out there

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

2012-02-02T17:20:00.000+13:00

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

2012-01-28T14:23:00.001+13:00

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

2012-01-22T16:19:00.000+13:00

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).

Self-publishing my novel as an ebook (1)

2012-01-06T13:12:00.000+13:00

My recently-completed novel, Where the HeArt Is, having been turned down by all the New Zealand publishers I cared to submit it to, I think self-publishing. I self-published Take It Easy, a earlier novel as a print book and managed the process well, except for the dreaded self-promotion and marketing. At which I was a failure.

The advantages of publishing as an ebook, once you have an edited, proofread manuscript, as I see it, are:
1. Little or no upfront costs (depending on whether you do your own cover, layout and so on.)
2. Riding the wave (well, there are a lot of people saying there is one) of sales for ebook readers.
3. There are some online promotional options that seem to be accessible to individual authors. Some of these I can contemplate doing, others I can’t. (More on this is a later post.)

There are a lot of people writing on the web saying how easy it is to publish an ebook. Don’t be fooled. To do a proper job you have to do a lot of work. I’ve been cruising (as it were!) the web for some months now, gathering information about how to epublish and how to sell ebooks, some of it contradictory, some downright offensive (like spamming your friends), some useful.

I’m sure there will soon be, and probably are already, people who will do all this for an author, epublishing agents/ publishers if you like, for a fee or a percentage. I am not interested in a new career, but I do want to figure out how to do my own book/s, producing a quality book for all the major ereaders. (Amazon/Kindle has to be done separately, in usual Amazon restrictive style.)

(For a touch of visual interest, this is where I do most of my writing.)

I plan to use the aggregator (a way of distributing to all the main ebook sellers, except Amazon) Smashwords. I’ll write more about Smashwords in a later blog, but it’s worth checking out the author sections of their website at http://smashwords. com

Some not-so-obvious things I have discovered:
1. The US Inland Revenue Service (IRS) will take 30% of your earnings on US sales unless you jump through a whole bunch of hoops to get an IRS exemption number. Which you can do from New Zealand. I have a notarised copy of my passport from the US embassy in Auckland (no other sort will do) and am waiting for a letter (an email won’t do) from Smashwords so I can submit (by snail mail) an application to the IRS. I got the “how to” for this from Roz Morris’s blog, “Nail Your Novel” at https://nailyournovel.wordpress.com I am extremely grateful to Roz Morris for this information.
2. To get a good-looking ebook that is a pleasure to read on an ereading device it has to be formatted to very specific instructions. I am familiar with the Smashwords ones, for which you can get a free-to-download pdf from their webiste. Search for Style Guide on their website.
3. People who write about epublishing on the web write with authority, as though their information is accurate, sensible and up-to-date. Sometimes it is. You have to find websites etc with information you trust. This takes time, and is not as simple as me putting in here a list of ones I like: finding the ones that work for you is part of figuring out how to do this thing.

Maybe I am making more of a meal of this than is necessary. If that is the case, so be it. I’m kind of enjoying the trip.

This is number 1 of a series!

On Reading David Foster Wallace (&Terry Pratchett)

2011-12-21T11:53:00.001+13:00

I don’t remember where I read references to DFW that made me want to read him. Two volumes—A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider The Lobster—of his essay-type pieces later, I was glad I found him. He portrays his disgust (lobsters) and despair at what people do (that supposedly fun thing, going on a cruise) through accumulating detail and a particular way of writing from inside his consciousness. I like both, and imagine a lot of people don’t.

He uses some odd sentence constructions, like starting a sentence with “And but so…” which, until I got used to it, had me re-reading several times. He also uses some very long sentences.

In the short story collection, Oblivion, the consciousness he writes from inside of is his characters’, not overtly his own. This has a strangely bleak effect (affect?). In “Another Pioneer” the narrator is reporting a conversation he partially overheard on a United Airlines flight in patches of great detail. DFW does this a lot, gives great detail and then not much information—it’s hard to explain.

He seems to have a yen to convey boredom, presumably without being boring. He certainly doesn’t bore me. I’m sure my own interest in conveying everyday boredom arises from my experience of it as a child and young person. (I have seldom been bored in the last few decades.) The story “Mister Squishy” is wonderfully evocative of at least two sorts of boredom, one of being in a group being talked at, the other of presenting too-familiar material.

In “Good Old Neon” (which begins, “My whole life I’ve been a fraud.”) the narrator describes thinking about himself thinking about thinking. (I’m avoiding the phrase “stream of consciousness” because it seems to me what DFW is doing is different from that, but I can’t say how.) And this—thinking about himself thinking about thinking—reminds me, oddly, of Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men, which I have just finished. In The Wee Free Men the protagonist, Tiffany, refers to her own ability to have first, second and third thoughts. The context and circumstances are where she is trying to hold on to her own, real, self in the face of a Queen who wants to put her in various dream spaces (yes, The Wee Free Men is one of 30+ books set in Pratchett’s fanstasy land, Discworld). Whereas DRW is concerned with solispsism, Tiffany is looking outwards by looking inwards. Or something. Anyway, one reminded me of the other.

Another thing DFW does with sentences is now and then make an ungrammatical statement, like, “The next time or next thing I wanted.” These sentences are placed, carefully, I suspect, as a kind of summary—or extension—of what precedes them.

The phrase “the loneliness of solipsism” comes into my mind as I write and I am not sure whether is it my phrase or one I came across reading about DFW before I started to read him. This in itself was unusual for me, I generally prefer to read an author before I look at others’ opinions, but I had accidentally come across descriptions of his writing as “difficult,” “challenging,” and so on, so decided some preparation was in order.

When I finish the short stories, it’s on to his novel, Infinite Jest. A novel with 388 footnotes. Did I mention DFW excels at asides?

Recent Reading

2011-11-20T15:36:00.001+13:00

In my last post, I promised another one soon about some of what I have been reading. Here it is.

I’ve had a Henry James jag, reading four of his twenty or so novels. Portrait of A Lady was my first read and my favourite. Isabel, its protagonist, wants to be an independent, free-thinking woman and to be good, by her own lights, which means authentic and real. Of course this is doomed in the long term. But how interesting for a protagonist of that time (pre WWI) in a book by a man to be so concerned with her own identity. This carries into The Wings of the Dove, about another independent, rich woman, this one ill.

The protagonist in The Ambassadors is male, though concerns with authentic identity, and an authorial focus on introspection rather than plot, remain. There is plenty of plot in all these books, but it is almost secondary to the characters’ thoughts about themselves, their motivations and their relationships. The same applies to The Spoils of Poynton, the fourth book of my James-jag. Of course, he is much studied and discussed in sophisticated ways I don’t even touch on here, and he writes beautiful sentences.

I think Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending is a worthy winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize.

It’s a novel that deals with the complexities of memory, and how we reinvent and reinterpret our past actions. It’s beautifully written. I hadn’t read any Julian Barnes before and now I will.

Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie was also short-listed for the Man Booker. It’s a good read, but harrowing in the gruesome details of harpoon-whaling and a long lost-at-sea stretch . Jaffy, in whose voice the story is told, is on the whaling ship as one of a small group of men seeking exotic animals for wealthy collectors in England at the time.

Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table is set largely at sea, and is written from the point of view of a young person, but those are the only similarities with Jamrach.

Three unaccompanied boys meet by being sat on a passenger ship’s most lowly dining table on a voyage from (then) Ceylon to England. The story is told by Michael, looking back. There are flashes forward to his later life, but the action of the story takes place on the ship. Great writing, great characterisations, great insights from the point of view of the young Michael.

My son lent me The Watchmen, a (mostly) graphic novel (is that the right word?) written by Alan Moorhead, with visuals by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, first published by DC comics in 1986. This is satire at its best.

I had to concentrate hard to follow what was going on, but it was worth the effort. Graphic novels require a different kind of reading from straight text. I’m not sure what exactly that difference is, and have never read anything about it, but suspect it’s got something to do with paying as much attention to the images, and how they are arranged, as to the words.

I picked up Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind because I so admire her novels. Absence of Mind consists of four essays in which she argues, more elegantly than I can say it, that “mind” (introspection, belief, self-consciousness and so on) is more than “brain”. It’s a dense and fascinating read. She argues for “…the odd privilege of existence as a coherent self, the ability to speak the word ‘I’ and mean by it a richly individual history of experience, perception and though.”

There is, she says, a human mind and consciousness that is more than can be described by closer and closer descriptions of the human brain. This is a fascinating book that I will read again.

Over the summer, I plan to read David Foster Wallace.

A writing fragment that grew, and the work of self-publishing

2011-11-12T15:30:00.000+13:00

The writing ideas that come to me lately are fragments, bits that don’t seem to go anywhere. Most of them get written down somewhere, so maybe one day some of them will come to life and grow. A fragment that grew into something, I think, is at the end of this blog entry. It’s called Sentences, and might well end up in the collection I am making, that might be called, Stones Gathered Together.

With the help of my friend Jill, I have devised something that might do as a cover for the ebook version of my finished novel, Where the HeArt is.

I’m still gathering permissions for using the quotes in that book. And the copyholders of A A Milne’s material said, “No.” I can’t use three lines from his poem “Disobedience” because, as they say in their letter, “The Trustees for the Estate of Milne feel strongly that quotes for the poems should be restricted to matters directly relating to children or in children’s literature.” This is the first time I have been turned down. Other copyright holders (most notably for Emily Dickinson) wanted to be paid rather a lot for quoting two lines, in an earlier book, so I changed the quote. In Where the HeArt Is I refer to ED’s poems, but don’t quote any directly.

Because there are a number of references to works of visual art in Where the HeArt Is, and because I don’t have the resources to either get permission to reproduce them or print them, I have put a list of where each one can be found on the internet at the back of the book. In the ebook version, this is hyperlinked to the text.

I am about halfway through the formatting needed to upload the book to Smashwords, which is a vehicle to get books distributed to all the major ebook retailers except Amazon. There is a way to get onto Amazon’s Kindle listing, but I haven’t sorted that out yet. And then there is the business of accepting that one third of anything I earn from online sales will go to the US tax department, or going through a daunting process to get an exemption, as someone who does not live in the US. There’s a great deal of work in self-publishing! Then there are blurbs to write, and online "marketing" to figure.... I have dome some work on how to let people know my book is there online. More of that in a later post.

There is also a whole lot of reading going on in my life. I’ll put some of that in a separate post. Soon.

Here's the fragment that grew:

Sentences
This is a sentence. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.
Full stop. (Fool, stop!) The noun, the name, is the anchor, the key. The article tells us it’s one. Solitary. A verb is existence or action.
(‘Is’ is bang in the middle of prison.)
‘This’ is a word. Not naming but definite. This, not that. This only. This ‘this’ only. Contains ‘is’. Existence contains ‘is,’ appropriately. ‘Lives’ contains ‘is,’ only with some rearrangement. Gone, dead, death, no ‘is’ in there. Gone has ‘no’, or strictly speaking ‘on’. ‘No’ is ‘on’ backwards but can you go backwards from gone? But finished has ‘is.’ You can take any idea too far.
‘I am’, said Descartes and McCahon and no doubt many others. Well, me too. I write this, therefore I am. If I don’t write this it doesn’t prove anything.
Gertrude Stein wrote ‘Rose is a rose is a rose’ in a poem. In this line, the first ‘Rose’ is purported to be a person. Later, she wrote, ‘A rose is a rose is a rose,’ which, according to Wikipedia, ‘is often interpreted as meaning “things are what they are,” a statement of the law of identity.’ Later again, in Four In America, she said, ‘Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying “is a … is a … is a …” Yes, I’m no fool; but I think in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.’
With Gertrude it’s hard to tell exactly what she meant, you have to ride along with her sentences, waiting for the occasional sense of something to float into your mind. She wrote: ‘I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences,’ (And had a passion for the full-stop.) Gertrude wrote about paragraphs as well as sentences, which is getting way too complicated.
‘To be or not to be [a mother] that is the question.’ And a sentence. Either way, in the end, you have to live with it. And, either way, it’s a life sentence.

On my way to an ebook

2011-10-03T15:21:00.000+13:00

I’m getting to grips with Goodreads, really, I am. Other people seem to find their way around these sites with ease and aplomb, while I stumble along trying to figure out what a “friends” are in this context, and do I want them.

Puddling around on the net looking at ways to promote an ebook leaves me with a feeling that thousands of us, looking to find readers for our book—preferably paying readers—are circulating the same information over and over again, with varying levels of gee-whiz type hype. As each of us is probably a reader we are our own audience. Why do I get a picture of snakes swallowing their owntails?

What about readers who don’t write? (I know there are some.) They don’t have the same motivation to make their presence known. What’s the point of setting oneself a “challenge” to read x books by the end of the year? Or having books you might like selected by an algorithm, based on what you’ve read before? I guess it’s a variation on browsing in the bookshop or library.

I have finally made the decision that I will publish Where the HeArt Is as an ebook as soon as I get it ready and do a print version next year. I’ll use Smashwords — known as an aggregator site, because it distributes ebooks to a whole lot of different outlets — because I know how to do that, and how to format a book to their requirements. Am gathering permissions to quote from various poets.

And it’s a fiction book, a novel, not a [name your genre] novel; my impatience with the genre-focus of a lot of internet material on publishing continues.

I’m going to mention only one book I’ve read recently,and that's Sorry by Gail Jones. It sat on my to-be-read pile for ages. It’s a terrific Australian novel about some well-drawn characters. Their lives, in northern West Australia mainly, are hard and tragic, but it’s a compelling read. One of the aspects I really liked about this book is that the social context is there, hovering in the background, unmistakable, but the story concerns the characters and their lives. It does not preach.

To sell or not to sell, is that the question?

2011-08-29T10:39:00.000+12:00

I’m gathering information about marketing using online resources as preparation for self-publishing my novel, Where The HeArt Is early next year. This has me thinking about the whole business of marketing and promotion, which I made such a bad job of with my earlier novel, Take It Easy. Now that I have a better idea of what I hate about marketing and what I will never get around to doing, I’m working towards a plan.

As I will publish a very small print run and an ebook simulaneously, a lot of the publicity will be on line, and that means using the dreaded social media. Facebook, aaarrggh! I hate facebook. I’m certainly not going to dump daily book promotion on my facebook ‘friends,’ nor am I going to send a barrage of emails to everyone on my contacts list.

There are all kinds of alternatives, such as using readers’ sites like Goodreads and Librarything and I’m teaching myself about them. And there’s something called a ‘blog tour’ which involves getting other blog writers, who write for readers, to ‘interview’ me on their blog about my book. Or write a review on their blog.

There’s a wealth of ‘how to market your book’ information out there on the web, a lot of it obvious, some objectionable and none delivering magic bullets. Some of it is free, but a number of the people offering it are writers wanting to expand their income stream. Fair enough, but I haven’t found any online course or publication on book promotion that I wanted to buy yet. I’m after some good evidence that the advice on sale has something to offer that I haven’t worked out for myself or read in three other places, before I spend any money.

There’s a big focus in a lot of the material on marketing on identifying a genre and then the audience for that genre. I write fiction. I suppose you could say adult fiction, though there’s nothing “adult” about it. Fantasy, romance, young adult, crime, horror, the categories of genre abound. My book is a novel. I don’t want to be a genre. "Literary fiction" seems pretentious, other qualifiers of fiction just don’t fit.

On the reading front, I am pleased to have finished The Brothers Karamazov.

I’m not sorry to have read it, but I did find it a bit of a slog. Three brothers, not to mention a bunch of other characters, anguishing about themselves, their humiliations, whether or not they love or hate this or that person, and their place in society and rushing in and out of rooms, wrathfully, or in some kind of despair, on urgent business they may or may not get to in the next few chapters ……. There are some fascinating themes; for example, whether people can be "good" without belief in a God and an afterlife. Many times as I read I thought of another writer, or a contemporary situation that Dostoevsky could be referencing. “I think it’s better to get acquainted before parting,” made me think of Gertrude Stein. And, “If everything on earth were sensible, nothing would happen,” reminded me of every television series or soap I ever watched.

Kathleen Jones’s Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller

is a tour de force of a biography. It’s a full and fascinating tale of KM’s life and writing. Her writing of course lives on after her, and Kathleen Jones spends some later chapters examining what happened to her writings after her death. John Middleton Murry was unbelievably mean about money while KM was alive and self-serving in his productions from her unpublished writings. There’s a different portrayal of KM’s relationship with Ida Baker from any I have read previously. Ida was the one who most reliably cared for KM in her illness, even if she often did it ineptly. Steadfast is the word that comes to mind. I liked the way Kathleen Jones ended this book; a lot of it is necessarily concerned with KM’s ill-health, but at the very end KM exits her story as a writer.

