In which Scott/Steve/Pack/Stack talks of white dog poo and pitching non-fiction

Planning to pitch a non-fiction book? Aimed at the general, commercial (as opposed to specialist) market? Would you like advice from someone who is or has been all of these things: a) bookseller (of a rather influential variety) b) a publisher (of general, commercial non-fiction) and c) an author? Look no further.

Today we are talking about 21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) by Steve Stack. Those of you who've been awake on Twitter recently will know that Scott Pack and Steve Stack do more than rhyme: they are the same man. And they are here today.

First, a bit about the author: Scott Pack, who writes as Steve Stack, used to be the buying manager at Waterstone’s head office, a role which did not make him all that popular. He is now the Director of Digital Product Development at HarperCollins, a role he combines with a few other jobs at the publisher. His first book, It Is Just You - Everything’s Not Shit, was a #1 bestseller in the Humour ebook charts (a small claim to fame, but one he is more than happy to chuck around). He blogs at http://meandmybigmouth.typepad.com and tweets as @meandmybigmouth.

About the book: A fond farewell to the many inanimate objects, cultural icons and general stuff around us that find themselves on the verge of extinction.

We’ve all heard of the list of endangered animals, but no one has ever pulled together a list of endangered inanimate objects. Until now, that is. Steve Stack has catalogued well over one hundred objects, traditions, cultural icons and, well, other stuff that is at risk of extinction.

Some of them have vanished already. Cassette tapes, rotary dial phones, half-day closing, milk bottle deliveries, Concorde, handwritten letters, typewriters, countries that no longer exist, white dog poo…

…all these and many more are big a fond farewell in this nostalgic, and sometimes irreverent, trip down memory lane.

I've been reading it and very entertaining and interesting it is, too. I'll tell you something: Steve Stack knows far more about cassette tapes than anyone really should. And at last I understand, in an almost geeky way, what really went wrong with Betamax. But absolutely the most fascinating entry is the one for white dog poo.

NM: You’ve been a bookseller, publisher and author. Tell us one thing you learnt in each of those roles that helped you succeed in or understand better the others.

Ooh, blimey. Erm…

I think I learnt the same thing in each role: authors who make the effort to be nice to deal with get more support than those who don’t.

[NM adds - that is SO true. I don't see why anyone thinks being anything other than nice is a sensible thing to be in a business that is about hearts and minds.]

NM: What are the commonest mistakes you see in non-fiction pitches?

The most common is that people don’t research their market. I often get pitches for books that I would never publish at The Friday Project, never in a million years, and any numpty could have worked that out with 30 seconds of research.

[NM: no numpties read this blog, I'm glad to say. We all research properly, don't we, people? That means discovering what sorts of books each publsiher publishes and pitching appropriate ones, OK??]

NM: What discussions take place in an Acquisitions meeting that aspiring authors would do well to know about?

Actually, all of the hard work for an acquisitions meeting takes place before the meeting itself. You need to prime everyone in advance, get them on board for the project you want to pitch. Identify the people who are prepared to champion it and make sure they are vocal in the meeting.

If you have that support then you are able to present the book with confidence and enthusiasm. That is what really matters.

[NM: indeed, I've heard that editors quake before these meetings, though I'm sure Scott is entirely unquakey. It's worth adding that in most publishing companies nowadays, the editor has to persuade the number-crunchers in sales and marketing, and they care less about the author's pretty words and more about the concept and whether they can sell enough copies. That's their job. They will also work out a budget and costings at this meeting.]

NM: Can you give your top three tips for non-fiction writers?

1. You may not be writing a novel but you still have to be a great storyteller.[NM: Good one.]
2. Does this really need to be a book, or is it a magazine article?[NM: Good one again.]
3. Listen to the criticism you receive from people in the business. It won’t always be right but it will almost always be helpful. [NM: interesting take. Think about that one carefully, everyone. That's a version of "Nobody knows anything."]

NM: How important is it for a non-fiction writer to have a “platform” before you will take them on? Is that view common amongst UK publishers?

It certainly doesn’t do any harm but it is by no means essential. I have published authors who have already developed a readership, either online or in print, but I have also published complete unknowns who have gone on to sell over 100,000 books.

If you have a great idea and you write it well then a platform is not always required.

I think all publishers feel more comfortable if they feel there is a fanbase or existing readership, some more than others, but all of them have taken punts as well.

NM: What will be the next dodos in the writing/publishing/book world?

Ooh, good question. Who knows? Will these new Flipbook things catch on? Will print books be wiped out by ebooks? Will hardbacks be no more? I think there will be a few casualties but the new digital age is actually making more things available so it may not be as bad as some are predicting. [NM: I totally agree. People are too fond of saying, "This much has happened in the last five years, so by 2016 we will have...". Not at all necessarily. Everything is changing so fast.]

NM: What about space dust? Surely that’s an unforgiveable omission? Scope for Volume 2? Oh, and Gumption, too! Pfffth.

Naturally, any omissions are deliberate and are absent purely to set up volume two. [NM: clever...]

People, for your pleasure, do also go and check out this Flipboard link. And if you have an ipad, for crying out loud hurry to download the free Flipboard app. Beautiful and functional, I promise.

Thank you, Scott and good luck with your book. This could be this year's stocking filler in many houses.

One more piece of advice about non-fiction from me: don't over-estimate the potential market. Be ruthless and objective about your position in the market and what the competition is  Differentiate yourself. And do go and read my interview with Stephanie Butland, who successfully pitched her book on dancing with cancer - Bah! to Cancer.

Never say never self-publish a novel: Catherine Ryan Howard visits

OK, I'll admit it: I'm a bit of a fan of Catherine Ryan Howard. Catherine is one of self-publishing's success stories and that success has come about through her being clever, nice, strategic and a very engaging writer. I think her attitude to the whole business is utterly professional and she is well worth listening to. I read and enjoyed her first highly successful memoir, Mousetrapped: A Year and A Bit in Orlando, Florida, and agree with her ruthless analysis of why it wasn't accepted by a trade publisher. I bought both the ebook and POD versions of her bible of self-publishing - Self-Printed: the Sane Person's Guide to Self-Publishing - and very much followed her strict (scarily so) instructions when I came to write and publish Tweet Right - The Sensible Person's Guide to Twitter. In fact, was there possibly some subconscious influence on that title??

But Catherine was on record as saying she would not self-publish a novel. And now, she has. So I dragged her here to explain herself.

But first: about Catherine:
Catherine Ryan Howard is a 29-year-old writer, blogger and enthusiastic coffee-drinker. She currently lives in Cork, Ireland, where she divides her time between her desk and the sofa. She blogs at www.catherineryanhoward.com.

And about her novel, Results Not Typical:
The Devil Wears Prada meets Weightwatchers and chick-lit meets corporate satire. Through their Ultimate Weight Loss Diet Solution Zone System, Slimmit International Global Incorporated claim they’re making the world a more attractive place one fatty at a time. Their slogans “Where You’re Fat and We Know It!” and “Where the Fat IS Your Fault!” are recognised around the globe, the counter in the lobby says five million slimmed and their share price is as high as their energy levels. But today the theft of their latest revolutionary product, Lipid Loser, will threaten to expose the real secret behind Slimmit’s success...The race is on to retrieve Lipid Loser and save Slimmit from total disaster. If their secrets get out, their competitors will put them out of business. If the government finds out, they’ll all go to jail. And if their clients find out… Well, as Slimmit’s Slimming Specialists know all too well, there’s only one thing worse than a hungry, sugar-crazed, carb addict – and that’s an angry one. Will the secret behind Slimmit’s success survive the day, or will their long-suffering slimmers finally discover the truth? Available now in paperback and e-book editions.


