One Day...

On Saturday I did my first proper book signing at Waterstone’s in Croydon, and if I’m honest, I could’ve done without it as it was way out of my neck of the woods and put me way out of my comfort zone.  I was expecting a chair and a table and hoping for a not too embarrassingly short queue of people.  What I got was a small side-table with 30 of my books and an encouraging word from the manager to “go sell ’em”.  So off I went, approaching anyone I could find loitering by the fantasy and horror sections, and as it turns out, I’m not too shabby a sales person.  I sold 20 odd books in about 4 hours and I’d say there were only about 30 odd people that went near the fantasy and horror sections all day. 

It cost me £50 in petrol and I’d be lucky if I made £4 in royalties, but I did meet some enthusiastic readers of fantasy and horror literature of which more than a few took the time to chat and show interest in what a writer does and how he does it.  Priceless.

But one day I hope to have a table, some advertising, and hopefully an embarrassingly long queue of people waiting to get their hands on a signed copy from yours truly.  One day I’d like to cover the petrol money.

One day I want to be a real writer…

King Cover

For all you Stephen King fans out there (of which I certainly am one), here’s a peek at Hodder & Stoughton's just-released UK cover of the much anticipated 11.22.63 ­– due to hit stores on November 8^th.  Ain’t she purdy…

Ernest work…

I am reading two books at the moment, and as I said last week, I’m striving for a mix of genre and literary.  This week my offering is nothing more than a passage I found interesting.  It’s from the literary one, but about this thing that we do:

It was wonderful to walk down the long flight of stairs knowing that I’d had good luck working.  I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next.  That way I could be sure of going on the next day.  But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of the blue that they made.  I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry.  You have always written before and you will write now.  All you have to do is write one true sentence.  Write the truest sentence that you know.’  So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.  It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.  If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.  Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.  I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline. 

Ernest Hemingway, A Movable Feast

Both of the ideas Hemingway talks about appeal to me.  Beginning with a simple sentence to get the paragraph going and edging into the next day’s work.  I find it much easier to start writing when I’m already into whatever it is I’m writing.  A smart fellow.

Book Signing

I'll be signing copies of Dark Heart at Waterstone's Croydon on the 27th of August, so feel free to pop by, say hi, and, erm... buy?

Full Circle

I have always tried to read widely, especially once I’d made up my mind to become a writer.  It was a mantra I’d heard over and over in author interviews and ‘How to’ books: If you want to become a writer you must read, and read widely.  My first love will always be seated in the dark and supernatural, but my journeys into so-called ‘literary’ fiction have been equally joyous, even if my selections in this genre (and it is a genre) have been for educational gain rather than escapism, although escapism was usually what I ended up with.  But this all changed when I signed over my first novel for publication.

All of a sudden I wanted to read more widely in the genre I was writing in, to read the work of my peers, and for that reason literary fiction took a back seat.  In fact it took a trip to Kent to make me realise that I’d been reading my genre for educational gain for the last couple of years, rather than escapism.

I’d taken a weekend break with my wife and a couple of good friends but hadn’t taken a book with me, and as every man knows, toilet time is reading time.  Anyway, it was time to go whoop-whoop and I had nothing to read and so grabbed a book from the shelf in my room.  It turned out to be Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road.  Over the course of the weekend I managed a couple of chapters, and although I wasn’t hooked, I thought I owed it to myself to finish (the book, not whoop-whoop).  Somehow (my god I’m a tea-leaf!) the book ended up in my bag and came home with me, and over the next week I devoured it and I loved it. 

Revolutionary Road has no plot to speak of, you just follow Frank and April Wheeler as their marriage implodes, and it was this lack of plot that set me free and allowed me to visit the Nirvana that is escapism.  Reading in my own genre it’s hard not to notice the mechanics of plot, and all the other tools and techniques that go into crafting such a story, and it’s a little bit like seeing the zip running up the back of the monster or seeing the strings on the marionette; you know it isn’t real. 

Of course when I reached the end of RR I could see that Yates had a plan from the start – call it a plot if you want – but it’s subtle, and revealed in a simple but beautiful metaphor (I loves me metaphors, ugh, ugh, ugh), and it’s the metaphor that shows Yates’ understanding of his material, and that ‘plotless’ is certainly not ‘aimless’.  He knew exactly what he was writing.

Genre writers, including myself, are guilty of defending their worth when it comes to the old genre V literary debate, but if I’m honest, those literary guys are just plain old better writers than we are.  It isn’t just about stringing beautiful sentences together; they have a deeper understanding of what they are writing about as a whole, and there is something to be learned from that.

