exactly the things I was interested in.

But in truth, I don’t care all that much about genre trappings. I’m happy to be called a crime writer. I enjoy reading crime fiction, and think that’s what my stuff is. But it’s an after-the-fact labeling of what I’d be doing anyway, as I think my description of The Dreaming makes clear. It’s simply where my mind goes. But I’m happy to borrow techniques and tricks from anywhere, so long as they’ll improve the story, or reveal character, which, to me, is the same thing.

David I: [W]hy do people read and write crime fiction in the first place?

RDJ: I have next to no idea. I can’t even tell you why I read and write crime fiction, much less other people. Proper mysteries -- which I don’t write -- offer puzzles that a reader can try to figure out, but I think that’s only a small part of the appeal of crime fiction for most people. There’s also inherent melodrama -- in the best sense of the word -- a chance to see human behavior at its most extreme. As well as many ethical shades of gray. We live in a world where there isn’t always a white hat, and a lot of recent crime fiction reflects that. Then there’s the social aspect. Crime novels are good ways to explore society from many angles, and look at everything from blue collar life and the death of unions to white collar crime and government corruption. But really there are probably as many reasons as there are readers and writers.

David I: [Y]ou’re a screenwriter as well as a novelist, which shows in your attention to economy. But Acts of Violence is very internal, with character thoughts spilling directly onto the page and adding a third (and very literary rather than cinematic) dimension to the narrative. What would you care to share about the differences between the two forms—and, in particular, which feels more rewarding and natural to you?

RDJ: The biggest difference, for me, is also the most obvious: length. As short as Acts of Violence is (59,000 words -- short for a novel), it’s about three times the length of a feature-film screenplay. After writing scripts for seven years, working on a novel was very liberating. All that elbow room. All that space to explore characters’ thoughts and feelings and relationships. In a script you have to reveal character through action and dialogue alone, and while that’s a good skill to have, it means ignoring what’s going on inside, which, to me, is the most interesting stuff. It’s a little like the difference between walking through a city verses merely looking at a picture. With the former you get the sounds and scents, the feel of the air on your skin and its taste. With the latter, you might be able to guess at some of those things, but a guess isn’t experience.

Added to all that is the fact that when an editor gives you notes, they’re doing it in order to make your book a better version of what it already is, while, when you get script notes, they often have nothing to do with improving the script, making it a better version of itself. Maybe they want the changes to attract a specific actor, or a director who’s said in interview that he’s always wanted to do a scene with a giant mechanical spider -- or whatever.

And added to that is how few scripts actually become movies. I know a writer who's sold, or worked on, well over a dozen feature-length scripts over a period of a decade who has never had a film made. He lives well, has a house, leases a new car every two years -- but for ten years he’s tried to write movies and hasn’t written one yet. Instead, he’s stuck writing scripts that sit on shelves in producers’ offices. I heard somewhere that maybe one in ten scripts bought in Hollywood actually gets produced. That’s one out of ten that have been paid for. Forget all those thousands of scripts floating around that will never get more than a passing glance.

Well, what’s the point of telling stories if no one is listening? If money is the only thing you’re getting for your storytelling work, you’re not getting enough. The best thing about money is that it buys you time to tell more stories -- stories that people will hear.

Also, it buys food. Eating, last I heard, is necessary.

Now, my questions for Eliza. Feel free to answer one or the other or both. I just want to give you a choice.

1. Each of your novels, unless I’m mistaken, is written from a first-person point of view, or else a combination of first and third -- what is it about first-person narration that appeals to you as a writer?

2. You’ve now written a couple books while under contract with Macmillan. Do you think that’s affected how you approach the writing process in any way? Or what stories you choose to tell?

A Brief Pause for Sex

2010-12-02T01:07:00.003Z

Might I take moment to point everyone in the direction of Faye's blog for a fine discussion of sex in the modern novel?

Plus, it has videos. (No, not that sort. It's people like you that make this sort of discussion difficult.)

Internet and authors--next phase?

2010-12-01T08:46:00.004Z

For a while now I've been standing back a bit from Google alerts, Amazon, Goodreads, etc. I keep half an eye out on Novelrank, just to see if my books are selling on Amazon, but I don't read all the reviews any more. (I used to read every word.)

My sense that this was a sensible thing to do was underlined this weekend when I read an article by a fellow Brit in which she freely admitted to writing Amazon reviews for her own book. In Britain we've had several instances of authors changing their names and slamming rivals' books on Amazon.

Is the system now so damaged that it's worthless? What's the point of spending a year or more on a book to have someone with a grudge come back again and again and deal out one-star reviews? Or having a rash of family and relatives boost your book to five-star status, even though their 'review' consists only of a brief summary of the plot and then a line saying it would make a good present?

When Playing with the Moon was nominated for a national prize a few years ago the voting system was based on people registering on a site and nominating books. The more people you were able to persuade to do this, the better you did. 'So there's nothing stopping us giving our nephews at university some money and getting them to buy beer for everyone who signs up and votes for you?' my husband said. 'That sounds an interesting way of running things.'

We didn't do this. But supposing we had? Would I have been able to win by simply lining up undergraduates in three or four universities?

I should say at this stage that there are some Amazon, Goodreads and blog reviewers who are fantastic. We may not always agree with what they say about our books but we can't fault them on integrity or their passion for the novel. I'd like to say a big thank-you to them all. You're doing valuable work.

Reviewing aside, there's the whole issue of the illegal free downloading of our work on the internet.

What's the next phase? How can we make the internet fairer to both readers and authors?

Round Robin: Floundering, with (probably misplaced) Faith

2010-11-26T09:29:00.003Z

To review, my assignment from the estimable Doug Worgul:

So, David. My first question has less to do with the process of writing a story and more to do with creating a story. Your novel, Shock and Awe is a suspense/action thriller based on real-life geo-political, military, and espionage scenarios. What stories, plots, characters has your fertile mind imagined based on some of the world’s current conflicts; Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea (maybe Chechnya, perhaps Venezuela)?

Next, which is more satisfying to write, the action sequences or the internal moral conflicts your characters struggle with?

Finally, who would you cast in the major motion picture version of Shock and Awe?

Thanks, Doug. Interesting questions—and the first one is somewhat disturbing, because my approach to constructing a story is somewhat like tossing a bunch of lumber into the air and hoping it will magically assemble into a house as it falls. I can’t really think my way through a plot without writing it, so I generally have only the vaguest idea what happens next.

I should mention that I never set out to be a thriller writer. I just happened to write a book that falls into that bin. But I hardly ever read in the genre, and most of the ideas I have don’t fit the genre. (I’ve completed one full novel since Shock and Awe…and it’s an urban fantasy!)

I really need three elements to get a story running, and I have a hard time getting them all on the same table. I have to have characters that interest me; I have to have a theme or question that interests me; and I have to have a place where I can box them in to let things happen. (I get many of these elements all the time, but they seldom belong in the same story.) The setting and situation, such as the conflict-ridden regions you mention—is usually the last element that is decided.

I’m utterly bored by the idea of writing stories where the protagonist is someone assigned to protect our nation or the President or whatever/whoever from disaster. Where’s the underdog aspect of that? The underdogs in that scenario are invariably the bad guys. I have to have characters who are a little bent, or are trapped or deceived into something, or are unwilling to act (the latter being a recipe for a protagonist who is really a lot of trouble for the writer).

Your list of countries is worth thinking about. I couldn’t do anything with Afghanistan because I don’t know the place or people well enough. I can imagine a great story taking place there, if I knew Afghan tribal intrigue well enough, with someone—maybe an Afghani-American returning home for some reason?—being smuggled from place to place on sort of an underground quest, but I don’t have the knowledge to write it. Ditto Chechnya.

North Korea is a no-go, because I can’t imagine a story set there that wouldn’t be about the North Korean nuclear program and turn into a good guys/bad guys thing.

I have thought about Iran many times, because I understand Iran and Iranians reasonably well, and I think a great deal of fun could be had with the complexity of the situations of everyday life there but I’ve never had characters and a theme present themselves. Maybe someday.

Venezuela? Now you’re getting warmer. Much of Latin America is dissolving into chaos, and at least two of the novels I’m toying with are set at least partly in Latin America. Another moves from North Africa (also a bit chaotic) to the US.

Let’s talk theme/problem. One of the big ones for me recently has been the commercialization of US intelligence. About 80% of our black budget now goes to private companies; the NSA in particular contracts out all manner of work. The idea of intelligence, paramilitary capabilities, and profit motivation all gathering under one roof is spooky to me—and I foresee that in parts of the world, small multinationals will emerge to run lawless areas of failed states (in return for economic concessions, of course). I have a story along those lines that takes place in the Peruvian Amazon, at the potential flash point between Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. The protagonist is a failed, drug-addicted medical doctor who saw things in Kosovo that he can’t shake, and has essentially been drafted by the local representative of such a “security corporation.” The book has sprawled out of control, and I need to simplify it somehow. I have more than 200 pages, and the situation is just getting set up properly. It'd be a 700 page novel if I let it play out.

Another theme? Well, torture and compulsion is always something to gnaw on. And, despite what the experts say, torture works. Oh it doesn’t usually work well on the individual being tortured. But torturing or harming their loved ones works wonders (that's how the Soviets approached it). So I have a story about an American who is tortured by the CIA by mistake. When they realize they have grabbed the wrong fellow, he is then sent out of Europe on a rendition flight to North Africa, where it is assumed he will die at the hands of interrogators (who have been assured that he was involved in a number of bombings in Morocco). He survives, though not exactly unscathed, and comes back to the US, intent on revenge. Then, like so many victims, has to face the question of what is fair in the matter of retribution. How many pages? About 130.

Last but not least, I have a partly finished novel about a fairly smart, irreverent young guy who in the course of data theft (his livelihood) stumbles across something he shouldn’t see. This one starts in California but detours down into Mexico. The theme or issue in this one is genocide—but not the nasty, old-fashioned Hitlerian type, or even the easy-going machete-wielding African tribal type; no, this is 21st-Century genocide, fast, clean, neat. Almost undetectable. Again, more than 100 pages. This one is easier to work on because I can see where it is headed, but I’m having a lot of trouble managing the tone, because the character is a little flip and the subject matter is pretty dark.

Am I stuck? You betcha. In every case, what I’m writing needs simplification, boundaries, limits: a crucible, a box, a lifeboat, some simplifying factor that corrals everyone and contains the sprawl.

Sigh.

Second question: Are action scenes or moral dilemmas more satisfying to write? That’s easy—moral dilemmas. Since I tend to write such scenes from a close POV, it is a fine opportunity to inhabit someone else’s head, and it has that charge that some people get from acting.