NM: You self-published Mousetrapped because you recognised that (and why) a publisher wouldn't take it; you knew that although you could find readers who would like it, there would not be enough for a publisher to recover investment. Is the same true of Results Not Typical?

Essentially, yes. Results was on submission for nearly a year, and even bagged me a meeting with the editorial director of one of the biggest publishers in Ireland/UK. (That was quite the exciting afternoon, let me tell you!) But it was Mousetrapped-scented déjà vu – everyone who read it had positive things to say, but ultimately they felt it wasn’t suitable for the Irish/UK chick-lit market. One editor said that UK/Irish readers wouldn’t warm to the satirical nature of it, another said the humour was too slapstick and yet another said they she loved it, she just didn’t love it enough. (Surely the most infuriating rejection!) They all said there was something there – somewhere – and recommended that I go off and write something more mainstream, more meaty. I was getting that banging-head-off-brick-wall feeling again, so I stopped submitting it so I could take a step back and regroup. I started work on the Something More Mainstream & Meaty, but as I did, an evil idea began to form in my head...

NM: You said that you would never self-publish a novel. Why did you say that and why have you changed your mind, you naughty person?

I said it because at the time, I believed non-fiction was the only genre that could really suffer from the “We Like It But There’s No Market For It” rejection. I mean, if your novel was good enough to be published they’d publish it, right? But publishing houses just don’t have as much money as they did before to take a chance on something new (if they ever had it) and if you’ve written something that doesn’t neatly fit into an existing genre, then it’s something new. Publishing is a business at the end of the day, and me and my book were extremely high risk. Too high risk.

But I’m a business too – a self-publishing business. In March of this year, Mousetrapped had been on sale for a year and I’d managed to offload 4,000 copies of it. Up until that point I’d looked upon my self-publishing adventures as something to keep me in coffee grounds until some Fairy Editor-mother came along with a six-figure deal (hey, a girl can dream...), but I realised then it was time to start treating it like a serious business, like my actual career. I made two decisions: to write and release the sequel to Mousetrapped, a book called Backpacked, and to self-publish Results Not Typical. The editors who rejected it because they felt it wouldn’t do well in the Irish/UK market were undoubtedly right – they are the experts – but I don’t have to sell to any one territory. I can sell worldwide. Plus, I already have an established readership – I’m not starting from scratch – and there’s only a miniscule financial risk involved for me, relatively speaking, because I sell e-books and print-on-demand paperbacks. So for me, doing this is extremely low risk.

Do I hope Results sells a gazillion copies and that all the editors who rejected it burst into tears of regret while emitting wails of despair? Yes, of course. Obviously. But even if it does sell a gazillion copies, those editors will still be right. A book can be wholly unsuitable for traditional publication, yet do well when the author self-publishes it. That doesn’t mean either side was wrong. What matters is that both sides agree the book has merit, and that there’s people out there, somewhere, who’ll be interested in reading it. I just need less of those people than publishers do to say, “Okay. Let’s go.”

NM: Anyone who self-publishes has to spend huge amounts of time on marketing, no? And trust me, although published authors have to do stacks, too, you DO have to do more as a self-pubber. I know. So, how do you manage it and can you pass on some tips?

I barely manage it, to be honest. [NM adds: thank you, thank you, thank you!] My computer is on almost as much as I’m awake. In the last few months I took a step back from Twitter, etc. so I could write Backpacked, and that is reflected in my sales. If you stop working, the books stop selling. I feel like I have some momentum now but still, I have to keep working at it.

My advice would be to concentrate first on having a great “hub”. For me, that’s my blog. That’s always my number one priority and I put more time into it than anything else. If I have time, I’ll do things like Facebook, Twitter, etc. but I always make sure my blog is up to date and offering new, valuable content, no matter what my writing schedule is. I think if you do that, the whole online platform/book promotion/tweeting incessantly thing becomes infinitely more manageable. Blogging brings people to you, and that’s a whole lot easier than trying to go out there and find them.

Having said that, I have absolutely no time for the whingers and moaners who are all, “I just want to write. I just want to concentrate on my craft. It’s all about the art for me, darhling. I don’t have time for Twitter...” etc. etc. Even if you sign a deal with a major publisher, you are going to have to promote your book – and rightly so. It’s like a certain young Hollywood actress who claims to hate publicity and only wants to make indie movies. How many movies no one goes to see because they don’t know they exist does she think she’s going to get to make, eh?

NM: What have you learnt about writing since writing your first book?

My favourite piece of writing advice has always been “Write the book you want to read” but what I’ve learned is that while doing that’s all well and good, you need to write the book you want to read that someone else might one day want to read too. Otherwise, there’s no point. With Mousetrapped, I definitely strayed into self-indulgence in places. I was enjoying writing about a certain thing or place, and I thought, Well, I like this and this is my book, so... but you have to re-write with the end reader in mind. If you don’t, you won’t have any.

NM: What have you learnt about publishing since publishing your first book?

I’m more convinced than ever that luck plays a huge part in success, whether it be traditional or self-publication. You can certainly “prime” yourself to receive luck by doing things like writing a good book, acting professionally at all times, doing a lot of online promotion, etc. etc., but there’s no sure-fire way to sell books. You can promote a book 24/7/365 and sell 50 copies, and you can sit back and do nothing and yet sell 5,000. All you can do is strive to make luck your only variable. Do everything you can and then wait as long as you can. As I type this I’ve sold around 8,500 self-published books, but I sold less than half of them – about 3,000 – in the first year (March 2010-March 2011) and only 500 of them in the first six months (March-September 2010). The first month I sold 62 copies. But I hung on, and I kept plugging away. Then, luck came. If I’d given up a few months in, I wouldn’t have be around to receive it.

NM: What do you wish I'd asked you? Answer it...

Oh, you’re good. You’re very good. I’m going to use that one myself in future!

Well, I suppose since this is a blog tour to promote my new novel, Results Not Typical, any opportunity to plug Results Not Typical, subtly or otherwise, is fine by me, I’m going to pretend that I wished you’d asked me why I chose to write Results Not Typical, a book about an evil weight loss company.

*cough*Results Not Typical!*cough* Well, Nicola, I’m glad you asked why I wrote Results Not Typical. (!)

It’s because a) I’m still annoyed about a certain bestselling chick-lit title that had the protagonist banging on and on about “ballooning up to 10 stone”, b) I think the weight loss industry has been asking to be satirised for years and years and c) I, fortunately or unfortunately, have plenty of experience in that area, most recently with a scary cult-like organisation that forbade me from eating 99.9% of all foods and tried to convince me that decaf coffee was a worthwhile thing. I’m still overweight but, hey, I got a novel out of it, didn’t I?

Would you like to buy Catherine's book?  (No, Catherine, not you, silly.)

Results Not Typical on Amazon UK is here.
Results Not Typical on Amazon US is here.

Would you like a chance to win one? If you visit Goodreads here you can enter a giveaway to win one of five paperback copies of Results Not Typical. Open for entries from September 30th-October 31st. Open to all countries.

People, if you plan to self-publish, please do read Self-Printed. And if you just want to curl up with a good piece of fiction, think Results Not Typical.

Thank you, Catherine, and good luck with all your books.

MRS DARCY VISITS, BRINGING ALIENS

Today, my blog has been invaded by aliens, barely controlled by Jonathan Pinnock. I tried to tell him that this was no666tonbutarrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggghhhhh...

YOU WILL LET THE MAN SPEAK, MRS MORGAN

"Yes. I will." *eyes wobble alarmingly*

Over to Jonathan.


