Guest post: HOW TO WRITE ROMANTIC FICTION Jane Bidder

 I first met Jane Bidder, who writes under the name Janey Fraser, when we were both writers in residence in prisons at opposite ends of the country.  We got on very well. I have always appreciated  her practical can-do approach to writing and this will be reflected in her forthcoming 'How To ...'  book.

Janey was a journalist for nearly thirty years until becoming a full time novelist. She is also a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Exeter University and a judge for the life story section of the Koestler Awards. Janey lives by the sea with her second husband and a constant going-in and out of older children.

She usually writes family comedy with a strong dramatic twist. Her current novel is ‘HappyFamilies’ published by  Arrow.  As Jane Bidder, she writes social crime novels. Her latest novel is Guilty, published by Accent.

www.janeyfraser.co.uk

Janey writes: 

'By the middle of January, I was beginning to feel like Cinderella approaching midnight. My deadline for HOW TO WRITE ROMANTIC FICTION was nearly nigh. Unlike Cinders, I had days rather than hours until crunch-time but even so, my heart was beating. I’d written the first draft a few months earlier but had to put it to one side in order to do the proofs on my tenth novel , Guilty. This is about Simon, a solicitor who goes to prison for two years for a driving offence – along with the humorous voice of Joanna, the beautiful woman who died in the crash and who acts as a witty commentator Inside.

The two books were like chalk and cheese. But, like many writers with different voices inside, the two actually helped each other. Although Guilty is a crime novel rather than a romance, it helped me to analyse how character ticks and how plot is constructed. It also provided a bit of a break from the different kind of discipline demanded by a non-fiction book.

Guilty is also a love story.  Simon, the solicitor, has just married Claire. They are totally wrapped up in each other until his transgression makes Claire wonder just how well she knows her new husband. It’s a problem which many a romantic fiction heroine has to grapple with. Love at first sight is all very well but what happens when you get down to the nitty gritty of the rest of life (not to mention the plot)?

In fact, a continual piling on of problems after problems was one of my main points in the How To Write a Plot section.  Readers might well get restless if you take the whole book to solve the main problem. (Without a crisis, remember, there’s no sorry story.) But if you allow the hero or heroine to solve the first one and then up the anti (in other words, the pressure), you’ll increase tension. And although that’s not great in real life, it’s a sure-fire seller in the world of books.

Realistic characters are also essential in romance – just as they are in any other kind of genre. Writers are always being asked if they base their fictional characters on real ones. The true answer is that we usually create a mixture. My characters might have an ear from someone I used to know; a craving for doughnuts like a long-dead aunt; and an uncanny sixth sense. The latter is partly fact and partly imagination. Simon, for instance, is certain he can hear Joanna. Personally, I believe that we carry on after life. But Simon himself, certainly isn’t based on a real living person.

Dialogue was another crucial chapter in my Cinderella race to beat the clock. Real people don’t speak like characters in novels and vice versa. If you taped your own conversation, there would be lots of ums and aahs and trivialities as well as (maybe) some riveting revelations.  When writing romance (and other genres too), every word of your dialogue has to count. It needs to push the plot along and also describe the character by showing us how he/she thinks , talks and makes love.

Talking of the latter, I had some real fun and games in the How to Write Sex chapter. Naturally, this involved some research by talking to other writers about how they ‘do it’. Advice ranges from closing the bedroom door to baring all. Personally, I go for the middle approach. That applies to my writing and my love life! After all, a girl needs a bit of mystery….

The whole point of a How To book is to help people get published. So there are lots of hints and tips too from other writers ranging from Katie Fforde to Kate Furnivall. Self-publishing has totally transformed the market but it is still possible to be published by a mainstream name. I spoke to publishers, authors and agents on how to get that elusive book deal.

All this took a lot of midnight oil and several cups of hot chocolate but in the end I made it, with twenty four hours to spare.  Rather disappointingly, my computer didn’t turn into a pumpkin although a hero did come knocking on my door. It turned out to be my newish husband. He’d left his keys behind......'

HOW TO WRITE ROMANTIC FICTION BY JANEY FRASER will be published later in the year by How To Books (Constable & Robinson). 

After The Honeymoon, by Janey Fraser will be published in May by Arrow, Random House. Her current Janey Fraser novel is called Happy Families

Guilty by Jane Bidder (a pen name) is published by Guilty. Currently available on Kindle. The paperback is due out in March.

www.janeyfraser.co.uk

www.janebidder.com

www.janecorry.co.uk

www.facebook.com/janeyfraserauthor

Twitter:

@sophiek_writer

@janey_fraser

Barney Retreat and a A Sense of Place.

