Remembrance of Things Past

If there was a theme to the 2012 Wellington’s Writers' and Readers' Week, part of the biennual International Arts Festival, then it is encapsulated in the title of Proust’s magnum opus, which I have cheekily used as the heading of this blog entry.

Kate Grenville, I discover, wrote 23 drafts of Sarah Thornhill, which I have yet to read, though I have read the earlier, A River Runs Deep. “Books about the present,” she says, “sit in the past” and she has been engaged with writing novels drawing on her family’s Australian history. “Sorry business,” she tells us, “when spoken by Aborigines, refers to what you do when some-one dies, to mourning.” So, saying “sorry” has a particular meaning in that context, one not obvious to a New Zealander. She talks, too, about her words being precious to her, taking them seriously, wanting to get her writing, “more than right enough.” Her first draft is random, drawing on sources, without necessarily an actual story line and it’s subsequent drafts that meld it into shape.

Alan Hollinghurst, however, writes his first draft slowly and doesn’t do much rewriting. “The Stranger’s Child", he says, “is about time and its workings and memory and its failings.” He also says, “Books creep up on me in little pieces.” Later, we look up Tennyson’s poem, “In Memoriam,” because he talks about it.

Jenny Erpenbeck’s East German beginnings seem relevant to her concerns about “who is the ‘me’ in me, how am I built up?’ and how ‘our stories of ourselves can be broken,’ for example, if we grow up in a family and later discover our birth origins lie elsewhere.

(Jenny E may be my new-author-discovery for this W & R) She spoke of writing about characters who “turn in on themselves” and how part of everyone is kept internal, for their own self. Her book Visitation, which I am yet to read, focuses on a particular house, drawing on one that was important to her as a child, but not about her.

Jean Gabriel Vásquez left his homeland, Colombia, for Paris, because, “books happen there.” He talks about how the USA’s “war on drugs” created the mafia in Colombia, and how history and politics “invade a private life” and shape an individual morally. He sees a role for novelists in working to make it hard for the forces of forgetfulness at large in the world, referring to Colombia as an “amnesiac country” where people try to forget difficult times in its history. (He and Kate Grenville would have made a good panel pairing.)

There were others, of course: Patrick Evans regretting the lack of “consequential writing” in New Zealand. (Writing, I think he said, about those things which must not be spoken of.); Germaine Greer, making the case for Shakespeare’s Wife as a tour de force in Stratford; Michael Hulse writing poetry from a place of asking questions; Kim Scott, searching on the inside to illuminate what is happening outside; Denise Mina, charming everyone and offering her set of bullet points about how to write comics (which she does, along with an impressive range of crime fiction). And more, always more.

The to-be-read pile has grown, but not by as much as some years, and I figure I’ll be back in 2014.

And the reading continues

This publishing business does chew up the hours, but reading has been going on.

August by Bernard Beckett is a discussion about free will in a novel. Two people in some undisclosed future time are having this conversation while stuck upside down in a crashed vehicle. Flashbacks elucidate the discussion. It appealed to the part of me that likes any discussion of ideas, although the story was somewhat overwhelmed by the weight of the ideas. The need of two of the characters—in-the-flashbacks to outdo each other was interesting, too.

Emma Donohue’s Room was compelling. Hood, (1995) an earlier novel, a coming out story, not so much. On the evidence of the newer novel being more succesful, for me, than the earlier one, I’ll certainly read her next.

Stella Duffy’s Mouths of Babes (2005) is a good read about lesbian detective Saz, her partner and their baby and a promise that is inevitably broken. The most interesting aspect of the book for me is how the person to whom the promise is made reacts when it is broken. (To say more would ruin the plot.)

Other books I have read I will be writing about in other places, to which I’ll refer in a later blog entry.

With Writers and Readers Week in Wellington on the horizon I am looking forward to discovering a new author or two, as well as hearing from some favourites like Kate Grenville.

Keeping on keeping on: publishing my novel Where the HeArt is as an ebook (5): Letting people know

The log I am keeping of my efforts to let people who might be interested know about Where the HeArt is is impressively long. However, many of the items are to record contacts I have made that have not, so far, produced any results. I am told, on some of the how-to-sell-your ebook sites I look at, that a slow build is the most likely scenario. Others suggest all sort of things to do, such as emailing your entire address list several times over a couple of weeks, which I regard as spamming and have no intention of doing.

If you look at the top right corner of this blog you will see the cover of Where the HeArt is and links to Smashwords and Kindle below it. These will remain at that spot on the screen regardless of what else I post, and I just checked both those links and they work. (In case they don’t work for you, googling my name or the book title will find them.)