MRS DARCY VERSUS THE ALIENS

On page 246 of Nicola’s excellent book, Write to be Published, (you have all got a copy, haven’t you?), she makes a very flattering reference to me being a rare case of someone who’d managed to get a book deal after posting instalments of my book online. I was particularly pleased to be used as an example because I’m a long-time reader of this excellent blog, [NM bows] and I thought it might be nice to repay the compliment by telling you how it actually happened.


Towards the end of 2009 I had a problem. I was around 10,000 words into a high-concept novel (Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens) that I’d been writing on and off for two years and I had a sickening feeling that if I ever did manage to motivate myself to finish the thing it would never get published. The main problem was that when I’d originally dreamt the book up, back in 2007, the concept of a sequel to Pride and Prejudice with added aliens was pretty radical. However, after that zombie book (I’m sorry, but I can’t bring myself to name it) [NM – you’ll be glad to know that I actually haven’t a clue what you’re talking about] came out in early 2009, what I was writing now looked like a wannabe bandwagon-jumper.


You may ask why I’d only written 10,000 words in those two years. First, I had very little idea how to write a novel and took ages to get going. More importantly, the arrival of TZB [NM – The Zombie Butler? Birdbath? Bathysphere? Bob?] had dampened my enthusiasm to the point where it was lying, sodden, in the gutter of my dreams. Worse, the word on the street was that publishers were, several months on from TZB, no longer interested in mash-ups. The bandwagon had left town.


The trouble was, I still liked those 10,000 words. More importantly, so did my writer friends, who kept badgering me to write some more. Time to take radical action. Why not serialize the thing? That way I could see if it really would find an audience. Not only would that give me a reason to continue writing it, but it might just provide a publisher with enough evidence to take it on.


I decided on 100 bi-weekly blog posts, plus prologue and epilogue, which gave me two spare days in case of disaster if I ran it over a year. My 10K words gave me two and a half months in the can, so I could at least run it for that long to see if it was going to fly.


Unbelievably, it worked, and in November 2010 I signed a contract with Proxima Books, with Salt Publishing (Proxima’s parent) committing to it being a lead title for 2011!


However, before you all leap to the conclusion that the answer to all your publishing prayers is to stick your WIP online, I offer a few words of caution, if only because Nicola will shout at me otherwise. [NM – I was just getting ready to do that.] Quite right too: generally speaking, this isn’t a remotely advisable thing to do.


So why did it work for me? Here are some contributory factors: none sufficient, but all necessary.


1) Writing: OK, I’ll put aside false modesty for a moment and claim that it was actually pretty well written.


2) Structure: the story broke down well into easily-digestible 600-700 word chunks, with plenty of gags in each one and a punchline or cliffhanger at the end. This suited my way of writing – by nature I’m a short story writer and this was the first time I’d ever coaxed a narrative beyond 3000 words.


3) Marketing: I already had a reasonable social networking footprint on Twitter, Facebook, my own blog and various writing forums and I used these aggressively (although I hope not annoyingly) to promote the serialisation. I also spent a long time doing the rounds of other blogs, pestering them to feature it. I also produced a couple of very silly YouTube promo videos that (ahem) proved to be a bit of a talking point. It was a question of trying anything I could think of, and it was a LOT of work.


So would it have found a publisher if I hadn’t done this? No idea. Would I have finished it? That’s a more interesting question, and I think the answer is: unlikely. In the end, the most important thing about serialising my first novel was that complete strangers ended up wanting me to keep writing it. So would I do it again? Almost certainly not. But never say never, eh?


Oh, and I almost forgot to mention. It’s out now. Do get yourselves a copy. I think you might enjoy it.

Sorry, I think Nicola has disappeared. I'm sure she'll be back.

JULIE BERTAGNA INTERVIEW

It's my huge pleasure to welcome a friend and fellow Scottish YA writer, the lovely and talented Julie Bertagna. Julie's latest novel, Aurora, is the final part of the trilogy which began with Exodus, published to great acclaim in 2002. With nine years between then and now, there can be little Julie doesn't know about the enormous task involved in writing a trilogy. And she's generous enough to share!

First, a little about Julie: she has established a reputation as an author of powerful, original and award-winning fiction for young people. EXODUS, described by the Guardian as 'a miracle of a novel' was shortlisted for the Whitbread Children's Book of the Year and won the Lancashire Children's Book of the Year Award. Julie's books are sold in many countries around the world and have been shortlisted for a number of major awards. The Ice Cream Machine was adapted for TV. Julie was born in Ayrshire, and has been a teacher and a feature writer for major Scottish newspapers. She lives in Glasgow with her family and speaks in schools, libraries and at book festivals across the UK.

NM: Take us back to when you first came up with the idea and suggested it to your publisher. Did you envisage it as a trilogy?

JB: Exodus began as a short story for an anthology of futuristic tales by Tony Bradman. So I had a solid idea in print to present to my publishers - which helped, as I’d originally presented them with a completely different, contemporary idea! But this idea was stronger. (I also changed publishers mid-book but that’s another story.) At the time, I was told that ‘no one is writing YA sci-fi so though we love it, we’re not sure how it’ll be received and we must steer clear of any hint of sci-fi on the cover as reviewers hate that. Plus, you’ve set it in Glasgow so it probably won’t travel.’ Or words to that effect. So I had no idea how it would go and was contracted to write another couple of books, though I was eager to write a sequel. Of course, as soon as Exodus got on shortlists and sold well and foreign sales came through, I was asked for a sequel. And that’s where the hard work started because there had been a gap, and the book wasn’t plotted as a trilogy. So I came back to it cold. I had to re-imagine myself back in that complex world again, remember it all, re-discover my characters - plus the arguments and events concerning climate change were everywhere now so I kept being ‘invaded’ by the real world as I wrote. But I deeply wanted to write more. It was a huge challenge, yet exhilarating to imagine all the possibilities of an epic story on a changed Earth of the future - I wanted to find out what happened next.

NM: Can you say a little about the difficulties and hurdles you faced with an unforeseen sequel to Exodus? Harder or easier than you thought when you began?

JB: The easiest book of a trilogy is surely the first one - especially if, like me, you didn’t know you were writing a trilogy when you set out! In the first book, you are free to take your story wherever you like. The middle book is perhaps the hardest as it’s the transition - now you have to create the big arc that links the books AND sustain the momentum that will power the third and final book. And carry with you readers that might not have read the first book without boring the ones who have. Plus, within the over-reaching story arc of a trilogy, you have to create the story arcs of each individual book, along with all the interconnecting threads of plot lines and individual fates. Truthfully, if I’d known that it was going to be a trilogy, there are parts of Exodus that I would have written slightly differently. There would have been a few things that I might have ‘planted’. On the other hand, I wasn’t constrained and the story was free to fly in ways that it might not have if I’d had a plan from the outset.

I do thrive on ‘organic’ planning - a rough map of the possible journey ahead and a faith that the layers and details, all the interconnecting threads, will emerge in the writing. I plan as I write. That can be scary, risky writing but it’s how my imagination fires up best. Characters did literally pop up and announce the part they intended to play in events as I wrote - I just wish they’d let me know a bit earlier and I wouldn’t have had so many problems to solve. But that’s the nature of writing - it’s a problem-solving exercise and the biggest challenge in a trilogy is to keep the forward momentum while balancing a lot of spinning plates!

NM: Although people of many ages read and love the books, what do you see as the core readership? Who is your "Ideal Reader" (Stephen King's term for the person, real or not, whom you feel you are speaking to.)