I may have to give up reading David Vann, his books are so bleak. The harshness of the Alaskan landscape he sets his novels in is one thing, the terrible, gut-wrenching awfulness of the relationships among his characters is too much. Caribou Island is beautifully written, and the characters are totally convincing and so, so hopeless. One character muses, “…in the end you feel what you feel. You don’t get a choice. You don’t get to remake yourself from the beginning. You can’t put a life back together in a different way.” I agree with this, but in the context of Caribou Island it becomes just too fatalistic.

I don’t know what I’m going to read next, which is unusual. Not that I’m panicked about this, I have several piles to choose from.

2011-08-05T13:09:00.000+12:00
With a knee operation and subsequent bad reaction to medications behind me, I am now back to reading and at least thinking about writing and publishing.

I'm stumbling along with The Brothers Karamazov, finding it, well, overwrought. Am also noticing how contemporary some of its concerns are and actually improving my understanding of what christianity/religion can mean to people, mainly through the character of Alyosha, the youngest brother. So I’m far from giving up on it, but reading other things alongside.

Re-reading Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live: A Life of Montaigne, is a delight. Bakewell is most impressive in the way she brings together historical context, what is known of Montaingne’s life, his reading and influences, and of course the ideas in his Essays. His ideas about how to live are worth thinking about, though at times I get annoyed with them.

J.M.Coetzee’s Diary of A Bad Year runs three versions of itself across the pages. Along the bottom of each page, separated by a thin line, is the story of a (not overtly sexual) relationship between an aging author and a woman in the same apartment block who types up the manuscript of a collection of thoughts he is writing. Starting a little way into the book is another stream, from the woman’s point of view. Across the top half - and more - of each page are the ‘thoughts’ of the author. I decided to read one strand at a time, starting from the one at the bottom of the pages, and this worked for me. As did the whole book. I admired it and enjoyed reading it and found the ideas of the short essays interesting, particularly the early ones about the state and the succession of power.

I’m finding it hard to think about the publishing of the new novel. There’s still a little editing to do, but that’s no reason to not at least settle on the beginnings of a plan. (Made a phone call to a friend, got more energised, watch this space.)

It seems a long time since I wrote anything new. There are a couple of ideas in there somewhere, I need to shake them out and see if they go anywhere, which means settling down at the computer and getting some words down.

I have written up the China travels, with photos, and put the file up on the web. You can access it at
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/766517/ChinaTripDB.pdf
without having to sign up for anything or identify yourself.

Tian'an Men Square, Beijing.
There’s no way to comment, if you want to make a comment come back to this blog or email me.

Not a travel blog

2011-07-10T09:48:00.000+12:00
While traveling in China I did little reading and no writing. It takes a lot of energy to travel, especially when you don't speak, read or write the language and it is very very hot

There were sights to delight and amaze, beauty to revel in , history to wonder at, and experiences to cherish, along with a few times when it was overwhelming, and that not in a good way.

And there is nothing like walking on the Great Wall with a crowd of Chinese tourists, thinking about the history and the lives lost in its building, and the invasions from the north that it was built over time to counter. It looks like the pictures, but being there is something else. Thirty-five degrees-plus temperatures put shade at a premium and I wasn't the only one using my umbrella to create some.

At the other end of our trip in more ways than one was how they hang out their washing in the lanes that run along the canals of Suzhou. Pagodas, gardens, temples, street scenes, food - there is so much more I would say if this were a travel blog.

Once the further impediment of a knee operation is behind me I have resolved to get moving on the project of publishing, one way or another, my latest novel. And new writing to do. And reading. I'm well into The Brothers Karamazov, with a pile-in-waiting, so my next post will be back on topic.

Books, again

2011-06-02T14:59:00.000+12:00
The reading goes on. Always.

Diana Athill’s Life Class is four of her memoirs in one book. The last one, Somewhere Towards the End, written when she was 89, is a riff on aging. How about this for a sentence: “What dies is not a life’s value, but the worn-out (or damaged) container of the self, together with the self’s awareness of the itself: away that goes into nothing, with everyone else’s.” (page 667)

She makes many references to her “secret sin,” which she calls laziness and which I thought more of a disinclination to do things she didn’t like doing. Is that laziness? I suppose, as so often, it depends.

How about this —

"…when men form ideas about God, creation, eternity, they are making no more sense in relation to what lies beyond the range of their comprehension than the cheeping of sparrows. And given that the universe continues to be what it is, reagardless of what we believe, and what it is will always continue to be the condition of our existence, why should the thought of our smallness in it be boring … or, for that matter, frightening?" (page 579)

She manages to be very self-revealing without telling anything much about anyone else—not her tales to tell, she says somewhere—except the subjects of some chapters about her life in publishing as an editor. The Jean Rhys chapter made put Smile Please in my pile of books to take away with me.

Along with nearly everyone else, I think Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad is fabulous. (Steve Braunias, on a television book show thought it a failure of a book.)

After the Wall by Jana Hensel is a book I read only because a friend from our school days here in New Zealand in the 1950s, who has lived in Berlin for many years, sent it to me. It’s a story - a memoir, I guess, by a woman who was 13 in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. She spent her childhood in the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) of East Germany, in a Young Pioneer group, among what she calls, “cheerful propaganda.” Then her generation was expected to forget all that and be assimilated into the western world of Germany at large. Her and her friends’ parents stay put and become unemployed and disappointed. “They hadn’t marched through the streets [in 1989] for the way things were now.” And Jana Hensel’s generation have lost a sense of their origins because, “we soon forgot what everyday life in the GDR was like with all its unheroic moments and ordinary days.” It’s a poignant and moving story.

I chose Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness for our book group. After reading the first story, “Dimensions” I was again in awe of her writing. Yet the story was so bleak I could barely bring myself to read on. Others in the book group found the view of humanity too bleak for their taste, and one loved the writing and the insights into people who live through what life throws at them as best they can.

Munro can pack a lot into a sentence. Here’s just one example: “The two women were not particular friends, but they were cordial about clothesline arrangements.”

When is a poem …

2011-05-31T14:31:00.000+12:00
I tend to write poems when they happen, in a way distinct from my prose writing which I make a fair effort to keep up, even when I’m struggling for ideas. This one I am not even sure is a poem, it’s more like prose in short lines. When I tried arranging it in standard prose paragraphs though, it died on the page. It’s certainly not a prose poem because they have a blocky shape, which this doesn’t.

It’s enough to get one thinking about what’s the difference between poetry and prose and after looking this up in a few places I conclude, for now anyway, that the difference is largely one of intent. So do I intend this as a poem or a prose piece? I don’t actually mind. It’s a piece of writing that has this shape on the page and call it what you like.

The conversation in the first part is “real.” I made notes as I eavesdropped on the train; I could never have invented what these two people say.

I’m very interested to hear what anyone thinks about this piece of writing. It’s easy to leave a comment, just click on the word “comments” preceded by a number at the bottom of the blog, write in the box that appears and click “post comment.”

I'll do a separate blog about what I've been reading.

Going Somewhere

The girl on the train
tells the boy sitting opposite
she’s only got three months to go
to pushing this thing
out.

She’d rather push it out, she says
than be cut open.
Yeah, says the boy.
Terry’s partner has had hers
says the girl, she had to have
a caesarian, her baby was
eight pounds eleven ounces.
How old is she? asks the boy.
Fifteen, says the girl.

How old are you? asks the boy.
Sixteen, says the girl.
Well, that’s the end of your life,
says the boy.
Yeah, says the girl.

He’s got his student allowance
and he’s going to Porirua
to buy a game, says the boy.
The girl is going to Wainuiomata,
she doesn’t say why. She hopes
the train isn’t late or she’ll miss
her connection.

He smokes a packet of rolly
in two and a half days, he says,
rolling one for when he gets off the train.
You smoke more, says the girl, when you
roll them in advance. She takes
a sip from a bottle of orange liquid.

Have you thought of a name yet?
he asks.
Nah, it’s real hard, man.
Porirua. His stop.
Seeya. He flips a hand. She puts
in earphones.

She is beautiful, with a long smooth neck
shown to advantage by silver ear-rings that dangle
low and hair pulled back in what we called
a pony-tail. Big blue eyes. Perfect skin.
A profile that could be on an Egyptian vase.
There’s a silver stud in the middle
of the dip just under her lower lip.

Her hands are delicate and too small to lift
a crying baby in the middle of the night.

Later that day,
there are two young women on a bus,
sitting on the sideways seat at the front
with a boy child — you can tell by the clothes —
with four front teeth
and an empty chewing-gum packet to play with.
He sits between them, contented, while they talk.

The young woman who is not his mother
looks at the boy. ‘What did you do at the weekend?’
She asks him. ‘Did you get drunk? Party?
Have you got a girlfriend?’ She looks at his mother
and they both laugh, and the boy laughs
and offers her the gum wrapper.

She goes on doing that thing people do, where an adult has
a conversation with another adult over the head of a child,
now and then directing a look, a wagging finger, a sound, a smile
towards the child, and looking away before the child responds.

The child seems happy. At their stop his mother picks him up
easily, and slings him on her hip while she talks to her friend
about whether that shop over there is Dan Carter’s
new fashion underwear store
and they step
off the bus
together.

Learning from the Best

2011-04-26T14:49:00.001+12:00
Three of the seven publishers I sent queries about Where The HeArt Is have said no, the other four are yet to respond. I am not entering the slough of despond about this, have decided to not think about it until we get back from a June trip that edges in to July. So, in mid-July I'll think about what next with it.

Which then reminds me of re-reading Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red because I have been reading a series of lectures he gave recently about writing. He's one of my favourite authors, and I also like what he writes about writing. I had forgotten things about My Name is Red, like the awful

way the apprentices are treated, including being sodomised by their “masters.” I was, however, fascinated all over again by the miniaturists of late fifteenth century Istanbul and how they ply their trade and deal (or not) with influences coming in from Europe. It’s a fascinating book on a number of levels.

The online reading group has finished Dostoevsky's The Idiot and started on Demons (also known as The Possessed) next week. If you want to join in, go to http://projectdblog.wordpress.com/ The writing in The Idiot was somewhat overwrought for my taste, but I did get into it. D's issues are big ones that remain relevant, like what does it mean to be "good" and how society and the individual influence each other, and so on. Here are

some choice phrases to illustrate my designation "overwrought: "exclaimed with spiteful vexation," "said impatiently and wrathfully," "grinned bitterly and sarcastically." The word "wrath" (and its derivatives) is used over and over; I'll be looking out for it in Demons. And I noticed that Pamuk uses "wrath" several times in My Name is Red. Mind you, the latter is set in 1491 Istanbul, it would be harder to use in a contemporary setting but what are the odds against me giving it a go sometime soon?

I’ve started Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Good Squad, which is causing a stir on bookish bits of the internet, and just won the Pulitzer.

The best commentary I have seen on it is at the New Yorker Book Bench, which you can access without being a subscriber at http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/bookclub/

I am playing around with other kinds of writing. I did an exercise involving analysing a short story and writing one to reflect it in several aspects. I chose a Lydia Davis story, and as she doesn't do plot in a conventional way, I had to selectively follow the instructions. The story I wrote myself is inconsequential, but it feels as though it was a worthwhile thing to do. Nowhere near as good, of course, as Lydia Davis. I am reminded of the way artists used to — maybe they still do — learn by making copies of works by famous painters.

Here’s the story I wrote after examining the Lydia Davis one. I am encouraged to show it by the fact that the other members of my writing group liked it. I have incorporated their excellent suggestions. I’ve been thinking about the writing group and how it works a lot lately and will write something about it and take it to our next session and see how other members feel about me publishing in here about it.

The Visit
Dad asks how my studies are going and I say "Good," which is partly true. There's no way I could explain to my father the ways in which they are not going well. It would take forever, and he wouldn't understand anyway. So, good is the right word and doesn't tell the half of it; I could never explain how having my mother's piano would make a difference to addressing what my teacher called "the emotional void" in my "technically excellent" violin playing.

Wanting something from an elderly parent is difficult, especially when the something you want is emotional for you both. Joe has come to support me but he doesn't understand why it's so difficult to ask. In his family they just ask, and people just say yes or no and that's an end to it. Also, I we have different ideas about all kinds of things, like sometimes I think he's shouting and tell him to stop and he is surprised and bewildered. Shouting makes me curl up like a quivering ball inside.

Joe told Dad a funny story that happened at his work and that made us all laugh. Everything felt less tense and that meant it was a good time for me say what I wanted, but I was enjoying feeling more relaxed and didn't want to spoil it. Then Dad started one of his stories from the old days and he kept referring to me and saying that's how it was, wasn't it girlie, and I would say yes. When Dad opened the photograph album on the coffee table, I felt Joe looking at me intently and I knew he was sending me a message to get on with it. I was getting on with it. Joe like sthere to be a straight line between things, the shortest route you might say.

It wasn't long before Dad had to pee and he said he'd put the jug on for a cuppa while he was up. I said I would help (I didn't want him carrying hot cups) and went into the kitchen. Joe followed. Of course he wanted to know why I hadn't asked yet, and I said I had to do it the way we did things in my family. He shrugged and noticed how dirty the kitchen was and got down some cups and washed them thoroughly.

Dad came into the kitchen and said he'd make some cheese and crackers. We said no need and Dad got the sulks and went on about how he could still make sure we didn't do the drive home without eating something and he knew it was no good inviting us to supper so the least we could do was have a snack before dealing with the motorway. He had some gingernuts somewhere too. Joe said all right then. I knew he was trying to do things my way. I got down a plate and washed and dried it. They both looked at me as though I was being a fusspot then looked at each other and smiled.

Getting us something to eat had cheered Dad up; he positively bounced back into the sitting room and let us carry everything, forgetting about the photographs and the old stories. He and Joe started a conversation about the cricket and Joe said he thought South Africa would take the World Cup and Dad said, no, India, and they chatted away about spin bowling and slow wickets and short outfields and I didn't say anything. Neither of them gave the Black Caps a chance. While they talked about the failures of New Zealand Cricket to bring through young players, I watched the dust particles dancing around in the sunlight, and thought about getting a cleaner for Dad and how to get him to agree to that. But not today, there was something else today.

For an hour or so the two of them talked sport and I practiced what I would say in my head. And wondered whether the itches around my ankles meant there were fleas. The conversation between the two men drifted to a close about when I was thinking that probably half the people in the world liked talking about sport and half didn't.

Then I asked. And Dad said yes right away. He hadn't played a note on that piano for years, of course we could have it moved to our place. Dad and Joe got to talking about carriers and arrangements.

I thought about how the afternoon had started off with me and Joe on a mission to get something from Dad, then shifted to me and Dad and the past, with Joe on the outside, and again to Joe and Dad and the plate then the cricket, and when I asked it was easy, and Dad never said a word about how much that piano had meant to my mother and that straight lines weren't always the best way to go.

Gathering writing, and what I'm reading

2011-03-29T11:24:00.001+13:00

A new story I started isn't going along so well—seems lifeless—so I'll leave it for a bit. Certainly I'm lagging on the new writing front, though I am revising and reworking the existing pieces I am gathering together.
Last year I took part in StoryADayMay, which produced some of those short pieces, but I don't think I'll do that again this year. I have signed up, at the same website (storyadaymay.org) for their warmup. Plenty of resources regarding keeping track of ideas and websites, most of which I won't use, though I'll check out some (more!) websites. The thing I am finding with websites is that it takes a fair amount of trawling to come up with a few that really offer something I want. Stands to reason, of course, how many books are exactly the book you want? The first actual exercise was to write a twitter story (a story in 140 characters or less, including punctuation and spaces). Here's mine:
When I met my husband he was married to my sister. Family gatherings at Christmas are so twentieth century. (108 characters)
On a recent visit one of the Spinifex publishers, (www.spinifexpress.com.au) Susan Hawthorne, left us a pile of books including My Sister Chaos by Lara Fergus, which I have just read. It's a strangely compelling tale, about twin sisters from a nameless country that they left as it was breaking up in turmoil. Only minor characters have names. One sister is a cartographer and is obsessively mapping the house she rents. The arrival of her sister disrupts this process. An original and disturbing novel about obsession and trauma. I recommend it.
I'm still collecting phrases from Dostoevsky's The Idiot with the idea of trying to write a story "in the style of". Phrases like, "said impatiently and wrathfully," and, "with a strange ardor." Hmmm. One of D's preoccupations is that we appreciate life only when we know we are close to losing it—only when we have some kind of death sentence do we appreciate that we have life. I don't agree with this myself. It goes along with another concern of his that if one doesn't believe in an afterlife, a crime such as murder, especially when one is close to death, has no consequences. I can’t wear this; it may have little consequence for the perpetrator but does for others, and our humanity demands a regards for others, even when we are about to die. (If we have no regard for others we cannot expect them to have regard for us and our well-being, which would make for a very sorry world.) For an online group reading Dostoevsky see http://projectdblog.wordpress.com/
I often have a non-fiction book going at the same time as I am reading novels and at the moment it is Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Belos, with the subtitle, "Dispatches from the wonderful world of mathematics." The jolly tone of the title is largely absent from the text, thank heavens. At about halfway through I am enjoying his explorations of areas like tesselations, equilateral triangles, the history of number systems, pi and so on. I'm enjoying it. I imagine it is too basic for anyone who has a real mathematics background, which I do not.
Re-reading The Price of Salt by Claire Morgan (aka as Carol by Patricia HIghsmith) after about thirty years is proving more of a treat than I expected. I'll say more about this in a later post.