I actually think that scenes of sex or violence are more challenging to write, because you have the problems of keeping it fresh, keeping it believable, and not getting tied into knots with all the Tab A-Slot B nonsense that such scenes require. But they are craftsmanship issues, and therefore not as satisfying to me as something deeper. Of course, when you’re lucky you can get both action and moral dilemma rolling in the same scene, and that’s the best of both worlds.

Third: Who would I cast in Shock and Awe as a major motion picture?

I have fairly clear pictures of my characters in my head, but I never fill them in with actors. (Do the rest of you?)

The male protagonist, Boyce Hammond, would be fairly easy—someone a little on the boyish side, but able to do angst if needed. Ewan McGregor* could do it (he does Americans just fine). So could a lot of other guys.

Carla Smukowski would be a problem. A-list (or even B-list) actresses don’t look like her. She’s a little brawny for a female. Hollywood would without a doubt cast Hilary Swank, and it would probably work. Carla doesn’t look a thing like Swank, but between Boys Don’t Cry and Million Dollar Baby I’m sure Ms Swank could pull it off. But that’s not what Carla looks like.

Thanks, Doug. That was fun. *(See comment trail for odd slip of the forebrain, adeptly caught and translated by Neil Ayres.)

And with that, on to prizewinning novelist (and my neighbor, at least in SoCal terms) Ryan David Jahn.

So, RDJ: Acts of Violence certainly is as noir as the books by your Californian predecessors (Chandler, Hammett, MacDonald, et al), but it employs a very different literary toolkit (and isn't a detective novel anyway). Did you always want to write crime novels, or were you drawn to other genres as well? Have you written or started novels in other genres? How do you think writers in other genres, or literary fiction, have influenced your approach?

(For extra credit, why do people read and write crime fiction in the first place?)

Second, you’re a screenwriter as well as a novelist, which shows in your attention to economy. But Acts of Violence is very internal, with character thoughts spilling directly onto the page and adding a third (and very literary rather than cinematic) dimension to the narrative. What would you care to share about the differences between the two forms—-and, in particular, which feels more rewarding and natural to you?

place and purpose

2010-11-22T18:44:00.001Z

Wonderful insights into your thinking and writing, Ciara. Thank you.

Place has also been a primary theme in my writing, whether it’s fiction or journalism. A strong, nuanced and well-integrated description of place within a narrative not only puts a story in geographic, cultural, political, social, and psychological context, it gives the story more texture, depth, and richness, than it would otherwise have, which provides the reader with a much more satisfying experience.

There are other things my fiction and journalism have in common. I read somewhere that there are writers who write sentences, some who write paragraphs, some who write chapters, and then those who write books. Myself, I’m a sentence writer. ‘Doesn’t matter if I’m writing novels or journalism or even advertising copy, I find myself focusing much of my creative energies on crafting each sentence as an individual work unto itself. I also expend a lot of effort on crafting a strong lead sentence and compelling lead paragraph. I’ve never been known as a particularly tough editor, but my staff reporters and freelancers would probably all tell you that I’m pretty unforgiving when it comes to lame leads.

Having said that, writing a novel is for me a spiritual experience. Whereas journalism is not. Which goes to your question about my statement that writing Thin Blue Smoke fundamentally my understanding of myself.

Three years on, I continue to be surprised that Thin Blue Smoke even exists. I didn’t think I had a novel in me. But I did. In fact, I now think I may have three in me. Maybe four. (If I live that long. I’m a slow writer.) That’s the first way in which my understanding of myself has changed.

The process of writing the novel also was something catharsis for me. I didn’t know it at the time, but my journalism career was coming to an end and I was approaching a professional and personal crossroads. At both conscious and subconscious levels, I was dealing with some of life’s bigger issues — loss, love, squandered gifts and opportunities, purpose and direction, and whiskey. Not coincidently I suspect these are the main themes of the novel.

Finally, about six weeks or so from completing the book, I realized that a peace had quietly come over me and that I had come know that writing this novel (and perhaps others) was what God had (has) in mind for me, which is something I have struggled to know my entire life.

The second novel is progressing slowly. Painfully slow. But I like the basic story even better than the first. I expect it to take me another two years to finish. Juggling a full-time day job and full-time parenting sometimes means I may only write two or three sentences a day. But they’re usually really good sentences.

* * *

So, David. My first question has less to do with the process of writing a story and more to do with creating a story. Your novel, Shock and Awe is a suspense/action thriller based on real-life geo-political, military, and espionage scenarios. What stories, plots, characters has your fertile mind imagined based on some of the world’s current conflicts; Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea (maybe Chechnya, perhaps Venezuela)?

Next, which is more satisfying to write, the action sequences or the internal moral conflicts your characters struggle with?

Finally, who would you cast in the major motion picture version of Shock and Awe?

Round Robin: Ciara Hegarty

2010-11-19T09:21:00.002Z

Alis asked:

Ciara, The Road to the Sea is set in a very particular time and place. Is there something specifically Irish in its themes or do you think it could have been set anywhere? And how does landscape and the importance of place impact on the way you choose tell your story?

*

Hey Alis, thanks for your question. And apologies to all for not passing on my congrats to all the exciting things that have been happening with you MNWers - I’m not on this blog v much and I can see I’m missing out!

Those of you who know me will know that I am not very good at talking about my own work...I just find it difficult, or strange or something, discussing what I’ve written, and am intensely shy about it al! so my answer may be considerably shorter (and likely less well-expressed than the others!)

Re the Irishness of it - I think it, for me at least, it’s fairly pivotal to the book - in how it’s bound together, how the characters interact, the general feel of the setting and the traditions and so on. Of course, the nitty gritty of the story and the major themes could be set anywhere...but in setting it elsewhere it would become a totally different book. Maybe that’s the same for any story though? It’s a very interesting question now that I think about it. It would actually be an intriguing experiment for one author to take the same story and place it in different times/cultures/places to see the different outcomes. I expect those things - place, era etc would dictate, to perhaps a great extent, how it was written.

For example, there there are certain Irish elements that pervade throughout - not simply in the setting and the characters’ speech etc but in the history and traditions of generations before that dictate the ways things are for this family - expectations formed by Catholicism, the culture and ‘ways’ handed down that gave me the threads with which to weave the fabric of the community and the central family. Of course the era (the 1940s) dictated certain aspects too.

Many people have asked whether the theme of incest came from the awful stories that have come out over the years over there - and here - and thus it could be construed as a specifically Irish, or at least Catholic, issue. But it wasn’t at all, and I am a bit dismayed when people ask me this as it was not in my mind in the slightest...This is where the story could have been set anywhere - it happens everywhere, to all sorts of people in all sorts of situations...I was more concerned with portraying a different angle or instance of incest - while it is always wrong and disturbing, for my characters it was almost inevitable that it would happen, a natural thing, and maybe a necessary thing - although I am wary of using the word ‘consensual’. Exploring the characters’ emotions with regard to what happens and the effects on the wider family and community were equally important as the reasons for the act itself happening. I worry about talking about it to be honest, as I would hate to be seen to be undermining the very real issue of abuse...But my book is not a comment on this, it’s simply its own story in which incest happens...

Obviously the shame and ‘what to do with’ young, unmarried mothers has been well documented in novels and the cinema over the years. But again, although these responses are society/culture/era-bound, I’d like to think that this was more generic rather than specifically Irish. And in fact, I hope there is the sense that the family/community reaction in my book is not the ‘stereotypical’ response.

I suppose the most specific Irish issue that is touched upon regards the feeling of unease that some people felt about welcoming back young Irish men who had fought with the British in the war (a minority viewpoint in my book).

A sense of place is definitely an important element of the book, and important to me as a writer and as a person...and I think the same is clear in my second book. For me, the characters of a book are inextricably linked to their surroundings, to the world the author creates for them. Kathleen (the main character) is so connected to her landscape for various reasons - I hope the reader gets a sense of this and feels it would be rather tragic for her to have to leave. In my new book a sense of place is equally prevalent. It is viewed from two distinct viewpoints over the course of time and we see how important the landscape around them is, among other things, in terms of connecting these characters as the story evolves.

*

So, to Doug: How does the thought/writing process differ when writing features/articles etc compared to novel writing - does one ‘feel’ very different from the other? Also you said previously on the blog that writing Thin Blue Smoke ‘fundamentally altered’ your understanding of yourself. I expect many writers empathize with this - it would be great to get it going as a talking point...was it that book specifically that had this effect of you, or the process of writing itself?

Latest Round Robin Interview: the joys of the Fourteenth Century

2010-11-17T13:15:00.003Z

After the recent flurry of excitement from Brian, Len and Tim, we’re back to the round robin interviews today. Just to remind you what my brief is, here’s Faye’s introduction.

And now my questions for Alis Hawkins, author of Testament and a fellow historical scribbler. Alis' first novel Testament is a fast-paced timeslip tale, and she has recently completed the first draft of her latest book, The Black and the White. Now that I feel like Parky having delivered that introduction, I'd like to ask Alis whether TB&TW is also a timeslip piece or a straight historical (and if it's the latter, how different she finds the experience of writing about one time period as opposed to two in the same story); and in particular what she thinks are the challenges and attractions of writing about the more distant eras she favours (TB&TW is set in the 1300s)?

Thanks, Faye! I like the idea of being a ‘historical scribbler’ – it conjures up an image of somebody hunched over a sheet of parchment, stripped and trimmed wing-feather in hand, a pot of oak-gall ink in a horn at their side; an image totally at odds, I may say, with the rather technophilic truth of me sitting at my ergonomically-uplifted Macbook and tapping at my wireless keyboard.

Anyway, to the question. No, The Black and The White isn’t a timeslip novel, it’s set fair and square in the fourteenth century. In the middle of the Black Death, to be precise.

So, how different an experience is it to be writing about one time period as opposed to two in the same story?

In a nutshell, it’s very liberating. Not to have to think about batting resonances back and forth between the different time periods, not to have to step out of one carefully-constructed world into another, totally different world, not to have to break the two different narratives up into nicely self-contained episodes that also provide enough of a ‘but what next?’ is pleasant.

There’s also the release from the insistent little voice that has been making its voice heard for years now. The voice that tells me that I’m just better at the historical voice than I am the contemporary.

But in choosing to write ‘straight’ historical fiction there are pressures as well as liberations.