JB: Readers are all different so how is it possible to know who an “Ideal Reader” is and what they want? Even amongst readers who love your books there are huge disagreements. ‘Pleeease let Mara and Fox be together at the end!’ begs one, while another warns me that if I DARE write a trite, cut-and-dried Hollywood ending they will ‘never ever ever’ forgive me. So what I do is pretend that I’m writing for my younger self and my gang of friends. [Julie, that sounds remarkably like an Ideal Reader...:) People: this is what I mean when I talk about thinking of your reader. And good writers often don't even know they're doing it!] Fashions and tastes change - and it’s necessary to have an awareness of the current market, though just as important to find an original twist - but imaginations, hearts and souls don’t. I don’t abide by ‘write what you know’ - I write to find out what I don’t know - but I try to write for someone I know: someone a bit like my younger self, living in today’s world. [Again, a good way of thinking of the Ideal Reader idea.] That works for me.

NM: Tell us about your own connection with the underlying theme - climate change and flooding? Are you actually pessimistic or optimistic about it?

JB: I still keep hoping, for the sake of my daughter’s generation and their children, that the ‘deniers’ are right or that predictions are exaggerated. But I’m afraid the evidence that’s stacking up is very scary in the long-term. Strangely, what inspired me was my own characters. Their stories crystallised a truth for me: that humans are the most selfish and destructive animal on the planet - but also the most ingenious. Our creative impulses and survival instincts are stronger than our destructive ones. In my books, there is a global empire of ‘dystopian’ sky cities that have abandoned the world’s flood refugees - yet the towers of these giant cities are wonders of green bio-architecture.

We have to invent new ways to live on this planet - and isn’t that what human beings have always done? There is an idea that we have to make the impulse toward sustainable technologies grip the global imagination just as the ‘space race’ of the sixties did - make that something that every nation on Earth will want to reach for in the way that we once wanted to reach for the stars. Ultimately, it might be ‘do or die’ for the human race but we have the imaginations and the creativity to do it - and a burst of new industries might just save the world economy too.

NM: What is it about foxes??! You have a crucial fox in the trilogy; Tim Bowler has a fox watching his latest novel; so do I (work in progress). Tell us about your fox. What do foxes bring to our stories?

JB: Foxes are fantastic characters, smart tricksters, mysterious and charismatic, sneaky and dangerous. There’s a tradition of fictional foxes going back to Reynard the Fox in the Middle Ages - and no doubt much earlier in oral tales. The night I began writing about ‘my’ Fox, all I had was the sense of a mysterious presence that was tracking Mara - then I looked out of my window and jumped. A pair of eyes gleamed at me through the darkness. A fox. The fox that, no matter what I did to keep it out, still found a way into my garden to raid the bins. Later, me and Mr Fox would fall out big-time when he tried to eat my rabbit, but that night he gave me my inspiration for Fox, the love of Mara’s life, who manages to sneak into places he has no business being - and ultimately it’s the smart, dangerous, charismatic trickster in Fox that finds a way to change a broken world.

Julie, thanks so much for those great answers! I know you've only just finished a very tiring publicity round, so I hope it wasn't too arduous to come and be interviewed here. I'll pour you a coffee in the Yurt next week!

Questions and comments, anyone?

See Julie talk about Aurora at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this SUNDAY Aug 14th. Hurry - book now! Julie is lovely and I promise that you won't be disappointed.

THE MIND-BLOWERY OF FLORENCE AND GILES

I don't review books. In the past, I have done so for the Guardian and a few other places, but I don't on this blog. Until today. This is different. Or - and you'll soon see why I say this - it has differented me quite. 

If my language seems somewhat unusual in this post, there is a reason.

Last week a book mind-blew me and it necessaries me to speak about it. I have not yet recovered and I am not intentioned to do so. The book is Florence and Giles by John Harding and it is to blame for the fact that I went into a meeting with a publisher without preparation, so distracted was I, so mind-altered. Mind you, I created a few sales instead. One to my agent and one spontaneoused to a random person on a train. And two excited tweets spiked sales on Amazon.

---

The story magicked me with its mind-trickery, heart-stopped me with its unreliable-witnessing. It originals along at a rattling pace, although I wanted to linger on every sentence to remember its whimsery. 

Let me talk about this language-witchery first, before telling you the aboutness of the story. The language is the extraordinary first-person voice of twelve-year-old Florence, a girl who has secretly taught herself to read after being expressly ever-forbidden to do so by her unmet guardian uncle. When she speaks to anyone, she does so in a normal voice, but the language she spell-weaves for us is one in which every speech part infinitely flexibles. So, instead of saying, "She said something which was obvious", Florence would say, "She obvioused." We hear her no-ideaing and franticking, or that something perfect-sensed her or that someone family-resemblanced someone else. Whereas you might hold something gingerly, Florence gingerlies it. You might have a hiding-place for candles you have stolen; Florence has a hidery for her purloinery of candles. You might take no heed of something; Florence unheeds it. You might say that it was impossible to steal something, but for Florence it impossibled her to steal it.

When she moves a book in the forbdidden library, it releases a "sneezery of dust". How beautiful an image is that?

Everything, absolutely everything, twisted as it is, perfect-senses. The reader does not have to work hard at all.

The effect is also astonishingly economical. It Chineses the words, fashioning a complex concept into one symbol. A Taiwanese friend of mine once pointed to daisies on a lawn and said, without preamble or verbery, "Snow in summer." Everything necessary was expressed in that new phrase; it wasn't just words put together: it was all the meaning and a whole load more than just those words. It perfected. It exquisited. It enoughed. That's what Florence does. Each time, her words breath-catch me quite. (And I apologise if I haven't justiced it here - I'm a beginner at Florencespeak.)

Set in 1891, the story explicitly references Edgar Allen Poe, The Turn of the Screw and (not explicitly but obviously) Jane Eyre. But what strongs it more than the sum of all of them is Florence. She is the unreliable witness to top all unreliable witnesses. Her unreliability is both her undoing and her saving. Some kind of genius she is, very damaged, her heart smashed by unmotheredness and then repaired crookedly as though a frightened child has gathered up the pieces of broken china and hastily stuck them together, higgledied them so that it is oddly strong and yet ugly. She is supremely resilient and brave –  for she has instincted the enormity of the risk of failure. Her icy heart and pschopathy are redeemed by her protective, desperate, maternal love for her brother, which is also both her undoing and her saving. It is a love that will anything. 

Anything.

It unboundaries her.

Florence is a girl I love and fear, want to wrap in maternal arms and yet lock up for ever, counsel and yet constrain. She has wooed me with her fake innocenting. I dread on her behalf the moment when, wisdomed by age, she understands the truth of what she thought she was telling us. I still don't know how much she knew, so much pokery does she play with her words, so murky is her soul.

Florence is twelve years old. Her half-brother, Giles, is nine. They are both orphaned, Florence unmothered during her own birth (and her eyes tear when she finds a picture of her mother, in a desperately moving scene given bathos by her use of the word "drippery"), and then both children unparented in a boating accident when Giles was a baby. It is not the main boating accident of the story but it's certainly one that the reader must remember and unravel with guessery. The children live a strange existence in the Gothic, crumbling, vast Blithe House, cared for by servants and a house-keeper, and then governesses - two, or perhaps only one, who knows? - with their lives distantly ruled by the absent uncle, whose absence and coldness the reader also wonders about.