Truth, writing, reading, rejection

2011-03-07T20:13:00.001+13:00

"The paradox of the arts is that they are all made up and yet they allow us to get a truth about who and what we are or might be." Seamus Heaney in Finders Keepers, Selected Prose 1971—2001
A conversation with my son has me thinking about truth-telling and how a poem, a song, a story, can carry truth that has not much to do with relating a string of events. I think maybe it's more than a paradox, it's a glory of the arts that they "allow us to get a truth." Like a truth of the tragedy of my sister. The week in which this conversation took place had been a medically dramatic one, culminating in my having a pacemaker inserted; hence, in part, the gap between this blog entry and the previous one. All, as they say, is now well.
Writing, however, has flown out the window and left behind a dearth of ideas and inclination. Fortunately, I believe both will return, and to help them along I have gone back into my journals of the last couple of years to see what I have recorded from what I have read and what notes and observations I have made. That's where I found the Seamus Heaney quote. I've pulled out Heaney's book of prose writings to re-read.
As I read Dostoevsky— currently near the end of Part One ofThe Idiot—along with an internet-based reading group led by Dennis Abrahms (http://projectdblog.wordpress.com/) I wonder about Dostoevsky's overblown prose and characters who seem to stand for ideas or aspects of Russian society and life. He is such a contrast to my own pared-down writing about characters in their everyday lives that, in my mind, stand only for themselves; examples of the human condition, if you like, rather than exemplars. I'll have a go at writing a few Dostoevskyian paragraphs, paragraphs that are unlikely to ever see the light of day, but I might learn something from at least trying to write in such a different way.
Here's how my reading goes sometimes, in a process I really really like. I'm reading Dostoevsky, along with DA and co, and in a London Review of Books see a review of a book called The Possessed: Adventures with Russian books and the people who read them By Elif Batuman, of whom I have not previously heard. So now I am reading that and enjoying it a lot and wondering about having a go at reading one of her subjects, Isaac Babel, who I have never read before. I'll try a library copy first.
I've had three rejections from publishers I have submitted my novel to. The last one was a clearly non-standard letter. It stated clearly they wouldn't publish my book, said they don't give feedback and suggested three other publishers (I've already been rejected by one of those.) It was a good letter; straight-forward, with a tone that was neither patronising nor dismissive. I appreciate that.

99 Ways Into New Zealand Poetry - the book

2011-02-15T19:12:00.000+13:00

This book is written by Paula Green & Harry Ricketts and Published by Vintage, 2010. I've been trying to figure out why I like it so much. It's got range and depth of knowledge of the field (NZ poetry), it's well written, it looks beyond the canon for examples, it's sensibly and interestingly organised … I could go on, but there is something less tangible here, something that really gets to the "ways into" poetry aspect of it.
The combination of thematic and chronological works well. Here are the sections: Poetic Forms, Poetic Contexts, Poetic Features and Effects, Poetic Identities, Rites of Passage, Ways Into Writing (New Zealand) poetry. (This last in ten excellent pages, including a splendid two-page Tool Kit.) Within these sections, chapters (up to fourteen) toss out ideas, examples, opinions and so on in an entertaining and informative fashion.
The first section, Poetic Forms, is my favourite, maybe because I grapple with writing poems, (though I wouldn't call myself "a poet"). If I was looking for a form to carry a poem idea, a ballad, say, or a sestina or sonnet, I could come to this section—via the excellent index—and find out about it without being turned away by demonstrations of superior knowledge. Paula Green and Harry Ricketts certainly know much more of these subjects than I do, that's what makes them interesting. They present their knowledge in a friendly, "come and join in" sort of way, emphasising the usefulness of knowing a form and the freedom in contemporary poetry to adopt it, adapt it, or experiment with it.
The whole book is nicely laid out, with break-out paragraphs defining some of the key ideas — modernism for example — plenty of boxed poems to demonstrates points made, and a number of statements by poets about how a particular poem that is included in the book came to be.
My quibbles are physical; the book is a hefty three kilos, on shiny paper that is hard to read in some lights, especially the boxed poems, which are in faint print. And the cross-referencing parentheses are so conscientious as to becoming annoying at times.
If you like the following two sentences—the first is from Paula Green, the second from Harry Ricketts', you'll enjoy, as I did, the way this book is written.
Wedde has neither abandoned nor cauterised the motivation of the odes that preceded him, but daringly challenges the reader to accept the ode as a vessel for what might, upon first glance, appear oxymoronic, 'the sublime commonplace.' (page 55)
… many … recent New Zealand poets are 'tough,' difficult, but not impenetrable, provided the reader remains unafraid and is prepared to work away, following the poem's arc of thought. (page 420)
There's a history of poetry in New Zealand in here, and an exploration of canon-building in ten pages. The writers have done a pretty good job, as far as I can tell, of including the "left-outs" (Maori, women ……) and acknowledging the canonical (Baxter, Stead et al) throughout the text, in special chapters and in the full poems they have included.
I think what makes me delight in this book is the pleasure the writers take in their subject, the scope of their considerable knowledge and that, having read it, I am even more inclined—and better equipped—to read poetry. Read it, buy it, make sure your local library gets a copy, recommend it to your friends.
Here's a poem of mine that was published a few years ago in a Poetry Society anthology.
Family

My mother’s name was Margaret.
She disapproved of Lauris Edmond.
I gave her a copy of Hot October
because they had both lived in Ohakune.
"Oh," said Margaret with her special, disapproving
sigh, "What a run-around she gave that poor
husband of hers. And all those children!
He was well-liked, you know, a good headmaster".

Margaret was, however, loved and respected
by all four of her grandchildren.
She treated them like real people, they said,
listened to them, and sent money
instead of judgements when they were students
or unemployed and it was a cold winter.

We became a thin family, cousins,
and aunts driven off by that disapproving sigh.
Death, sudden, did the rest, punched holes
in the threadbare family fabric.
Margaret, widow, 78, herself died alone,
probably painfully, likely from choice,
before the daughter who chose her own end
and the grandchild who succumbed to
smoking and bronchial pneumonia.

Lauris Edmond, 75, died the other day.

In an obituary she is described as, ‘the great
New Zealand poet of parents and children.’

Books, books and a new project

2011-02-03T07:35:00.002+13:00

On the subject of querying publishers, things are proceeding slowly. Various life events have intervened, including a dead internet connection for three days. Four queries have been sent off, there are three to go. Each one takes about three hours, by the time the synposis, letter, bio and so on are adapted to each publisher's requirements. It's a shade less aversive than marketing/promoting an actual book, so I am doing it, and will continue to the end of my list.

I'm still reading 99 Ways Into New Zealand Poetry, by Paula Green and Harry Ricketts and still enjoying it and continuing to be most admiring of how much they know and how they put it together.

The great birthday pile (see photo above) is as exciting as ever and promises much excitement and many treats. An early one is The Torchlight List: Around the world in 200 books by Jim Flynn. This is a small attractive book that takes a thematic look at how to get an education about the world, through reading great literature. Some extracts from his opening:
"I want [people] to be able to understand the world, rather than just be swept along … with no real comprehension of what is happening to them. … you need to know something about science, and nations other than your own and their histories, and the human condition."
The 200 listed books are supplemented by sublists. Counting from just the 200, I find I have read 39. Is that good? Or bad? I don't know, and it doesn't matter. It is illuminating to see where my gaps are - I have read few books about Spain, Portugal, South America, for example. Jim Flynn gives pithy descriptions of the books he lists and his own candid opinions of them. It was fun to read.
Now I'm onto my next writing project, which is gathering together short pieces I have accumulated over the years that I may be able to shape into some kind of collection. I fancy having 60 in total, which means writing some new ones, but I'll do the gathering first and see what I've got. Here's an early draft of what could possibly be the first piece in the collection:
An Opening
He was twenty-two when he died, a soldier in another country’s army fighting a different country’s war in yet another country, felled by support fire from a friendly gun. A full military funeral was called for, and held in the country of his origin, though that country was none of the earlier ones mentioned.
Family members flew around the world to bring his body home and his coffin sat in his parents’ living room for two days.
“I thought they usually had the coffin open,” said someone.
The funeral was a stage-managed affair on all fronts, at all levels. His sister bought some expensive high-heeled shoes in bright yellow, especially to wear with her short black skirt and tight black top. The family is well-connected. The army is well-connected.The funeral was in the cathedral. Joint ops. Lies were told about the man who died. Well, not outright lies, but that combination of exaggeration and omission that make someone look better than they were.
A woman was there who had no business being there, except she cared about an extended family member who would be there and perhaps sidelined. As one who did not believe in any god, she had not been to the cathedral before and admired the colours in the stained glass windows. Between the karanga calling in the coffin and the trumpet playing of the last post as it was carried out on the shoulders of slow-marching soldiers there was no tangible emotion, except for a stranger sitting beside her, who sobbed quietly throughout and appeared to know none of the family.
During a reading of verses from Ecclesiastes, widely known through a Seekers’ song, a gentle pop in the mind of the woman who had small business there turned into an idea for making a whole bunch of her short writings into something real and formed; “stones gathered together.”

A query is not a pitch

2011-01-21T16:31:00.001+13:00

Oh dear. I gave my last blog post the wrong name. I should have said “query,” not “pitch” in the title and in the plog post itself. In my rambles around the internet I stumbled upon the blog of Janet Reid, literary agent (http://jetreidliterary.blogspot.com/2011/01/difference-between-pitch-and-query.html) and discovered the following:

"A pitch is short (VERY) and verbal.
A query is short (250 words, but not 25) and written.
A pitch is face to face.
A query is not.
A pitch requires some set up: my novel is finished; it's a historical romance; it's 78,000 words. That helps your listener get ready to hear your pitch.
A query starts with the name of the main character and what problem or choice he faces.
A pitch is about 25 words.
A query is 250."

So now I know. And so do you. I am querying publishers in New Zealand re my novel. Seven of them. Each wants something different: a different length synopsis, more or less sample chapters, and so on. Have posted two, and have two more nearly ready. Response times vary between two and four months, and by all accounts (the extremely low percentage of unsolicited mss that get accepted) are most likely to be negative. Why am I doing this, then? I guess I want to try out the system before I grapple with knotty problems like confronting my own inabilities in the marketing area, the pros and cons of print on demand, ebooks and so on.

I am reading 99 Ways Into New Zealand Poetry, by Paula Green and Harry Rickets. It’s a fabulous book, a “how to read poetry” with oodles of examples and a mass of cross-referencing. It’s also an overview of New Zealand poets and poetry and the various ways they have clumped, or been clumped, together over the years. And the writers give poets who are women their due place and comment on ways they have been denied this place in the past. And there are useful short breakouts which are definitions of things like modernism and romanticism and some lovely covers from poetry books and photos of poets and pieces about their poetry by some of the poets and all in all it is a stunning cornucopia. I wish it wasn’t so heavy and the paper was less shiny, it’s hard to read in bed and/or some lights. Otherwise, it’s an education in a book.

A novel that’s been on my to-read pile for a while that has just made it to the top, is The Housekeeper + The Professor, by Yoko Ogawa. She’s written a lot of novels in Japanese, some have been translated into English, some into French. A charming story involving a single mother and her son and the professor with a memory problem she housekeeps for and maths. It’s built around the excitement of numbers. I loved it. It didn’t matter that I didn’t understand the bits about baseball — which incidentally involves pitching, which we all know I am not doing.

Pitching

2011-01-13T17:46:00.001+13:00

I've made a decision about the-novel-known-as-Ann. Actually, I've made two decisions. One is that, for now anyway, the title will be Where The HeArt Is. (The capital A in the middle of HeArt is deliberate.) I need a title because I'm going to offer it to some publishers. Not with any great expectation of success, but because it seems closer to what I want to do than self-publishing, or publishing it as a ebook only, which are the other options I have been thinking about.

So, I've been reading the internet about "making pitches" as it seems to be called and have written a "hook" and a synposis and am working on a "query letter." Most publishers' submission guidelines ask for these plus the 2 or 3 opening chapters. I have identified seven publishers in New Zealand that I will send to, carefully following the (different) guidelines for each. Most want printed, not emailed, submissions: for their "slush pile," which is publisher-speak for unsolicited manuscripts. Here's the "hook":

In Where The HeArt Is (52,000 words), forty-two-year-old New Zealander, Ann Williams, has intimate encounters with art treasures as she travels in New York, Washington DC, London and Paris, after losing her partner to another woman and her university job to redundancy. In the first three cities she is visiting relatives, at the instigation of her mother.
During an extended stay in London to help the family of her cousin, whose twins are two years old and whose wife is pregnant and afflicted with day-long 'morning sickness', she has an intimate encounter of a different kind with a librarian. The librarian, Suzanna, is a black citizen of the UK and insists on a 'present tense' affair — no sharing of past histories, no future planning. All the while, Ann seeks answers to her own questions about who she is and how she will determine her future when she returns home to New Zealand.

I am also going to send a "pitch" to an agency firm in the UK. I think my novel is more suited to the UK than to the US, and I liked the website of this outfit. I've never had an agent, but I gather to get a book published overseas you need one, so I'll give it a try.

Why aren't I including the names of the publishers and the agent? Because I found them in relation to my particular novel, and I think that is a useful thing for everyone to do, seek out publishers etc specifically for their own project. The website at http://publishers.org.nz/ has a list of members with plenty of information about each one.

So, that's the next couple of days' to do list. Here's where I'll be doing it:

Writing Dilemmas & Reading Pleasures

2011-01-04T15:50:00.000+13:00

At the beginning of a year I tend to go back and read the notes I made the previous year on what I had read. One of my reasons for doing this is a very bad memory for names. Another is that I like to record quotes from the book that struck me when I was reading it. These are not necessarily what I would note if I was doing a critique of the book, more things that remind me of something, or relate to an idea I’m thinking about, or even something I am writing.

This was brought home to me as I re-read Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, which I first read a year ago and which is our reading group choice for January. The things I noted a year ago, and the things that struck me second time round are distinctly different from each other. The Lacuna stood up well to re-reading and I recommend it.

I have completed another revision of the-novel-known-as-Ann and made a list of all the poems, writing and art works that are quoted from or referred to in it. Now I will give it to a new reader, someone who hasn’t read any of the earlier versions and who has a perspective on an aspect of the story that I am keen to get input on. And nervous about.

So, deciding how to go about getting it out there, so to speak, is looming. I’ve been published by regular publishers, and self-published, so I know my way around. I’ve also kept reasonably up-to-date with what is happening in the epublishing world. So I know about the options. All have their pluses and minuses. I don't expect to sell a lot of books/ make money; I write about the lives of people to whom big, dramatic events don’t happen, although personal trials and tragedies do, and my protagonists are lesbian.

The biggest downside of any form of self-publishing, for me, is marketing and publicising, because I hate it and so don’t do it. It’s not that I can’t do it, more that I am overcome with resistance and fatigue whenever I set out to.

Watch this space as I figure out what I will do.

I don’t have another novel idea in mind, but I do have a lot of short pieces, some short stories, others shorter than that, which I will do some work on and gather together and see if they make something. If an idea for a short story or poem or novel comes along, I’ll go with that, too.

Whatever else. I’ll keep reading. Here are some of my favourite books from last year’s reading:

Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsi. (She was at Writers & Readers)
Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
Re-born Early diaries of Susan Sontag, edited by her son David Rieff
The Graveyard Book & American Gods by Neil Gaiman (he came to Writers & Readers too)
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
The Collected Short Stories of Lydia Davis
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
Room by Emma Donohue
Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins
How To Live: A Life of Montaigne By Sarah Bakewell.