One of the reasons for confining myself to split-time fiction, prior to my current book, was the feeling that I had no right to be a ‘real’ historical novelist. I have no claim on history – my degree is in English and I although I’m fascinated by the medieval period everything I know has been gleaned piecemeal. I felt that it would be a massive act of presumption to write a historical novel; I worried that it would imply that I felt qualified in some way to do so. It’ all very well having a historical strand in your novel (even if it amounts to half the book) but if you’re clever, you can make the history a necessary preoccupation of one of the solidly contemporary characters and sneak it in that way. ‘What can I do’ you’re implicitly asking the reader ‘my characters are just fascinated by all this stuff.’

If you’re not a ‘real’ historical novelist and you get details wrong, you can hide behind the fact that you’re actually just a contemporary novelist whose plot demanded a foray into the fourteenth century. Once you’re writing straight historical fiction, you’re into a whole different ball game. I now feel a far greater pressure to get things right. I know how cross I get when historical novelists get things wrong, particularly about my beloved fourteenth century. For instance, in a well-regarded and best selling recent book set in the fourteenth century, the author had a reference to the manner of Edward II’s rather painful alleged death several years before he actually died.

I realised I was going to have to be a lot better versed in fourteenth century life than I had been for the writing of Testament. Not that I was slipshod in my research for that book. Not at all, I just confined myself to what I needed to know for those very specific bits of life the narrative demanded. As long as I knew about those bits in great detail, I felt I could ignore, for example, the political situation, or what other classes of person were wearing.

With the prospect of 100-150 000 words of undiluted fourteenth century life to write in The Black and The White, a novel that details two rather traumatic months of my central character’s life and touches on everything from sleeping and eating to the layout of towns and the differences between the fourteenth century landscape and our own, I felt the need to know a lot more. So I researched subjects from underwear to fairies, from what kind of knife would have hung from a man’s belt to what the weather in the summer of 1349 was like, from what coins were in circulation during that year and how men wrestled (a near-murder is committed during a wrestling bout). I consulted a website that claims to be able to tell you the phases of the moon in long-gone centuries. And another that told me the precise date of Easter that year. I not only read everything I could get my hands on about charcoal burning, I became a charcoal burner and have now graduated to hearth-watcher at the twice-yearly earth burn at the Dean Heritage Centre in the Forest of Dean. Historical fiction can take over your life.

I also learned more than I ever hope to need to know in real life about how long it takes to suffocate somebody to death, when rigor mortis sets in and when it wears off, as well as burial customs of the fourteenth century. (There are several deaths in The Black and The White and, despite appearances, there is a suspicion that not all of them are due to the plague. Which is kind of the point of the book, really.)

As with any historical fiction, the vast majority of what I learned didn’t make it as far as the page, but I hope it has stopped me making the kind of errors that annoy me in other people’s writing. (Twelfth century people sitting on bales of hay annoyed me in an otherwise excellent and enjoyable book the other day…) It won’t have stopped me, of course, because nobody can know everything and I shall, no doubt, make my share of the bale-type error. But the intention and commitment is to be as error free as possible.

However, the necessity for research is as much a pleasure as it is a pressure. I’m fascinated by the medieval period in general but there’s something about the fourteenth century that, I think, links it to our own time. There was such a feeling of change in the air, such a feeling of impending global doom as pestilence followed famine and war; there was even, towards the end of the century, a considerable amount of popular discontent with the way England was being governed and her involvement in foreign wars.

As far as the actual writing is concerned, that’s been more pleasurable than the split time narrative, too. Unlike my work on previous books, I haven’t had to work out how the characters in the contemporary strand of my story could possibly come to know what happened in the historical strand. (I was rather pleased with the way this happens in Testament, but the discovery of a medieval wall painting is not a trick you can pull off again and again…) All I have to do is work out how best to tell the reader my characters’ story.

Writing split time novels – for me at least – there was always a sense that the whole thing was as much about how we view history as it was about the story I was telling. On the whole, I think that worked in Testament. For various reasons (some of which are alluded to here) it didn’t work in the novel that followed it. But writing straightforward historical narrative does not immunise you against the fascinations of looking at history from another viewpoint, in fact there’s an extent to which, in The Black and The White, there is a slightly knowing game going on between me and my readers as they come to the narrative with a post-Christian, post-Freudian, post-Enlightenment eye and can form very different ideas of what’s going on beneath the surface narrative than either of the two main protagonists could possibly do.

To answer the second part of Faye’s question, I suppose it’s this business of world views and how ours, now, is so different from theirs, then, that drives my fascination with the fourteenth century.

Once, when I was talking about Testament at a book group, I was asked whether a fourteenth century person would really have believed a particular thing. Surely, the questioner said, there were those who did believe that sort of thing and those who didn’t, who took a more rational view? But, of course, she was asking the question with a modern mind, a mind that finds it very difficult to imagine not having access to a variety of ways in which the world might be viewed and its events interpreted. We, in the western world of the twenty first century (and the twentieth century was no different) have a highly sophisticated way of looking at and responding to events in our environment, whether it’s on the world stage – volcanoes and tsunamis, war and famine – or in our own psyche. As long as we’re mentally healthy and appropriately educated, we can choose rational, scientific, logical worldviews which are based entirely on empirical evidence, or we can choose a worldview based more on the mysterious forces which we feel are at work in our universe, whether they be God, fate, destiny or luck. Most people, if they’re honest, juggle the two.

In the medieval period there was no juggling. There was just the one worldview. God made everything. God controlled everything. God judged everybody. Heaven and Hell were as real as a city you’d heard of but had never been to. More real, since you were likely to have heard a lot more about them, particularly Hell.

So the answer to my questioner was, yes they did really believe that, because they lacked any framework that might have allowed them to believe something else. Theirs was a closed system. There was no explanation for anything – seen or unseen – that did not come back to God.

And that, for me, is one of the fascinations of writing medieval fiction. People in the fourteenth century were just as clever as us. They were often far more resourceful and personally capable than us. Within the confines of their worldview, they understood their world better than we do. As a consequence, they were probably more confident and at ease with themselves than we are. And yet, their view of the world was one that – even to people of faith – is alien to us today. Trying to emphasise both the similarities and the differences is a fascinating task.

And now my questions for Ciara Hegarty whose The Road to the Sea was published in February of this year. Described as ‘A paean to the lost landscapes and communities of Ireland, and a meditation on the responsibilities of parents’ it is a morally complex tale that makes you care about its characters.

Ciara, The Road to the Sea is set in a very particular time and place. Is there something specifically Irish in its themes or do you think it could have been set anywhere? And how does landscape and the importance of place impact on the way you choose tell your story?

Kindle Debut

2010-11-15T13:35:00.003Z

First it was self-published. Then it came out in German. Now Dragonchaser is available on the Kindle. At £1.71 (the US version retails for $2.71), what do you have to lose?

This is my first foray into the ebook market and it will be interesting to see how it goes.

Authors for Autistica

2010-11-12T15:51:00.004Z

Along with a number of other authors (including Ken Follett, AL Kennedy, Louise Doughty and R J Ellory) I am taking part in a charity auction to aid research into autism. Over the next ten days or so, people can bid for our services, the resulting funds going to Autistica. Some of us are offering to name a character in our next book after the person submitting the highest bid; some of us are offering to critique the opening chapters of an unpublished manuscript. Since the book I am currently working on is set in the seventeenth century and only bidders named Praise God Barebones, Sir Roger de Clifford or similar could be squeezed into the text, I have opted to offer a critique. I am impressed by the reserve price Autistica have put on my critiquing (and I hope you are too) but it is after all for charity. I’ll try to give value for money to whoever bids for me! Anyone curious to know more can go to: http://members.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=autistica_charity

The auction runs until 21 November.

Congratulations, Brian!

2010-11-11T18:29:00.005Z

Brian McGilloway's Bleed a River Deep has been included in Publishers Weekly's list of the 100 best books of 2010. It is one of only six crime novels published in the US to make the cut. Congratulations, Brian - a fantastic achievement!

For more details see: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/awards-and-prizes/article/45070-best-books-of-2010.html

Round robin: why I gravitated towards the Victorian era.

2010-11-08T12:58:00.004Z

So, after a bit of re-jigging of the round robin order, it's my turn, and Tim has asked me what attracted me to the Victorian era in particular, and whether I can see myself writing in other eras at some point.

The attraction of the Victorian era for me is a many-splendoured thing, and I think it has a lot to do with the fact that so many of my areas of interest can be found there. Because they seem quaint and dated to us, it's easy for us to forget this, but the Victorian era was one of tremendous progress: technologically, intellectually and socially. I'm a bit of a nerd and I love my gadgets (even if I don't always understand exactly what they're doing), and in the 63 years and seven months Victoria was on the throne, they made huge strides towards the understanding of the world we currently have today. There was Darwin's Origin of Species, of course - a massive 'eureka!' moment - and our practices of medical hygiene and surgical sterilisation took their first steps under Victoria. Of course, one of the vital ingredients for an interesting plot is to have some sort of change and turmoil rocking the boat of your character's life, and so to place them in an era in which so much is changing is helpful in achieving that.

However, I have a hypothesis that as a society becomes more technically advanced, it's as if they sometimes become a little frightened of the speed at which they're moving, and so they subconsciously put the brakes on in other areas, often by becoming - outwardly, at least - more socially conservative. This certainly seemed to be the case in many respects as far as the Victorians went, if you compare them to the 18th and early 19th C preceding them, which seem to modern eyes to have been more permissive than the Victorians who came next.

It is important, though, not to take this apparent primness at face value, because (as I have discussed ad nauseam on my blog), underneath that voluminous white underwear, the Victorians were a friskier generation of people than they probably would have wanted you, or the people next door, to have known about; and they were better at making moves towards social change than they might have admitted, too. The working class suffragists of the northern mill towns began their campaigning for the right to vote for all adults, male and female (as opposed to the rather more notorious suffragettes, who only seemed to care about well-off women being able to vote alongside their well-off male counterparts - don't mention the name Pankhurst to me around the time of an election unless you want a lengthy diatribe); and from 1874 it was possible for a woman to train as a doctor (although they did have to attend a women-only institution - the London School of Medicine for Women - to do so; and no doubt they would have faced prejudice from patients and other doctors once qualified). Those of you who know me will know I'm a soft touch when it comes to animals, and while the Victorian attitude to our non-human relatives was by no means ideal, again, they were making progress: the RSPCA¹ was a Victorian invention, as was the Vegetarian Society. Oh, and apparently something called the NSPCC² came about later in the Victorian era, too. (Internet disclaimer: don't take my tone too seriously there, will you?)