Florence's madness perhaps begins when she decides that the second governess is the ghost of the first one, who “tragicked” in a boating accident with only Florence present. Florence guilties about this because she had wished the woman dead, and indeed the death conveniences remarkably, being on the very day on which Miss Whitaker had "unlibraried" her, meaning that Florence's elaborately – and Florence does do elaborate – secret library trips would have ended if Miss W had had a chance to tell. After four months in which Florence and Giles halcyon and feral their summer away, the replacement, Miss Taylor, arrives and Florence is convinced that Miss T is an evil spirit who can read her guilt precisely and who has come to take Giles away from her.

The story then becomes Florence's daily and increasingly terrifying battle to protect her brother from the clutchery of the devil. And when you're dealing with the devil, there are no limits to what you are allowed to do. You are unlimited. You are perhaps even dutied to go further than otherwise.

I'm not going to spoil the ending or even the middle because I am desperate for you to read this book. But I will say two things: first, Florence is both terribly right and terribly wrong. Second, all the clues to everything you need are in the book. Everything jigsaws into place. You know enormously more than Florence, even though you see everything through her eyes.

I mentioned some of the influences on this book but there's another book which I pretty much guarantee John Harding hasn't read but which Buddhaed in my mind throughout: The Moth Diaries by Rachel Klein, a book I reviewed for the Guardian. There are madness, parental loss, adolescence, literature, psychosis and unreliable narratory; both are set in America in settings without external influence, are Gothic, violent, macabre, playing with the supernatural. Even the flashes of humour are similar, delivered in each case through the biting intelligence of young uber-literate girls.

(From my Guardian review): "The Moth Diaries delves deeper into the neuroses and psyche of female adolescence than anything I've read. It is dark and dangerous, gothic, brutally revealing, regularly shocking and perfectly controlled. We know from the preface that the main character has 'borderline personality disorder complicated by depression and psychosis'. We know she recovers. That foreknowledge never weakens the story's grip.

“Set in 1960s America, it is the diary of an unnamed 16-year-old, who has been sent to a girls' boarding school after her father's suicide. Forget jolly hockey-sticks - this is no Malory Towers. It's a night-time world of obsession, passion, blood - and death. Every girl wallows in parental abandonment, clinging to friendships with a Sapphic intensity; food is friend and foe, to be gorged or rejected; life must be lived dangerously, with the need to risk death with self-starvation, drugs, suicide attempts, or crawling along gutters 100 feet up. Death does visit Brangwyn Hall several times. Is it bad luck, or is it caused by creepy Ernessa, the object of the diarist's jealous spite? Is Ernessa a vampire, or is this the melodramatic imagination of a psychotic and grieving girl? Does she really see Ernessa sucking blood from Lucy, or was she hallucinating? And is Lucy's increasing weakness simply caused by anorexia?”

I've often said that The Moth Diaries is my favourite book of all time.

Until now. Florence has place-taken it quite.

________________________________

Are you intrigued? Well, good news: I’m going to meet John Harding later this month during the Edinburgh Book Festival. I’ll be interviewing him – a podcast if possible, possibly even with video. Please come back for that. I want to know about the language, how it came, how he worked it; I want to know a lot. I want to know about his own childhood, too. But meanwhile, for goodness’s sake: BUY THE DAMN BOOK and share my altered neural networks, otherwise this book will continue to crazy me alone! And the ebook is stupid cheap. There is quite simply no reason not to buy it. And if you love it, join me in singing it.

DO go and see John Harding and Michelle Paver at the Edinburgh International Book Festival NEXT WEEK - Weds 17th August. Details and booking here.

Some links: 

John Harding talking about the book.

John reading the beginning.


John's website and blog.

The Times review.

BLOG BABY: CAROLINE GREEN

Blog Babies are writers who contact me to tell me of a publishing deal after (but I make no claim that it was caused by...) reading my blog. Today I am delighted to bring you Caroline Green. Did she stuggle? Did she suffer for her art? Find out!

_______________________________

Caroline is the author of Dark Ride and here is the blurb:

A mysterious boy. A haunting secret.

A shiver crawled up my spine. It felt like the loneliest place in the world. For a second I thought I caught a snatch of music in the air, but it was just the wind whistling through cracks in the fairground hoardings. My instincts screamed, ‘Run away, Bel! Run away and never return!’ But instead my fingers closed around the ticket in my pocket. Admit one.

 

Bel has never met anyone like Luka. And the day she follows him into the abandoned fairground, she is totally unprepared for the turn her life is about to take.

NM: Tell us something about your early writing history, before you successfully submitted your novel.

CG: Dark Ride is actually the third novel I’ve written. The first, an adult book in the WF genre, got some positive rejections but was really a learning exercise. It felt a bit like falling in love. I couldn’t wait to work on it and the words just poured out of me in a way that was really exhilarating. This meant, naturally, that the plot was pants! The second book was for children aged 9-12 and was written initially for my eldest son. Despite winning a prize at the Winchester Writer’s Conference, and being briefly touted by Cornerstones, it didn’t go anywhere and I know now that it had some serious flaws. I forced myself to move on and write what became Dark Ride. This time I had lots of call in from agents and lots of interest that made me feel as though I was ‘almost there’. But none of them came to anything and they all ultimately rejected me.

NM: So, you decided to stop subbing to agents and go straight to publishers. What happened then?

CG: Feeling very battered and bruised by the process by this point, I had one last ditch attempt at publication by sending it directly to a publisher, Piccadilly Press. They asked to see the whole thing, then wanted to meet to suggest some changes. I was asked to come up with a revised synopsis, replacing a storyline that wasn’t working. My editor then came with a few queries and just wanted to know in a line or two  how I would handle certain sections. I had a week of horrible limbo when I didn’t really know what was going on. Then, one afternoon, I received the best email of my life, offering me a book deal.

NM: And you now have an agent! I presume that once you had a publisher that was easy? Can you take us through how that worked? And what has your agent been able to do for you that you couldn't have done yourself?

CG: I had also written a short book for my now eight year old son that Piccadilly Press passed on. I approached a bunch of agents about this and received very fast responses when they knew I already had a deal! Catherine Pellegrino at RCW surprised me by asking if she could see Dark Ride as well. I asked my editor if it was OK and she said fine, but obviously it’s gone beyond stage of an agent having any editorial input. Catherine had initially rejected it on three chapters and remembers it coming in. She is quite honest about the fact that she wasn’t very taken with it in that instance. But when she read the whole thing, she loved it and was horrified that it had slipped through her grasp! She invited me in and we just hit it off straight away. She offered to sign me and I said yes instantly. I’ve sort of given up on the younger kids’ book for now. Has an essential structural problem and I don’t feel strongly enough about it to address at the moment. I was subsequently offered a further 2-book deal by Piccadilly and Catherine was invaluable at this stage. She negotiated the contract to the nth degree. She has also helped me to secure a contract writing a book under a pseudonym for Working Partners.

NM: You'd been reading my blog for a while before you were picked up - what do you remember learning?

CG: I vividly remember you once writing about how many rejections you’d had and how you’d got where you are the hard way. It helped to bolster my desire not to give up, however battered I felt.

NM: You said, "Dark Ride has just come out and the whole thing is a total and utter dream come true." Go on, tell us about the dream! Tell us what it feels like!

CG: Being published feels incredible. It’s better than I imagined. Standing at my launch party, surrounded by family friends, publisher and agent was one of the best evenings of my life. I’ll never forget telling my husband and family about the book deals, especially dancing around the room to very loud music [Blink 182!] with my youngest when we were alone here and the first email came in. Just last night a friend’s daughter ran up and breathlessly told me she’s loved Dark Ride, all eyes shining. You really can’t put a price on how that feels.

NM: Has anything surprised you about being published? What do wish you'd known before? Anything you could have prepared for better?