The Montaigne book is a real treat, and I strongly recommend it — one of those biographies that looks at the man and his work as a whole. I gather it will be out in paperback this month (I read a library copy). Two fairly random quotes from it:

“Montaigne … Saw himself as a thoroughly ordinary man in every respect, except for his habit of writing things down.”

Montaigne thought “that the solution to a world out of joint was for each person to get themselves back in joint: to learn ‘how to live,’ beginning with the art of keeping your feet on the ground.”

About reading

2010-12-22T14:14:00.000+13:00

I like it when one thing leads to another. For example, Lorna Sage’s Moments of Truth, which was recommended to me by a friend, reminded me of Angela Carter. I have a couple of her books from the eighties, so I reread the collection of her reviews, Expletives Deleted. Here's a great sentence about American folktale collector Henry Glassie of whom I had not previously heard: “He is grievously afflicted with fine writing.”

I’ve also got her book The Sadeian Woman which I remember being bewildered by back then. I know more about the surrealists now, who Carter was interested in/ influenced by. Until, that is, as she says in Expletives Deleted,

… I realised that surrealist art did not recognise I had my own rights to liberty and love and vision as an autonomous being, not as a projected image, [so] I got bored and wandered away.

Another connection is with the novel-known-as-Ann where the idea of folktales comes up and it is useful to be reminded of Carter’s interest in them. While I didn’t know all of the writers she reviewed, I enjoyed Carter’s writing so much I’ve put her on my list of novelists to seek out at the Wellington Public Library.

Some time ago I became aware of recurring mentions of the essays of Montaigne. I’ve forgotten where, but I picked up an Everyman edition of them in three volumes from a second-hand bookshop and have delved in here and there. Then I noticed reviews of a book by Sarah Bakewell, How To Live, or A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer. Thanks to my good friend, the Wellington Public Library, I have a copy to read over the holidays. Three chapters in and I’m fascinated.

One of Montaigne's answers to the question, "How to live?" is, "Read a lot, forget most of what you read and be slow witted." I haven't read that chapter in Bakewell's book yet, but I think I'll like it.

My other reading just now is Peter Hessler’s Country Driving, his latest about China. More on that when I’ve read more. And then there’s Barbara Kingsolver’s Lacuna to re-read for our January reading group session.

Re-writes & Wrestling with commas

2010-12-17T11:22:00.000+13:00

The novel-known-as-Ann has been revised/rewritten over and over. Most people reading it wouldn’t notice much of a difference between versions because the revisions are usually at the sentence level - this word here, that one there, out with that phrase - so the story itself hasn’t changed except in a few places and then not the major plot.

I’m trying for a tone, a point of view, a development in the character that is inherent in the story, not stated. Who knows whether I am succeeding, but I have certainly worked more on this novel than earlier ones. Part of the rewriting involves close attention to punctuation, including commas. (The New Zealand Style Book has a good section on commas.)

Whose hands? Not mine.
When my partner and first reader read my most recently published novel we had some brisk conversations about commas. Since then, I’ve given commas more attention and now I use them more — and I hope more consistently — while not as much as she would (probably, how do you know what someone else would do?). I like dashes instead sometimes.

(Last published novel, Take It Easy, 2008. Email me at pat dot rosier at xtra dot co cot nz if you'd like a copy.)

Today, I am resolved to finish this rewrite of the final chapter, which involves adding a small amount of new material. So, onwards!

The book, launched; others read, friend visited

2010-11-28T11:11:00.001+13:00

Yesterday the book launch for Out To Lunch happened, in the local Paekakariki Hall. Fifty or so friends and a few relations came, many bought books. Jobs had been shared around, so it wasn’t a big preparation-stress for anyone, I think.

We each read from our own selection for a couple of minutes, with the partner of, our member who died last year, reading for her. People ate the food,

prepared by the same partner — her wish — with help from one of us writers and drank the punch and wine, overseen by the partner of another writer, and milled about talking to each other and bought books and had us all sign them. It was a lovely sunny afternoon and the new side doors of the hall were open, looking out to a bank of flowers and the freshly-painted white church, and it was all lovely.

The whole group project, from critiquing each others’ work, to the publication process, to the launch itself has been great. Next year we will meet in late January and continue to critique each others’ writing. As the costs of producing the book were covered, we are banking the money from sales and in a couple of years will think about another project. If anyone is keen to buy a copy of the book (178 pages, $20.00) email me at pat dot rosier at xtra dot co dot nz.

Reading Cynthia Ozick has its challenges.

She prefers “classic feminism” to what she calls “new feminism.” She’s writing in the 1970s when she says this. If I’m reading her correctly, she endorses feminism as women gaining “access to the great world of thinking, being and doing.” She does NOT go along with any idea of “’male’ and ‘female’ states of intellect and feeling.” She doesn’t, in what I have read so far, address the “how to” of women getting the access she refers to, or being taken seriously and judged fairly when they do. I have a 1993 collection of her essays from the library and am interested to find out what else she has to say about feminism. I’ll look out for her 2010 novel Foreign Bodies, which is a reinvention of a Henry James novel. (Oh dear, do I have to read Henry James?)

Other reading includes Marianne Wiggins’ Evidence of Things Unseen.

As this is current reading for my book group, I won’t talk about it in detail, just say that I love the science in it and the detail of time and place. I am learning about the Tennessee Valley Authority, which is fascinating.

My friend in Auckland liked the-story-known-as-Ann and gave me some excellent feedback on it. I’m still unsatisfied with the end of this novel and her comments about it losing emotional drive in the last couple of chapters have given me an idea to strengthen it in a way I like. It will be another week before I get to actually work seriously on this.

The friend I visit who has Altzheimers has read a couple of my short stories and given me wonderful feedback on them. She has read them several times, she told me, and they get better every time. Do I have more? A collection? When am I publishing them? She had made a few notes on the printouts, perceptive and useful comments. We had a great conversation about these stories for more than ten minutes. As I was leaving an hour later, she picked up the pages and said, “Did we talk about these?” My appreciation of her appreciation of my stories was undiminished, but it was all I could do not to cry, as I said something like, “Yes, we did and I’m so pleased that you like them,” and she looked confused and put down the papers. She wanted to read more of my stories, so today I posted two to her address at the rest home where she lives and talks often of getting back to her home and garden, in the country, several kilometres from the nearest town. What she misses most, she says, is being able to practise her "domestic arts" — her phrase — which include growing flowers and picking and arranging them in her house, cooking, entertaining, spinning and weaving. The one she can do, and does constantly in the rest home, is knitting. She says it is soothing.

She knitted me a scarf. "With love," she said.

We are having this run of sunny, calm weather which is a delight. (Last summer I remember constant wind.) So our decision to spend the summer at home — after all, we do live at the beach — feels like a good one. Any day soon I may even scrub up the barbecue that sat out on our wind-exposed deck all last summer and never got lit once.

I notice that today is 28 November. It is my sister's birthday. She killed herself at age 56. Today she would have been 73. I am remembering you, Ngaire.

Editing again, more reading & Out To Lunch

2010-11-11T15:50:00.000+13:00

I printed out the ms of the-novel-known-as-Ann and right away I’m editing again. Those damned sentences keep jumping out at me demanding a tweak. This time, though, I’m starting from the final chapter and working forward a chapter at a time. I figure the early chapters have had much more attention - apart from anything else they’ve been around longer - so this time I’m walking backwards for (not christmas, never!) - well, page 1 guess. It’s way beyond me to work backwards at a page level, so I’m starting at the first page of each chapter and working to the end of that chapter, then starting the first page of the previous chapter. Never done this before. I wouldn’t try it if I didn’t by now know the story really well.

The reason I printed it was for reading by some Auckland friends we are visiting soon. These friends read the short story this novel/novella arose from, over a year ago. At 52,000 words it’s short for a novel and long for a novella, so I don’t know which to call it. What I do know is that it’s the right length for the story that it is, so will not be messing about with that. I’m still thinking about the pieces of writing that might go with it I referred to in my last post and whether I can assemble a book from them plus Ann.

I read about Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe somewhere and have forgotten where, but I got one of his many novels from the Wellington Public Library. It's title is Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! and it's about a writer and a son who was brain damaged at birth. The protagonist is also studying the poet William Blake and using Blake to interpret his world, although he, the protagonist, is not christian like Blake. The title is a quote from Blake. I found it strangely fascinating. Lately I seem to be coming across a lot of books with a protagonist who is kind of the author and kind of not. For example, in the acknowledgements to The Shadow Catcher Marianne Wiggins thanks her sister for, “permission to decorate our shared history.” And there are whole books written about Marcel in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and The Narrator and Proust himself and how separate they are, or not.

We took A Cynthia Osick Reader to Australia last year and never got to read it. Stimulated by news of a new novel from her, Foreign Bodies, I have started it. Issues around being classified as “a Jewish writer” — and hence of interest only to Jewish readers and a standard-bearer for Jewish culture— are a feature of her career, and the editor of this collection from her writings, Elaine M Kauvar, says of this, “No imaginative writer, whether or not she is Jewish, sets out to write a novel to become a spokesperson for a group of people or to become responsible for its culture.” As a lesbian who writes fiction, often with lesbian characters, I heartily agree with this.

Out To Lunch, the book of writings by the writing group I am in, is being printed as I write. We’ve seen a proof copy and everyone in the group is happy with how it is. It’s a good project to be involved with. Here’s an extract from the introduction.

Our meetings are long chatty affairs where we workshop our writing. There's praise and encouragement and many helpful suggestions, and a shared lunch. Food brought to share reflects the bringer just as the writing offered reflects the writer.
Writing without the endpoint of publication becomes unsatisfying after a while. You need an audience, to complete the act of communication. At one of our meetings, we talked about publishing.
“It’s nice,” said Annabel, “to put something out there, not just write into a vacuum.”
“We can give lesbians something about themselves to read,” said Kate.
“It’s good to have things for women who haven’t come out,” Terry added.
Pat thought it would be good for everyone to be involved in a project doing the nuts and bolts of publishing. Judith agreed with all of this. Kate applied to the Armstrong Arthur Trust for some money on our behalf and we were successful.

Disappointed, flattered and assembling

2010-10-29T15:53:00.000+13:00

Now that I have figured out, again, how to post pictures to this blog, here is the cover of the book of Virginia Woolf’s essay On Being Ill that I couldn’t post last time. Both the essay and the introduction by Hermione Lee were a disappointment. HL did little more than summarise the essay, with a bit of context, and the essay itself started off with a fantastic few pages and then rather dribbled along to an ending that HL made rather too much of. If anyone else has read this essay I’d love to know what you thought of it. Please note that my disappointment at this piece does not diminish my admiration of either Hermione Lee or Virginia Woolf overall. I do, also, have the lovely book.

The book this month for my book group is Marianne Wiggins’ Evidence of Things Unseen, which I haven’t yet managed to get a copy of. The library did however have The Shadow Catcher on the shelf so I’m reading that in the meantime. I had not previously heard of Marianne Wiggins, and am enjoying The Shadow Catcher a lot. It’s called a novel, the protagonist is called Marianne Wiggins and one of the major characters is a true historical figure, photographer Edward Curtis. The overblown blurb says that this book, “chases the silhouettes of our collective history into the bright light of the present.” Fortunately the book itself is not written in this ornate style.

Out to Lunch, the book of writings by members of my writing group is almost ready for printing. There’s always some anxiety at this time — what mistakes have we missed? Have we spelt everyone’s name right every time? Will we meet the deadline? Will anything bad show up in the proof copy? Will the printers meet their deadline?

I’ve finished the latest edit of the-book-known-as-Ann. Except I have one more thought about the lead up to the ending. I don’t know what I want to do next about it. I’ve had helpful feedback from my partner, who is so far the only person to have read it all and from my writing group, who have read the first two chapters. More readers, I guess. I’ll just make this one addition, then I’ll print it out again and … watch this space.

Someone I know slightly who is trying to get a book published following the renegging of a publisher who had said they would, is reading this blog from the beginning and taking notes! It’s the self-publishing posts she’s interested in, I think. I am strangely flattered by her interest.

I’ve got all these short pieces of writing, many of them in several versions, so I’m going through the writing folder on my computer and taking the ones that I think have something in them and assembling them into one file. As I go I’m putting pieces together that seem to fit together. There’ll be sixty pieces in all, I think. Not short stories, exactly, although some are. Possibly a prequel, in the same volume, to Ann. There's whole lot of thinking going on.

More reading than writing

2010-10-18T10:08:00.000+13:00
There's more reading than writing going on here just now. I'm still editing the novel-known-as Ann and did some research in the library the other day, which involved reading Dennis Glover poems in the New Zealand section. He sure wrote some odd poems as well as some terrific ones. I think he had a talent for making unlikely rhymes work. It reminded me what fun doing the research for writing can be when you get off the internet. (Not that the internet isn’t most useful for research.)

My recent reading has involved some heavyweights as well as catching up with New Yorkers and copies of the London Review of Books from when I was away. (Interesting issue about plurals here, which I avoided. I suppose it would be London Reviews of Books. Or not. Or LRBs to cop out.)

The Books
On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf, reprinted by with an introduction by Hermione Lee. A small book, but perfectly formed, with a facsimile of the original cover by Vanessa Bell. (I was going to add a photo of the cover but blogger has changed something and what was really simple is now impossible unless you have files on picasa, which I don't. Grrr.)
Room by Emma Donohue. Shortlisted for, but not the winner of, the Man Booker. A compelling read of a book that is my book group choice so I can’t say more until after we have talked about it.
Freedom by Janathan Franzen. This book is being much-discussed on a number of the erudite blogs I read and was reviewed in LRB. I think it’s a dish with too many ingredients, used too cleverly by half; kind of up itself. It has many characters, much plot, and a large bunch of issues. The theme about wanting to be a good person was one of the most interesting, and ‘goodness’ or lack of it was a big deal for the three main characters, Walter, Patty and Richard, who were all in love with each other one way and another. Another theme is that of title - what does freedom mean, if anything, in America today? It’s clever and very contemporary and has some very quotable sentences, such as: “When you think about it, for a mature organism, growth is basically a cancer, right?” So why didn’t I like it more? As the LRB reviewer pointed out, there’s a lot of sobbing
Self by Yann Martel. He wrote this way before The Life of Pi, which I loved. It’s a self-indulgent, memoirish, sort of travel book and I didn’t finish it. That hardly ever happens.
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobsen. This is the one that did win this year’s Man Booker, against the odds, literally (the UK bookmakers stopped taking bets on another book). I’m only a little way into it, and it’s challenging and takes concentration and even then I think I am missing a lot of allusions. And yes, it is funny. And it is shaping up to be well worth the effort.

Out To Lunch the book of writings by my writing group
We meet on Sunday and will plan the launch in late November. There’s varying degrees of excitement and nervousness among group members. I’m enjoying working with the group on the project.

Nanowrimo (write a first draft of a 50,000 word or more book in the month of November) is about to start. I’m not taking part this year. Doing it last year was how I turned a short story into the-book-known-as-Ann. There are thousands signed up worldwide and over a hundred from New Zealand. Online forums and various encouragements are on the website all the way through the month. Here’s the link if you want to find out more: http://www.nanowrimo.org

Holiday reading & ongoing writing

2010-10-03T13:24:00.007+13:00
It was a good holiday in Queensland and Melbourne. Saw some new places - Glass House Mountains, for example - and some important people, such as my son and my friends Judi and Margot.

A Glasshouse Mountain

The kookaburra that appeared in our back yard at Dicky Beach

My holiday reading ranged widely:
Solar, Ian McEwen (for my book group). Like it a lot, laughed out loud a few times, enjoyed the “science.” Such an unattractive protagonist, yet still a great stimulating read.
The Thousand Autumns of Joseph de Zoet, David Mitchell. Love DM’s writing. Learnt a lot about 15th century Japan and Holland from this novel, set in the Dutch-run Island in Nagasaki Harbour that was the only centre for European trade with Japan at the time. Also a love story.
The Danger Game by Kalinda Ashton. Australian novel, family tragedy, interesting relationship between adult sisters.
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi What can I say about this inspiring man and his writings? In this book he uses his knowledge of chemistry to talk about some of his life experiences.
The Glass Room, Simon Mawer. Learnt about Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. A story of a family and their friends over several decades. And a spectacular house that over the years is taken over by Nazis and Soviets and the Czechoslovak State.
Isak Dinesen, Judith Thurman. I am such a fan of Judith Thurman’s writing. She has said herself if she was writing this biography now it would be shorter. There sure is a lot of detail. ID had a fascinating and troubled life.

