On my way to an ebook

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?

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.

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

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

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 …

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

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.