by admin | Oct 19, 2015 | Uncategorized
A good friend and colleague of mine died yesterday. She was an inspirational educator and only fifty two. An aggressive cancer killed her, just over a year after the first diagnosis, despite surgery and chemotherapy. I did what I could to help her, but it could never be enough. In the end she slipped away with frightening speed while I was on the other side of the world. There was nothing I could have done, but I wanted at least to be there, and I wasn’t.
And here I am now in New Zealand, on a glorious spring day, trying to distract myself with trivia about the new book, but in the end the only things that really matter are friendship, love and kindness. I’m remembering my friend, and wishing she had lived a little longer to realise some of the plans she had made for a brief spell of happiness.
by admin | Oct 4, 2015 | Uncategorized
Here’s the thing. I’d been in New Zealand for a couple of days and was feeling quite emotional when I fell asleep, then woke up at 3am. I thought the iPad by my bed was on mute, but the volume was just loud enough for me to hear the ping of an email as it came in. So I lay there and thought, should I just turn over and forget it, or do I need to turn the volume down so I’m not woken again? And if I have to turn the volume down, I might as well check the email at the same time, right?
Not the best idea: attached to the email was the first draft of the cover of ‘Cruel Tide’. I say the first draft, but actually this was after I’d already thought about and sent the brief to Kevin the cover designer. I had an image in my head and it was this that he’d incorporated into the cover that was staring back at me now in the middle of the night. I knew it would be powerful but it blew me away. Then I started having doubts. Was it too graphic, too haunting, too strong? What would readers of my previous books make of it? Would there be howls of protest, and was I risking my current readership for the potential larger potential audience of crime/thriller readers? These are not good thoughts to grapple with in the depth of the night, far from home, after three hours sleep.
Too late. I was hooked now and sleep evaporated. I’d already said I wanted the cover sorted out as soon as possible so we could get on with promotion, posters, and so on. So in I dived, and the emails zipped to the other side of the earth and back again. Maybe email was better than a phone call, as I couldn’t hear the frustration in the voice at the other end who was liaising with Kevin. ‘More of this’, I said, ‘and less of that’. You know how it goes, picky, picky.
By the time that exchange was over, light was dawning in the New Zealand sky and the tuis had begin their wonderful squeaky croaking chorus to welcome the day. If you’ve never seen or heard a tui, check it out. I love them, but perhaps not so early and after a disturbed night. Welcome or not, the new day and the early birds reminded me that the world goes on. Angst about a book cover is nothing, relative to the real issues of our world. A mere pimple on the cheek of life. Get over it. Yes the image is powerful, and maybe some people will find it disturbing, but the content of the book is disturbing too. I knew that from the start, and I haven’t backed away from it, so now’s the time to stay strong. ‘Staunch’ is the Kiwi word for it. If you can’t take some risks and follow your instincts when you self-publish, why bother?
by admin | Sep 28, 2015 | Uncategorized
It was a sixteen hour journey from Vancouver to Wellington and from northern hemisphere autumn to southern hemisphere spring, and now here I am on a glorious day, with flowers and blossom, blue sky, sunshine. Bliss. Rain in Auckland gave way to brilliant light on snow-capped Mount Taranaki and the Kaikoura Ranges as I watched transfixed from my window seat on the crowded plane.
I’ve been dreaming for a while about my return to New Zealand after a three year absence. The short plane trip from Auckland to Wellington this morning triggered a flood of memories of places and people and events, and made me cry, as it’s done before. I feel the same about the landscape of West Cumbria where I live, and have tried to portray this powerful sense of place in my writing, but inadequately. It’s hard to find the words to convey a passion for colours and contours and light without slowing down the pace of the story. You can infer what the characters see through what they say but real people rarely talk at any length about the landscape around them. The author’s own voice may be the only one available to carry the description, and the author’s voice should be heard rarely and only for a purpose. In ‘A Good Liar’ I used description of a hot languid afternoon to explain Jessie Whelan’s readiness for an erotic experience, and I think it worked, although no-one else seemed to notice. Oh how I yearn for some feedback about my writing at that level of detail.
Today, overwhelmed by my return to this wonderful place, I wonder if I can try again to capture the power of place in words that don’t intrude. The new novel ‘Cruel Tide’ is set in late autumn. Maybe the next story should be set in a Cumbrian spring, and all the jewellery of this glorious day could be harnessed to enfold the characters: dark deeds in brilliant surroundings. Could be fruitful.
by admin | Sep 9, 2015 | author platform, self-publishing, Uncategorized
Last Saturday I led my first ever workshop on self-publishing, at the Borderlines book festival in Carlisle. Considering I’ve been running workshops for twenty five years, and had been thinking about this one for weeks – I blogged about it at the end of July – I was surprisingly nervous. Could I cover in three hours the range of wants and needs that my participants might bring with them? Did I have enough experience? Would they want the technical guidance that is only really possible if you have a laptop and internet access available for each person, and did I have the skills for that anyway?