I think I’ve made progress with the ending of the novel still known as “Ann.” I just might be on the final draft. File name: Ann 15. Here’s my list of abandoned titles:
Ann
Ann Goes Into Art
The (he)Art of the Matter
Present Tense
Present Perfect
Perfect Present.
I find titles hard. My favourite title of any of the books I have been associated with is the title for the writing group book, and I didn’t think of that. (Yay, Annabel!) I have to come up with a title for “Ann” myself, but so far it eludes me.

"Ann" has a lot of quotes from a lot of different writers in it and the whole business of permissions to quote will have to be faced up to at the point when I am making decisions about publishing it. As I found with wanting to use a line from Emily Dickinson in Take It Easy, long-dead authors can be tricky. A university holds the copyright on ED and wanted me to pay fifty USD to use that line. I used something else, something I didn’t like as much. All the living authors I contacted were fine for me to quote them at no cost, just with the usual acknowledgment. However, I suspect it will be an even bigger issue with the Ann story, because I have included many more quotes and they are essential to the story. Watch this space.

Out To Lunch is well on the way into production. We are reading final proofs, the fabulous cover is nearing its final version, we have an ISBN number. (There’s nothing like an ISBN number to make a book seem real). A launch is planned for 4pm Saturday 27 November, St Peter’s Hall, Paekakariki, New Zealand.

When I think I have a final version of the Ann story, I’ll go back and look at some of the many short pieces I have. Maybe some of them would fit with the Ann story to make a book. Or not, still thinking about that.

This month has a number of friends’ birthdays in it, so my calligraphy efforts are directed at making individual birthday cards, which is a lot of fun. Thinking about them is a big part of the fun. And talking with my partner, Prue, about possibilities - she had a great idea the other day.

Publishing Merry-go-round

2010-08-28T09:48:00.003+12:00
Prior to heading off on a three-week holiday in Queensland and Melbourne I have competed yet another rewrite/ edit of my fourth novel and printed it out to take with me and have my partner read. Previously I have shown only the first five chapters to anyone.

This is the novel that began its life as a short story and I morphed into a novel during Write A Novel in a Month last November, and wrote about in earlier blogs. I’ve been experimenting with writing in the present tense, and with other aspects of my writing. I’m still not satisfied with the ending to this novel, but the rest of the story is probably done — which doesn’t exclude more rewriting, just means that I think the story elements are there. There is a lot more plot than in the short story, but the key idea of the short story is central to the novel.

It’s around fifty thousand words, which is short for a novel, long for a novella, but that seems to be the size it is. There could be one more chapter, but I’m not convinced about that. The novel doesn’t have a title yet. I call the files of various drafts ‘Ann’ because that’s the name of the protagonist, but I don’t think that will be the title of the book. The current file is Ann15.

I don’t know yet what I’ll do about publishing it. The whole publishing business is in a state of flux. Fewer and fewer big publishing houses control more and more of what one might call ‘mainstream’ publishing, the smaller presses can afford less editing/ marketing support, and so on and on. Self-publishing is less denigrated than it was, ebooks are a potential; options, maybe, certainly a tangled web for writers.

The writing group I am part of is in the process of self-publishing a book of our writings, to be called Out To Lunch. The title relates to group members being lesbians, the fact that we meet on Sundays with a shared lunch, and us all liking the idea of being a bit crazy. We have some funding from a local trust and from one of our members who sadly died last year and help from friends and relations with cover design and typesetting. It will be published at the end of November.

I’m enjoying working with a group on this project. And, I suspect — hope —that when we have Out To Lunch out there I will have decided what to do with my novel.

In my last post I quoted a couple of lines of my poetry in the short story I added. Just for fun, here is a version of the same quote using my slowly-developing calligraphy skills.

More reading, some writing

2010-07-28T13:26:00.007+12:00
I’ve been reading some writers who write very differently from each other as part of my search for ways of writing that I find satisfying for myself.

I forget what the references to it were that made me interested in Thomas Bernhard, a dead Austrian who wrote in German. His last book, Extinction, which I got from the library, is 326 pages in two paragraphs, one for each section. It took a while to get used to reading pages without any paragraph breaks, it gave the whole book a relentless feel. The setting is largely inside the protagonist’s head. He spends the first half ruminating about the family he hates, having just received a telegram from one of his two sisters saying his parents and only brother have been killed in a car crash. The second half is still in his head but he is physically at the family estate (they are rich). He thinks everyone despises and judges him, as he does them. There are hints that he is an unreliable narrator, as they say. He rails against the action of Austria the country and Austrians the people in WW11. Looking back I am surprised at how much I enjoyed reading it, mostly over several train trips to Wellington. I’m not going to give up paragraphs.

Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories is another matter altogether. Short stories, some a few lines, some a few paragraphs, others several pages. Written over xx years. Again, mainly from inside people’s heads but many different point/s of view and voices. A lot to do with mothers, both being one and having one. The reviewer in London Review of Books (22 July) calls them, “uncomfortably intimate.” Apart from one of the longest stories, which I didn’t get at all and thought boring, I loved reading this book, too. What have I learnt about my own writing? I don’t know, that’s something I find impossible to articulate. I certainly don’t want to write ‘like’ people I read but somehow reading the kind of writing I don’t do informs what I do.

The third book in my recent exploration is Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs. This is a writer who wallows in words, the sound of them, the meanings of them the mis/use of them. It’s a grim novel, with a lot of sub-plots, and it’s funny.

At least part of the impetus for this reading has been Francine Prose’s Reading Like A Writer, (Must read one of her novels.) which I referred to in an earlier blog.

I’m still flopping around with my own writing. Need some discipline to get the latest draft of the novel finished and have some people who read the early chapters read the whole thing. I have some short stories on the go, one of which used to be a poem. I took this to my writing group on Sunday and thanks to their feedback it’s improved a lot. See the end of this post for its current version. Might be a final version.

The writing group is in the throes of publishing a book of our work. More on that in my next post.

Between
On the anniversary of her daughter’s death, she walks to the southern end of the beach, well away from the day-trippers.

Between the rumble of the train
and the waves’ reiterating roar.

She watches two oyster-catchers feeding at the mussel rocks. The afternoon looms appropriately grey, with the hidden sun now and then sheeting arrows of light through gaps in the clouds, making the waves’ white tops flare. A man fishes from the shore. A child climbs the skeleton of a tree dropped on the beach by a winter storm. Last week it had been further along, now it’s lodged in the sand like a climbing frame. She wants that child, whose mother sits on the sand with her knees pulled up to her chin, her arms wrapped around them, watching; the job of all mothers.

Oyster-catchers fly off at the skittering approach of a small black dog. The pied shag drying its wings on a rock scares into flight. The waves come in, the waves pull back, the sun’s rays are shining, then not, birds eat, preen, fly off, bent on their own safety. All are careless of her desolation and she finds a strange solace in their indifferent beauty.

A man approaches, running behind a push-chaired baby, smiling as he guides the three-wheeled buggy in a semi-circle around her and heads back the way he came. Her eyes fill with tears. She laughs, at his heels flicking up sand.

why write? why not read?

2010-06-24T18:26:00.005+12:00
Why write? It’s the ongoing question. Sometimes I bore myself thinking about it, so I try not to think about it and just do it. Today it popped out of hiding as I was thinking about writing a new blog entry. “Because I have to,” is a silly answer, though it often enough comes to mind. Maybe it’s really, “because I want to.” If I want to I must think I have something (worthwhile) to say. What could that be? A particular way of seeing the world, perhaps. Maybe I read books by writers who write about writing in search of a better answer.

The daily writing diary has been stop-start jumpy. Days when I forgot, others when I just didn’t do it. Being sick with a cold was a credible excuse for only a couple of those days. Still, rambling away to myself about what I am writing — and not — is something I will carry on for July. Along with a new spurt of editing the novel that keeps slipping into the background.
I found and bought a second-hand copy of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style which I mentioned in my earlier post. Its “do this” and “don’t do this” approach is an antidote to a lot of writing about writing on the web, which is kind of wishy-washy.

Novels made it back into my reading. Alison Wong’s When The Moon Turns Silver, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (three short novels from the eighties), Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs.

And a bit of new writing:

…the other side…
I try not to envy Maria. She’s my best friend, after all, and envy is such a corrosive emotion, not too many steps away from resentment, and you can’t be friends with someone you resent. Married to maybe, I’m sure many are, but not good friends with.

We’ve known each other for forty years, Maria and I, been through a lot together — my illness, her divorce, the horror of her son going into the army, the SAS, no less. Not to mention various financial crises, forced house sales, teenage children in various kinds of trouble. All history now. We talk sometimes about how things we lived through, like the ’81 Sprinbok tour and the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, are the subjects of documentaries about the past. “That’s not history, that’s my life!” we want to say.

We haven’t always lived in the same city or even country, but it never stopped us keeping in touch. How old-fashioned writing and posting a letter with a stamp on it seems now.

It’s so easy to be romantic about something that isn’t and won’t be available to oneself, so easy to think “it must be wonderful to…” and it wouldn’t necessarily be, on a day to day basis,j so wonderful in its happening. But I do envy. Oh, I have my laptop, bless it, that takes me out and about in the world, but it’s not the same as living, as they say, in the bosom of your family.
“Here you go, Helen, here’s your call from Adelaide.” They’re very nice the staff here, mostly from the Pacific Islands, quietly spoken and pleasant

“Hello Helen, it’s so good to hear you.” Maria sounds tired. I can hear her grand-children in the background, arguing with their father by the sound of it. “That’s just started up. I’ll go into the other room and close the door.”

More writing, editing and reading

2010-06-01T10:38:00.003+12:00
Story A Day May is finished. I posted 29 stories in 31 days. See one at the end of this blog entry.

Have finished the tense-edit of the current novel. One more chapter to write, this time with some of the early story of the mother, Shirley. I’m avoiding thinkng about what to do when it seems finished — apart from having Prue and some others read it. Publishing is an odd beast at the moment, with the big print-publishers looking for fashionable writers who’ll sell vast quantities of books and epublishers talking themselves up like mad and neither side really knowing anything about the future.

I just read an excellent book, Reading Like A Writer, by Francine Prose, a novelist with fourteen published novels, none of which I have heard of let alone read. It’s sub-title is, “a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them.” She recommends Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style from way back and reading and analysing the best of writers, with lots of examples from Raymond Chandler to Chekhov. Katherine Mansfield is in there, and Gertrude Stein.

What now for daily writing? A writing diary I think, which may include bits of writing. A sort of keeping tabs on myself, not something to show people or put online. I’ll try that for a month and see where, if anywhere, it goes.
And it’s definitely time to read a novel.

Here’s the story:

June
June had been born in July and was grateful to have been named for her maternal grandmother and not the month of her birth. When she had suggested to her Uncle August that he could use his second name, the harmless John, he’d told her that his father had called him August and that was good enough for him, thank you. June was accustomed to her helpful suggestions being taken the wrong way. It was only the other day at work when Nigel had complained, yet again, about how put upon he was and how Keith and Shona took it for granted that he would clear away all their coffee mugs and she had said, ‘Leaving them there is a good alternative to being a martyr,’ and he hasn’t spoken to her since.

She doesn’t see much of her siblings these days. Not since their parents died. She had suggested, quietly and calmly, that they take turns at choosing something they wanted from their parents’ house until they didn’t want any more and Graham had said okay, he’d go first as the oldest and take everything in the china cabinet and Doris had screamed at him that alphabetical would be fairer and the whole cabinet-full was more than one thing and they had both turned and blamed her for the idea. ‘You always come up with a solution and it’s always a bad one,’ Doris had said and that really hurt her feelings and she ended up not even putting her dibs in for the piano, which was now gathering dust in Graham’s oldest’s spare room and she would definitely have started piano lessons.

Still, she had her pleasures. She liked to think of her small back garden as her courtyard. She had it just as she liked it, from the two metre long raised bed where she grew silver beet and lettuces and tomatoes and the occasional capsicum bush and a crop of broad beans over the winter, to the wisteria along the side fence. All her life she had wanted a garden with a wisteria and a flowering kowhai tree and this year the dwarf kowhai she’d found a space for in the corner had flowered at last. Two magnificent yellow blooms; she had learnt to use the macro setting on her new digital camera specially and now had them as a screen-saver that gave her a small thrill every time she woke up her computer.

The clothes line had been a challenge; there was something particularly domestic about a Hills Hoist that would have ruined the atmosphere of the whole area. It took a while, and she even considered the wickedness of using the dryer for everything and not having a clothes line at all, but in the end she came up with a solution. There was just room along the side of the house next to the driveway to the garage for a non-revolving foldaway that she didn’t actually have to fold away, she could get the car past it easily. The electrician who backed the corner of his van into it and made a significant dent just wasn’t paying enough attention.

No-one could look in to her courtyard. It was private. Occasionally she could hear a neighbour in their garden, but she liked that, as long as it was a background noise and not loud and intrusive. She got on well enough with her neighbours, it paid to, in case of a civil defence emergency or even an accident or heart attack or something. Not that she worried, if she had a heart attack or a stroke she hoped it would be a big one and take her out. She rather liked the idea of coping with the aftermath of an earthquake but not anything that lost her her independence.

The people who had just moved in next door were a bit noisier than she liked. There were a couple of young teens and a toddler and two parents, one man one woman, who both seemed to go out to work all day. It was no doubt a child-care baby; June had no opinion about whether that was a good or a bad thing, she’d never had children. A hysterectomy in her thirties had seen to that, and she never minded. She’d been with Gloria at the time.

So here she was, on her own and as happy as she had ever been. She sank into her chair and opened the Sunday paper.

Writing up a storm

2010-05-17T12:14:00.004+12:00
In a funny kind of way I am writing up a storm at the moment. And having an extremely good time with it. A Story A Day for May is working out really well, because I am doing what I thought I would and taking a piece from my earlier 250-a-day project and finishing that for the day’s story. Sometimes that involves only a little light editing and a final line, sometimes it’s a major rework and a lot more text. I’ll add a couple to the end of this post.

And the other day, in the midst of running hither and yon to get a new back window put in my car (smashed it myself, by accident of course, closing it on a boot full of wood) I came up with a whole new book idea. Not that I’ve anything like finished the novel I am working on. The new idea would involve using some of the stories I am writing at the moment. No, not exactly a short story collection. More in a later post, when I have the idea better worked out.

I am managing to put some serious time into the current novel. It’s a matter of editing and rewriting at the moment. I like the story, it’s the writing that needs work!

I read the first volume of Susan Sontag’s letters, called Reborn and edited by her son, David Rieff. I can’t say anything about it because it’s my book club choice and some of my book club people read this blog. After we’ve had our book club discussion I’ll say more about this book.

Stimulated by SS, I found Kafka’s diaries in a second-hand bookshop and have just started reading those. (I recently read Metamorphosis because my son mentioned it as an important book to him when he was young but grown-up.) I don’t have a handle on Kafka at all, but am already riveted by his diaries. He is, to put it mildiy, a miserable fellow. Sometimes it hard to tell whether a diary entry is just that, or an attempt at something he wants to write. His lack of belief in himself and his writing is well expressed in this sentence: “My doubts stand in a circle around every word.”

Here are two of my short stories: (I’ve included the first one because Prue liked it.)

Separations
When you have parents who don’t get on, and you are an only child, you learn some things. Angela learnt that she could often get what she wanted by playing them off against each other. The down side of that was that she never felt she could quite trust the stability of the situation. Her parents didn’t row, or at least not noisily, and they slept in the same bed, so it wasn’t embarrassing when her friends came over after school.

The worst thing was hard to describe; a kind of tension. It would vanish when she and one parent were together, cooking something, or watching television, or doing her homework, but when the other parent came into the room the air would turn cold and empty-feeling and she would know she had to be careful to not seem to favour one over the other, to spread herself evenly between them.

When her father told her he was leaving, he assumed she would stay with her mother and visit him on weekends; he’d get a flat not too far away, he said, so she could still see her friends. Having separated parents wasn’t anything unusual, but still, she was anxious. I’m thirteen, she wanted to say, I’m the one who’s supposed to change things, you’re the grownups you’re supposed to stay the same until, well, at least until I finish school.

They both went to a lot of trouble to tell her that it wasn’t her fault, she hadn’t done anything wrong. She knew that and she knew that parents always say that, she had known it since Valerie’s parents separated when she and Valerie were six, and there had been plenty of break-ups since then.