I sometimes treat myself to a visit to Barnard Castle in South Durham.

I had just finished a big editing, revising and publishing task and was  sorely in need of a break which, as I am not a walker,  means a ride in my little car to drink a coffee and scribble/and/or enjoy conversation in some congenial place.

The old South Durham town of Barnard Castle is one of my destinations of choice. I go there regularly to drink coffee and scribble.

As a  family we are very fond of this old Weardale town  whose affectionate name in this locality is Barney. Through the years we have shopped there and generally hung out here, Many times we have visited the elegant  Bowes Museum  to look at  its paintings and exquisite artifacts.

 I once spotted  a tiny Roman silver spoon in a case there. It had been picked up in the nearby town of Spennymoor, dropped by some Roman when there was no town there at all - merely a pathway across a moor.

This silver spoon has  found a place in my forthcoming  novel Lines of Desire.

Our own Barney,

It was in the Museum - as part of the Durham Book Festival - that I had a fascinating  In Conversation session with  the writer Adele Parks.

My grandson, the Boy Who Likes  Chocolate went to school in Barney and my daughter Madam Licked Spoon and her husband Sean,  called their border terrier Barney, I'm still not sure whether she named this delightful family member after the town or after the school.

I have posted  on this blog before here and here,   about how important a sense of place is for a writer of  long and short fiction.

And so  my recent R & R visit to Barney made me wonder whether Barney might be an interesting place to locate a story,

Although swept through with a broad roadway dedicated to trade, this small town is full of ginnels and narrow places and has an old mill on the river which some years ago served as a damp and creaking book warehouse and is now being developed.

Charles Dickens famously slept here and dreamed up Nicholas Nickleby. And I myself have some material on the mysterious and much reviled second wife of Sir John Bowes (the one who built the Museum). Her name was Alphonsine and she is a fascinating character. i gathered a lot of material into a box. But it is still there a box - perhaps to re-visit in later times.

I have to admit I'm a bit more attracted to the history of  the old  Barney where carpets were woven and Durham Quilts were made and through whose streets , through the years, have swarmed hundreds of boys from  Barney School to greater and lesser dramatic effect -   later to emerge  into the sporting and public life of the nation.

There surely is a great story lurking in there somewhere.

 So, occasionally stir-crazy from writing and reading all day,  the delights of retreating to Barney and drinking coffee or watching a film in the newly refurbished Witham Hall can count as research.

Can't they?
wx

The Champagne and Strawberry Book Launch

 

 My close writing friend Avril Joy and I had a great Sunday in Durham celebrating the coincidence of the launch of our very different books about our writing process.

Our books are both out on Kindle this week and out in Paperback next week.

We meet regularly to talk and to write together and encourage each other. Avril actually writes beautifully about this process in her book.

But today was to be a pure celebration. And where better to celebrate that in the beautiful Durham City? This is an old haunt – and an old inspiration - of mine .and features in several of my novels. A great place to celebrate.

 The day was a bit damp but that only added a certain sheen to the lovely old streets and to our celebration.

 

We started in the Saddler Café with strawberry tarts and coffee. 

We looked at our books on Kindle and reflected on the amazing creative processes  that allow us to share our work with loyal and lovely readers far and wide. A magical process for all writers.

Not reallu us going to the champagne bar!
The monks bringing the relics of St Cuthbert
to Durham City 

Then we moved on to the champagne bar ...

and toasted our books and ourselves and buzzed with new ideas, new projects and renewed our optimism about – well, just everything.

So just what was it that we are celebrating?

 

Click here to See Avril's Book From Writing with Love 

Click here to See my book The Romancer: A Practical Guide to Writing Fiction  
 

All writers are dreamers, optimists, romancers. Read 'The Romancer'.

New Edition, Updated,On Kindle Now

My revised and updated my How To... book about writing, the  'The Romancer''  is on Amazon Kindle today and will be out next week as a new paperback. 

If you are a writer or wish you were, this book might get you going again or simply get you going for the first time.

If you get to read it and like it let me know. Share your own experience with me.  (Perhaps there is another book in there*...) 

It's not necessary to write a much valued review for me on Amazon, but truly that would be the cherry on the cake...

'Dreamers, optimists, visionaries, enthusiasts, escapists.’ Wendy Robertson declares that all writers are ‘Romancers’.  In this book she explores the way memory and dreaming have been at the roots of her inspiration for her fiction.  Here in 'The Romancer', aspiring and experienced writers will find writing processes and practical approaches – including her forty day plan for writing a novel – to re-imagine their own lives to inspire their fiction and develop their writing. '

* That would make an intriguing new anthology about writing wouldn't it?