As I anticipated, each person in the group came with a unique set of prior experience, interests and questions, as was obvious as soon as they introduced themselves and began to talk about what they’d done so far. Predictably, one or two really needed the technical guidance through the maze of WordPress or Createspace or Lulu that we weren’t really geared up for, although there was another workshop the following day with that focus. Others came with a notion of how they wanted to proceed if they couldn’t find a ‘proper’ publisher. Some were optimistic about their chances of success, others less so, and each defined success differently, all as I anticipated. Some were quite reticent: why I wondered.
What was very striking was the number of people, and not the oldest, who were still coming to terms with the digital and online world. A few appeared to be very uncertain about how to use the internet as a resource to learn from, and were reliant on external guidance – from me in this case – about matters that they could have discovered for themselves with just a few clicks and a short tutorial on Youtube. Others had heard of Twitter or WordPress but the idea of an ‘author platform’ was new and nerve-wracking. I know it’s a truism that the under 30s are naturally more internet savvy than us oldies, but some of the over-30s seem to have forced themselves to catch up while others are still fearful, or dismissive, or both.
I’ve been wondering since then how I managed to learn some of this stuff myself over the past few years, despite my relatively extreme old age. I suppose it needs some spare cash to invest in ‘courses’ of various kinds, but it also needs a belief in eventual success, and a willingness to overcome the fear of failure. Faltering first steps don’t always feel good, but they are a pre-requisite if you want to learn anything.
Many years ago I was visiting a small primary school in Northland, New Zealand and noticed a poster on the staff room door, the inside of the door to be read by the staff not the outside to be read by the children. It said:
We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure.
It is a powerful obstacle to growth.
It assures the progressive narrowing of the
personality and prevents exploration and experimentation.
There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling.
If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on
risking failure – all your life.
It’s as simple as that.
I kept a copy and brought it home, and still have it twenty years later. Much of what we discussed and shared last weekend involved exactly this type of learning – full of ‘difficulty and fumbling’. Once that expectation was established, people were able to ask the ‘simple’ questions that had been confusing them and getting in the way. Different people had learned different things and were able to share them. No one had a monopoly of expertise, and three hours passed very quickly. Before we left I asked everyone to think about their next steps, write them down and then share them with one other person. I learned a long time ago that I feel more committed if I’ve spoken it, not just thought about or written it, so that’s what we did. The feedback was positive, but the real feedback if I could get it would be what each person managed to do later, on their own, with some of the difficulties eased a little as a result of our time together. ‘Fear of failure’ is a habit of mind that needs continual practice to be overcome. Practice may not make perfect, but It’s pretty important in self-publishing. The 4th self-publishing project I’m on now feels a lot less scary than the first one. Maybe it’s time to find the next challenge.
by admin | Sep 1, 2015 | Uncategorized
I’ve worked hard all my life, because I had to support myself and my child in the early days, and more recently for reasons other than earning enough to live on. As a self-employed education consultant I worked because it was fun, and creative and occasionally provided magic when everything came together and was indescribably satisfying. And I got to travel too, all over the place, and not as a tourist. There’s nothing like working in a community for a while to give you a sense of what it’s really about, not just the superficial view you get as a ‘visitor’. There were downsides too: working alone meant that the quality was down to me and no one else. I needed to think and plan well ahead to make sure things went well, and there seemed no end to it. As soon as one job was over I was into the next, and rarely felt free of the responsibility that is integral to self-employment.
Up to a point that’s fine. But somewhere down the line I’ve lost the art of doing nothing, if I ever had it. If there’s nothing on my mind I assume it’s something I’ve forgotten that will trip me up later. Having one major thing on my mind, to the temporary exclusion of everything else – like when I’m writing – is easier than spinning several plates at once, but not when that one thing invades my sleep as well as my waking hours. And trying to focus on one major thing while keeping other plates spinning at the same time – well, that’s too hard.
Maybe it’s something to do with age. Or maybe after decades of plate spinning I would like it to stop. The problem is, I want my writing to be successful, and that means keeping on writing. A book a year, that’s what it takes to keep up the momentum as a self-published author, and just recently I’ve detected signs that this could turn my pleasure in writing into an obligation, or – worse – a chore. If it is an obligation, it is to no one except myself: how self-indulgent and ego-centric is that? I have what countless other people crave – a high degree of control over my own life, and here I am finding that difficult.