Once the separation actually happened, Angela noticed her father fading, gradually getting more and more hazy, seeing her less and less often, paying her less attention when they were together; something about having a new wife and baby. She didn’t mind, the new wife was a terrible fusspot, more concerned about her own makeup and clothes and that people might think Angela was her daughter, and that she was old enough to be mother to a teenager. When Angela got to university and struck Gertrude Stein in third year English Literature, she found an explanation of what happened with her and her father. “Little by little we never met again.” They did see each other occasionally, but they never met in any real sense, they never said more to each other than pleasant nothings. “How are you?” “Fine, thanks. And you?” “Oh, good.”

Being just Angela and her mother in the house was surprisingly relaxed and easy. There was the occasional man who stayed over, but never anything serious, and Angela herself even had boyfriends stay over once she was sixteen and that was never a big deal. Then Angela went off to university in Wellington and her mother sold the Wanganui house and moved to Otaki to live with a man who bred llamas.

Angela completed her first degree the same month that her boyfriend and her best friend broke her heart. Julie, her second-best friend took her off to spend the summer in midst of her own seven-sibling family. With partners, sundry extras like Angela, and children, there were nineteen people in and around the rambling house. Tents on the lawn. Bunks in the sleep-out. Julie and Angela shared a built-in veranda that had two single beds, end to end.

Christmas and New Year were a kind of family chaos that Angela had never known. No solitude. No silence. No pressure to do or be anything in particular, along with an expectation that everyone would lend a hand here and there while Julie’s mother orchestrated the whole. And everyone was responsible for their own stuff. “Leave it lying around and lose it,” Julie advised. “Leave it in your bag or on your bed and no-one will touch it.”

It didn’t take Angela long to notice cracks, jealousies, manipulations. They fascinated her. No-one, certainly not Julie, wanted to talk about any of that, it was like a river, all action and doing on the surface, surging sometimes, quietly pooling some-times, but with undercurrents pulling this way and that, unexpected eddies and blockages making confused and confusing ripples and waves, some of them powerful, none acknowledged.

One of the older brothers, Alan, was taken with her, Angela could tell. When he was around she stayed closed to Jill, mother-organiser.

In the first week of January, when Angela was beginning to think about extracting herself back into her own life, which she could at least bear to think about again, one of the children drowned in the river. The real river, the one flowing past the bottom of the long garden. Kevin was six, one of the kids that ran about all day doing kid-stuff, being hushed regularly by the adults.

Some wanted to know what happened, wanted to blame someone, a parent, an older child, someone. Others went quiet, comforting and being comforted. Two brothers dealt with the police. A sister-in-law and Julie dealt with the media. People swore and cried and went for walks in ones and twos and the departures started. Irritations and squabbles came to the surface. Angela left with the first wave, deciding for herself that her bed was more use to the family than her presence.

She stood in the bow of the ferry as it ploughed through Cook Strait, feeling the wind against her body, the spray not quite reaching her, and thought of her ex-boyfriend and her once friend together and saw that the hole in her life was quite a small hole and diminishing.

Home and Away
Time to go home. She thinks she knows where home is, and it’s not where her heart is, her heart is a tired, dry, shrivelled thing inside her. Home is that familiar place, that place where she can stand and know where thing are; Australia is that way, across the Tasman Sea, for South America she will need to turn east, towards the Pacific Ocean, south is Antarctica (yes, yes, Antarctica is always south). Almost everything else is north of where she stands when she is home. At night, looking up, she will be able to find the southern cross and work out half a dozen other star forms in relation to it. She knows the weather, whatever it is, will change, that there are spaces of countryside between cities and towns, that home is small and underpopulated except around its northern city, and both future-focused and backward-looking. Sooner or later she will run into people she knows, there will be friends who have drifted and friends who will fit right back into her life and she theirs.

She will go home and wear it like an old, comfortable coat, and rest. It will not be the rest that lasts until death, it will be rest to fit her for the restlessness that is just as familiar as home, the restlessness that will drive her on. This she knows, as well as she knows that for now her only option is to rest.

The volume of noise sinks. The helicopter has landed.

Bearing Fruit

2010-05-01T11:55:00.004+12:00
Oh, the internet!

Now I have joined up for A Story A Day for May. http:storyaday.org/ Finish a short story every day (well, I have decided on six days a week, with a movable day off to accommodate the rest of my life.) Any length. As much or as little chat and/or support as one wants to take part in at the website. I might post the occasional story here. This will be my May version of 250-words-a-day. The point remains to keep myself writing new stuff, pushing myself into different points of view (hah!) and experimenting with tenses and generally playing around with the actual writing.

The Novel continues. Have completed the first extra chapter enough to insert it into the manuscript and am working on the second one (I think there will be three extra chapters in all, each expanding one of the secondary chapters.) Not as dissatisfied with the overall project as I was. Thank you Prue for encouragement.

On the reading front, I finished 2666. Worth the effort, I think, quite memorable, but not to everyone’s taste. When the Earth Turns Silver by Alison Wong came in my birthday pile. I really enjoyed it, some good insights into turn of the 19th/20th centuries Wellington and the Chinese community. It’s a story of tragic love of more than one kind and does that tricky thing of giving background history without undermining the story-telling. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffers & Annie Barrows, also a birthday book, is a good book but not a great one. Told in letters from a variety of writers, who all actually write the same, its biggest flaw. I enjoyed reading it and learnt a lot about the German occupation of Guernsey in WWII, about which I was pretty ignorant.

I was moved to re-read Tillie Olsen’s Silences by its inclusion in a list of the 10 books a writer should read. (I didn’t recognise most of the other entries, was intrigued by this one being on the list.) It’s a collection of fragments and a wide range of quotes from other writers, plus transcripts of a couple of lectures she gave from notes. It’s an excellently argued treatise about women writers being diminished and ignored as well as full of ideas about what writers need in order to write. It was first published in 1980 and I remember reading it then. Here’s one of my very favourite quotes. Tillie Olsen is quoting William Blake:

“Blight never does good to a tree … but if it still bear fruit, let none say that the fruit was in consequence of the blight.”

Going somewhere, maybe

2010-04-12T18:57:00.004+12:00
At the beginning of April I started taking a 250 word piece from March and adding 250 words to it. (The prospect of having 365 beginnings after a year was just too much.) That was okay. Unexciting, but okay. Some of the pieces I had written I didn’t remember at all. Then I decided I wanted to add a chapter to the Ann novel, so started doing that a bit a day, and I have got a chapter, though not one I am happy with yet. Still, it’s some of the way there, so I’ve put it into my novel ms. Then I moved into editing the next chapter, now chapter 4, and I’m really not happy with the whole novel. Not the story, I like the story a lot, it’s about the writing. I guess. I'm looking for a variation of my usual style, I think, but can't articulate it. I’ll keep gnawing away until something happens. The thing to not do, I tell myself, is stop trying, it's always easy to go on to other things, but I think the 250 words a day thing is showing me the benefits of keeping at it.

On the reading front, I am two-thirds of the way through Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. A very unusual book in five parts and over 800 pages. I struggled in the middle to maintain interest, but Part 4 got me hooked back in. Strange, because Part 4 consists, not entirely, but mainly, of a detailed list of women who were raped and killed. No voyeurism, just facts, and names of policemen and a few other bits. A bit like a wordier Eliot Weinberger list (a lot wordier) it kind of builds up.

Previously read Hicksville, the graphic novel by Dylan Horrocks that has just been reissued by VUP. I read the original version from the Wellington Public Library. A comic about comics, at least in part. Also about New Zealand, and fitting in, or not, and a bunch of other things. There’s an art to ‘reading’ the visual part of graphic novels, which I don’t think I have quite got the hang of. Maybe I didn’t read enough comics as a child.

I have accumulated a great list of writers' blog, which I dip into now and then. Mostly they are interesting and well-written but they can become too much of a good thing. I get sick of them after a while. The best book blog I have found so far, because it is extremely varied (eg, includes notable pictures of books) and has really good writers is the New Yorker's book bench. Find it at:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/?xrai It will also lead you to the book club blog, where a noted author chooses a book to read and it gets talked about on the blog. This month it's Lorrie Moore's choice, which is David Vann's Legend of a Suicide, which I haven't read, but will.

Writers and Readers Week, Writing, Editing

2010-03-22T11:49:00.002+13:00
As I expected, I loved Writers and Readers week at the International Arts Festival in Wellington. Highlights? Kamila Shamsi, for one. She's Pakistani and writes about wars on terror as an ongoing historical phenomenon, and how fear leads to accepting anything in the name of safety and security. Her novel Burnt Shadows is stunning. Also Neil Gaiman and Margo Lanahan both of whose books have large fantasy elements which I have enjoyed a lot. Audrey Niffenegger was fun, too, talking about Highgate Cemetery and her latest book. Geoff Dyer said he can’t think of stories so his books don’t behave the way readers expect. He admires Allan Hollinghurst, who does tell stories. Dyer looks for “unmediated experience” and tries to reduce the the distance between what he is writing and how he is writing it. I do love listening to writers talking about writing, even if I don’t always understand everything they say. I take notes. Another highlight was Philip Hoare, historian of the decadence of the nineteen twenties and, more lately, his current passion, whales. A very entertaining eccentric.

On my daily tasks I am doing better on writing 250 words a day than I am on editing my book. The latter needs longer periods of time I think, and my days have been very full lately. I am surprising myself with what comes out of my mind in the daily writing. At the end of March, I have decided, I will print all to date - about 40 beginnings - and read them and see what I want to add to and what I can mine for other purposes and review the whole exercise. I’ll keep doing it, might just change the parameters. Or not. Will report.

I’m changing my editing plan to available half days, of which my diary indicates there are some ahead. Interesting how recording these activities makes them concrete.

Reading the web, new writing & revising

2010-03-05T10:28:00.004+13:00
I’ve been looking at lists and blogs about writing and writers. The best general writing blogs are via literary publications, like the New Yorker’s Book Bench http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/?xrail and the blogs at the LA Times http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy and the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog. They all have links to other places and writers and act as useful filters (for me, anyway) so you can avoid spending hours trawling through individual author websites devoted mostly to bios and promoting their books, which is fair enough, but not what I want to read.

The New Yorker Book Bench is particularly good. It often links to non-nyer sites and, as is the nature of the internet beast, one thing leads to another. The trick is not to spend (waste?) too many hours on the intelligent musings of good writers. It can feel ‘educational’ but actually there is a law of diminishing returns. Lists of writing ‘rules’ and tips crop up often, some of them really useful, but in the end it’s each to her own. I really like to read what published writers say about their routines and habits, and there's plenty of that. Again, I look for the occasional tip that can be useful to me rather than rules to follow. For example, in spite of advice to the contrary I don’t plan to give up semi-colons altogether in favour of full-stops, but I might be more considered about where I use one. I might.

So, to create some discipline in my own writing I have set myself two daily tasks.

The first is to write 250 words of new fiction a day. This isn’t much, about two paragraphs, and can be done in fifteen or so minutes. I started about three weeks ago and so far have 21 short story beginnings. In a year I could have 365 short story beginnings. Yikes! Many of course will never go anywhere and I could try endings and middles in due course. Or even look back at earlier beginnings and add another 250 or so words. The word count is not exact, by the way, it’s not a matter of stopping at 250, it’s that once this number is reached I am ‘allowed’ to stop. It is interesting to have to dredge up an idea/ character/ bit of plot from scratch and get something on the page. Occasionally I surprise myself.

The other task I am setting myself is to spend at least an hour a day revising the novel I first-drafted last November. This is proving to be a major undertaking, which I am enjoying more than I expected. There have been lots of time and other detail issues to sort out, and now I am concentrating on tenses. I want to use present tense a lot and this is tricky. Will write more about this in a later post.

Plotting and Quoting

2010-02-18T11:18:00.003+13:00
I like to write about someone in their life, the everyday, the quotidian to be pretentious. This means I think a lot about whether or not what I write is interesting enough. I also like to quote from other writers. Showing off? Maybe, depending on whether or not the quote arises from the story/character or I have put it in because and know and like it.

I’d like to quote Gertrude Stein all the time and mostly don’t because it’s self-indulgent to put “there’s no there, there” in every story I write. Another favourite from GS is “little by little we never met again.”

I am writing my fourth novel from the point of view of one protagonist, focusing on her “ordinary” life, which is similar to the approach of the previous three. Themes? How to live a worthwhile life, identity, relationships. This sounds, and sometimes feels, banal, as in why bother? Yet I do bother, I work at writing as well as I can, so I obviously think it’s worthwhile.

To illustrate what I have just said here’s the opening of the novel I am working on at the moment. It’s still a draft. Title? No, not yet. The working title, as they say, is Ann.

Chapter 1

She left. Just like that; announced her intention after lunch and was gone before dinner. Not that Ann wanted any.

“Yes, there is someone else,” she said. “Julie. Sutton.”

Shit. Julie was Ann’s friend. Emphasis on was.

“How long?” That was the wrong question but it was the one in Ann’s head.

“Six weeks.” She wouldn’t look at Ann. “Look, there’s nothing to talk about,” she said, “it just happened and I didn’t know how to tell you. You’ll get over it.” That’s when Ann got mad and shouted and cried for a long time, until her ex-partner — get used to it, Ann — picked up her bag — a small bag for fourteen years — and walked out, saying over her shoulder, “You can stay here for now. We’ll work out the rest later.”

“CAN!” Ann was yelling again. “I thought we were happy! Happy! Silly me!” Her only answer was a quietly closing door.

Ex's laptop was gone, of course. Bella the dog, Ex’s dog, remained.

“She’s abandoned us Bella, for pastures new. Don’t take it personally, but you’re going too. I will find someone to take you to her, and you and she will have a beautiful reunion. Until then, I’ll do my best, but we both know I am not a good dog mother.”

Ann experiences being left as banal. She thinks of an Edna St Vincent Millay poem.

Love has gone and left me and the days are all alike

She finds a mutual friend to deliver Bella and takes advantage of her decade of lecturing a third-year paper on Romantic Literature to re-run last year's lectures and tutorials without revisions. Upheavals in the university, as funding cuts lead to restructurings lead to redundancies, pass her by as she struggles with rediscovering how to live on her own. Ex wants to talk about selling the house.

“You could buy me out,” she suggests cheerfully to Ann. “You earn plenty.”

Not that plenty! Ex will want full market value. Mind you, it's a buyer's market, and would make good financial sense, but Ann is not going to be obliging. Nor is she going to be talked to by Julie Sutton. Ever.

Love has gone and left me and I don't know what to do.

On a dismal Sunday morning, in the house on her own,

And life goes on for ever like the gnawing of a mouse

Ann wanders through the rooms, feeling each one as a cloak, enveloping her. It's winter-cold, a brutal southerly wind whipping branches of the karaka tree against the side of the house. Her hand slides over the red formica of the kitchen table, built into an awkward space, its bench seating giving it the look of retro cafe in downtown Wellington. Ann never liked it much, Ex showed it off. The rest of the kitchen, their first renovation, was slick and modern, including an expensive toaster, for Ann, for whom multi-grain bread, toasted until crunchy at its edges, is a food group. She knows exactly which setting works best for each of her three favourite breads, the ones you can only buy uncut. She slices them herself, with an old, wide, bread-knife, freezes the slit loaf and eases off two slices at a time for breakfast or lunch or dinner; some of these days it's all three.

Whole grain bread and peanut butter together make a perfect protein. She forgets where she read this. A lettuce leaf or two, a tomato, a chunk of aging cucumber from the bottom of the fridge and she can convince herself she's having a balanced meal, never mind the two glasses of wine. Only once has she emptied the whole bottle, on her own, in an evening. Only once, truly.

They had cooked together a lot at first, then, increasingly, they took turns. A senior lecturer and a senior public servant had busy lives, worked long hours.

The dining room centre-piece is a long rimu table with eight matching chairs. They had fought over this table, one wanting it, the other not. Ann can't remember who was on which side. She likes it now, can see it with friends all around, eating, talking, drinking, laughing. The best of times. And meetings. Neighbourhood watch, until too many people moved and their replacements didn't opt in. Ex had tried very hard to keep that going. Occasional end-of-year afternoon teas with Ann's third-year students, never very many, most of them too involved with their own lives. Their book group — no, that met in the living room. Other meetings, she can't think what, but she thinks of this room, dominated by the table, as full of people.

