Is there life off-line?

by | Aug 11, 2015 | Uncategorized

I wonder how long it will take BT OpenReach to find our remote village and get the problem on my telephone line fixed? Until then I’m reduced to going to my daughter’s down the road or to the local cafe to get online, and it feels different, as if I’m encroaching on others and need to hurry up.

So I shall be brief…

Being off line is strangely liberating. I feel less tied to the iPad and the laptop, more free to think without so much external stimulus, like I do when travelling. A possible story line for the next novel is being to float around, in the new space available in my head. I’m also aware of the anxiety that comes with it. Starting another book before the proofs are ready on the current one is probably a bad idea. The final stages of editing need proper focus with the details part of my brain, not the expansive part that generates new stories and ideas. If I knew more about my own brain I could explain this in more grown-up terms, but you probably get the picture.

So for the next few days I shall be reliant on time-consuming processes and visiting to get on-line. I may see more of my grandchildren – a good thing – and/or drink more coffee – not such a good thing. But I shall survive. In the great scheme of things, being off-line is a mere pimple on the nose of life.

Self-publishing: what does it really entail?

by | Jul 27, 2015 | Uncategorized

On Saturday September 5th, at the Borderlines Book Festival in Carlisle, I’ll be running my first workshop on self-publishing. I’m delighted that they asked me to do something at this event. I went last year and did a very short session on writing local fiction. It was too short to do any justice to such a complex topic, but I enjoyed it, and the rest of the festival was really good too, so I was glad to be part of it.

This time I have a little longer, and the topic is quite specific, or so I thought when I said I would do it. But the more I think about self-publishing, the more complicated and multi-dimensional it seems to become. I’m trying to create some kind of sequence of sub-topics as the basic structure of what I offer, but it’s looking more like a flow chart, with binary choices to be made a various points. The people who present themselves, assuming that some will sign up for it, will all be very different in their motivation, confidence, prior knowledge and aspirations, and I’m struggling to create something that will have a chance of meeting such disparate needs.

The first stage in the flow chart has to be the existence of a ‘product’ – novel, short-story, poem, whatever it may be, – that will actually be worth publishing. Without a well written and crafted ‘thing’ any kind of publishing is premature. We’ll have to address the issue of quality, and the importance of professional editing, although I know right from the off that some people want to self-publish with as little financial outlay as they can possibly manage. How do you persuade someone that getting their well-meaning but amateur friend to edit their work is not a good start?

Given a quality ‘product’, the next step is to consider whether self-publishing is the best choice, rather than putting more energy into finding an agent and thence to ‘traditional’ publication, with most of the decisions taken out of the author’s hands. We will need to look at the pros and cons of self-publishing in some detail, to make sure that anyone choosing that road understands what they’re doing, and why.

If self-publishing is the best option, then another host of variable and choices present themselves, which is where the diversity of the people in the group will probably be most manifest. Some want to publish just for family and friends, others only as ebook, others again – myself included – prefer the paperback as well as ebook option, aware of the costs that can be incurred, including storage if you don’t want to be falling over boxes of books in your home. Keeping precious books in a damp garage isn’t a great idea, and mice love paper.

Whichever self-publishing choice the author makes, books don’t sell themselves. Unless you’re extremely fortunate and well-connected, reviews will be hard to come by, and the mainstream booksellers may not want to put an unknown writer’s self-published stuff on their shelves. So how do you get people to buy your book, once you’ve run through those who know your name and want to support you? At this stage, under the heading of ‘promotion and marketing’, off we go into the development of the ‘author platform’, the very idea of which will make some wince and others lose heart. If you’re starting from scratch, the work involved in developing and connecting the various components of a ‘platform’ – website, blog, Facebook and Twitter presence, and much more – looks daunting, and it takes time.

And after all that effort on the laptop, the digital presence will need to be supplemented with personal appearances, anywhere and everywhere. I sold more books last year at meetings, events and so on than by any other means. and really enjoyed doing so, but I know what a nightmare they might be to others with less experience and practice.

Does self-publishing pay for itself, or even generate some real money? It can, certainly, but that takes a great deal of work and time that could – or should? – be spent on the real business of the writer – writing!

See what I mean? It’s not easy. My challenge is to plan three hours or so of pertinent activity and discussion that will raise these issues and give the participants a chance to work on a plan to take away. If you read this far and fancy joining us, hit the website link at the top of this post and follow the stages to book your place. There’ll be other great sessions to sign up for too, if last year’s successful Borderlines event is anything to go by. I heard Rory Stewart there last year, and Alan Johnson, both talking very impressively about their new ‘conventionally’ published books. For those of us with less clout, the road to publication is more difficult but offers far more control and more income per book too. If self-publication appeals to you, come and work with us on September 5th and we’ll learn together.

Local sensitivities

by | Apr 15, 2015 | Uncategorized

I was speaking at a local Women’s Institute last night, and chose to focus on the challenge of writing fiction set in my local area within living memory. It’s a tricky issue, and it’s rarely raised as a question when I talk about my books, so I wanted to air it myself.

