Hope you all enjoyed a nice weekend 🙂 Just a very quick post today, linking to a guest blog I’ve written for the Bloomsbury Writers & Artists website:
It’s about different promotions I’ve tried for my book, and the idea of working within a budget (as I am). The W&A site is always worth a visit – they have lots of blogs, events and info for writers, as well as a lively online community. I’ve attended one of their events already and plan to do another later this year – they are always well organised and a great resource for networking.
Even on a rainy day you sometimes get a rainbow. Too cheesy? 😉
The other day I received a rejection letter. It was fine, as they go. It addressed me by name, offered the vague yet slightly hopeful response that my story ‘wasn’t what they were looking for at the moment,’ and reminded me to format future submissions in standard manuscript format (which, to be honest, seems to change from submission to submission). It was just for a short story I’d sent to a magazine, a long shot to be honest and I hadn’t really been expecting much from it. So again, fine.
And yet, not. It really hurt, in an ow-y punch to the gut kind of a way. And I couldn’t really figure out why. I mean, it’s not my first rejection letter. But it is the first one I’ve received in a while. And then I realised that it had brought it all back to me. How it felt last summer when I was riding the submission train, living in hope only to have another letter, another email, dash my expectations to the ground. I wasn’t such a nice person for a little while – at least I felt I wasn’t, though perhaps no-one noticed. I did have a couple of requests for the full manuscript and some lovely responses from other agents, but they led nowhere in the end.
It is part of being a writer, they say. And of course it is. Just like one star reviews and people who get cross and launches that fizzle to nothing. The key is to persevere, they say, and I get that too. But that little rejection threw me. I realise I’m a bit emotional at the moment. I’m having some health stuff sorted over the next few weeks (which may mean I won’t blog as often for a little while) and that’s freaking me out. So perhaps that added to the intensity of my response.
But I am getting ready to re-board the train. I have a book called A Thousand Rooms that is nearly finished and that I hope to start submitting soon. Another summer marred by rain and rejection? I hope not 🙂 I shall gather my British optimism with regards to the capricious nature of both agents and the weather, and I shall live in hope. Because that’s part of being a writer too.
On Tuesday night I participated in my very first author event.
I know – exciting, right? It was very exciting – I was invited by a local library to do a reading with their teen reading group, as well as sell signed copies of my book afterwards, so it was a wonderful opportunity.
And I was incredibly nervous. It’s one thing to read your words back to yourself within the privacy of your study (spare bedroom), and quite another to declaim them in front of an audience. However, this library had already been incredibly supportive of my work, purchasing several copies of my book for their shelves as well as hosting me on a previous evening to talk about being a writer. So I couldn’t say no, nor did I want to – opportunities like this can’t be passed up when you’re self-published.
I arrived early, was welcomed with tea and biscuits and warm conversation as I gathered my nerves and prepared to speak. They had done a lovely display in the YA section:
This was quite thrilling and scary at the same time. Although mostly thrilling. To see my book on the shelves of an actual library was something I’d only previously dreamed of. Once again I thanked my lucky stars for the ability to publish through Createspace, without which this wouldn’t have been possible.
And then it was time. I sat down with the group and spoke a little about myself, then steeled myself to read. As we were in a library, I had decided to read a section where Alma, my heroine, enters the Great Library of Ambeth for the first time. As I read I could feel my cheeks burning, as red as the jacket I’d chosen to wear. But the group was silent. They listened. And after I finished they asked me many questions, the hour slipping by so quickly. I sold a few copies, signed them and left, feeling so pleased to have had this support.
I have always loved libraries, which is why I put one in Ambeth. There is something about a roomful of books waiting to be explored and read that is fascinating to me. I introduced my daughter to them from an early age, and she too loves to read, spending time perusing the shelves and emerging with an armful of books. There have been some blogs recently about supporting our local libraries and it’s something I wholeheartedly endorse – they are a tradition as old as the written word and one well worth preserving. And I am extremely grateful to have had their support in my first publishing endeavour.
The biggest blogging event of the year is here. If you have blogging friends, comrades or just fancy being nosy, then this event is for you. I am organising the first Bloggers Bash. An opportunity for you all to get together and meet the friends you made through blogging, in person.
Everyone is welcome. If you fancy joining us for the bloggers bash in London this summer then read on…
For many years he was vicar there, the ancient village surrounding it dating back to the Domesday Book (and possibly beyond). It was the kind of place that had a castle once, but ‘Simon De Montfort and his crew tore it down.’ Where the old manor house had fallen prey to post war neglect, where another old home had an indelible bloodstain by the fireplace, relic of misdeeds long ago.