Aah, the living room. Comfort. Big sofas, two. Big arm chairs, two. They'd got into habits, Ann on a sofa, feet up, Ex in one of the arm chairs using a squab as a footstool, watching their favourite television shows. Ann followed 24, which Ex hated. Ex was fixated on Lost, which Ann couldn't be bothered with. They both liked ER, and Outrageous Fortune. Now, Ann would sit on her sofa for an evening channel surfing and have forgotten everything she saw by the time she went to bed.

The bedroom. Theirs once. Hers now. Ann couldn't think about that. The office. A spare room, really, they both worked at home on their laptops, anywhere. Sometimes one of them would spread out papers all over the dining room table. They’d had a kind of two-day limit on that. Now that Ann could leave anything for as long as she wanted, she never used the big table for work. The cubbyhole in the kitchen suited her better; she didn't feel as lonely there.

There's this little street and this little house.

Except the house isn't little. There are two more rooms downstairs, a double garage — probably the only double garage in Wadestown, Ex used to say. But little describes Ann to herself today. Diminished. Bereft. “Oh, fuck it! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” She says — shouts — to the house. “Fuck OFF.”

“I have,” says the voice of Ex from somewhere in the back of Ann's mind.

“I mean FUCK OFF HOUSE!” Her mouth is still poised for words, loud words. The thought is somewhere else.

“She can buy me out. Or they. Ouch. Yes, they. She/they can buy me out and I can …” That's an idea with nowhere to go, Ann thinks, but she feels lighter. Ex can decide what to do with this and that. She, Ann, will float free. She spends the rest of Sunday making a list of what she wants to keep from the house and is surprised at how short it is. Monday and Tuesday evenings she makes another list, of chattels, things that they bought together, that she can get bought out of, too.

On Thursday she goes to see Jennifer Ryan, lawyer, who explains the legal situation, which Ann, unusually, doesn't bother to follow. She's still got that floating feeling, as though she was in a Chagall painting. Ann leaves the chattels list with Jennifer. She and Ex kept well organised accounts, so she has the date of purchase and the price they paid for every item.

“How are you?” asks Ex, sitting opposite her in Gotham Cafe, Chews Lane. Her voice is gentle, her eyes are soft.

“Not your business these days.” Ann likes her own reply. “You — and her if you like — can buy me out. Of the house. You always liked it more than me.” That's not true, but Ann doesn't care.

There's no reply, for a long time. Ex looks at the table. When she raises her face Ann can't read her expression. Maybe this is what Ex wanted. That doesn’t matter to Ann, it's what she herself wants now, and she's not going to go cheaply. She thinks of those divorce stories on television where one person tries to do the other down. That's not what she wants, she wants to be fair, but fair to herself as well.

“Well! That's caught me on the hop. I thought you’d want to stay there.”

“You buy me out or the house goes on the market. Soon. By the end of August.”

“I'd have to agree to it going on the market, you couldn't just sell it. We do own it jointly, after all."

“I know that. I'm thinking you'll do what I want because you're guilty about dumping me. And guilty about being a coward and not telling me about you and — her.” Ann is pleased with herself for saying that.

“I'm not sure that Julie and I have much of a future.” Again, Ex can't look at her.

Ann throws back her head and laughs. And laughs. People look. Ex wipes away tears.

“Too late,” says Ann, “I’ve taken your advice and gotten over you and,” she pseudo-sings, “I’m mo-oving on,” then reverts to being crisp. “Let me know about buying the house. Here's my lawyer's card.” She tucks the card under the saucer of Ex's coffee cup.

Ex looks at Ann and says, “I miss Shirley and Keith.” She's still teary and Ann is still refusing to take notice and just looks back and waits, enjoying feeling cool and angry and detached. “I thought I might ring them,” Ex says eventually.

“They're my parents, not my children, you don’t need my permission to contact them. Ring, don't ring, it's your call.” Ann thinks she is enjoying this far too much.

“I thought they might be, you know, angry with me or something.” Ex is practically pleading to know what kind of reception she would get.

“We haven't actually been talking about you,” says Ann as she stands up. Which is nearly true, if you don't count her mother's, “How could she?” or her father's, “I always wondered if she could be trusted.”

Ann doesn't look back as she walks off. She feels tall again, as though she is taking up the right amount of space.

Reading, Mostly

2010-02-04T11:52:00.005+13:00
I am reading a book about blogging. That’s factual, not an ironic statement. I still learn much of what I know about computers from printed books. The rest comes from, firstly, Miraz's mactips, which I recommend accessing via her blog, http://knowit.co.nz/ which is about technology, science and wordpress, and well worth reading. Find mactips by scrolling down the sidebar on the left. My other source of information etc is welmac, the Wellington mac user's group. Check it out at http://www.welmac.org.nz. If you use a mac and live in the Wellington area it's worth the membership fee.

I understand the business of writing a blog, but not how one can ‘distribute’ it, if that is what one wants to do. Part of my problem with learning how to do this is no doubt my lack of conviction that I want to do that. I guess my question is still ‘What’s it for?’

I recently had a birthday and, as is usual, my partner gave me a great pile of books. Yum. I read Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal first because that’s the book our book group is reading this month. Then Kamila Shamsi’s Burnt Shadows, because she is coming to Writers and Readers week in Wellington next month. What a hard, and believable, ending this book has. I recommend it. Now I’m halfway through Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry, which I am liking more than I liked The Time Traveller’s Wife.

I also read the Millenium trilogy over a week. (One of them was in the birthday pile.) They are written by Steig Larsson, the first is called The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and they are best-sellers, in bookshops everywhere. Three long books! Gripping. The Swedish setting helped hold my interest, as did the two complex main characters, and the social context of the stories. The politics gets more depth as the stories develop and by the third questions like ‘What is democracy, and how much secrecy - for example in countering terrorism - is possible without undermining the whole ethos of democrary?’ are part of a series of thrillers. I didn’t like the movie, I thought it skated across the top of all the big ideas in the books and flattened out the two main characters.

And yes, I am still editing my novel. In between other things. I am beginning to wonder whether I should have a writing/editing schedule, like writing between the hours of x and y, but have never done this and am resistant to it. Most of my writing/editing gets done in the afternoons, a reversal of what many writers do. Does this matter, I wonder?

Second drafting

2009-12-11T13:58:00.002+13:00
Less than two weeks after finishing the first draft of a possible novel during Nanowrimo (www.nanowrimo.org) I am wanting to start editing and researching it into a second draft.

There are some plot details to sort out, such as does my protagonist, Ann, have the right job at the beginning of the story? Having decided not, I have re-decided she does, as a lecturer in Romantic Literature. That gives some background for things that happen later in the story.

There is some research to do, in all those places where I wrote [CHECK] as I ploughed on, one word after another (which is what writing is!) chasing the 50,000 word count. I made it a couple of days early, with 50064 words. For some people, being unable to work right up to a deadline is a character flaw, for me it is the way I am and I live with it.

Then there is some awful writing, from those times when I was squeezing out words, even when I couldn’t think of anything to say. Not to mention changing my mind a couple of times about the time the story takes place. It started off having a beginning in mid 2009, then I pushed that back a year because the story was getting ahead of the real time I was writing in, now I have put it back to 2009, because by the time the story finishes, about the end of Jan 2010, that will be the actual time I am writing revisions in. As Ann spends Dec 2009 in London, I am drawing on friends who live there and buying the Guardian Weekly. There are a couple of useful weather websites, too.

On the reading front i am well into Orhan Pamuk’s latest, The Museum of Innocence, which was not liked by the reviewer on National Radio (NZ) whose name I forget. I think the reviewer missed the point of the book, which is an extended metaphor about Turkey trying to be both modern and traditional, which is what most of Pamuk’s books are about, one way or another. I love his books, but I think they may not be to everyone’s taste. His protagonists tend to be self-referential, somewhat neurotic, middle class, well-off men.

Nobel Prize for Literature

2009-11-28T20:03:00.002+13:00
Because she won the Nobel Prize for literature I got a book by Merta Muller from the excellent Wellington Public Library called The Appointment. I didn’t enjoy reading it on the whole, but once I had finished I started appreciating it.

First of all I kept thinking of Kafka’s The Trial, though the woman in The Appointment did at least know why she was being interrogated, just not what was being gained by her being interrogated in the way she was. Romania under Ceausescu was clearly grim and bleak, the picture is one of stagnation. The protagonist looks out for chances of happiness. She is being interrogated, on random days, because she put a message saying 'marry me' in pockets of men's shirts going from the factory where she works to Italy.

It was shocking, in the context of New Zealand mores, that she found the fact of her and her friend Lilli having sex with father or step-father to be nothing much. Lilli said, “He never became repulsive to me … but in time he did come to seem ordinary. The fact that we’d be at it as soon as my mother left the house became more of a habit than using the door handle.” I found that shocking.

There is some lovely prose. “When I stepped outside everything was preparing for the night, the sun had already spread itself red across the sky, every shadow in town had lain down.” It’s a translation from the German, so there’s no way for me to know how well it conveys the original.

A friend who has lived in Germany for a long time admires Muller and the way she speaks out since she emigrated from Romania, which she had to do when she refused to spy on her fellow-workers.

Write, write, I say

2009-11-25T20:43:00.002+13:00
My excuse for not doing a weekly entry is the 'write a novel in a month' thing at www.nanawrimo.org. I just had 50064 words validated on the website. Now I can do something else, like update this blog.

Going to Melbourne slowed me at the beginning, but catching up wasn't so bad. Yesterday and today I was really fed up and wanted to get finished. I felt as though I had run out of plot again - this happened in the middle, too. The trick that worked for me was to make myself keep writing the most banal detail and drivel until some plot happened. Not quite as bad as, 'She got out of bed and put on her slippers, then washed her face and cleaned her teeth. The bed was soon made, the tidy way that she liked it and she went out into the cold morning to get the paper.' Not quite that bad, but nearly.

Now it's time for the big edit, which will involve some research. I'll wait a while before I start that, take a break from this thing that has gripped me by the throat.

What I found interesting about the process is that I was forced into whatever plot I could find in a corner of my brain and sometimes that worked well in terms of my overall themes for the story. I even ended up with a whole new character that I got to really like writing about.

I'm not sure I'll do it again, this is an annual event. The only way to write is to write, after all, and I can probably do that without a competition. Nonetheless, I was frustrated that I was not writing more and this certainly overcame that.

How the words count

2009-11-09T18:37:00.004+13:00
I'm in Melbourne,so the writing has been s l o w. Only a thousand or so words since I left home. Total about 8000. Should be 15000 at this stage in the month. When I get home (tomorrow) I'd better get my writing shoes on and get going.

It is so hot here I can't believe it isn't January. 35+ degrees today, and a breeze that is hot, too, so gives no relief. I can feel the moisture being sucked out of me. Beautifully cool in the Victoria State Library, and free internet access for 15 not-well-monitored minutes at a time. A queue forms.

I'm taking notes for my novel in odd moments. Need a completely new subplot and haven't found it yet. Have something that might turn into one. It's a whole new thing for me writing to get the word count up, without editing as I go. I have to put notes to myself in caps to check things (like how long does a fast train take from new york to washington DC)which is not what I usually do).

Am reading a book by Brazilian Clarice Lispector, because a friend said CL was her favourite writer. It is seriously weird and compelling. From p12, "Happiness? I have never come across a more foolish word." Think about that for a moment. I think the idea of happiness, what it is, if anything, what it does to or for us etc etc might be making its way into my novel. Maybe. She takes on the persona of a male writer in the novel, and talks about words, and how the story she/he is/is not writing is all words. A different notion from my current preoccupation with numbers of words - word-counting in a adifferent kind of way. I saw an ad for a biography of Lispector in lrb, might have to follow that up.

Have to go from this computer. Odd, when one is used to being in control of the period of time. More soon.

The Big Write

2009-10-31T20:43:00.002+13:00
Tomorrow the Big Write starts. 50,000 words in 30 days. See www.nanowrimo.org I have a kind of title and a main plot idea. Here's a very short synopsis:

Ann's partner walks out and her job disappears in yet another government restructuring. So she leaves New Zealand for a tour of relatives and art galleries in Europe and the United States, thanks to a legacy from a childless uncle. To say that travel broadens the mind falls a long way short of describing her experiences.

I've used this idea in a short story that has been read only by my partner and my writing group.

I'll hardly have got going when I'm off to Melbourne for six days to see a friend and my son, without a laptop. (I don't have one.) Might do some plot planning. Or write by hand in my journal. Might get some additional inspiration, you never know.

I finished Wolf Hall. It's well worth the effort — it's a brick of a book, with over 500 pages. The way Hilary Mantel wrote it continued to fascinate me and the story got even better. By inventing (I assume) some minor characters, she makes the story really come alive. It's a more nuanced and more sympathetic portrayal of Cromwell than the one in the television show The Tudors. Henry's bad leg, that was in one episode I saw, features in the later part of the book.

How long is long enough?

2009-10-27T17:23:00.003+13:00
Today I signed up at www.nanowrimo.org for the write-a-book -in-a-month event. Starting on 1 November the aim is a 50,000 word novel by midnight on 30 Nov. That's 1600+ words a day for the consistent. Don't edit, is the advice, this is a first draft, edit later. That's new for me.

Everyone who achieves the word count in the time set wins. No fee, but a donation requested if you make anything as a result of doing it. No prizes. Last year over two hundred thousand people worldwide started and sixty thousand plus finished. Crazy, why would anyone do this? I don't know about anyone else, but my reasons are to do with just making me write and keep going. I have an idea, arising from a short story. I plan to ignore the short story and just use the idea, though a few bits might end up similar.

I'm away in Melbourne for six of the thirty days of November, so that could be a challenge.

Change of topic — I'm half way through Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, the book that has recently been announced as the winner of this year's Man Booker Prize. It's excellent. Even though I kind of know the plot — Henry VIII and all that, focussed around Thomas Cromwell — it's rivetting. From a writer's point of view it is very interesting, not to mention clever, the way she writes in the third person almost entirely from Thomas Cromwell's point of view. 'He' most often refers to Thomas, including his thoughts, but it's not the usual kind of 'voice of god' writing. I am fascinated by how she does this.

Reading

2009-10-17T11:06:00.000+13:00
Reading
The four most recent books I have read:
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
The Anthropologist, Nicholson Baker
Falling For Science, Bernard Beckett
Street With No Name, Kapka Kassabova

A classic, a contemporary novel about poetry, popular science, a memoir/travel story (kind of). I am pleased to have read them all, one way and another.

Then there are the new yorker and the london review of books, both of which I get via my letterbox and both of which I read cover to cover. I'm not sure why I so like both of these. The very good writing will have something to do with it. They are both kind of liberal in their own way. Their writers are thinkers. Maybe I'm just a magazine snob.

I also read the internet rather a lot: web sites; help sites for various other sites I am learning to use, like mobileread; other peoples' blogs and so on and on. Learning to use the internet can take up hours in a day. I can kid myself that I'm seeing it as a potential marketing tool for my writing, but really, it's just so damned interesting.

More marketing

2009-10-10T13:13:00.000+13:00
Write a press release, is the advice - I'm reading the Smashwords Marketing Guide, which is free from their site. I would if I could think of something to write it about, given that Take It Easy first came out last year. Publishing as an ebook, hardly seems enough. So, pass on that one for now.

Encourage your fans to write online reviews. This is the stuff that makes me cringe, so I probably won't do it. First cringe point - I don't want 'fans,' I want friends and readers.

Participate in online forums. This is the one I am working on. (Will continue to buy my paper books from Unity Books in Wellington, a great independent bookstore. ) might even open an Amazon account, as suggested, so I can post about my book there. (Did you know that it's complicated and expensive for a self-publisher to get on Amazon?) Smashwords, however, does publish its eversion of my book in the format for Kindle, so who knows if that will be a way in to that market. I have joined mobileread.com but am yet to figure out how to take an active part in it. Am I particularly obtuse about learning to use these websites? I do wonder, even though I manage computer and internet use competently enough in general facebook often defeats me and these participation websites tend to get me in a muddle with them.

Coupons is another technique that is encouraged (buy one, get your second one for half price, 20% off until the end of the month, etc). I'll leave that for now.

Write a blog. Ah! Got that!

How Fiction Works

2009-10-04T10:30:00.000+13:00
This is the title of a book By James Wood, critic, academic, writer for The New Yorker etc etc. It’s the best book about reading and writing I’ve read for a long time. He talks about “free, indirect style” which allows for the voice of the author, not always obviously, to be there alongside the characters.
A long quote from How Fiction Works

"The novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author’s own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character’s presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we would call language of the world—the language that fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into novelistic style, the language of daily speech, of newspapers, of offices, of advertising, of the blogosphere and text messaging. In this sense, the novelist is a triple writer, and the contemporary writer now feels especially the pressure of this tripleness, thanks to the omnivorous presence of the third horse of this troika, the language of the world, which has invaded our subjectivity, our intimacy, the intimacy that James thought should be the proper quarry of the novel, and which he called (in a troika of his own) “the palpable present-intimate."