Sometimes I would love to go to bed knowing that there was absolutely nothing to do the following day, except walk, or read, or swim, or eat and drink or sit in the sun. When I took six months off a few years ago, that was the plan. But then I decided there had to be a project, which was to write my first fiction, and with that decision the treadmill began to turn again. And now it’s turning like crazy and I’m still on it. It may be a different treadmill than the education work I was doing before, but I have to reassure myself that I can get off it if and when I want to. I drive my writing, the writing should not drive me, and the treadmill needs to be dismantled before it becomes truly addictive. Or maybe I just need some warm sunny weather to justify a day on the beach, or swimming in the Duddon. What happened to summer?
The upcoming trip overseas could be just the ticket. I have work to do in Edmonton, and a little more in Wellington, but that’s only a few days in all out of the five weeks of my trip. For the rest of the time I shall indulge myself, seeing friends who are important to me on the other side of the planet, eating and drinking and walking and talking. It’ll be early spring in New Zealand and probably not swimming weather, but I’m looking forward to everything else.
by admin | Aug 16, 2015 | Uncategorized
Last week brought the annual visit to the accountan for a review of the year’s business for ‘Ruth Sutton Ltd’ and discussion about the coming year. As I anticipated and had planned for, my ‘real work’ as an education consultant is finally winding down after 27 very busy years since 1988 when I left my safe salaried job and set off on my own. In the early years when I was ridiculously busy my accountant wanted me to arrange things differently so that I could make more money and grow my business, which is what he assumed I really wanted to do. This would have involved ‘packaging’ my services with special resources that could be sold to a larger numbers of clients, or ‘franchising’ my consultancy, bringing in others who would do the work under my ‘brand’ and would be hired out to clients under my direction and supervision. ‘As it stands’, he said, ‘you can only be in one place at once, so there’s a clear ceiling to the work you can do and therefore the money you can earn.’ That was true, but it still didn’t convince me to go down the road he was suggesting. Professional relationship and trust was at the heart of my work: if there were others whom I could rely on to replicate what I could offer then they would have to be my partners, not my ’employees’, and setting all that up would take time away from the core work I wanted to do and enjoyed.
As time went by, and my work took me regularly all around the UK and then to Canada and New Zealand, I found a special role in putting these various systems in touch with each other, brokering very productive visits and professional sharing and getting great satisfaction from doing so. That was the ‘goodwill’ that had to be quantified when I set up the ‘limited company’ some years later and which was now coming to an end.
I’ve always maintained that an education consultant’s shelf-life is limited, and is also to some degree a function of the regular high quality work s/he is doing with clients at all levels of the education system. Once that work begins to slow down you have less to offer, and at a certain point you should be prepared to ‘shut up and sit down’. I’d seen some of my peers not do this, drifting slowly from the education business into the entertainment business, with the same old routines, presentations, ideas and decontextualised suggestions, – packaged, slick and still financially rewarding but repetitious and well past their sell-by date. ‘Snake oil salesman’ is too harsh a description, but you probably see the problem. The punters themselves often want you to soften and popularise the message, which is flattering, and it’s easy to succumb when they offer you heaps of money and treat you like a celebrity.
So when it comes to winding up my consultancy business, there is no financial or tangible ‘legacy’ product that can be sold, except the private pension money that I’ve assiduously put away over the years and will now pay me a modest and sufficient amount, if I manage it well. The accountant went once again through all the ideas that had first been discussed twenty five years ago, and with the same result. ‘So what have you got out of all those years and all that work?’ he asked. It wasn’t hard to answer that one: twenty five years of travelling the world, working with teachers, school and system leaders in many countries with a view always to improving the quality of real deep learning and teaching that children and young people receive. That work has been a privilege and a pleasure, and I’m rewarded with good friendships all over the world and countless amazing experiences as a traveller, not a tourist. My only regret is that I didn’t keep a more detailed and consistent diary, although I have a shelf-ful of notebooks, as well as books and articles I’ve written over the years.
There are a couple more work commitments in the diary for the coming year, and then I’m done with the education work and able to focus on learning and developing a different set of skills, as a fiction writer who publishes her own work and does all the promotion and marketing herself. That should keep me going for a while. What I want is the recognition that self-publishers writers are usually denied, and an added bonus would be the chance to sell my novels further afield…. and a tv or film deal wouldn’t come amiss as well. Any offers?
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