Any day now, I’ll do a blog entry about what I’m reading.

Self-publishing my novel as an ebook (4) Details details details

Getting to grips with the marketing thing means letting people know the book is available, how to get it, and encouraging them to buy and read it. I tend to focus on the first two, and have a ‘handout’ in both electronic and printout form that I am distributing. Here it is:

Where the HeArt is by Pat Rosier
Published: Jan. 22, 2012 Price: 4.95USD
Blurb
Will travel fix Ann's broken life? Suddenly bereft of both partner and job, Ann needs to find a new direction. Connecting frayed threads of family and finding herself in what she calls "art events" in America is rewarding, but no preparation for the totally unexpected—in more ways than one—things that happen in London. Ann returns home to New Zealand both shaken and stirred.
Extended description
It was her mother's idea that forty-year-old Ann should go traveling. Ann's parter has walked out and she's been made redundant from a university job she enjoys, teaching the Romantic poets. She can combine her love of art museums with visits to family members in Washington DC, New York and London, mending frayed connections. A final few family-free days in Paris will round off her trip. Travel will give her a break from well-meaning advice and a chance to think about future directions for her fractured life. After all, she has a willing father to take care of the sale of her once-shared house, and the dog was always more her partner's.
Unexpected "art events" begin in New York, where her experience of the art works she admires take on a whole new dimension. In London, Ann finds that her cousin's competent wife could actually use some help with two-year-old twins, so she extends her stay and her knowledge of young children. A decidedly non-familial encounter with a dynamic librarian in London and an impetuous mistake in Paris mean that Ann returns to New Zealand and her future both shaken and stirred.
For sale for 4.95 US Dollars as an ebook on both the smashwords site and the kindle site. The URLs are:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/125647
This is the Smashwords site, where you can get versions for all different kinds of readers, (including Kindle) including a pdf for your computer if you want. One purchase gets all versions.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0073O5DVC
This is the Kindle site itself. You can buy it here, but only the Kindle version.

I’m keeping a log of what I am doing to get the news out about the book, both to avoid repeating myself and for future reference should I do this again. I trawl around the internet looking for likely places to announce it. Each place I approach, usually by email, wants something different and has a different way of doing things. It can take a LOT of time with, I suspect, little return.

I have discovered that (in New Zealand) you can get ISBN numbers for self-published ebooks from the National Library, just as you do for print books. They issued me with separate numbers for pdf, mobi and epub versions. It costs nothing and makes books findable. They also operate legal deposit for ebooks, so have sent mine in.

Nielson book data is another place to make books findable, and I am awaiting a reply from them regarding whether they list ebooks.

I’m not writing anything new while all this is filling my mind.

Self-publishing my novel as an ebook (3) It’s Done!

It's done. Now you can buy my ebook Where the HeArt is from Smashwords:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/125647 Or just go to smashwords.com and search on either my name or the book title.

You can get the KIndle version from the Smashwords site, or go to http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0073O5DVC
to buy it from the Kindle store (4.95USD).

One advantage of buying it from Smashwords is that you can, with one purchase (4.95USD) download a whole range of versions for different ereaders. For example, you can download a Kindle version and an ibooks (epub) version for your ipad. And a pdf version for your computer. And so on.

Here’s the blurb:
Will travel fix Ann’s broken life? Suddenly bereft of both partner and job, Ann needs to find a new direction. Connecting with frayed threads of family and finding herself in what she calls “art events” in the United States is rewarding, but no preparation for the totally unexpected—in more ways than one—things that happen in London. Ann returns to New Zealand both shaken and stirred.

Where the HeArt is will also be available soon from ebook retailers like the apple store and Barnes and Noble in the UK and all the major ebook retailers and distributors except Amazon (hence the separate Kindle version). This is a distribution service provided (free to authors) by Smashwords and is one of the reasons for using them.

Now I need to let potential readers know Where the HeArt is is out there. This is the worst bit for me. This blog will link to facebook, so that's covered. I’ll blog about the whole promotion thing from time to time. I read on sites like Goodreads that lots of self-publishers find this part the hardest, it’s not just me.

If you read my book and want to be helpful, a good way is to make a comment about it (often called a “review” but it isn’t really), or a rating, on the website you bought it from. Or anywhere else, for that matter. (I sit and stare at this paragraph, wanting to delete it—what a nerve, asking readers to promote my book, I think. I suppose it could be seen as a variation of the venerable “word of mouth.” Maybe it’s the asking that seems wrong.)