So it seems I’ve come full circle; I’m going to divide my reading up like I used to: one lit, one genre.  And if they happen to crossover and meet in the same book… Nirvana. 

Read Horror Interview

Read Horror puts its fingers in its ears while I talk about guts and gore and McCarthy and Yates and The Tommyknockers and...

Guest Blogger: Jo Reed

Today I'd like to introduce Jo Reed, author of the very fine Blood Dancers series of novels.  Take it away, Jo... 

A few years ago I had a bit of set-to with an elderly lady from the next village. We shared a mutual hairdresser, so it was inevitable we were going to be introduced sooner or later. One of these days I’m going to write a spooky tale about women’s hairdressers. I think the only reason Stephen King hasn’t put one centre stage yet is because men’s barbers just don’t operate on the same level. But to get back to the plot, I was an unpublished writer at the time and my hairdresser just happened to say, ‘Hey, you know, you’d love Betty. She’s had loads published, and she’s a fantasy writer, like you. I’ll give her your number.’

In due course, I got a call from Betty inviting me to lunch. Nobody messes with a hairdresser, not even Betty. I was quite excited. At that stage, nobody but the dog had read my work, and this woman was published, for goodness sake. Betty was keen to read my novel. I was delighted. At least, I was until she called back a couple of weeks later, spluttering with indignation. ‘You said it was fantasy. It’s got sex in it. Fantasy does not have sex in it.’

‘Mine does,’ I said, a bit miffed.

‘And it’s in the real world. You can’t have fantasy in the real world.’ Betty clearly had never read Neil Gaiman or Charlie Huston.

‘Mine is,’ I said, feeling a bit more miffed.

‘Then you can’t call it fantasy,’ she said, and put the phone down hard, leaving me bemused and draining my ear of imaginary spittle.

My hairdresser smirked, and said, ‘I knew she’d say that.’

It got me thinking – the fantasy/horror/speculative fiction spectrum is a very broad church. From my point of view, as a reader, there have never been boundaries between denominations. I once got into terrible trouble as a kid for offering to read to my little cousin a bedtime story. She liked ‘fantasy’ so I selected my then favourite – Poe’s ‘The Tell Tale Heart’ – well, yeah, I know. I was stretching it. I got grounded and my little cousin didn’t sleep for weeks.

With hindsight, handing my novel to Betty was like giving an essay on why God was a Mormon to a Catholic. Yet categorising my work was something that never occurred to me while I was writing it. The idea for the novels was one that had been germinating for a long time. For more than fifteen years I had worked as a researcher, and later a lecturer, looking at the effect of genetics on behaviour and mental health. Lunchtime speculations with colleagues tended to focus on the possible long term consequences of prolonged inbreeding in humans. Well, geeks are like that. By the time I stopped being a geek and had time to write, the Blood Dancers series was well sketched out in my head. A natural genetic mutation two thousand years in the past produces a superhuman madman who embarks on the greatest genetic selection program in history – the result is the ‘Family’ – power hungry, unstoppable, riddled with insanity and unable to break free of its own flawed genetic heritage. I cleared my desk and wrote it all down. The issue of where to place it in genre terms didn’t arise – at least it didn’t until Betty put in her tuppence worth of unsettling advice.

It was only when the novels were complete and I started submitting the first in the series, The Tyranny of the Blood, to agents and publishers that it suddenly became important to try and pin it down. When it comes to a genre as diverse as fantasy, that’s no easy thing, especially when, as a nervy fledgling writer, you’ve been shouted at down the phone by someone like Betty. I finally nailed it when a successful scifi/fantasy writer read the books and very politely made some complimentary comments, including, ‘I do like good contemporary fantasy.’ Ha!

‘See,’ said my hairdresser after the publication of Tyranny, ‘I told you it would be worth your while meeting Betty.’

My next novel (if Stephen King doesn’t get there first), will be a spine-tingling tale entitled ‘The Salon’.

Bio

Jo Reed lives and works as a writer and lecturer in the Southwest of England. She is the author of the Blood Dancers series of novels, the first two of which, The Tyranny of the Blood, and A Child of the Blood are published by Wild Wolf Publishing. Her next Blood Dancers novel, Malim’s Legacy, is due for publication in late 2011/2012, and she is currently working on a fourth novel.

In addition to her fantasy novels, Jo won the Daily Telegraph travel writing prize in 2009, and her short stories have appeared in many national magazines.