CG: I’m not sure...I think I’d been around the houses so long and been part of online writing communities where other writers have had both good and bad experiences galore, that I was actually quite well prepared for how it feels. If anything is surprising, it’s just how brilliant it DOES feel. More so than I even imagined. I guess I could add that I perhaps thought that if I made it over that mountain, subsequent books would be easier to write. And I’m finding that’s not the case at all!

Hooray for blog babies! Good luck, Caroline and thanks for letting me know of your news!

MARY HOFFMAN ON HISTORICAL FICTION AND DAVID

I am delighted to welcome the award-winning and highly intelligent writer, Mary Hoffman, on publication day for her new historical novel, David. But I don't have people on here only to launch their books - I make them teach us something. So, my questions to Mary are all based around the idea of historical fiction, how it works, what it needs, what the pitfalls are. It's one of my favourite things to write - and for a children's or teenage author, as Mary and I both are, it's full of extra possibilities, unconstrained as we are by the bounds of mobile phones, social services and interfering parents.

A little bit about David, first:

Aged just eighteen, Gabriele sets off from his home in Settignano to make his fortune in Florence. He plans to go straight to the home of renowned sculptor Michelangelo, who is also his ‘milk brother’, but instead finds himself in the house of a wealthy widow. Before he knows it Gabriele’s plans of living a simple life as a stonecutter have disintegrated and instead he has become an artist’s model, embroiled in Florentine politics and spying for the frateschi. Gabriele is playing a dangerous game and will be lucky to escape Florence with his life.

And a little about Mary:
Mary Hoffman is an acclaimed children’s author and critic. She is the author of the internationally bestselling picture book Amazing Grace. Her Stravaganza sequence for Bloomsbury has a huge fan base and Stravaganza: City of Secrets was nominated for the Carnegie Medal. She has also received award recognition for her stand-alone historical titles: Troubadour was nominated for the 2010 Carnegie Medal and shortlisted for the Costa Book Award and The Falconer’s Knot was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Award and winner of the French Prix Polar Jeunesse 2009. Mary lives with her husband in Oxfordshire.

Right, you lot, settle down and listen to Mary opening the door to historical fiction.

NM: When you hear a true story that you want to turn into a novel, what are the ingredients you look for which make it work?

MH: The three "straight" historical novels I have written have all begun in a different way:

The Falconer's Knot had a "mother" and a "father". My editor at Bloomsbury asked me if I'd like to try writing "The Name of the Rose for teenagers" and my husband came back from a falconry day, talking about how to tie "a falconer's knot" and the two fused together to make the novel.

Troubadour began with a single word. I just could not get the word "troubadour" out of my mind. I was sort of haunted by it. So I knew I had to start researching it. Then I found out that the flourishing of the troubadours - and women troubadours too (called Trobairitz) - came at the same time as the most ghastly massacres and mutilations of the Albigensian Crusade in the early 13th century. Courtly Love and hideous slaughter: hence the subtitle, a story of love and war.

NM: What attracted you to David? [Apart from his, erm, physique!]

MH: Funnily enough, although I am a massive fan of Michelangelo's sculptures, David is not my favourite. But he is just so "there"! [NM: Indeed!] You can't ignore him. I suppose I felt bound to write about him. But what really attracted me was that the historical facts were there as a sort of scaffolding but that no-one knew anything about the model of the David - or even if there was one. That's an irresistible challenge for a novelist.

David is so well known that he needs no explanation but the other two are about much obscurer events and practices. I can't find anything in common across the three or with the next historical project; I can only say "I know it when I come across it"!

NM: Sometimes we have to alter or ignore historical details. Can you define what sort of things you feel you can alter and what do you feel you can't?

MH: I don't change anything! What I do is add and insert and elaborate. But, possibly because I don't have a history degree, I try to be as accurate as possible. And I always put a historical note, to show which characters and events are historical and which invented.

NM adds: I've also never had to change anything such as dates or events, but I have an example to show the sort of thing we could change. When I was writing Fleshmarket, I needed a fire to have happened in a certain part of Edinburgh's Old Town in 1824. Now, there were often fires in the Old Town, so I could just have invented one, but, as it happens, the biggest fire of that era happened in exactly the part where I needed it, in 1824. But if it hadn't, I'd have invented it.

MH: Having just said that I don't change anything, I did change the leader of the pro-Medici faction in David! The real historical one was called Doffo Spini - great name isn't it? - but I wanted him to play a specific, quite unpleasant role in the story, so I made up a different leader, called Antonello de' Altobiondi, and then clad all his followers in purple and green. But I play fair and say that in the Historical Note.

NM: Are you more research fanatic or impatient to get the story down? Can you tell us something of your research methods?

MH: I research madly, fanatically, for months and make copious notes. Then I put it all away in a box, write the story and just trust that, when I need it, that bit of detail I researched will come back to me. And if I'm lucky I'll be able to find the right note and check on it. [NM: Sounds just like me.]

And of course, while writing, I am bound to come across something that I didn't anticipate needing to know. Then I stop writing and find it out. But ultimately it's the story that matters; you could stop and check a dozen times on every page but you need to reach a point where you can trust your ability to tell a story and hope that you've done enough homework not to make any mistakes that will require a complete re-write.

I make timelines and card indexes and family trees and love all the supporting apparatus of writing a historical novel.

NM: Do you have a favourite period or setting that you like to return to?

MH: I write about the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, mainly in Italy (though Troubadour begins in the south of France). I don't think I would write about anything earlier than 1200 or later than 1620-ish. But that's still over 400 years so quite a big span. At the moment I'm researching some Plantagenet novels set in England for a change, beginning about 1389.

NM: Apart from familiarity with that period, what makes it so wonderful to write about?

MH: What makes it wonderful to write about is partly not having to live in it! Imagine having toothache, or giving birth or having to have an operation in my favourite period! [NM: I felt that while describing the mastectomy without anaesthetic in Fleshmarket...] And as a vegetarian, I would probably starve. There's a wonderful book by Ian Mortimer, called The Time-Travellers Guide to the Middle Ages, which makes it very clear I wouldn't have survived five minutes.

But what attracts me about those periods is that in medieval and Renaissance Italy art was revered and considered part of everyone's life. When a great new altarpiece was made for the cathedral in Siena, it was carried through the streets of the city and practically mobbed. That's connected with the role of religion too, which fascinates me. Everyone in Europe understanding the iconography of great religious painting and sculpture. Everyone knowing the stories behind them.

I like the idea that people believed there was more to life than getting your daily bread. It doesn't have to be religion (although it pretty much did have to be then) but they accepted there was a spiritual dimension to life; they took that for granted and we seem to have lost that.

NM: How do you approach the historical "archaic" language problem, especially when writing for young people who might have less tolerance for old word usage? Any tricks?

MH: Ah the old "forsooth" and "gadzooks" trap! I try to keep dialogue very plain but without much elision. "I cannot" in dialogue immediately gives an older feel. But I use the "right" word in narrative, even if its occasionally a hard one, like "psalter" "unshriven" "flagon," even if they are not part of modern teenage vocabulary. The context always gives it to the reader and I'm not going to say "book of psalms," "without being absolved" or "vessel for holding wine." I think
readers LIKE unusual words, as long as there are not so many of them as to obscure meaning. And it gives the right flavour to the story, a sort of richness of detail in the language, which matters to me.

NM adds: I completely agree. Another trick I use is occasionally to alter the modern order of words. for example, instead of saying, "I don't know," I might say, "I know not."

NM: Sometimes in historical fiction, it's the secondary, (often truly fictional), characters who are the most fun to create, perhaps because we have total freedom with them. Who is your favourite character in David? 

