by admin | Apr 16, 2014 | cover, Cumbria, Fallout, historical fiction, Lake District, readers, trilogy
Everything’s coming to a head: final proofs, back matter, acknowledgements, they all have to be thought about, generated, discussed, revised and checked while the printer’s deadline looms closer. And still the iterations of the front cover continue, back and forth, as we consult about an image that will grab the readers’ attention, please the eye and intrigue the mind. John Aldridge my book designer visited West Cumbria while I was away in Canada and took some stunning pictures of beaches and sunsets, and this is the first chance I’ve had to see them. Then Kevin Ancient the cover designer got to work, aiming to combine beauty and message. ‘Don’t be too specific about the message,’ they say, but I want a sense of threat, because it pervades the book. Threat to the community, and then a different, more personal threat to one of my beloved characters. Beauty alone, however striking, will not be enough, hence the debate, and now I think we’ve finally found what I want.
Once all the bits and pieces are agreed, off it all goes to the printers in Cornwall and we wait. Only three weeks and then the pallet with its precious cargo, the outcome of countless hours of work, will be delivered and we start the distribution to bookshops and tackle the long list of pre-orders. The trilogy is almost done: I can’t quite believe it. When I thought about the possibility several years ago I had no idea whether I could pull it off, but here it is. Amazing. Quarter of a million words about a West Cumbrian family in the first half of the twentieth century. There’s nothing quite like it anywhere, and it will still be there long after I’m gone, hopefully enjoyed by visitors and locals alike as a testament to this wonderful place and the people who live here.
by admin | Mar 4, 2014 | A Good Liar, Fallout, Forgiven, readers, self-publishing, title, trilogy, Windscale fire
Here’s the thing…..for several months I’ve been referring to my new novel by a title. It wasn’t a brilliant title – intriguing, clever, achingly memorable – but it was pertinent, had a useful double meaning and I was getting used to it. The novel is about a continuing family saga, and part of the action takes place in a nuclear plant where there’s a fire and radioactive contamination of the area. All the detail about the nuclear reactor fire is real by the way, and makes a very suspenseful story. My chosen title is – or was – ‘Fallout’. Get it?
So far so good. The manuscript is with the editor; the book designer and I have been discussing the new cover, which has not been started yet. BUT today I hear via Twitter that another novel with exactly the same title is due out on May 1st, and is already visible on Google. No nuclear connection in this one, but it’s a resonant name for a dysfunctional group or relationship, and I’m sure it fits this other novel perfectly well.
Now what do I do? There’s no copyright on titles, so I don’t have to change mine, but do I want my novel to come out with the same title in the same month? The title of my first novel ‘A Good Liar’ was only a prefix away from other book titles, but they had been published years before. This feels different.
I’ve been jotting down alternative titles all afternoon, realising as I do so ‘what’s in a name’. Now the editor and the book designer and I – and you too if you wish to join in – are playing around with the possibilities, with a fairly imminent deadline. If we have to change, I hope it doesn’t cause confusion among my potential readership, and we can come up with something so magical that more readers are inspired to pick it up, and then also read the two previous books in the trilogy (‘A Good Liar’ and ‘Forgiven’) just to get the full flavour of my heroine Jessie Whelan’s courage, flaws and fierce protection of her independence. By the way, if you’re thinking of suggesting a title, Jessie does find love, even if she’s not sure what to do with it. When a decision is finally made, you’ll be the first to know.
by admin | Feb 19, 2014 | A Good Liar, Cumbria, Fallout, Forgiven, historical fiction, readers, Rohinton Mistry, selling, structure, trilogy, writing
Of all Rohinton Mistry’s poignant and ‘pain-full’ stories the ones I love most are in his ‘Tales from the Firozsha Baag’, about an apartment building in Bombay (as was), told through the eyes of a boy who lives there and knows all the quirky tenants and the connections between them. The eleven stories are linked by the boy and a place, and we follow the complex trail of friendships, quarrels and animosities which leads from one episode to the next.
A trilogy, three stories in a sequence, can have similar delights, and present similar challenges. I didn’t make a conscious decision to write a trilogy until I found my main character Jessie Whelan, months after starting to write ‘A Good Liar’, and quickly discovered that she was too complicated and interesting – to me at least – to be lost after just one book. So I left the ending of ‘A Good Liar’ ambivalent and unresolved, to encourage the reader to want more, jumped ahead ten years, and carried on.
It was only when planning the next part ‘Forgiven’ that I realised that for some readers this would be the first book, not the second. I needed to build on the prior knowledge of some readers without repeating too much and boring them, while at the same time enabling new readers to have sufficient backstory to develop the internal tension I was striving for.
Flashbacks weren’t going to work: there was too much detail that could seriously interrupt the forward movement of the plot. So I had to reveal necessary backstories through reminiscent conversation, or questions from ‘new’ characters requesting and receiving information that new readers might also find useful. All that couldn’t be within the first few pages, but if the new reader was kept waiting too long they might give up. Not all that the new reader might find interesting is needed at one time: little morsels can be dropped in from time to time, just to add flavour to what’s currently happening.
It all needs to be planned of course, and I’m getting better at that from a very cold start. My early assumption that I could start to write and all the necessary plot details would fall neatly into place was the main reason why my first effort ‘A Good Liar’ took four years to complete, compared with a tight year or less for each of the following books.
Once the first draft is readable, it then needs to be looked at both by ‘experienced’ readers, who’ve read the previous parts of the trilogy and ‘newbies’ who have not. Their needs are different and both have to be reasonably happy with what’s presented to them. In commercial terms, it’s helpful if, wherever the reader starts, she is keen to read either the previous parts of the trilogy or the following ones, or both.