My grandfather was a wonderful vicar. At least, that’s how I remember him. He preached love and tolerance, filling the church with vegetables and fruit at harvest time, the scientist and historian in him acknowledging traditions older than his religion. On Sundays, after the service and Sunday School and dinner in the old Georgian vicarage, he would sit at his desk and prepare his notes for next week’s sermon while I danced around the small circular table at the centre of the room, French doors open to let in the scents and sounds of the garden beyond.
He died when I was only nine, struck down by a massive heart attack as he readied himself for service in the small vestry. He was carried out through the packed congregation (which included my grandmother) and, several days later, laid to rest in the churchyard nearby. I still miss him (as I do all my grandparents), and feel glad I had the chance to know him for a few short years at least.
We sometimes visit the village where he lived, though I haven’t been for a couple of years now. It still slumbers peacefully among the fields, the small stream where I used to play Poohsticks with my grandmother meandering through the main street past half timbered cottages and Georgian houses. It’s a beautiful place and not much changed since I was small.
About eight years ago we visited, taking my husband and baby daughter to the church where my parents were married and my brother and I christened, a carved wooden memorial chair marking my grandfather’s years of service there. It was an auspicious time for me – coming out of a difficult spell after the birth of my daughter and reconnecting with my past, the trip we made to visit family in the UK was life changing for many reasons.
And so I stood in my grandfather’s church and I remembered. Singing in the pews next to my grandmother. My very-small-at-the-time brother deciding one day that he would rather stand with Grandad in the pulpit than sit in the pew (nobody minded). Taking my basket of apples up to the altar at harvest time, so heavy I had to use both arms to carry it. Years and layers of time and memory weaving around me. And then something, I don’t know what, prompted me to take out my camera. I held it up and thought (again, I don’t know why), ‘Grandad, if you’d like to be in this picture, please do.’ Then I paused for a split second before pressing the shutter.
And this is the image that appeared:
I don’t know how you feel about the idea of an afterlife, or our loved ones coming to visit after they are gone. I have my own opinions but I won’t bore you with them today. However, this photo seemed quite special to me.
Do you see the two orbs? The big one is directly above my grandfather’s memorial chair, while another seems to be ascending the stair to the pulpit. (it’s on the bottom step)
And then who is this peeping around the pillar? The chapel to the right is called the Lady Chapel, and houses two very old and worn burials of a knight and his lady, their names lost to time. Did one of them decide to come back and have their picture taken?
I should go back, I suppose, and take another photo from the same angle. It’s a very old building, after all. Dust, tricks of the light and worn marks on the stones can sometimes present images that seem other than they are. So I leave this with you without further comment, although I’d be interested to hear yours.
It’s been a busy week. I’m finalising my structural edit on No Quarter before it goes to my editor, plus there’s the usual client work and house work, which hasn’t left me a lot of time to post. So today is a very quick post about the wonderful blog community I’m pleased to be part of. I think we are enormously fortunate as writers to have such a wide community of support available online. There are many blogs offering free information, reviews and feature spots invaluable to the starting out writer, plus plenty of friendly conversation. The other thing about being part of a community is that we can stand together against book piracy, trolling and the other negative aspects of being online. Kristen Lamb wrote an excellent recent post about bullies here. Since starting to blog I’ve made some wonderful connections and am looking forward to actually meeting some of my fellow bloggers at the First Annual Bloggers Bash, hosted by the intrepid Sacha Black.
Here are some blogs I’ve found incredibly helpful as I’ve navigated the self publishing process – big thank yous to each of them!
Nicholas is an award winning author who posts thoughtful articles on every aspect of publishing, from statistics to advertising to social media. He’s also a really nice guy who takes the time to respond to comments and offer generous encouragement 🙂
Ryan offers a huge range of services for writers on his blog including The Writer’s Toolbox, his critique posts called Under the Microscope and also a growing list of bloggers who will review books, separated into genres – something I’ve found incredibly useful.
What can I say about Chris? He regularly features independently published authors (including yours truly) as well as collating links from across the blogosphere to useful articles on every aspect of publishing. He’s also a published author, yet still finds the time to respond to comments – I don’t know how he does it.
Chris’s blog is a goldmine of information covering just about every aspect of publishing. Well worth a visit.
Of course, these are just a few of the many wonderful people I’ve connected with in blogland – I hope to feature some more links soon.