A Writer's Afternoon in Very Early Spring.

Afternoon light in my garden

These flowered through winter into spring

 Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,
The seasons' difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile.
(As You Like It, 2.1.12-16) 

Snowdrops insisting on their earlu presenc, always come first.

I am longing for some sun and some heat.

Yesterday I dashed out to get the papers and in the sleety rain and the raw wind I was a miserable, cold soul.

I came inside and sat on a long sofa by the fire, turned on a powerful spotlight and read a book from my pile of must-reads. (Adele Geras' Facing the Light)

Warming up. I pulled out a notebook and wrote a list of all the things I have to do this spring, I stopped at fifteen and thought I must try to whittle it down.

I pulled out my drafting book and pored over my sketches for the forthcoming book. I wondered whether it should be a novella. This literary form has been much on my mind lately.

Then I looked  outside saw the dark afternoon light. \My heart sank..

So I went outside and my eye settled on the primulas which - against all odds - have flowered through this damp chill season.

And I knelt down to see the snowdrops insisting on struggling through the detritus of a garden winter.

Hope,  then ...

Compelled to Write - My Writing Process

Today is "My Writing Process" blog tour day, when writers post about their writing process. Last week, the inspired Kathleen Jones, posted hers.  Thank you Kathleen for inviting me on your Writing Process blog tour. I read your post and was inspired.  Click here for Kathleen's post 

My Writing Process

Q. What am I working on?  I have just sent to my agent the completed revision of my novel ‘Herding Peacocks’ about a group of writers on retreat in a house in France and...   ‘You can’t have rules for writers. That would be like herding peacocks,’ says crime-writer Ruthie Dancing, who suspects her plan for a Writer’s Retreat in might be a folly. Still, she gathers together a diverse group of writers - from young Joe, who lives in a homeless hostel, to the venerable romance writer Francine, whose life, going back to World War 2, is at the core of this novel. Then there are the cerebral poet Mariela and sociopathic Abby with her dangerously passive boyfriend Felix. Ruthie’s honoured guest at the retreat  is Booker Prize-winner Kit Hallam. And then there is American actor-playwright Tom Roache who comes join the fun and perhaps nail a part in the film of Kit’s prizewinning novel.’…

I hope my lovely agent and the editors like my new baby. The writing profession is unique in that with each major project we writers are reduced to an anxious infant, hoping that our parents approve of our precious product.

As Kathleen pointed out in her last post this situation is in a changing state with with the independent eBook publishing revolution. I have joined in this, recently using Amazon Createspace to publish my novels Paulie’s Web and Cruelty Games on Kindle and in Paperback. This was a truly pleasing and empowering process that I would recommend to anyone disappointed in the present state of mainstream publishing. My next personal publishing project with them will be to republish my two short story collections Knives and Forms of Flight.

In this intensely weird 'waiting game' I am also waiting for publishers reactions' to my novel Lines of Desire.

This one is  set on the island of Britain in 383 AD when a great love story blossoms between Magnus Maximus, (in the Welsh myth Macsen Wledig), the Roman military leader in Britain, afterwards for five years Roman Emperor. At th ecentre of the novel is Elen the legendary daughter of a powerful British king in the place we now call Wales. Magnus is fascinated by Elen, a gifted Seer and healer who is a ‘pathfinder’ and whose artistic, talented ancestors made straight roads in Britain long before the Romans. Now, as the Roman Empire begins to crumble, these two lovers symbolise the merging of the spiritual, sophisticated Celtic culture (with its esoteric rites and rituals) and the pragmatic military culture of Rome which is beginning to embrace Christianity as a useful political tool. 

At present,ever compelled,  I'm involved in reading and researching  for a novel about an as-yet un-named (do you have any names to suggest?)  ex-military prisoner, painter and poet. It's set in Bohemian London society just after World War Two. 
      I reckon you need to read and explore a hundred sources -  letters, histories, diaries and  artifacts before embarking on a fiction that will spring authentically  out of those times and events. 
      My working title for this one is Wraparound - after a short story written last year out which will be the basis for this novel. More about this on Life Twice Tasted anon...

Q. How does my work differ from others of its genre?    A perpetual drawback for me -  in publishers eyes - is that my work is seen as not sufficiently ‘genre-specific’. This is demonstrated by above, I suppose, by my diverse (some say crazy...) work-in-progress list above.  
      Interestingly this diversity has never been any kind of drawback for my precious readers, who themselves are a pretty diverse, imaginative, intelligent, well-read lot,

Q. Why do I write what I do?  The past-in-the-present dominates my mind, my imagination and my writing. I always 'see' individuals, unique characters in their times. And I tell their stories.
      I have lived through interesting times and have been a compulsive writer since I was eight. Anais Nin once said that writers taste life twice, once when they experience it and secondly when they write it. This so very much expressed my own writing experience that I named this blog Life Twice Tasted.