Anyway, you get the idea - it was a very confused, conflicted, neurotic era, so that's probably why it and I clicked. There's something very intriguing about a society that invents the camera and then immediately sets about making the first photographic pornography and taking pictures of the bodies of their dead relatives to keep in the family album; and yet as I say, over time the Victorians have still become grossly misunderstood by the majority of people, and had their already-pretty-damn-peculiar quirks exaggerated to mythic proportions; and I have an affinity with the misunderstood and the misinterpreted too that probably informs my interest in the period. On a purely shallow level, I think the Victorian era was more aesthetically beautiful than any period before or since - I love the clothes and the decor (the Victorian attitude to the latter being about as far from minimalism as you could manage, and no bad thing); and being a bodiceripper, I don't think it's beyond my remit to comment on how much better the men put themselves together then. Perhaps I've spent too much time looking at history books, but I think Prince Albert was a bit of all right in his day; and the other day I caught myself ogling a portrait of Elgar on the cover of Classic FM magazine. When I rule the world, football club shirts, baseball caps, tracksuits and trainers will be banned.

Finally (as far as the first half of Tim's question goes), I'm reminded of a quote that - if I recall correctly - is attributed to Stephen King; who, when asked why he wrote the types of stories he does, replied "what makes you think I have a choice?". In many ways, I think it's the same for me and my era of choice - these are the characters who come to me, and I think my Muse wears a waistcoat and top hat and carries a cane. At least, I like to think so.

As for writing about other eras, actually I already have - the third novel I completed (which may see the light of day at some point, once focus has shifted from the WIP) starts at the very end of the Victorian era and segues into the Edwardian (I know, so adventurous, aren't I?). From there, I have ideas for one or possibly two more sequels to that book, which would take me further into the Edwardian era and perhaps (if I'm feeling brave) into WW1, which is probably as modern as I can see myself getting. As for going back in time from 1837 (when Vic took the throne)...well...I can't see it at this point, anyway; at least not as far as full-length novels go. I enjoy reading about a wide variety of times, but writing about them...not so sure.

For the non-Brits:
¹ Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
² National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children

*

And now my questions for Alis Hawkins, author of Testament and a fellow historical scribbler. Alis' first novel Testament is a fast-paced timeslip tale, and she has recently completed the first draft of her latest book, The Black and the White. Now that I feel like Parky having delivered that introduction, I'd like to ask Alis whether TB&TW is also a timeslip piece or a straight historical (and if it's the latter, how different she finds the experience of writing about one time period as opposed to two in the same story); and in particular what she thinks are the challenges and attractions of writing about the more distant eras she favours (TB&TW is set in the 1300s)?

Brief Pause

2010-11-05T09:32:00.003Z

Just a quick reminder of the Round Robin order, after a small tweakette:

Dee Swift
MFW Curran
Tim Stretton
Faye L Booth
Alis Hawkins
Ciara Hegarty
Doug Worgul
David Isaak
Ryan David Jahn
Eliza Graham
Frances Garrood
Brian McGilloway
LC Tyler
Suroopa Mukherjee
Aliya Whiteley

Still lots of interview goodness to stay tuned for!

Round Robin - World-building in Fantasy

2010-11-05T06:54:00.000Z

And so to Tim Stretton, another writer who likes to go down paths unknown. Tim’s novel, The Dog of the North, is a fine example of world building – Mondia is a fully realised fantasy land of epic proportions, which was visited first in the novel, Dragonchaser. But I would like to ask Tim, which came first? The world or the plot? And why? And would he ever consider writing his books the other way around?

Finally, as it is something that effects us all and Tim has had some experience in this area, I would like to ask him whether self-publishing via e-books is something that has become not only more viable, but also more appealing?

--Matt Curran

The challenge faced by fantasy novelists in bringing their worlds to life is the same one which faces all writers of fiction, except in a more extreme form. When we read Deborah Swift's The Lady's Slipper, the reader must be compelled and convinced by a world they can never have visited. Even L.C. Tyler, whose novels are invariably set in present-day Sussex, where I live, is creating a fictional analogue rather than the real thing: "Sussex", rather than Sussex. The writer works unobtrusively to lay down the ground rules for their world regardless of genre.

The fantasy novelist goes only one step further, in creating a world about which the reader knows nothing. (At least at the outset; by the end of some fantasy series, the created world can be stiflingly familiar, particularly if it recycles the tired epic fantasy tropes). The wise fantasist will make familiarisation as easy as possible for the reader. It is sensible to ground a fantasy world in some aspects of the one we know, however much you subsequently departs from it. (The Lord of the Rings can be read at least in part as a lament for a pre-World War I England). My Mondia novels draw heavily on Renaissance Italy, with its glittering surfaces and treacherous depths. I hope this gives the stories greater richness, because readers are unconsciously bringing their own perceptions of the period, and so doing some of the heavy lifting for me. This approach also acquits me of the need for tedious exposition, which slows the story, and allows the reader to make a greater emotional and imaginative commitment to the story.

Plot, for me, is rather less important. There are only five--or seven, or twenty--plots; the exact number is unimportant. The key is that there are so only so many ways you can configure character interaction, and those ways are susceptible to codification and analysis. Whatever the shape of your plot, someone has been there before. I hope that the ending of The Dog of the North surprises, satisfies and moves the reader, but my aim in getting there was not to make a shape which had never been seen on the page.

The third leg of the stool, which Matt does not mention, is character. Plot and world together, in whichever order they are conceived, make a sterile brew. It is character which draws us in, character which keeps us turning the pages. Some writers give us plot without meaningful characters--Agatha Christie springs to mind--and create fiction analagous to an intellectual puzzle. (This is an observation rather than a denigration; no value-judgement is implied). The idea for most of my fiction begins with character. Without characters to keep me interested, the world is flat and static, the plot a limp succession of events. The projects with which I struggle are the ones where the characters resolutely refuse to come to life.

The Dog of the North is my only commercially published novel (and this was self-published before being picked up by Macmillan New Writing). My two previous novels, Dragonchaser and The Zael Inheritance, exist solely as self-published titles. Self-publication met most of my objectives as a writer, the one missing thing being breadth of audience (unfortunately the one which allows the writer to make a living). Print-on-demand technology, for instance with Lulu, brings self-publishing into the grasp of most writers, but the cover prices remain significantly higher than commercially published books, even where the writer is prepared to take a negligible royalty. The rise of the ebook counters even this problem; it is possible to publish an ebook for the Kindle, iPad or Sony reader which retails for next to nothing. As these reading platforms grow--and the Kindle looks to be here to stay--this is a market which will become increasingly important for self-published writers. I still don't see it being especially lucrative, but if your aim as a writer is to put your fiction in front of the widest possible audience, and build a reputation by word of mouth, ebook publication is something you should take very seriously.

* * *

Next on our round robin is Faye Booth, whose novels Cover the Mirrors and Trades of the Flesh have a fresh and compelling take on Victorian England. Faye, what is it that attracts you to that period, and as your career develops can you see yourself writing in other settings?

Radio 4 Story

2010-11-02T12:13:00.002Z

I hope you don't mind my interrupting the round robin for a short post just to say that BBC Radio 4 are airing a new Devlin short story tomorrow afternoon at 3.30pm as part of the Red Herrings series. The story, In Pursuit of the Uneatable, is read by Eugene O'Hare and will be available to listen on iplayer here for seven days after broadcast.

The other two stories in the series, which starts today, are by Lynda La Plante and Andrew Taylor and are well worth catching if you get a chance.

Bookshelves, worlds within carpets and not being conventional

2010-10-19T16:16:00.008+01:00

A big thanks to Deborah Swift and her fantastic start to this round-robin of questions for the Macmillan New Writers.
Deborah was kind enough to put a couple of questions to me, and while they’re not fiendish, they do require a bit of answering, so bear with me!

“What were your favourite childhood books and can you trace their influences in your novels?”

My childhood influences were largely dictated by my parents, though not by any design. They had this bookshelf that I recall towered over me like some extraordinary monolith and it was filled with paperbacks of science fiction, fantasy and horror novels. During the 70's and 80's the covers of these books were lovingly illustrated and that's what caught my imagination first. I mean, who could forget the Bedouin styled Bruce Pennington cover of Herbert's Dune or 1967 edition of The Worm Ouroboros? I remember there was this one hauntingly nasty paperback cover of a ghost ship burning some unfortunate guy in a rowing boat with this green ethereal ray, until half his face had melted and his chest was just a ragged collection of bones. It was gross and the fact I kept reaching for it was reason enough for my parents to put the book on a higher shelf.

So my folks did do their best to keep such horrors and delights from my young eyes, but you know what kids are like once they get something into their heads. I just followed my curiosity and far from being scared witless by the covers, they spoke to my imagination. I guess that's why - when my peers were reading the Hobbit and the Enid Blyton books - I was nose-deep in the words of Frank Herbert and Stephen King. My teachers were quite worried about me, and my own short stories at that age didn't make them any more comfortable.

With regards to direct influences, ones that you can see in the writing, I can’t say that Frank Herbert’s Dune had a particular influence in my stories – no still-suits or Paul Maud Dib – but the sense of epic was perhaps one that stayed with me.
Stephen King, I think, had more of an impact. I guess I wanted to write like Stephen King, or to quote another one of my heroes, Clive Barker, “I didn’t want to write like him, I wanted to give the answers he gave” (with reference to William Blake). King wrote for the everyman who found themselves in unusual places often by chance, and I was drawn to his honesty, that children could be ‘eaten alive’ much like Hansel and Gretel in the original Grim fairytale, often quite nastily. Just look at the urban epic, IT. Children get devoured by clowns - how fucking scary is that? It was refreshing to have that honesty, and its something I’ve tried to repay during my writing though I haven’t been able to display it much in the Secret War books (not yet anyway!).

Later in my teenage-hood I was drawn out of the shadows into more middle-territory of fantasy and wonder, with Clive Barker. Weaveworld continues to be my favourite novel, because of the bravura of the writing and also because of the timing - I was a 16 year old and my future was a bright shining road for me, though a safe one. Weaveworld took me out of the humdrum - it made me grow-up, whilst telling me that it was okay to be an adult and still have a vivid imagination. So if anything it’s Barker who has the most influence on me, especially his depiction of the “weird” and there are moments of Barker in my books, more so than the oft quoted influence of Cornwell’s Sharpe and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, (of which I have either read none of or watched very little of to be influenced at all).
In more recent years it has been Steven Pressfield who has had the greatest impact, not so much the characterisation or tone of his fiction, but the battle-scenes which allowed me to follow my own method of writing war – using rhythm and pace of the language to imitate the beating heart or adrenalin, and the “dance” of battle. Which is how I look at battle-scenes – simply put they are ‘dances’, engaging and retreating and engaging again, brutal sometimes, while other times quite beautiful and breathtaking.