And finally, I sent Oak and Mist to a reviewer, the lovely Meredith at Mezzalilys Teen Book Reviews. I would like to make it very clear that I sent her the book with the expectation only that a review would be written – the content and evaluation were entirely at Meredith’s discretion, as I believe in honest feedback. So, fingers crossed and a little nervous I posted her the book. A little while later she wrote her review – if you’re interested, please check it out here
It was a hot Melbourne day, the kind where the air is heavy and damp before 9am, holding the city hostage until a cool change blows in from the west. I was waiting for a train at one of the red brick rail stations so ubiquitous in the inner city, federation bungalows and Victorian houses backing onto the tracks. If it weren’t for the prickly pear and palm trees lining the embankments and the sticky, overbearing heat, you could almost be in old England, wrought iron arches and curving brickwork evoking somewhere half a world away. Perhaps that was what they wanted, the architects of this city by the bay – a reminder of faraway home.
I sat on a bench in the shade as I waited for my train to arrive, fanning myself with my hand, though all it did was move the warm air around. The platform was almost deserted. The only other occupant was a tiny old lady with a wrinkled face and improbably black hair, dressed in dark layers that looked stifling in the heat, her small feet stuffed into black shoes. She came to sit next to me and I smiled at her. She smiled back, flash of bright eyes in her lined face.
‘Hot day,’ she said, her strongly accented English betraying her European roots.
I nodded. ‘Sure is.’
‘Where you from?’ she said, lifting her chin at me.
‘Canada,’ I said. It was my answer at the time, my most recent address before coming to Melbourne, the twang in my voice giving me away.
‘Ohh,’ she said, nodding. ‘It’s cold there. Lots of snow.’
I think I said something about how nice it would be to have some snow as we both wilted in the heat, air shimmering on the tracks nearby.
She agreed then leaned in, as though about to share a confidence.
‘When I was a little girl in Italy, we sometimes have snow. Not very often, but I remember one time when I was at school. Our classroom had a balcony with big doors and we all ran out to touch the snow as it fell. When the teacher called us back in, we threw snowballs at her.’
Then she giggled, her legs swinging back and forth like the little girl she used to be, transporting both of us back to a place where snow fell and children laughed. Eventually the train came and we both went on to our destinations – I never saw her at the station again. But I always remembered her story, the small glimpse she gave a stranger of snow on a hot day.
After my good weekend, it seems to have been a quiet week. It’s half term so you would expect I’d be running here there and everywhere, but that hasn’t been the case. The gorgeous girl seems to be feeling the same way, quite happy to be at home working on projects or playing games, plus her new Barbie DVD seems to be a big hit. Of course we’ve seen some of her friends, had glorious sunny times at the local park, done our thing where we go shopping and have lunch – though I’m not sure how a trip to buy fabric, buttons and canvases for a project turned into her standing in Debenhams with an armful of clothes saying ‘I think I’d like to try these on.’ Sigh. I suppose she is my child, after all 🙂
It’s also been quiet on the writing front. This is my first post since Monday, and it’s simply been because I’ve had nothing in particular I wanted to write about. Not writer’s block, heaven forbid, just a sort of lull in the words that swirl through my mind daily. I’ve not been completely idle in this regard – I have a client for whom I supply web copy each week, so have been working on that. And of course I’m supposed to be working on my edit of No Quarter, as it’s meant to be going to the editor next week. But I find I’m stuck – I’ve reached a point in the story that was difficult to write, and that I still find hard to read. It is a major turning point, a catalyst for what happens in the rest of the books, and therefore very necessary. So I will have to steel myself at some point and get on with it.
These spilled sprinkles are sort of how I feel at the moment, plus they are stars, so they tie in quite neatly hey?
If you follow the stars you will know that Mercury is retrograde at the moment. According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, this is a time when plans go awry, when we need to leave extra time for travel, not sign anything if we can help it and be prepared for mix-ups in communication. However, it can also be an excellent time for intuition and reflection. I’m not sure, to be honest, whether far away planets swirling around distant constellations have any effect on our lives. But then I consider the idea that we are all connected, all part of some greater pattern that we only get to glimpse occasionally and I feel I need to be open to the possibility. It certainly does feel as though things are moving more slowly at the moment, but maybe that’s just me. For example, I’ve been approached about an interview with a newspaper – the journalist is lovely and very interested in my work. However, we can’t actually seem to get it together to do the interview. With persistence I’m sure it will happen, but maybe it won’t be until after June 11, when Mercury starts moving forward again.
And once again it has happened. I wasn’t planning on writing anything about the stars and Mercury, yet my mind has been pulled down that path and I’ve had to go with it. Such is the life of a Pantser 🙂
This has been a good weekend for a variety of reasons. First is the result from Ireland, where the population voted overwhelmingly to make marriage available to everyone.
When we were married, my husband and I wrote our own vows. However, when we did so we were surprised to discover that we had to include a section from the Australian Marriage Act, which read in part:
‘marriage, according to law in Australia, is the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.’