MH: What an interesting question! My favourite characters CAN be historical; I loved writing about the painter Simone Martini in The Falconer's Knot. In David, it really is Gabriele, the main character, who most engaged me because I did have almost total freedom with him but I also enjoyed writing about Leonardo's retinue of "boys" especially Salai, his favourite in every sense.

Fabulous answers, Mary! Thank you, and I wish you the hugest success with David. It's a wonderful story, very expertly and grippingly told.

Mary also told me that there'd been some discussion on Twitter about what the Italian for Crabbit Old Bat would be. They settled on "vecchiaccia bisbetica", which apparently has no bats in it at all but I do think it sounds suitably irritable and snappy, so I graciously accept the title. Even though I can't pronounce it.

By the way, Celia Rees and I are speaking together about historical writing for young people, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival - Sunday 21st August. Do come!

Also, DO head over to the brand new and already wave-making History Girls collaborative blog, where Mary, Celia and I, along with many others, can be found keeping the past alive.

THE MASTER CRIMINAL NOVELIST AT WORK

Today we're going to talk about writing a crime series. Well, I'm not, because I don't know anything about it, but I'm going to ask my expert friend, Aline Templeton, hugely acclaimed author of the Marjory Fleming series of crime novels set in rural Galloway, that beautiful and peaceful  - hooray! - South-West corner of Scotland.

Cradle to Grave, Aline's latest, is published in paperback today, so I asked her to come and talk about the intricacies of creating one of the Holy Grails of publishing: the successful series character. Easily persuaded by the promise of a modest glass of wine, she agreed.

NM: You'd written several stand-alone novels before you started the Marjory Fleming books.
What was the thinking behind deciding to create a series character? Was it your publisher, your agent or you who had the initial idea to create a series?

AT: I'd enjoyed writing stand-alones, and rather fought shy of doing a series, which would tie me down in terms of setting and character. With my stand-alones, the plot had tended to dictate the setting: for instance, Shades of Death, set in limestone caves, had to be in either Somerset or Derbyshire, and I knew Derbyshire better.  So in some ways that's easier, and plots can be more straightforward too, in that you don't have to do what I always think of as the Fair Isle knitting bit – interweaving the main action with the continuing story of the series characters' lives.

So I think I'd have to say it was the character  that came into my mind and settled who produced the initial idea!  I could see her clearly: she was tall, fit-looking and strong-minded and  she wasn't the standard dysfunctional loner with lovers, an attitude problem, and an intimate relationship with the bottle. She was like the policewomen I had known when I was a JP: a working mother, married, with the problems of elderly parents and teenage kids on top of  the crazy demands of the job. I knew at once that she wasn't a one-book character, so I had to take the plunge .My agent and my editor were both enthusiastic, so the DI Marjory Fleming series began.

NM: If you were advising an unpublished author, would you advise starting with stand alones, or is it fine to launch straight into a series?  

There's no doubt that readers – and so publishers - like series.  It lets them feel they know the characters and there's a sort of 'soap opera' hook to draw them in.  If you're starting out, there's no reason at all why you shouldn't start with a series, if you feel will have enough compatible ideas to keep it fresh.  But lots of writers have produced a stand-alone which has such a strong central character that it becomes obvious there's more to say and some of these have turned into very successful series.

NM: When I interviewed Ian Rankin, he said it took a couple of Rebus novels before he felt he knew the character. How strongly did you feel you knew M during the first one? She's a family woman and very much has "stuff" going on in her life - was all this planned? Also, I notice that in each of the books, she has a particular "issue" to deal with - is this a specific technique you recommend for a series character?

AT: I felt I knew a lot about Marjory's character from the start; I lived with her for a long time before the detail of the series fell into place.  What I felt I didn't know in the first books was about her past.  It was  rather like making a friend, but only later discovering what had happened to them before you knew them – and being quite surprised!  She was quite a new DI in the first book, and I do feel that the scars of experience  have changed her, that she's learned a lot – sadder and wiser, perhaps -  and I feel that happened organically rather than being planned.  But quite often in a book I will lay down a plot line which I pick up in a later one, particularly in The Darkness and the Deep and Lying Dead.  

I had certainly planned that her family would be a very important thread, and yes, some of what has happened to them I planned from the start.  But again, as characters develop, their personalities dictate events.

The 'issue' themes came about, really, by accident.  The first book, Cold in the Earth, had a background of the Foot and Mouth epidemic, and when I decided to set my second book in a fishing village where the fishing has gone (close to my heart, since I come from one like that) I began to think in general about the problems of rural life.  Our urban society tends to have an overly romantic view of country living as propagated in the glossy mags – gingham curtains blowing in the breeze, a row of preserves on the shelf, rosy-cheeked children frolicking under the blossom in the orchard - and it appealed to me that I could highlight problems like savage unemployment and deprivation, local families being priced out of villages, and small shops having their existence threatened by a supermarket.  The 'issue' has been a background rather than the lynchpin of the plot, but I do feel it gives an additional dimension to the book.  Of course you can achieve that in all sorts of other ways, but in a series I think you need a very solid, believable background if readers are going to want to come back to find out more. Ideally, it should be like returning to somewhere they visit regularly; when readers open a new book, they should be saying, 'Right! Now, what's everyone been doing since I went away?'

NM: I'm always telling writers to think of readers. By this, I don't mean I pander to them, but I'm always asking myself "Does the reader want or need to read that sentence?" But Ian Rankin and Joanne Harris both said on this blog that they are not really thinking of their readers. Stephen King is on my side and talks about writing his second draft very much with the reader in mind. Where do you stand on this? 

AT: What I love about crime writing is that I write with the readers at my shoulder, all the time. We're in this together - but I'm not writing to please; I'm doing my level best to wrongfoot them, and it's a constant challenge.  I play fair with clues to the puzzle, in that they will be there, but I'm going to do my level best to make sure readers don't spot them – ah, the joy of red herrings!  I've been known to write and rewrite a scene half-a-dozen times until I'm sure that the reader at my shoulder will miss it.  My editor said that reaching the denouement of Lying Dead, she had exclaimed aloud, 'But it can't be!' then looked back and saw the clues – that's what I'm aiming for. [NM: Perfect!]

 I do agree with you about cutting out extraneous material, though I don't really think about the reader at that point, more about tension and pace and good style – quite technical stuff.  I can't bear flabby prose and setting to with a scalpel is another particular pleasure.  If I need to add in something later, it's a bad sign if I can just slot it in: it should be so taut that I have to do unpicking and reweaving before I can do it.

NM: There will be aspiring crime writers reading this. What do you believe publishers are looking for in a debut crime novel? Leaving aside things like the ability to write a great sentence, what do you see as the essential ingredients of a must-be-published debut crime novel?

AT: I'd have to say to aspiring writers that the trouble is, there isn't a recipe, alas.  You could have fantastic ingredients like a brilliantly worked-out plot, original characters, a fantastic setting, the most amazing first sentence  - but if you don't have that odd, intangible ability to make the reader want to turn the next page (ideally as fast as they can) there's no point.

Let's assume you do.  (Of course you do!).  After that, I think I'd say it's originality, freshness.  I can't begin to guess how many crime novels have been written, yet authors are still coming up with the idea that makes the publisher say, 'That's intriguing!'  Once they've nibbled at the bait, they have to be reeled in with compelling characters and a driving plot with pace and tension.  And the main thing?  They have to want to know what's going to happen.  [NM: Yes!] The best compliment I can get is when someone says to me, 'I was up reading your book till three in the morning.'

NM: Which of your books is your favourite? If someone hasn't read an Aline Templeton, which one would you like them to start with?