These days, I’ve been growing beyond the borders of the strange and the bloody, which is reflected in my reading habits and the projects I have on the go and in the pipeline.
So will I ever write a non-genre novel? I think so, one day. Purgatory and a future project called The Fixer of Clocks are steps towards more literary novels. But you know, at the moment I’m having too much fun to step away from the bravery of fantasy, horror and science fiction. Way too much fun!

“What sort of things do you think your readers would enjoy when they've finished your books?”

You know, this should be an easy question to answer, but like my books, it’s a little more complicated. The Secret War novels, even now, are not in a genre that has a spectacular number of subscribed writers. Imagine, then, what it was like when I originally wrote these books! There wasn’t such a genre as “historical fantasy” when I originally sent them around the agents in the Writers and Artists Handbook. Naomi Novik had yet to set out on her Temeraire sequence and Jasper Kent didn’t arrive on the scene until after the Secret War was published.
Because my books cross, perhaps, two or three genres, if my readership went on from the Secret War novels it would be like the fragmenting of a group of partygoers, after the house party has finally come to an end – each going their separate ways. Some would gravitate towards the historical adventure/war genre inhabited by your Cornwell’s, Pressfield’s, O’Brien’s and Iggulden’s. Others would head for the stock horror troupes, vampire books and such (though please, I wouldn’t suggest anyone head to the likes of Stephanie Myer and the legion of “urban fantasy” writers out there – my stuff just aint the same as that!). Others may even head off to the fantasy/science fiction worlds of which there are so, so many.
It’s a tough question to answer because there are many books that exist on the different literary roads, while there are not that many that sit on the cross-roads, thumbing a lift to anyone who would pull over. My books are like that – they’re like hitch-hikers, they have no home until someone picks them up for that long dark journey into the unknown.

And so to Tim Stretton, another writer who likes to go down paths unknown. Tim’s novel, Dog of the North, is a fine example of world building – Mondia is a fully realised fantasy land of epic proportions, which was visited first in the novel, Dragonchaser. But I would like to ask Tim, which came first? The world or the plot? And why? And would he ever consider writing his books the other way around?
Finally, as it is something that effects us all and Tim has had some experience in this area, I would like to ask him whether self-publishing via e-books is something that has become not only more viable, but also more appealing?

My love affair with historical fiction

2010-10-13T13:30:00.001+01:00

Thanks Aliya for kicking off this round robin. Before I hand over to the next Macmillan New Writer with my questions, Aliya asked me how I came to write historical fiction.

Beore I came to write The Lady's Slipper, most of my writing was contemporary. I read a lot of contemporary fiction as well as historical fiction. A few years ago I would have been surprised to find I had produced a historical novel. So why write one?

The answer is that it wasn't a case of me deciding on a period and then setting the novel there, it was more that my characters demanded certain conditions to flourish and tell their story. I started with a character who wanted to paint an orchid - I had seen the rare lady's-slipper orchid myself and wanted to write (initially) a poem about it. This desire was subverted into my character's desire to capture it in paint. From then on the character grew and developed. I thought for the flower to have impact I needed a time when ideas about botany and images of flowers were new and fresh. Perhaps a time before mass printing, a time when herbs and flowers were used for healing. This led me to the 17th century when herbalists such as Nicolas Culpeper were just making their mark on history and the science of botany was in its infancy.

The idea of the medicinal use of the lady's-slipper then sparked the character of Margaret the herbalist, whose views on "the web of the world" were a very different religion from the conformist view of the time. I am interested in the different ways that faiths have shaped the world and this tied in nicely with the burgeoning Quaker movement, viewed in the 17th century as radical and dangerous. I couldn't resist having a Quaker character, so Richard Wheeler was born. In addition, the Quaker movement started close to my home in Westmorland, and visits to the still surviving historical sites fascinated me.

I was also keen to exploit the enmity between two men, and needed an atmosphere of unease where people felt unsafe so that the developing plot would be credible. The English Civil War where the King had been beheaded by his own people supplied the background disturbance I needed.

My second book, The Gilded Lily (on the editors desk) is set in the same period through necessity as it features Ella, one of the characters from The Lady's Slipper. It is a very different book as it is set in restoration London, a choice made so that I could exploit the desire for wealth and luxury which is a part of Ella's character. I will have to apologise to readers though, as the book features the Thames frozen over, which in fact happened in 1662 and not in 1661 as my book would suggest. This is because I didn't know I was going to write The Gilded Lily when I began The Lady's Slipper and unfortunately I cannot bend history - only apologise when I have had to do so.

The one I am working on now will be set in a different period. As with the first two I am looking for a time and place where my characters and ideas will collide in the most satisfying way. At the moment that seems to be turn of the 16th century in Spain. I can't tell you much more about it because I want to keep the excitement about it inside and not let it dissipate until I have a first draft in front of me.

Now though, I find I enjoy the researching period such a lot, and the wonderful excuse it gives me to hang around museums, historic houses, art galleries and libraries. And I have discovered some fantastic writers in the historical fiction genre, who have given me further insights into our rich heritage. So I cannot imagine that I will run out of ideas from the wealth of our history, and I guess that will keep me writing historical fiction for a while yet!

Aliya asked how I communicate my passion for the period to the reader, but I've really no idea. I just loved writing about the seventeenth century, and my revelling in it I hope will somehow be transmitted, maybe through the language of my characters.

Thanks Aliya for your questions.
Deborah

Now - over to M.F.W. Curran, author of The Secret War and The Hoard of Mhorrer -

On his website Matt says that as a child he had "a diet of fantasy and science-fiction from parents who might have known better but loved to encourage their son's imagination."
So I would like to ask Matt, what were your favourite childhood books and can you trace their influences in your novels? And I'm interested to know what particular things your imagination feeds on now, as I take it your parents are not still taking you to the library! Perhaps you could talk a little of your influences past and present.

Also your books are not easy to categorize, so I would like to ask what sort of things do you think your readers would enjoy when they've finished your books?

Looking forward to hearing your responses, over to you.....

Round One

2010-10-11T12:12:00.006+01:00

The Round Robin interview kicks off today with me asking a question to Dee Swift, author of The Lady's Slipper, a gripping novel of beauty and faith set during the Restoration. I'm very jealous of the skill and commitment that is required by the historical novel. It seems to me to be the pinnacle of writing ability to capture the past accurately and yet make it current and meaningful for the reader.

So, Dee, was it only ever historical fiction that appealed to you? Did you always want to write novels set in the past of England? What is it about the period that appeals to you, and how do you communicate that passion to the reader?

So, here's the order for the Round Robin:

Dee Swift
MFW Curran
Tim Stretton
Brian McGilloway
Alis Hawkins
Ciara Hegarty
Doug Worgul
David Isaak
Ryan David Jahn
Eliza Graham
Frances Garrood
Faye L Booth
LC Tyler
Aliya Whiteley

An impressive line-up!

Dagger Award

2010-10-08T22:54:00.002+01:00

Ryan won!!!! Check it out at www.thecwa.co.uk.

New Blood

2010-10-07T13:49:00.002+01:00

Finally, it's time for the Dagger Awards. Ryan Jahn's "Acts of Violence" was shortlisted several months ago for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award, and it's been a long wait. The awards ceremony is Friday, October 8, and I'm staying tuned to the Internet for results. Ryan, best of luck!

Coming Soon - Interview Dizziness

2010-10-06T08:56:00.002+01:00

It's an enormous Q&A that goes round and round in circles... yes, it's the Great Big MNW Round Robin Interview, coming to a blog near you in the very near future! Lots of enjoyableness and insightfulness into the writing process to follow. Yess.

By the way, if you're an MNWer and this is the first you've heard about all this, but you'd like to take part, please leave a comment here or contact me and I'll put you in the pecking order.

The Germans are coming!

2010-10-02T12:49:00.000+01:00

Buy Serendip!

They are flocking, in fact, to mark the launch of the German edition of Tim Stretton's fantasy novel Serendip (published in English as Dragonchaser). Len Tyler interviewed Tim about his first foreign edition.

Len: For those of us who have not been involved in galley racing lately, could you tell us a bit about the sport?

Tim: Regrettably my first-hand research was rather limited, the sport these days being somewhat in abeyance. In Dragonchaser--or Serendip as I must now call it--we are taken to Paladria, a corrupt oligarchy where galley-racing is the people's obsession. Ambitious politicans finance their own galleys in the hope of swinging the mob to their own side. (We can think of Silvio Berlusconi's patronage of AC Milan, or the games sponsored by Roman emperors).

Our hero, Mirko, is a galley-captain from a neighbouring city. When he agrees to skipper Serendipity, the galley of the unscrupulous Bartazan, he doesn't realise quite what he is letting himself in for. This being a Tim Stretton novel, matters are complicated when Mirko finds himself attracted to Bartazan's mercurial niece Larien.

Len: The English version is Dragonchaser - the German book is entitled Serendip. You seem to be switching your allegiance from one galley to another. Why is this?

Tim: Dragonchaser is the hitherto unbeatable galley of Mirko's rival Drallenkoop, and I used it for the English title because the name is so dramatic (and also from the outset the reader knows as soon as the galley comes on the page, it means business). My German translator Andreas Irle felt that Serendip was a title which worked better in German, and not speaking the language myself I was not qualified to suggest otherwise. The title is in any event more logical, relating as it does to the hero's galley.

Len: How did you find being translated? I know Andreas is a friend of yours in addition to being your translator and publisher.

Tim: Andreas and I met when we were working together on the Vance Integral Edition a decade ago. I first knew him as a respected publisher and translator of Jack Vance's work, and I figured that if he could handle Vance, my stuff would be easy. When Andreas asked my permission to translate the book I was delighted.

Len: Did you hit any problems with the translation? - you are after all writing about places and things that don't actually exist and for which there may occasionally be no English word, let alone a German one ...

Tim: Our contact was fairly light-touch. Occasionally Andreas would email me a list of questions relating to expressions he was not clear about (maybe a couple of dozen over the course of the translation). These were either obscure or obsolete English idiom, or words (and particularly titles) of my own. I'd send Andreas a couple of sentences for each explaining what I was trying to achieve and he would then render the best German equivalent. My own German was wholly inadequate to assess his success so I was always happy to trust his judgement.

Len: Are there plans for any of your other books to be translated into German?

Tim: Andreas has a day job, so this translation took a couple of years. We will see how this one goes, but we don't own the translation rights to The Dog of the North, so there are no immediate plans.