This didn’t sit well with either of us for a variety of reasons, and we asked our celebrant if we could change ‘man and a woman’ to ‘two people’. However, we were told that our marriage would not be considered legal if we did not include these exact words and, while she didn’t agree with the sentiment either, if we wanted to be married, we had to say it.
So of course we got married. We’d already booked the venue, started planning and I think had even sent out invitations, so it wasn’t really something we could cancel. And we wanted to be married, very much. So it is wonderful to hear that another country has now made it possible for people who love each other to be married, regardless of gender. Love, after all, comes from the heart and I feel we should all be free to express our commitment to another person.
So come on Australia, get on board!
The other wonderful thing about Saturday was the Eurovision Song contest. I love it and watch it every year, and now my daughter is hooked too. So we got our snacks, pulled out the couch and prepared for several hours of kooky European musical goodness. We had our favourites from the semi finals (Israel, Serbia), and we both thought Sweden was a deserving winner. And we were thrilled to see the Australian entry by Guy Sebastian. But our overall favourite ended up being Belgium’s Loic Nottet with ‘Rhythm Inside’, a hypnotic finger snapping beat with overtones of Lorde – it’s on my Itunes as we speak.
I had a message from my US based sister-in-law just before the show started and, when I mentioned I was watching Eurovision she decided to watch too, even though she’d never heard of it before (and this is a woman who knows a lot about music). We pinged messages back and forth, laughing at it all. Around song 20 I messaged her asking if she was still watching. Her response was that not only was she watching, she had put aside her whole day to watch it until the end.
Such is the power of Eurovision 🙂
Natural History Museum and traditional English Bank Holiday weather.
Yesterday brought an impromptu visit to the Natural History Museum in London – we don’t live too far away so it was a case of hopping on the train and going. It was great, though very warm inside. I was thrilled to find that the earthquake room that had so terrified me when I was eleven was still there, though updated to reflect the recent Kobe quake. The gorgeous child loved it all, pressing buttons and answering questions, mesmerised by fossils and rocks and dinosaur bones, while I found myself drawn in by the intricately carved walls and ceilings, the building itself as much of a draw as the exhibits. We stood for ages at a coral reef tank, watching brightly coloured fish dart and swim as prawns hid under rocks, hermit crabs with electric blue legs shuffling across the sand.
Afterwards we sat outside in the soft English rain, finding a bench under a spreading plane tree as we ate sandwiches and drank tea. Children ran around on the grass, one with big dinosaur hands chasing another clutching a stuffed dinosaur, another little girl with binoculars naming everything she could see. And as I sat there with my two favourite people, looking at the beauty of the building, the children and even the misting rain, I felt one of those moments of happiness when all is right with the world.
I’ve said this before – I am a Pantser. When I start writing I have an idea, maybe a couple of characters and an end point but not much idea of what happens in between. But off I go anyway, letting the story pull me forward, sometimes finding what the characters choose to do or not do as surprising as if someone else had written the story. It can be an exhilarating feeling, words coming from my fingers as fast as I can type them, the story pouring onto the page.
Oh, I’ve tried the whole planning thing, laying out the chapters and what I expect to have happen to each character, the whole thing building to a neat and tidy solution. But then I start to write and the characters come to me, pulling my hair back to whisper in my ear, tapping me on the shoulder during my morning walk.
‘we would never do that’
‘I’m actually interested in this other character’
‘this happened to me as well’
‘I’m not such a bad guy’
And I have to give in, knowing in my heart, or that spot under the breastbone where such feelings reside, that what they are saying is absolutely true. That they know, better than I do, it will all work out in the end.
Only thing is, writing like this makes structure a bit of an unwieldy beast. I’m wrestling with it at the moment as I make a final structural edit to No Quarter before sending it to my editor. I feel like an old time lion tamer with my chair and whip, shouting at all the paragraphs to get it together and make sense, dammit, while they roar and claw at the air, unhappy to be pushed around. But we’re getting there. I’ve had to add a few extra scenes, plus realised there was a whole section where time of day and weather were pushed aside, when they actually needed to be part of things. And as it’s the second part in a serial, more threads are coming into the weave, new characters and storylines taking their place in the story.
I confess, I do have my moments where I wish it was all laid out in front of me as orderly notes. I’ve gone as far as to write a small list of some of the main characters, just for continuity’s sake. And I have a small pile of paper with notes scribbled on, various colours of pen, which I refer to as I bring it all together. But that’s as far as the planning goes, I’m afraid.
So how does your writing garden grow? Is it orderly rows of well planned chapters, or a wilderness of tangled plotlines you struggle to pull into place?
PS I am looking forward to Eurovision tonight – how about you?!
Helen Glynn Jones 