Here in West Cumbria, and in many other settled rural locations I’m sure, people are sensitive about where they live, their neighbours, their histories and their reputations. Details of the landscape are very well known to those who’ve lived in the same village for generations, and memories are long and intense. I realised very soon after I came to live here ten years ago that ‘offcomers’ like me are a subject of curiosity and possible suspicion. Would I ‘fit in’ I wondered? It’s easy to upset local sensitivities, although forgiveness is quick if your motives are deemed to be positive, which is just as well or you could be so afraid of upsetting someone that you compromise yourself too much.

The up side of local fiction is that people love to read about where they live, to see familiar names and places on the page. But you have to get them right! I know of one place in ‘A Good Liar’ where I’ve given the wrong name to one of the passes that run between the valleys, spokes of a wheel on the west side of the Lake District with the Scafells at the hub.  Was it Black Sail pass that should have been Scarth Gap or the other way round? It’ll be corrected before the next reprint.

In developing characters to populate this landscape I have carefully avoided any similarity in name, appearance or disposition to anyone I know to be living or have lived here. It’s a fiction, I tell my local readers repeatedly: you may recognise some of the places but the people are made up. Some still nod sagely and tap the side of the nose to indicate that they know I have to say that, but we both know that one of the characters is really so-and-so, isn’t it, eh? There is one exception to this rule, the vicar Lionel Leadbetter in ‘A Good Liar’, who was based on the real vicar of Waberthwaite and Corney in the early years of the last century. Stories about Rev. Pottinger abound and he was clearly an important and recogniseable local figure who made his mark on this community in a positive way, despite of or more likely because of his energy and forceful personality.

In the second book of the trilogy ‘Forgiven’ I wanted one of my characters to be part of the main background event, the explosion in the William Pit in August 1947 that killed 104 men and boys. Each of the 104 was memorialised in a poignant book called ‘104 Men’, published a few years ago. Was it ethically appropriate for me to add another fictional person to that list, the 105th man, just to beef up my story? I decided not, not because I was afraid of any local reaction but because it wouldn’t be right. Another opportunity to blend fact with fiction was available, however, and I took it. Three men walked out of that pit alive, 20 hours after the explosion took place. Their experiences were told, first hand, to the enquiry held by the national Coal Board into the disaster, and I had one of my characters become part of that small group, to live and tell the story of courage and experience and resourcefulness that saved their lives.

The third book ‘Fallout’ presented a further, and the most tricky, demand to a writer looking to blend fact and fiction in an era where the facts are still within living memory. In October 1957 the nuclear reactor at Windscale, just up the coast from here, heated up uncontrollably and then caught fire. It was a tiny reactor by modern standards but if the fire had caused the reactor building to collapse, which was possible, the uncontrolled release of radio-active material into the atmosphere would have been disastrous. In my book ‘Fallout’ this event forms the backdrop to the final part of the family drama that began twenty years before with the start of my trilogy ‘Between the Mountains and the Sea’. Some of the details about what happened at Windscale (now re-named Sellafield) are well-known to many local people, although much of the story – and in particular the underlying causes of the accident – was protected by the Officlal Secrets Act until the papers were released in 2007. In writing the first fictional acciount of what happened during that historic week, I had to make two choices. First, I decided to place a fictional character right at the heart of the action, in the form of a nuclear expert called Lawrence Finer who had been seconded to Windscale to help with problems in the reactor. Secondly, I chose to include some of the key people at the plant as minor backdrop characters, observed by Lawrence Finer as they played their roles during the crisis. I was worried about legal as well as ethical considerations and took advice from a lawyer who specialises in publishing matters. I was told that my treatment should address three issues; one, were the facts about the people and their tasks accurate? two, were the ‘real’ people well in the background, not the foreground of the story? third was anything going to be recorded in my work that could be deemed damaging to the reputations of these people?

I was lucky. The facts had been meticulously gathered and recorded in a book written by the official Atomic Energy Authority historian, Lorna Arnold in ‘Windscale 1957: Anatomy of a Nuclear Accident’. I had already given the key role to a fictional character who was plausible but had no actual equivalent in the plant at that time, leaving the ‘real’ characters in the background. And, thanks to the actual exemplary expertise and courage of the men I chose to mention, their reputations – which had been unfairly damaged at the time by the Government enquiry into the incident – could be enhanced rather than damaged by the facts of the case. On that basis I decided to go ahead, but when the book was published in June 2014 I had some concerns about a possible local reaction. To this date, there has been none, apart from the repeated feedback from people who worked at the plant that they didn’t previously know what had really happened there in October 1957. Incidentally, some of the irradiated mess left behind after the reactor fire was extinguished is still being dismantled today, 60 years later. In this part of the world, the fact that nothing has been said to my face to indicate unhappiness about my treatment of the story doesn’t mean that nothing is out there. The only roundabout feedback has been that a relative of one of them men involved bought several copies of the book to send to family members in Australia. I interpret this – if true – an an indication of acceptance, but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Slow snow falling on Friday

by | Nov 15, 2014 | Uncategorized

I wonder how much the physical circumstances of writing affect my thoughts. The last post, about ‘Flow’, I wrote in an apartment on the 14th floor of a condo building in downtown Winnipeg, as the traffic streamed into the city and construction workers on yet another new building across the street picked their way around in a gusty wind beneath a massive crane. I felt energized and quick, with movement all around me.