The writer Paul Freidinger from http://longpinelimited.blogspot.com/2009/04/writer-paul-freidinger-on-james-wood.html April 15 2009 comments in regard to the Wood book:

"I’m suggesting a reader examine whether a writer can resurrect our daily language and give a character an authentic voice, or whether he becomes a victim of the superficial, to the degree of being unable to make us care enough about that character to complete his story. The rest of Wood’s book takes one deeper into the formation of a novel and what is essential to its success. He offers equally sound advice as he takes the reader through the essential elements of the novel. Give it a chance, read the book. It might make you a better reader. It might even cause you to reconsider your own writing."

James Wood credits Flaubert with changing the way western novels are written, so I re-read Madame Bovary What a pain I found Emma to be. However, giving attention to Wood's ideas, I was more aware of the presence of an authorial view. (Does this matter? I don't know, but I find it interesting.) One example, from page 341 of my edition, translated into English by Gerard Hopkins, "Where had she learned the arts of a power to corrupt which was so profound, yet so well disguised, that it appeared to be somehow disembodied?"

How Fiction Works is a short, dense book, written, quaintly, in numbered paragraphs and is in the Wellington Public Library. (Dewey number: 809.3 WOO)

In my next post, I'll be back to talking about marketing.

Fronting up to marketing online

2009-10-01T18:45:00.000+13:00
I’m working my way through the Smashwords marketing book. Sheesh! Put my book in a signature for my emails, it says. A good idea and I am resistant to doing it. Is that in part because most of my emails are within New Zealand where ebook readers are limited to iphone/ipod touch? Or because I don’t like the idea of advertising to my friends? Both. Compromise - make an alternate signature with book details in it and (remember to) use it as seems fitting. Now learn how to do active links.

Click here for my profile page on Smashwords:
http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/PatRosier

Click here for Take It Easy on Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/4048
You can buy an ebook version from this page. You can buy a printed version from http://www.womensbookshop.co.nz

Okay, done that. I had to go to Blogger help, and it did help.

the ebook world

2009-09-26T15:50:00.000+12:00
I’ve read a few books on my iphone touch recently, using Stanza, which is free from the apps store. I’ve focussed on out of copyright books from gutenburg.org (a very interesting project to epublish out of print books and make them available for free). I read Kafka’s Metamorphosis, because my son told me he had read it as a teenager and was very enthusiastic, and followed that with The Trial, which is one of those uncanny books that reads as very contemporary.

And I’ve read Flatland; A romance of many dimensions by Edwin A Abbot, which is about a land in two dimensions; am dipping into Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Montaigne’s Essays, and have some Herodotus, Homer and Dostoevsky waiting in the wings.

I still really prefer to read books as books, but the carry-around aspect of the ipod is a winner and it is easy to read and use. It works splendidly for print, but Stanza does not cope with pictures of any kind, so seems best for fiction and poetry.

I have not yet bought an epublished book. I still buy books on paper. However, I am now selling one. There’s a process for doing it for free at Smashwords.com and I’ve converted my final word file in accordance with their instructions, which took a couple of days, and submitted it. Search its title - Take It Easy - on the Smashwords site if you want to check it out. It costs $5.96 USD to buy it as an electronic version. You can choose what format you download it in, everything from html and pdf to epub and a whole lot of others. I don’t know anyone who would want to read a novel on their computer, and there’s nothing much in the way of an ebook reader on the market in NZ except for the ipod touch/iphone. If you happen to have an Amazon Kindle, I think you can download from Smashwords, but I’m not clear yet on that.

So now I’m going to read the Smashwords book on marketing. Don’t hold your breath.

A year later

2009-04-21T12:52:00.000+12:00
The absence of any further posts since March of 2008 makes it fairly obvious that the whole promoting area failed to hold my interest. I didn't realise how apathetic I could be about the publicity machine. I kind of knew what to do and couldn't bring myself to do it. Just as I got myself some expertise in the design and layout of the book I should have got some for publicity. I did reasonably successfully promote Take It Easy to New Zealand libraries. And among my friends. I now find I don't care how many I sell and am inclined to give it away if anyone is interested.

So now I will turn this blog into a general one. Wonder if I can change the title of and take off the pjpress and just call it 'out there'.

I don't have another novel underway. There's no big idea for a novel floating around in my consciousness. I am writing some short stories and a little poetry and enjoying that, but am easily distracted from it. Oh dear.

I have books

2008-03-21T15:26:00.000+13:00
I have books! Boxes of actual, physical copies of my book. Zenith publishers have been great to work with and met every deadline we agreed to. See how they work at publishme.co.nz You can buy a copy for $28 plus freight from the same website – click on new releases or search on the book title or my name.

The cover looks fantastic, with colours richer than those in the image on this blog.

Now I am in marketing mode, not my favourite activity. However, needs must. The Women’s Bookshop in Auckland and Unity Books in Wellington will carry copies. I’ll work on expanding further into the independent bookstore network. My focus at the moment is libraries and my own networks, which are extensive, I can hook into several email lists and will be in the next newsletter from The Women’s Bookshop, which goes to 4000 subscribers.

I’m having a launch next Sunday at 4.30 here in Paekakariki at the local community hall. Writer Renee will launch Take It Easy. To help cover launch costs I will sell, for $10 a copy, some of my previously published books.

the cover & Launch

2008-02-16T17:11:00.000+13:00

Here is the front cover.The artist, Seraphine Pick, was very gracious about me using her painting as the image. The blurb on the back, which was sooooo hard to write, reads:

Isobel is confronted by a decision from her past that she thought she had dealt with. Now she wants to understand her actions and that means digging back into her past. Surely she was fighting for her own sense of who she was, not just reacting to an arid childhood. A wobble in the foundations of her relationship with her partner Iris intensifies as Isobel seeks understanding of herself and of the meaning of family.

I tried very hard to make it cliche-free.

A date has been set for the launch - 30 March, here in Paekakariki. Renee, friend, writer, playwrite and poet will launch it and many of my Paekakariki friends will be involved. My partner Prue will MC the event.

We have a time line that is designed to get books in hand by Easter, which gives a week, more or less, with public holidays involved, before the launch date.

Production progress

2008-02-09T12:01:00.000+13:00

This is the logo Jill and I have worked out for pjpress. Inside the box the black and white can be reversed. I'll put the cover on the next post, when I have a version with the new blurb text. Setting up a page on google pages, a kind of faux website as far as I can tell is my next step. Learning these new techniques is what I find hard, probably because I don't really understand what I am doing, I am just following instructions that don't necessarily mean a lot to me and my brain works best when it understands what's happening.

Very soon I will have a proof-reading printout, which my partner and a friend will proof-read for me - have done a copy edit - and then it will be ready to go to the printer who will provide a printed proof copy, which will be the moment of truth for how it actually looks as a book. I am planning a launch for 30 March, here in Paekakariki where I live, more in a later post on that.

layout, fonts and more

2008-01-19T16:02:00.000+13:00
Holidays are over, layout is underway, cover designs are going back and forth between m e and Jill, who is doing the design work. There's a logo for PJ Press, too.

For me, because the details of designing and laying out a book are the least known aspects of this project, having Jill involved is essential. She knows the technical business of what used to be called typesetting and now is computerised. Selecting a font went differently from how I expected. I had a couple I liked, maybe a bit old-fashioned, but had the right feel - Garamond and Bookman. When I saw them in a page sized as for the book I wasn't so keen. Jill came up with Bembo and bingo! there it was. In fact, what we are heading towards is using that one font, in different sizes, for everything, including the cover, which Jill tells me is unusual. But so far I like it. The text will be in Bembo 10pt, with spacing between the lines as Jill has worked it out for readability, 5mm para indents.

We have gone for a simple page layout, page numbers centred at the bottom, no headers, chapters numbered but not named, each one starting on a new page. The book has three parts, each part starting with a quote so each of these will have a full page. There is a lot of detail to decide on. It matters, I think, and the end result should be that the reader doesn't especially notice any of it.

The cover is looking great. Pink (a kind of a melony pink from the artist's image) and grey sound bad but are looking good. The hardest part is the words for the back cover. As soon as I start writing something the cliches flow in a great torrent. One of the main plot points is not one I want to reveal on the cover, it's an unusual, possibly shocking, decision the protagonist made in her early life and to talk of a 'secret' in the blurb straightaway suggests sexual abuse, which has nothing to do with it. I've read lots of advice on how to write this and none of it is helping. I've just emailed version 3 to Jill but who knows if it is the final one.

My next job is to go to the sales website and work my way through that.

blurbs, front pages and such

2007-12-02T11:23:00.000+13:00
Paying attention to the front pages of a novel, the bits before the story starts has shown me how varied they can be. Previous books, acknowledgements, publisher information, dedication, bio, ISBN and so on. I think I won't include a photo of myself. I found it really easy to get an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) from New Zealand's national library. This, I have learnt is a number unique to any published book in the world. It is easily converted (Zenith/Publishme will do this for me - see earlier posts.) into a bar code which goes on the back of the book cover and which retailers link to the shelf price on their computers.

So I've put together all those front pages bits. The hard part is the blurb for the back cover. Even thinking about writing such a blurb creates an outpouring in my mind of cliches. I think it will be very brief. At the moment it is two sentences, but I am not at all sure this will be the final wording:

"Sleepless nights send Isobel off to a therapist, until she turns to a different approach to sort out the impact of her past on her present. As she starts rebuilding connections there’s an accident that somehow puts her in conflict with her partner, Iris."

I'm even thinking I might drop the second sentence. In which case the back cover will be very empty! Might have to put a photo! I notice that on some books something from the front cover is repeated on the back.

So I'm nearly design-ready. Jill, the designer, needs to get all the files on a CD and as a printout. I'll hand them over about 14 Dec and she'll check that she's got everything and can open it all and then I go away for ten days! She, meanwhile, will be doing the design and typesetting. (As well as coordinating the feeding of our cat.)

Cover image success

2007-11-11T16:42:00.000+13:00
I have permission from the artist and a CD Rom of the ink and wash painting I really want to use for the cover of Take It Easy. All she wants in payment is a couple of copies of the printed book, which I think is really generous. I have had to pay $100 to the gallery that holds the painting to get the image, but hey, that seems reasonable enough.

My current activity is searching various websites - with some success - for places I might be able to use for promotion. What I should be doing is the marketing plan, for which I have a template from sellmybook.co.nz, and which I am avoiding because this is my least favourite aspect of this whole publishing enterprise. I'm also using the NZSA notes for writing a synopsis of the book, leading to writing a blurb for the cover and the words for a promotional flyer, which will be finalised by Jill, once we have a cover design. These are the exciting bits.

In the meantime my actual writing, which is focussed on short stories at the moment, has ground to a halt. Maybe I will have to live with that while my mind is full of production and publication activity, but I do want to keep doing some writing. Discipline, maybe.

Yes, you can quote these words…

2007-10-14T11:35:00.000+13:00
Responses have arrived from all the publishers etc I contacted regarding permissions to quote from other writers. In all but one case they gave permission with no fee. I should perhaps mention that the quotes are all very short, a few lines at most.

The exception is Harvard University Press, who hold the copyright on Emily Dickinson. They insisted on a letter, not an email and answered by letter. They gave permission to use the two lines i had requested use of and wanted a fee of $US50 that must be paid by US cheque or money order, not by credit card or direct transfer, thus adding considerably to the cost from NZ unless you have access to a US bank account. I nearly didn't ask for permission for the Dickinson quote, as she has been dead for more than the usual 70 years. So, while the two lines of Dickinson are what I really want to use as the epigraph for the second, middle, section of my novel, I'm looking for an alternative, possibly a proverb.

On a more positive note, I have had a phone conversation with the artist whose image I want to use on the cover. Her approach is a 'what you can afford' one. I will certainly pay her something. Her usual $200, which she quoted when I asked doesn't seem unreasonable. I haven't done an actual budget yet, that requires me to decide how many I will print in the first instance and I haven't done that yet. My next step is to work my way through a marketing and promotion plan, then I might be able to decide how many copies to print in the first instance.

Another thing Jill and I have been talking about is the choice of font for the text. Times New Roman is a very standard seriph font for text, and we have decided against that as it is such a standard choice and we want to be a bit different, while not trying to be so innovative the look of the text is strange to actual and potential readers. I am certainly noticing fonts more in books I read, and really like ones where the font is named in the front of the book; it often isn't. Because parts of Get Used To It are in journal form that needs to be distinct from the main text, the font must look good in italic. For this reason we abandoned Garamond, because the italic version is fussy. My favourite at the moment is Bookman (which comes in a range of ocnfigurations, but starting from the standard Bookman which is included in most word processing software). It has a slighly old-fashioned look, but I don't see that as s bad thing for this book. No, it is not a historical novel, it is set in the year 2000 and in the '60s.

Permissions et al

2007-09-23T11:30:00.000+12:00

This is the website of the place I am going to print my book. I chose them because:
a)They do small print runs with competitive pricing.
b)They offer a lot of (currently free) advice on the processes.
c)They reply promptly and give straightforward answers.
d)They offer assistance with the marketing and selling side - at a parallel website, sellmybook.co.nz - which I haven't explore in detail yet.

I have had some fast replies to my requests for permissions to use (in every case short) quotes from other writers. They are surprisingly specific and detailed and so far all three agree to my use and tell me how to word the acknowledgement.

Most of my time at the moment is going into figuring out this blogging business. This bit, creating posts, is easy enough but other parts have me floundering around. For example, I got my photo onto my profile, then accidentally removed it and now I'm having trouble getting it back. It's in the second post, that's easy, it's getting it into the profile that is the challenge. Something to do with getting the URL right. The help files are, I think, written by and for people who don't need the instructions spelt out as fully as I do.

Moving along

2007-09-15T17:32:00.000+12:00

Making haste slowly with this project.

Have been talking with Jill, about page layout and fonts and how I want the pages to look. Find I have opinions about this! Seriph fonts (the ones with little flicks like Times New Roman) are best for text. Garamond and Bookman are my favourites at the moment, they have a slightly old-fashioned look which I like. Jill is exploring variations on Bookman.

Haven't done anything about checking out whether I can use the cover image I like.

Have written and emailed off to the relevant publishers for permissions to use quotes from other writers. Seven of them. The web makes this kind of thing easy. I got advice from the New Zealand Society of Authors (recommend them to any nz writer) then did searches on 'permissions author's name'and in every case found a place with the instructions I needed. Some I could do online. In order to fill the 'publisher' space I had to name a publisher, so rather than just using my own name I invented PJ Press (PJ being the first initials of both myself and my partner) and have permission to use a friend's post office box for an address different from my own residential one. So it's PJ Press, P O Box 2, Paekakariki, 5258, New Zealand. Not that I want to hide anything but I think I might be taken more seriously or something if the publisher information is different.

Jill, the friend who will do the book layout, can do it over christmas and new year holidays, so that is the time frame I am working to.

I have done yet another read through of the ms, correcting minor errors - there are always more! I'll get a clean copy printed. My next job is to assemble the information needed for those beginning pages. I have a model for this from a website that works with writers to publish their work. I'll say more about them next time, after I have asked for permission to do a link to their website.

That's it for now.

the beginning

2007-08-13T21:06:00.000+12:00
I have a manuscript of around 86,000 words, which is a medium-sized novel. I have had two other novels published by a publisher. That publisher is not doing new titles and I have decided to embark on doing it myself - with the help of some friends - and recording what I do here so I can refer other people who want to publish their book to it. And 'talk' to others.

What I am starting with:
The manuscript, which has been read and commented on (twice) by my partner and sundry friends, all of whom are intelligent readers and have given good feedback, most of which I have taken notice of.
A friend - and this is important to my doing this - who has worked in book production, who can do page layout and a whole lot of that technical stuff. She is keen to be involved.
Support in the undertaking from my partner.
Information I have gleaned from websites, workshops, library books and the New Zealand Society of Authors, of which I am a member. Most countries have something similar and most apparently, like the one here, produce helpful pamphlets etc.

What I have done:
Sent an email letter to three (fairly) local printers to get some indicative information about costs. One of the things that makes this venture possible is the development in printing that means it is possible to get small runs printed without affecting unit price. More on this when I have some prices.
Found an image I'd like for the cover. It's by a local artist so I have to find out if I can use it.