Len: After the first book in my Elsie and Ethelred series was sold to a German publisher I made some hasty changes to the second one, turning a rather obnoxious German character into a Russian. When you are writing now, are you thinking at all about how The Fall of the Fireduke (the current work in progress) might translate at some future date?

Tim: I'd be delighted to see an English-language version of The Fall of the Fireduke, which is currently 20,000 words into a first draft. It's another fantasy novel which I think would appeal to fans of my other work, so perhaps there's a German audience for it. I am never inundated with fan emails, but a disproportionate number of them come from Germany, so it would be nice to think that I am building a German audience. The plan is to make the English text the best I possibly can, and then hope good things flow from there!

Len: For those who don't read German, can we still pick up the English-language edition of Dragonchaser?

Tim: Yes indeed--you can still grab it on Amazon.

The Hoard goes off to Sunny Spain

2010-10-01T08:33:00.006+01:00

Big congratulations to Matt Curran of these blog pages: La Factoria de Ideas have bought Spanish rights for The Hoard of Mhorrer.

Punting

2010-09-10T10:11:00.005+01:00

Partly in the interests of recording all great literary events and partly because nobody seems to be posting anything at present, here is a picture of Eliza punting. Eliza and I and our respective families (though, after a certain amount of debate, not dogs) gathered in Oxford with the aim of punting upstream to the Vickie Arms for lunch. A clear plan and a good one but, in some sort of twisted allegory of the whole writing process, we had to revise our plot several times and the finished article looked a little different from the original intention. We arrived at the Cherwell Boathouse in the middle of a heavy rainstorm. The only punt on the river was occupied by a group of Japanese tourists, each carrying their own small umbrella. My assertion that "all weather is good for punting" was quickly dismissed, and we retired to the Ashmolean Musuem for a bit of Culture. The rain having cleared around lunchtime, and one lost writer having been located, we set out again. The original epic punt to the Vicky Arms was replaced with a novella of a trip downstream to the Parks (is this analogy really working? no, probably not). Anyway, we punted about for a bit, stopped for a Pimms under the shade of an overhanging bough, then dashed back home to check what the dogs had been up to in our absence. I think an annual punting trip could become an MNW tradition?

Home at Last

2010-08-14T01:23:00.002+01:00

I'm having the experience so many of you have had: publication in my home country. The Personal History of Rachel DuPree was released in the U.S.A. this week. It's a different experience than when it came out in the UK. There, it felt far removed and if the novel ended up in the discount bin, I never knew. Now it feels quite personal. Neighbors know that I've written a book and they're weighing in with their opinions. I'm lined up for readings in bookstores and am worrying that no one will show up. Should I hire actors to sit in the front row? I'm doing interviews (yikes!), and have the amazing luck of Barnes & Noble, a chain bookstore, selecting it as a Discover book.

It's a thrill but nerve racking, as many of you know. We'll see how it goes. It's in the hands of readers now, American readers. If they are half as gracious as the British readers, I'll be fortunate. We'll see what happens next.

Where is everybody?

2010-08-09T19:20:00.004+01:00

Everything's gone very quiet. Is everyone on holiday? Or sitting glued to their WIPs? One or two of us (we know who we are) keep going (Aliya manages it even though she's in the middle of moving house - quite a feat), but others seem to have vanished.

Anyway, just to liven things up a bit, I thought I'd share a couple of useful facts:
1. One in every 45 novels sold is by Dan Brown
2. The voice that tells you to "mind the gap!" on the underground belongs to the actor who plays David Archer in The Archers.

Oh - and are we still on for October?

Featured Novel for August

2010-08-03T15:36:00.003+01:00

MNW-watchers will be familiar with L.C. Tyler's quirky detective duo Elsie and Ethelred, and delighted to learn that the latest instalment of their adventures, The Herring in the Library, is now out. Len took time out to tell us about life as a full-time writer ahead of publication.

It would be churlish of me not to kick off by asking you tell us a bit about your new novel, The Herring in the Library. You have the floor...

It's the third instalment of the Elsie and Ethelred series. When Elsie is invited to accompany Ethelred to a dinner at plush Muntham Court, she accepts only so that she doesn’t miss an opportunity to sneer at Ethelred’s friends. The other guests invited by Sir Robert Muntham (“Shagger” to his chums) are however remarkably ordinary – his lawyer, his doctor (and their respective spouses), a former banking colleague and a lady novelist who writes mainly about wronged women and who has an inexplicable but very strong dislike of Ethelred. Elsie finds the evening dull until Sir Robert makes a brief speech to the guests and excuses himself for a moment. Twenty minutes later he is found strangled in his locked study. During that time, each of the guests has also been absent from the dining room. Since there is no way that a killer could have made an exit from the study the police conclude that Sir Robert has killed himself. A distraught Lady Muntham, however, asks Ethelred to conduct his own investigation and establish which of the guests was the murderer (dot, dot, dot)

Since we last spoke on the MNW blog, you've made the big leap to being a Full-Time Writer. What prompted that, and has it differed from your expectations?

I suppose I'd reached the point where I realised that if I was ever to be a full-time author (as opposed to an old age pensioner who just happened to write) I'd better get on with it and turn pro. I had a contract for three books and the children had finished university. Most sensible people were surprised when I did actually quit my job, but it would be a dull life if you never took a leap in the dark. Strangely, full-time or part-time, a book still seems to take a year to produce. If I still had a day job, however, I doubt that I would have made the trip over to the States or gone to so many conferences this year.

With four novels under your belt, by no stretch of the imagination are you a Macmillan New Writer these days. What are the differences between being published by MNW and the mainstream Pan imprint?

Fortunately Will Atkins is still my editor and Mary Chamberlain my copy editor. So in many respects it feels much the same. With each book you become (hopefully) a little better known. I notice it most at conferences, where a couple of years ago I would turn up and know nobody, whereas now I turn up and know more people than not. You cease to go into shock when you discover a shop is stocking your books (though it's always a pleasant surprise). You get more invitations to things - this was the first year, for example, that I was invited onto a panel at Harrogate. You get more reviews. What you don't lose is the insecurity that comes with the territory - you have no more idea than you did on day one whether what you are writing is actually any good.

Macmillan New Writing has been very successful in discovering and promoting crime novelists--Brian McGilloway and Ryan David Jahn have both joined you in going on to bigger things. Why do you think crime pays?

Crime has always been popular. In the 1930s a quarter of all novels published in the UK were detective fiction. It still accounts for a large number of sales (21,000,000 books a year in the UK) and the biggest sellers - Colin Dexter, Ian Rankin, PD James, Stieg Larsson - are pretty much household names in a way that writers from other genres aren't necessarily. I'm not sure that answers your question about why crime pays or why so many crime writers gravitated to MNW. But I agree that the MNW crime writers have done well - as you know, both Brian and Ryan were nominated for major prizes this summer.

Like many successful crime novelists, your range of influences is much wider than the crime genre (and of course your second novel A Very Persistent Illusion was not crime at all). How did you end up writing crime fiction? Which other crime novelists do you admire?

I tend to tell people that I didn't set out to write crime. I hadn't realised until recently that that is a bit of a cliche (Ian Rankin didn't originally set out to be a crime writer either). Having accidentally written a detective story, I discovered that crime writers, and readers, were really nice people. So I thought I might as well hang around. Which writers do I admire? Always a slightly tricky one, that. And likely to result in a fairly long list! One recent discovery (and it shows how far behind I am in my reading) is RJ Ellory - beautiful, lyrical prose and a high body count. If you want to try somebody who is currently a bit out of fashion, but who wrote very funny crime novels back in the 50s, try Colin Watson.

Your novels have attracted commercial success and critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Are you suprised that your very British humour has been a hit in the US?

You are much too kind in your assessment, but thank you all the same! My American publisher (Felony and Mayhem) specialises, amongst other things, in British crime fiction and has a very strong list. I was interested to note that they didn't feel that it was necessary to change any of the text of either of the books that have so far been published in the US - though they added a hyphen to the title of one of them. I think plenty of Americans like British humour, just as there is a big market for American humor over here (yes, spellings can be tricky). "Cosy crime" (i.e. what I write) tends to feel a bit British, even when written by Americans - for example GM Malliet sets her books mainly in Cambridge.

This is your third Elsie and Ethelred mystery. As a full-time professional, do you feel reassured that you've developed a recognisable brand, or pigeon-holed by publishers' understandable desire to have more of a good thing?

I've never had any problem with the brand thing. Some people resent being treated as a commodity, but as long as it is a brand that is selling reasonably well, you can't complain. I try to write in a consistent style from one book to another. I think Macmillan have worked on creating a brand via Mark Thomas's covers and the "herring" logo that features on them. Yes, it's reassuring rather than otherwise.

Many crime writers get to the stage where they can barely suppress the urge to kill off their star characters (which you amusingly deconstructed in The Herring Seller's Apprentice). Are Elsie and Ethelred now sailing close to the wind?

Conan Doyle famously felt like that about Sherlock Holmes (but botched the job of killing him). Many other writers have said that if they had known the series would go on so long, they would have made the main character very different. I did have this idea that I might kill off my narrators at the end of each book and then bring them back again for the sequel in increasingly unlikely ways.

These days there are all kinds of widgets for writers to monitor their sales on Amazon. Do you subscribe to this solitary vice, or do you affect a lofty disdain for sales?

I am totally a Novel Rank junkie, monitoring my sales via the internet. It's interesting how an appearance at a conference, for example, can create a spike in sales - contrary to what you might imagine people would do after meeting me in person.

And of course the question all LC Tyler fans want answered (other than "How's Thistle these days?") - what are you working on at the moment, and when can we expect to see it on the shelves?

All LC Tyler fans? You mean both of them? Well, I'm currently working on The Herring on the Nile. For the first time I am not just mirroring a Christie title but also (up to a point) a Christie plot - and jolly complicated it is too. Elsie and Ethelred take a trip on the Nile, but Ethelred's work catches up with him when one of the passengers is shot .... If all goes well, it should be out in summer 2011.

Len, thanks for your time. Best of luck with the The Herring in the Library!

Ryan David Jahn shortlisted

2010-07-26T18:47:00.002+01:00

A big heads-up to anyone who doesn't follow his blog: Ryan David Jahn's Acts of Violence has been nominated for the Crime Writers Association New Blood Dagger Award (the award for best first novel).

Well done, RDJ--and well-deserved, too!