AT: That's the 'Which of you children do you like best?' question! [NM: hehehehehe] If you haven't read any in the series, Cold in the Earth introduces DI Fleming – 'Big Marge', to her detectives. The books are all self-contained novels so don't need to be read in sequence, though for the best effect The Darkness and the Deep and Lying Dead, should be read in that order. But if I'm forced to chose, I think the new one, Cradle to Grave, is my best yet. Like Marjory, I think I've learned as I went along and it has more psychological depth and drama  than any previous one. The ambiguous main character, Beth – a nanny accused, and controversially acquitted, of murdering her charge – was immensely satisfying to create – and I enjoyed learning a bit more about Marjory's dubious past!

And now for my "How Was It For You?" slot:
Was your route to publication paved with rejections? How long did it take and roughly how many rejections?

Oh yes!  I knew from the moment I could hold a pencil that I was an author, but for some reason publishers were very slow to understand this and had to have it explained to them over and over again for years before the penny dropped.  I couldn't begin to tell you how many, except that I've often said I should have kept them all to paper the downstairs loo instead of tearing them up and jumping on them.  Never give up, guys!

Do you have a memorable rejection letter?

Not as such, but I did learn to ignore completely the first sentence when they told me how fantastic it was and how much they loved it, and go straight to the paragraph that began, 'But ...'

What stopped you being published earlier?

My agent!  No, that's not quite fair.   I could have ignored the advice she gave me, but I didn't.

I had written quite a bit for newspapers and magazines and I was approached by an agent before my first book was finished.  It went to Collins who were keen on it, but wanted a lot of work on the first half, which in those days meant rewriting by hand, then retyping, with a carbon sheet  and  industrial quantities of Tip-Ex.  I was a bit reluctant, being well into my second book by then, and my agent's advice – the single worst piece of advice I've ever had – was to go on and finish that book and see about the other one after that.  In the interim, publishing had another of its periodic fits of recession, Collins sacked a third of its work force and weren't much interested in untried authors.  That set me back, and I was in my late thirties when I got my first book published - after I'd sacked my agent!

What do you wish you'd known earlier?

It took me a while to appreciate that you are enormously lucky if a professional takes the trouble to criticise your work.  It's always tempting to bristle, to say they don't know what they're talking about, but the chances are they do.  Even if I decide I can't accept it for the sake of  the story's integrity, I try to take it on board – not that it's easy.  It's a bit like that joke, 'How many authors does it take to change a light bulb?'  'Does it have to change?  I've worked so hard on it already…'

THANK YOU, ALINE! So much in there, so much. Thank you for being so generous with your time. Very inspirational, informative and entertaining.

I do heartily recommend Aline's books, whether you're an aspiring crime writer or a reader who likes a cracking, engaging, gripping read. 

MOIRA MONOLOGUES & ENHANCED DIGITAL THINGUMMIES

Photo by Christopher Bowen, with permissio

Recently, when I was badly, and with impeccably awful timing, losing my voice, I bumped into Alan Bissett on a train journey from Inverness to Edinburgh. Now, since Alan's latest work is called The Moira Monologues, which he has been touring in Scotland to great acclaim and with sell-out shows, I should have been able to rest my voice. Surely, Alan, chatty man that he is, would do all the talking? But oh, no, no: this is me we're talking about. I don't stop talking just because I have a sore throat, events coming up and an acclaimed comedian sitting opposite me. Even with his very lovely girlfriend there.

So, we got talking. Or he did when he could. And I discovered that the Moira Monologues is (are?) now an enhanced ebook thingummy, which I was very interested in, mainly because I didn't actually know what it was, except vaguely. Basically, it's an ebook, enhanced by extra stuff, in this case by the full audio version of the Monologues, which people can then download onto other platforms. Also, you can buy the print version of the book as Print on Demand. So, multi-purpose, multi-platform. Anyway, I thought I'd get Alan to tell you a bit more, including a bit more about Cargo, his innovative young publishers. (Who, by the way, sent me a press pack so digitally sophisticated that I couldn't open it. But they were so enthusiastic that it almost made up for it.)

In which I interview the man behind the Moira Monologues.

NM: What the hell is this project?? Spill the beans, Bissett.

AB: The Moira Monologues is a 'one-woman show' which I wrote, performed and toured throughout Scotland last year, including 3 weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe.  It's a story based on the women in my family, who are brilliant talkers, which, for some reason, I thought it would be a great idea to perform myself...as a woman!  The reviews and audience responses were through the roof, and the BBC have even bought the character for development, so I figured publishing the script plus audio version would be the next logical step.

NM: What's the thinking behind the enhanced ebook + POD platforms?

AB: First of all, I wanted to support Cargo, who are a new Glasgow publisher, run by people in their early twenties, who have tons of ambition and energy, [NM: indeedy]and I thought this project would suit them.  They have very innovative ideas for how to publish and promote work that don't just include the usual book chains/broadsheet reviews route.  The idea of publishing the Moira text PLUS an audio of me performing the show live for downloading to iPods, iPhones and laptops is a very new and exciting one.  It retools fiction for a generation who are far more au fait with technology than I could ever be.  AND for people who like a good old fashioned book, they'll also print you one on demand! [NM: btw, I note it's not available for Kindle. Haha Amazon. EDITED TO ADD: oops, wrong info. It is available on Kindle. Sorry, Amazon.]

NM: What are you doing to promote it?

AB: What I always do: touring myself round the schools, reading groups, libraries.  I probably do about 3 readings per week, sometimes more, and now I almost always get requests for Moira.  She's a popular woman!

NM: Tell us about @moira_bell on Twitter. Do you find that works in a way that your own persona wouldn't? I know a couple of people who have alter egos as Twitter characters but I remained to be convinced.

AB: Yes, I'm having fun with it.  I like being Moira anyway - because she says things that I wouldn't DARE - and given I'll have to write more of her for the BBC it allows me to explore her world a bit more.  For people who saw the show, and now feel like they know her...well now they get to have her as their Twitter pal! [NM: I follow @moira_bell - highly recommended.] 

NM: Tell us a bit of other book news - what does Alan Bissett do when he's not pretending to be a woman?

AB: My first novel, Boyracers, is being re-released in April for its 10th Anniversary, with a new afterword by me, and my new novel, Pack Men, will be out in August.  STV have just bought my most recent novel, Death of a Ladies Man, also.  So it's a very exciting year.  Moira, however, is queen, and you should check her out.  She's kinda unforgettable.

Big thanks to Alan for giving up his time. If you want to download Moira, or order the book, the link is here.


I think this is all really interesting, giving us some ideas as to what ebooks can do.  Enhanced ebooks are, I believe, a really good way forward. I lied when I said I didn't know what they are. I actually have my own dream of the future: a paper book just like a "normal" book, but enhanced by a sheet of electronic paper at the beginning, so that you can access extra e-bits and online stuff by touching something on the e-paper. So, better than an enhanced ebook - an enhanced booky book.

On that subject....
I have actually read (and paid for) an enhanced ebook - and I'm afraid I give it only 5/10. It's called Net Matters, published as an app for iPad only by Canongate Books. It seemed to me just an excuse for producing a disappointingly short book, with pictures, some of which move without reader control and which in one case completely prevented me from being able to read the text. You can't find your way around; it's nigh-on impossible to find a bit you want to read again; and it's more like a long essay divided into chunks, with pretty (but sometimes distracting) pictures and a few links to websites. So, enhanced ebooks are the way forward but this was not a good introduction, in my opinion. Canongate is a very clever and often brilliant publisher: I believe they could have done much better.