I’ve checked out the look of it, as far as I can with the resources I have, in various the formats for various ebooks, and it seems to be working all right. If anyone gets a version with something awful, like squashed headings or links that don’t work, please let me know. (If you don’t have an email address for me, leave a comment on this blog.)

So here we go, off into the ebook ether.

Reading Infinite Jest

One way I had thought of describing Infinite Jest is as a long scream with funny bits. It’s an evisceration of Amarican-style, commercial, pleasure-based culture where there is so much choice that choice is meaningless, in a USA where people are over-entertained and sad and bored and lonely. Especially lonely.

I set out to read IJ as a challenge to myself. I read some reviews and comments on it and every one said it was difficult. It's certainly long, at over 1000 pages if you include the 388 footnotes (yes, it is a novel) that are invariably referred to by reviewers.

There's a LOT of detail, whether it's the description of a room, or a person, or the person's state of being, or the drugs they use, or the tennis academy that is one of the locations of the story, or the workings of AA or whatever. The plot is not-quite-hidden in the details, and I'm not sure I could say exactly what the main plot is.

Infinite Jest was first published in 1996 and its setting is the 2000s, so there's an element of futurist technology. One device key to the story is something like what we know as a DVD, and there is a particular one of these around that has such a high entertainment quotient (not DFW's word) that once a person starts watching it they cannot stop. One plot line is to do with various agencies seeking to find and destroy the master copy of this Entertainment, which of course can't be watched by anyone wanting to destroy it. Such pleasure is fatal! Which creates funny and gruesome and fascinating scenarios.

Protagonist Hal Incandenza is a teenage tennis star at an invented academy. The training regime is horrendous. And, as with most of the contents of this book, it provides a context for exploring a whole range of ideas about society and power and success and so on. Including loneliness. The man who created The Entertainment was a film-maker (he's committed suicide before the book begins) and Hal's father. The mother of Hal and his two brothers is a really creepy character who is so nice and considerate and outright good, she gave me what DFW calls in a couple of places the "howling fantods."

Across the road from the tennis academy is the house for people getting off drugs. That's where another protagonist, Don Gately, is. A main source of treatment is going to AA meetings, and IJ includes an exhaustive level of detail about these meetings. "Yes, of course 'one day at a time' and such are clichés, but, hey, they work."

There are a myriad more characters, themes and story threads, such as the Concavity—a huge area encompassing Vermont and part of Quebec where no-one lives and the trash from the northeastern cities is catapulted to. The various plots and characters are carried along on an accretion of details.

The writing is extraordinary. I still haven't figured out why some sentences start with 'And but so...', or variations of that. It's not possible to ask, because DFW himself committed suicide in 2006. There are plenty of clips of him speaking on YouTube and masses of articles about him online, but I haven't found one that asks why he started sentences like that.

So much more could be said about Infinite Jest, and has been—try googling it. My conclusion is that in the end it is maybe a plea for doing our best to live in an actual, present world, and never mind an imagined (remembering is imagined) past or future. Or something. Anyway, I found it utterly worthwhile to make the effort and persist through what were almost boring bits, and excruciating descriptions of coming off drugs.

Self-publishing my novel as an ebook (2): Nearly There

I have done the formatting for Smashwords (http://www.smashwords.com) . I have created a cover (much better than the earlier one I included in a blog post of 12 November 2011). Thanks to Jill H. who helped me put together the earlier cover, I knew just enough to add the text for the title and my name as author to a photograph of my own to make this cover. A blurb is written and tags—maximum of ten—sorted.

The process for getting the US tax exemption number I mentioned in my last post is not completed and involves a lot of waiting, so I’ve decided to go ahead without it.

Because Smashwords does not yet distribute to Amazon for the Kindle store, athough I gather they are working on that, I am looking into putting it there myself, but that needs more research. As far as I can tell, people with a Kindle will be able to buy the book from the Smashwords site, but there are sometimes problems with the way it turns out. If I can get this to work, I’ll include instructions in my next post.

So, tomorrow morning, I’ll upload to Smashwords. Their process takes about a week at the moment. They vet the book, but only for technical issues, they don’t assess or edit the content. Watch this space, I’ll let you know when it’s up at the Smashwords site. The price will be $4.95 USD from there. If you buy Where the HeArt is from Smashwords you can download it in any of the main ebook formats—epub, mobi, Palm Doc, PDF and so on, or all of them if you want. They also distribute to ebook retailers (except, so far, Amazon/Kindle).