Works in Progress and Reads in Progress

2010-07-25T10:10:00.000+01:00

Wondered what you were all doing, so thought it might liven up the blog to see where we are all at. I am currently reading Tracey Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures,which has taken me off to a quieter and more genteel age, and the fossil strewn cliffs of Lyme Regis. What I admire about Chevalier's writing is that it all seems wonderfully restrained, and this suits the women's repressive lives rather well. (see, I'm already saying "rather") When I read Girl with the Pearl Earring I was similarly impressed by the way she managed to capture the spirit of the times. I am dabbling as well with a lot of non-fiction research books, including a very readable book called The Elizabethan Underworld - strange how yesteryear's criminals become somehow picturesque rather than despicable when put into print.

Work in progress - well I'm at the stage where it is nearly done but I'm picking over it trying to smooth out all the wrinkles. I am about to have the luxury of a whole day writing, good job it is wet and the garden can wait. I have a couple of events lined up for The Lady's Slipper at local branches of Waterstones - signings are odd events aren't they? I'm never very sure how much entertainment I am supposed to provide or whether my mere presence is enough! Which it probably is if you are very well-known. I have met some very interesting people at my various events though - orchid enthusiasts and people interested in local history.

This feels a bit like one of those Round Robin letters that people send at Christmas, oh dear.

If your update is long and interesting maybe put it in a separate post.

A fun way to waste time

2010-07-19T23:06:00.004+01:00

This one is courtesy of Ryan David Jahn, who came across a site called "I Write Like." You paste in a few paragraphs of your prose, click a button, and some sort of algorithm tells you which famous writer most closely matches your style.

I pasted passages from the first four chapters of Shock and Awe--which rotate POV--and found that I Write Like:

1) David Foster Wallace
2) Chuck Palahniuk
3) James Joyce
4) Dan Brown

Hmm. Toss those in a blender and see how the result tastes.

For those of you too lazy to click on RDJ's link above, I should mention that his multi-POV novel gives him Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Chandler, and Stephen King--although a second pass with the Nabokov chapter gave him HP Lovecraft. (That's a bit of a comedown from Vlad, I suppose, but I'll gladly swap my Dan Brown voice for his Lovecraft.)

Have fun, you Jane Austen, William S. Burroughs, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Allen Poe hybrids.

BODIES IN THE BOOKSHOP – 15 JULY 6PM

2010-07-06T13:06:00.003+01:00

The MNWers coincide at literary events only occasionally, but at least three of us who have published under the MNW label will be at Bodies in the Bookshop at Heffer’s in Cambridge next week – me, Eliza Graham and Roger Morris. It is (though I am shamelessly ripping off this fact from Roger’s blog) the twentieth annual Bodies event, bringing together crime writers from all over the country to chat informally over a glass of wine with anyone who wants to show up, and maybe even to sell the odd book or two. I’m hoping to be signing copies of The Herring in the Library there.

The complete line-up so far, in strict and impartial alphabetical order, is as follows: Don Bartlett (Translator of novels by the Norwegian authors K. O. Dahl, Jo Nesbo, Pernille Rygg and Gunnar Staalesen), A. L. Berridge, Richard Blake, Alison Bruce, Armand Cabasson, Charlie Charters, Mary Andrea Clarke, Rory Clements, Barbara Cleverly, Adam Creed, John Curran, Ruth Downie, Ruth Dudley Edwards, JT Ellison, Ann Featherstone, Jason Goodwin, Dolores Gordon-Smith, Eliza Graham, Michael Gregorio, Lucretia Grindle, Elliott Hall, Sophie Hannah, Veronica Heley, Suzette Hill, Matt Hilton, Lis Howell, Seth Hunter, Rebecca Jenkins, Erin Kelly, Jim Kelly, Laurie R. King, Patrick Lennon, Adrian Magson, Rose Melikan, R. N . Morris, Janet Neel, Chris Nickson, Gerard O’Donovan, Christine Poulson, Ann Purser, Philip Purser, Sheila Quigley, Mike Ripley, Imogen Robertson, Leigh Russell, William Ryan, E. V. Seymour, Lynn Shepherd, Stav Sherez, Harry Sidebottom, Roz Southey, Lyndon Stacey, L. C. Tyler, Nicola Upson, Andrew Williams, Emily Winslow.

Bodies in the Bookshop tickets at £5 are available from the Ground Floor Cash Desk at Heffers (01223-568568) or by contacting Richard Reynolds on 01223-568532 or by e-mail at literature@heffers.co.uk

See you there?

Congratulations, Brian

2010-07-01T23:06:00.002+01:00

Gallows Lane has been short-listed for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award – see http://www.harrogate-festival.org.uk/crime/award/

Bring back the Net Book Agreement!

2010-06-17T07:31:00.000+01:00

... or so Sam Jordison argues in today's Guardian.

The original suggestion that the death of the NBA would not harm independent booksellers and promote a wider range of sales has clearly not borne fruit--and it's ironic to see that the chief executive of the now-defunct Dillons was its cheerleader.

What do you think? Would the reintroduction of a price-fixing cartel be backward (and unenforceable) step? Or would readers and writers be better served by an arrangement which stopped Tesco and Amazon undercutting the rest of market? Would it see more titles published, or less?

Of steamy sex

2010-06-15T19:31:00.002+01:00

I have just spent the afternoon agonising over my first really steamy sex scene, and discovering how very difficult it can be. It's not that I have any problems with the subject matter; I wouldn't have been able to do my job if I had. It's getting it right that's so tricky. I'm talking sex, not love, so no misty murmurings and subtle melding of bodies. This is raw sex; the real McCoy. And for the sake of the plot, it has to be fairly graphic. The protagonist is a tart. She knows what she's doing. The trouble is, I'm not sure that I do.

So what I'd like to know is, how do others feel? Do you write sex scenes, or just leave things at the glimpse-of-a-finely-turned-ankle stage? Do you find it difficult, and if so, how do you overcome it? How does a writer describe what's going on without reading like a medical textbook? Some time ago, I believe I quoted from the writer whose hero "nibbled his way all the way up her (the heroine's) torso". That's appalling, isn't it? (The word "torso" doesn't help.) I really don't want to fall into a trap like that.

I Love This Book

2010-06-11T14:23:00.003+01:00

C'mon and vote for Doug's Thin Blue Smoke over at The People's Book Prize. You know you want to. It's a cracking book - glad to see it getting some praise.

And Another Award Nomination for MNW

2010-06-10T22:50:00.005+01:00

I heard this evening that The Herring Seller's Apprentice has been nominated for a second award in the US - the Barry Awards - again in the Best Paperback Original category (since that's how it was published in the US). The winner will be announced at Bouchercon this autumn.

Times is Hard

2010-06-08T13:29:00.000+01:00

A gloomy but surely accurate article in today's Guardian.

It's an all too familiar scenario. The squeeze on mid-list authors has been a big story in publishing for years now. It's impossible even to keep track of which authors have dropped off the radar. Publishers don't announce it, and the last thing most writers want to do is broadcast the fact they can no longer get published. Yet, it seems reasonable to estimate that dozens (maybe hundreds) are disappearing every year – judging by persistent industry chatter,

I suspect there was never an easier time to write novels (the growth of technology, and the ready availabilty of advice and information on the internet offer options barely imaginable thrity years ago), but never a harder one to get--and stay--published.

Another MNW award nomination

2010-06-07T11:22:00.000+01:00

This time it's Terri: Carry Me Home is shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Award.

Carry Me Home is the only fiction on the shortlist, so in terms of best novel Terri has already won!

Congratulations, Terri, and fingers crossed for the big night (30 June).

Featured Novel for June

2010-06-03T07:47:00.001+01:00

After a hiatus of several months, Macmillan New Writing returns to winning ways with Deborah Swift's debut historical novel, The Lady's Slipper. The author took some time out from preparing for publication day tomorrow to answer a few of my questions about the book and her writing.

It is 1660. The King is back, but memories of the Civil War still rankle. In rural Westmorland, artist Alice Ibbetson has become captivated by the rare Lady’s Slipper orchid. She is determined to capture its unique beauty for posterity, even if it means stealing the flower from the land of recently converted Quaker, Richard Wheeler. Fired by his newfound faith, the former soldier Wheeler feels bound to track down the missing orchid. Meanwhile, others are eager to lay hands on the flower, and have their own powerful motives. Margaret Poulter, a local medicine woman, is seduced by the orchid’s mysterious herbal powers, while Sir Geoffrey Fisk, Alice’s patron and a former comrade-in-arms of Wheeler, sees the valuable plant as a way to repair his ailing fortunes and cure his own agonizing illness.

Fearing that Wheeler and his new friends are planning revolution, Fisk sends his son Stephen to spy on the Quakers, only for the young man to find his loyalties divided as he befriends the group he has been sent to investigate. Then, when Alice Ibbetson is implicated in a brutal murder, she is imprisoned along with the suspected anti-royalist Wheeler. As Fisk’s sanity grows ever more precarious, and Wheeler and Alice plot their escape, a storm begins to brew, from which no party will escape unscathed.

Vivid, gripping and intensely atmospheric, The Lady’s Slipper is a novel about beauty, faith and loyalty. It marks the emergence of an exquisite new voice in historical fiction.

Hi Deborah, tell us a little about your novel, The Lady's Slipper.

Hi Tim,

The Lady's Slipper is the name of a wild orchid which until recently was almost extinct in Britain. It is still so rare that it has round the clock police protection whilst it is flowering, which is now. When I came across the flower, complete with guard, I thought it was one of the most bizarre-looking wild flowers I had ever seen.

I combined the idea of the rare flower with an interest in seventeenth century history - specifically Quaker history.

The story is about characters who come into violent conflict over the fate of the orchid, and it is also a love story.

How did the book find its way to Macmillan New Writing?

My agent had tried unsuccessfully to place The Lady's Slipper, so I sent it off myself, following the instructions. I was flabbergasted when Will rang to say they wanted it, because I had read in an article that they get thousands of submissions.

One of the unexpected things about professional publication is working with an editor. How did you find that experience?

For me it was immensely reassuring. I come from a theatre background and was used to having creative discussions with directors and scenic artists about design. So I enjoyed the input of other people who were intent on making the book shine. I think unpublished writers imagine that there must be pitch battles whilst the writer fights to keep their original idea - I never felt that at all, Will was someone with an objective eye, who had 'got' what I was trying to do and was alerting me if I had gone astray. And I loved it - I like all that nit-picking over small details.

Historical fiction is currently very popular, and with Wolf Hall winning the Booker Prize, also attracting critical acclaim. Why do you think we love to read stories set in the past, and what attracted you to the period you chose?

Hmm. I think we just love good stories. If they are set in the past then that gives us another context to examine some of the age-old questions in a new way. And the fact that the history has survived as a tale in the first place means that it has a certain power already, from being told to generation after generation in school. I am just reading Robert Lacey's Great Tales from English History, and the stories that survive - King Canute, Hereward the Wake, Thomas a Becket, all have something extraordinary about them to keep us interested. So the challenge with historical fiction is to make your story as big as the History in which you are placing it.