Today, now, I’m sitting in a silent space watching light soft snow falling into the Salmon River as it slides past a few metres from my window, on its way to Grand Lake, New Brunswick. Fat, fluffy flakes drift gently down, the river’s movement is almost imperceptible, and my mind has slowed down too. Maybe it needed to: the past three weeks have been full on. And for the first time in three weeks I’ve had space in my head for the book that had pre-occupied me for weeks before I started this trip, the one I’m writing, the first one of a new series.

Walking in the snow this morning I had a clear vision of one of the characters in my head, and was also convinced that this was a different image than the one that found its way into the first draft of Chapter 1 written over a month ago. Lots to change I thought. But then I re-read the draft, and there it was, identical to my current image. Curiously reassuring: the complexity I wanted to see was already there. Then I went to the character study of this person that I’d written and filed many months ago, and all the prior work and thinking suddenly filled my head as if they’d never been away. Over the next few days, exploring the Bay of Fundy before I finally head home, I have to keep the thoughts simmering gently. If it carries on snowing like this, I might even make a virtue of confinement and write some more. It’s a relief to get back to the real writing after so long away from it. The snow is reminding of a wonderful book by David Guterson called ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’. I hope I can achieve the sense of place and atmosphere as well as he did.

On the verge of downloading Guterson’s book and re-reading it, I hesitate. ‘Be careful what you read during your writing project,’ was advice offered on a writing course. ‘Beware of being influenced by someone else’s style and losing your own voice.’ Could that happen, really? Even if it did, I couldn’t stop reading while my writing is underway. And I choose books within the same genre as my own, using my inner critic to deconstruct them and inspire to do as well, or better, myself.

Location – real or fictional?

by | Mar 9, 2014 | Uncategorized

The question of whether the location of a story should be real or fictional has bothered me ever since the first idea for my first novel ‘A Good Liar’ several years ago. I wanted to write about where I live, but I also knew my neighbours – many of whom had lived there for generations – were cagey about having their place and inferentially themselves, publicised in this way. So I fudged it. I created a fictional village called Newton at the heart of the story, but all the rest of the locations were real. Many local people who’ve read both ‘A Good Liar’ and ‘Forgiven’, the second of the trilogy, have asked about this decision. Some have asked for a map, which I resisted because of the fudge between fact and fiction.

On balance, I’m glad I didn’t name my village in the books and at least tried to protect its privacy. I’m also glad I checked beforehand with the current owners of a house where some of the action in ‘A Good Liar’ takes place – the Mill Cottage in Boot, Eskdale – to ensure that they were OK with seeing their home both in print and in illustration. They were, as the Mill attached to the cottage is now run as a tourist attraction and publicity is good for business. In the second book, ‘Forgiven’, I wrote about another very precise location, West Row in Kells, Whitehaven. You can check it on Google Maps and see as I did the wonderful view from the houses on that street, looking out over the Solway Firth to Scotland. If – or when? – the story is ever filmed, how would the current residents feel about the tour buses bumping down their cobbled street? I don’t seriously expect that to happen, but it’s an interesting speculation.

So when you’re writing fiction set in a particular area, as I do, deciding about real or fictional place names and details is an issue. In Part 3 of my trilogy set in West Cumberland in the last century I faced this question again, with the choice of Seascale as the main location, and the Windscale nuclear plant (as it was called then) close by. I didn’t ask the residents of Seascale if that was alright with them. Neither the place nor its people were presented in a negative way, and I don’t expect complaints when the book comes out later this year. The question of its title, by the way, remains unsettled, and you can see why if you read my previous blog post, ‘What’s in a Name?’.

With the as yet untitled Book 3 going into production I’m turning my mind to Book 4, and the possibility of switching genre from historical fiction to crime fiction, using as my protagonist one of the characters from the trilogy. If you’re read ‘Forgiven’ – and if not, why not? – you might want to speculate about who the lead character might be. The decision I’m facing now is where to set this new book. I want to stay in Cumbria with its rich history and glorious landscape, but should it be a fictional location or a real one? If it’s crime fiction, the dark side of the place will necessarily be revealed, with bad people doing bad things. If that’s in a recogniseable setting, and only a few decades ago, could that put me at odds with the community I have chosen to live in? If it does, should I care about that?

Fiction writers have always plundered their own lives for people and places and doings and sayings: some of them – D.H. Lawrence for example – knew they would cause upset and didn’t appear to care. But I do care. Does that make a wimp rather than a real writer?