Selling more books was not a major consideration when I decided to write a trilogy, but it’s been noticeable that when the second part appeared it boosted sales of the first one. I’m hoping of course that the publication of Part 3 of the trilogy ‘Fallout’ will similarly bootstrap the sales of the previous two. For a self-published author of fiction, finding a readership will always be a challenge. A single book might have novelty value but then sink without trace when the first flurry of attention – if you’re lucky – is past. Producing three books in a series in successive years is a writing challenge, but should help sales, if the books are worth reading. If the first one is a reeker, then it could work the other way. Until the author’s name on the cover is so well-known that anything you write will sell, you’re only as good as your last book.
Despite the complications, I’m glad I decided to write three linked books, each set in the same area with overlapping characters and ten years on from the previous one. The story encompasses the first half of the twentieth century in West Cumberland, and I enjoyed the long view as well as the microcosmic details of each episode. It’s a West Cumbrian saga as well as a family saga, and I’m happy about that.
Now that the third part is virtually complete, I’m casting about for the theme, place and time of the next book. I may even try a different genre, crime fiction this time, but set in the past like ‘Life on Mars’. I won’t be making a definite decision about that until ‘Fallout’ is ready for the printers in about three months’ time.
by admin | Feb 7, 2014 | Explicit details, Fallout, readers, self-publishing, trilogy, writing
Writing a trilogy is trickier than I thought: I’ve written the three novels in ‘Between the Mountains and the Sea’ as three ‘episodes’ set ten years apart, but readers may not tackle them in chronological order. No matter how much you want her to start at the beginning, every reader may start wherever she wants. As a consequence, I can make no assumptions about what the reader already knows about previous events or understands about the characters.
Other series I’ve read with pleasure, notably the Patrick O’Brian ‘Aubrey and Maturin’ stories, make very few concessions to the reader: if you’re lost, that’s your problem. But I have tried to be a little more accommodating, and there’s the rub. For the ‘experienced’ reader I can afford to be implicit, letting them fill in the gaps from what they already know. For the ‘novice’ reader however, implicit is harder: it may drive them back into the previous episodes for greater understanding, or it might drive them away altogether. More details and back stories sometimes need to be provided, which could threaten the flow of the plot and risk annoying those for whom the repetition is unnecessary.
On the whole I think explicitness has won out, but while writing recently the final stages of Part 3 ‘Fallout’ I’ve tipped towards ‘less is more’. The main thread of the story is the one that really matters, to me at least, and is reasonably well tied together at the end. I had planned to have a big ‘set piece’ as a penultimate chapter, to update the wider cast of characters and make their futures more explicit, but when I got to that stage the big scene lost its appeal. I knew I was done when I started to cry, and didn’t want to dilute the final impact by writing more.
So the ms of ‘Fallout feels almost complete. It will have to be read out loud and crafted more thoughtfully, sentence by sentence, but the main work is done, a couple of weeks before my self-imposed deadline. Is that a good sign I wonder? After the protracted agonies of the first novel this has felt alarmingly straight-forward. If there’s something seriously awry I’m counting on my wonderful editor Charlotte to find it. Mick, my partner, has been reading as the draft has unfolded and his feedback has been invaluable, but he may be too close to see the faults clearly, as I am myself.
I recall this feeling of anti-climax: restlessness, uncertainty, desperate for feedback. The urge is to start on the next stage in self-publishing, the nightmare of promotion and ‘marketing, but I’m trying to be patient – not my strong suit. By next week I may know more and feel differently. Watch this space.
by admin | Jan 24, 2014 | A Good Liar, Fallout, readers, sex scene, Uncategorized, writing
After nearly three books with my main character Jessie Whelan, I know that sex has always been important to her. Her first affair resulted in a baby she was forced to give away; the second reckless fling with a much younger man ended with a drunken sexual assault that left her bruised and humiliated. When the love of her life finally arrives, how will the sex be, if at all? And – the big question for me – how will I represent this on the page without being too graphic or too coy, and in a way that honestly illuminates their relationship, as the best sex should?
Writing about Jessie’s violent encounter with the young man in ‘A Good Liar’ (Book 1 of the trilogy) was very difficult: even thinking about it in retrospect makes me feel uncomforatble. The first draft of the sex scene in Book 3 ‘Fallout’ was easier to write, but that may be because both parties are clearer about what they mean to each other. It also helps that their friendship is based on mutual intellectual respect and a similarly rational, even ‘matter-of-fact’ approach to sex as a natural extension of their close relationship. Now I’m on the second draft, and the issue is on my mind again. My guess is that some of my readers will prefer implicit allusions with more left to their imagination, while others would prefer more explicitness. Anyone who thinks that sex is irrelevant doesn’t understand Jessie Whelan.
So far in writing this scene I’ve been explicit about a few ‘stages’ in the first sexual encounter, but left gaps, to avoid the tedium of a ‘blow by blow’ (sorry!) account. It is their first time and both partners are relatively inexperienced, so extended feats of sexual athletics are therefore unlikely. I anticipate that their enjoyment of each other will grow with trust and practice, and this might be hinted at later. Despite all the passion, we can still laugh about sex too, and they do. My mother would have been appalled, no doubt, but my heroine doesn’t aspire to be ‘lady-like’.
I’ll have another go at it and then check with one or two people for their reactions. My best hope is to steer a readable middle ground between too much information and too little, and to avoid the ghastly Lawrentian euphemisms that ruined a good story in ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’. If you want to see how it turns out in the end, Fallout should be out in June 2014. The difficult sex scene in ‘A Good Liar’ can be found in the book, which you can get through my website or through Amazon. The Kindle version is available as well.
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