In my case I have taken the period of 1660 - right on the cusp between repressive Puritanism and the excesses of the Restoration, when people could still remember the bloodshed of the Civil War. It seemed to give me maximum potential for conflict, misunderstandings and torn allegiances, and meant I could give each character a radically different past.

What is your typical writing day?

There isn't one! But I'm best writing in the mornings, and best doing a bit every day. But it can't always be like that, so I just fit it in wherever I can in between my other bits and pieces of work. If I have a good idea and can't get back to it, it feels like torture to wait for the next 'writing slot,' so I carry a notebook for these desperate moments. (Shows picture of of untidy scrawlings.)

It is traditional for us to ask our writers to supply Four Random Facts about yourself - and we aren't letting you off this one!

1.I have a scar on my left wrist from trying to be too clever with fire poi (flaming torches on the end of chains)

2. I have been the back end of a pantomime camel.

3. I have learnt how to massage people with my feet, whilst hanging off a rope. (This skill is currently on hold.)

4. I am one of the few people left in the world who takes two sugars in tea.

Do you have a writing mantra?

Not really but if I did it would be "Stop making tea and bloody get on with it!"

Do you compose by pen or by keyboard, or what....and why?

Keyboard so I can edit as I go along. I have never learnt to type so it is a slow process, using only a few of my fingers! But it seems to tie in with the amount of thinking time I need to compose my sentences. When I write by hand I seem to get extra woffle. But I like the romance of a pen, and write letters with a proper fountain pen and Quink.

Who are the writers you most admire? Can you trace their influence in your own writing?

Mostly it's plays that have influenced me. I spent years analysing texts to create set and costume designs - everything from Shakespeare to Pinter, to Tennessee Williams, to Mamet and Hare. So there is a strong sense of drama that wants every character to have a moment in the spotlight, and for the curtain at the end of a chapter to come down with the reader wanting more.

Book-wise, I have been impressed by Zadie Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, Tracey Chevalier and Geraldine Brooks. I love Rose Tremain and Philippa Gregory who write historical fiction in very different ways, and because I've read so much of both I would love to think perhaps they are influences too. (Someone will have to tell me!)

I know you have a second novel underway. Can you tell us anything about that yet?

It tells the story of Ella, one of the characters from The Lady's Slipper, but it is not a sequel - more like a companion-volume. I hope it will stand on its own without needing to be propped up by the first. I have done a few drafts but it is still growing and developing, and I have still a few juicy bits of research to do before I tie it all together.

Deborah, thanks very much for your answers. Best of luck with The Lady's Slipper!

2010-06-01T09:40:00.003+01:00

MNW News for June

Things have been quiet in the MNW world recently, but June sees three important releases.

On 4 June, Deborah Swift formally joins the MNW gang with the release of her historical novel The Lady's Slipper. More about this over the next few days, but for now we'll make do with this:

It is 1660. The King is back, but memories of the Civil War still rankle. In rural Westmorland, artist Alice Ibbetson has become captivated by the rare Lady’s Slipper orchid. She is determined to capture its unique beauty for posterity, even if it means stealing the flower from the land of recently converted Quaker, Richard Wheeler. Fired by his newfound faith, the former soldier Wheeler feels bound to track down the missing orchid. Meanwhile, others are eager to lay hands on the flower, and have their own powerful motives. Margaret Poulter, a local medicine woman, is seduced by the orchid’s mysterious herbal powers, while Sir Geoffrey Fisk, Alice’s patron and a former comrade-in-arms of Wheeler, sees the valuable plant as a way to repair his ailing fortunes and cure his own agonizing illness.

Fearing that Wheeler and his new friends are planning revolution, Fisk sends his son Stephen to spy on the Quakers, only for the young man to find his loyalties divided as he befriends the group he has been sent to investigate. Then, when Alice Ibbetson is implicated in a brutal murder, she is imprisoned along with the suspected anti-royalist Wheeler. As Fisk’s sanity grows ever more precarious, and Wheeler and Alice plot their escape, a storm begins to brew, from which no party will escape unscathed.

Also scheduled for a 4 June release--although I'm already halfway through a copy that Amazon delivered on Saturday--is Eliza Graham's Jubilee. This is Eliza's third novel and, as she's no longer eligible to be published by MNW, it's released under the Pan imprint.

It's the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, and Rachel and her aunt Evie are celebrating with the crowds on the village green. The scene is tranquil, but Rachel and her aunt can never forget what happened exactly twenty-five years ago. On that day, Evie’s young daughter Jessamy vanished. She hasn’t been seen since.

Soon after, news comes of Evie’s sudden death, and Rachel must return to the village to deal with her aunt’s estate. The extraordinary story she uncovers there will change everything. It is a story of departure and return, of atrocity and betrayal, of unrequited love and the dreadful legacy of war.

Fans of Eliza's previous work will be unsurprised to learn that this one is excellent too.

On 16 June, US readers will be able to get their hands on L.C. Tyler's Ten Little Herrings. It's published by Felony and Mayhem (no, really...) and should consolidate his growing reputation in the States, where he's already secured an Edgar nomination.

When obscure crime writer Ethelred Tressider vanishes, his dogged literary agent, Elsie Thirkettle, is soon on his trail. Finding him (in a ramshackle hotel in the French Loire) proves surprisingly easy. Bringing him home proves more difficult than expected – but (as Elsie observes) who would have predicted that, in a hotel full of stamp collectors, the guests would suddenly start murdering each other?

One guest is found fatally stabbed, apparently the victim of an intruder. But when a rich Russian oligarch also dies, in a hotel now swarming with policemen, suspicion falls on the remaining guests.

Elsie is torn between her natural desire to interfere in the police investigation and her urgent need to escape to the town’s chocolaterie. Ethelred, meanwhile, seems to know more about the killings than he is letting on. Finally the time comes when Elsie must assemble the various suspects in the Dining Room, and reveal the truth . . . Ten Little Herrings is a brilliantly anarchic take on the classic Country House Mystery, and an uproarious sequel to the first Elsie and Ethelred mystery, The Herring Seller’s Apprentice.

Let's hope Dee, Eliza and Len get the success their talent and hard work deserve.

The New Goodbye

2010-05-28T12:52:00.002+01:00

I just want to steal a bit of space to highlight the fact that Neil Ayres' app is now available, and a very beautiful thing it is too. And the novel itself is marvellous, well worth a read: moving, lyrical and poignant. Do please have a look at it.

Don't you love the cover?

Do you find yourself rushing towards the end?

2010-05-26T13:14:00.001+01:00

How many times have you been absorbed by a book to such an extent that you just don't want it to end and could happily live within its confines for the foreseeable future… only for it to finish so abruptly, so quickly it feels like you've been soaring through the air only to be shot down unceremoniously?

I've just finished reading a pulp science fiction novel by the legend that is Edgar Rice Burroughs, called the Swords of Mars, a book that eschews all sense of the word "calculated pacing" for what is a mad rush through the final fifteen pages; an ending that could have quite easily been written over a further 100 pages but for reasons of creativity or economical editing it has been shoe-horned via some dodgy exposition into about two thousand words. It's a bad ending to a good book, yet I suppose it could be forgiven - as all books of that age can be "forgiven" - for adopting a story-telling style where the destination isn't so much crept upon but charged at, a crime plenty of late 19th century and early 20th century pulp fiction is guilty of due to the medium of being serialised in pulp fiction magazines with a finite page-space to contend with.

But this is by no means something confined to early 20th century writing. I've read rushed endings more recently from writers who should know better.
Neil Gaiman - whose writing I adore - is guilty of it in American Gods, a book which ends not particularly well compared to the rest of the book, being slipped a hospital pass where the ending had to be something world-breaking to match what had gone before. Unfortunately, in my view, it didn't and was poorer for it. Don't get me wrong, it's a good book, but I don't think it's the great book it could have been. Stephen King is another guilty party, but more guilty for his ending for the Dark Tower series, falling into the same trap of impressive build-up, but a damp squeak at the end. When this happens, I always ask "why?", not only out of indignation and frustration as a reader, but as a writer who wants to avoid the traps other writers fall into. I reckon it’s an important lesson to learn and not just one that can be learnt from the page…

…A few years back when I was travelling around New Zealand, Sarah and I climbed the Franz Josef glacier, and our guide, a wiry Kiwi with a great ice-cutting arm, warned us the last few yards of the descent were the most dangerous - no matter where we were, be it a steep slope or level ground. You see, it's that last dash home, the final few steps of complacency or perhaps the impatience of reaching the end that can undo many a climber. The carelessness of those end steps have lost fingers or toes, broken legs and arms and one climber almost fell down a fifty foot crevice. In our case, the ice-steps at the last melted too quickly and half of our party slid down the slope, crashing into each other like a motorway pile-up. There were no injuries, thankfully, but it got our hearts racing for all the wrong reasons...

…With writing, if there are any injuries due to rushing the end or being complacent, the writer won't see them until they put the book to a publisher or the publisher misses it and it goes out to the reading public. And I guess it is an injury when a reader has invested £8 and many hours of their time to sit through a 400 or 500 page paperback only to be disappointed by the sloppy ending.
We are always told by writing guides or tutors that beginnings are important, but how much care do we really take over our endings, even if the book isn't always about the destination but the journey there? Is it more of a crime to be instantly forgettable or memorably sloppy?

As I head towards the end of the first draft for my new Secret War novel, The Traitor of Light, I realise the book is growing beyond expectancy. I've underestimated its length by around 30,000 words and 3 weeks, and damn me if it's not tempting to hurry it up or even skirt over the closing chapters to reach the end.
But I'm not going to. I'm going to write what needs to be written and keep the pace constant and not skimp on the ending. My final steps in this draft will be measured and careful or I just know I will slip and break something...

Yet more awards

2010-05-21T12:39:00.003+01:00

Gallows Lane - Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award Longlist - all hail Brian! Yay!

I should add that you can vote for Brian to make the shortlist by following the link on the blog. Go vote!

Autumn meeting?

2010-05-12T16:53:00.002+01:00

It occurred to me, reading the recent MNW emails, that it might be good to have another (lunch?) meeting this year - perhaps in the autumn? I know we don't even seem to have a summer yet, but given how busy and far apart we all are, would now be a good time to start thinking about it? Are enough people interested? (come on, Ann, Maggie and David and others across the pond - this would give you plenty of time to book your flights!)

Just a thought.