     My novels are mostly set in some crosspiece of time, place and the unique lives of my characters. Look at my Lavender House,  set in London in the 2010s and goes back to life in the 1960; and The Woman Who Drew Buildings , set in present day Durham City,  which  goes back to Poland in the 1991.  And An Englishwoman in France set in contemporary France  2006 and goes back  through the Middle Ages to even earlier times. . My new novel, Lines of Desire, is entirely set in Britain in 383 AD but in its way looks back thousands of years and forward to imperial attitudes today.

Q How does your writing process work?  My writing process has evolved from the early days when autobiographical scraps stumbled on into stories that were published, then into longer stories that evolved into young adult novels which were also published,  then into much longer adult novels that required reaching and research to absorb the feelings of a time and a place to I could write my novels freely and imaginatively. These were also published.

 (Add to this the practical and personal insights obtained from my five years as writer in residence in a women’s prison, from which emerged my novel Paulie’s Web emerged.)

I suppose my ingrained habit of  writing every day, every year, has meant I have taught myself a good deal about the writing process and how it works for me. I read, think and dream for some months - often years – before a  whole idea emerges, in the end welding all this together into shapes in my head, like iron filings tapped by magnets.

This is the most  exciting part of the process and often happens when I am editing and working on the earlier novel, I sometimes have to fight quite hard  to keep it at bay until I’ve completed and sent off the earlier novel. Like Kathleen Jones I start writing by hand in notebooks and drafting books. (See my last post…)

Then I transcribe and tentatively edit this draft onto my computer,  and play about with it for a time. Then by some kind of organic magic I begin to recognise that I have a novel there.

Then I print off the whole novel and look at it before giving it two buddies - my colleagues at RoomTo Write for their opinion. Then I enter all my own amendments and viable suggestions from my buddies. Then I go through it editorially yet again, And again.

I relish  this editorial stage. It is finicky and detailed – the opposite of the seductively exciting flamboyant early stages where the words flow onto the page and the pages pile up,
       I think all writers nowadays have to develop editorial skills to a high level because publishers are not prepared to invest so much in the editorial process and like near perfect copy and joined up storytelling.

Equally important is the fact that in these days of personal and independent publishing - enabled by companies like Amazon Createspace - the writer her or himself has to ensure the perfection of their own copy before they upload their baby and send it out into the world.  
       For me the kingdom of self-publishing  out there is divided into two categories. One category features good novels so well edited that the reader’s mind never thinks about the edit, The other category features potentially equally good  novels whose under-edited  state sticks out like a sore thumb and does the writer no justice.  Nothing is ever perfect but it is our job as writers now os  to make our babies as perfect as they can.

I am well aware that  everyone has a unique approach to the writing process but I think the great key is to begin by writing freely and very consistently - eventually to create a critical mass of relatively coherent prose text with an original story at its core. In time will inevitably form up into articles, poems, short stories and novels.

        In this critical mass of writing the writer will find her voice, her style, her themes, her  form and the default errors built into her intuitive writing.  Recognising all this through several writing processes must show in better and better writing in each successive novel.

Now I am passing the Writing Process Baton on this Blog Tour to a writer whose work I admire,

So the baton goes on to novelist Avril Joy.

Avril Joy writes novels, short stories and poetry. Her first novel The Sweet Track was published in 2007 by Flambard Press. In 2012 she won the inaugural Costa Short Story Award. .

Click here to  Read Avril

 

Small Aspects of Courage for the Writer

Being a writer demands acts of courage, large and small:

Among the large ones are:

Working entirely alone and sustaining your self belief

Writing with honesty and telling the truth

Tapping into strong elements of your own experience and telling some kind if truth that will relate to more generic human experiences.

Having faith in your vision of the world even if it doesn’t fit the genre-ridden business model of modern publishing,

But in thirty years of writing I have discovered other small acts of courage which involve opening a new notebook and making a start on new work.
 

I’ve written here before about the significance of notebooks - and writing by hand with an ink-pen - as the first stage in serious work, letting the blood flow from your heart down your arm into the ink and onto the page.

One consequence of trumpeting this theory all over the place is that good friends have given me fine notebooks to work in. I’ve just finished working through two such notebooks (fine board covers and stitched spines so the book lies flat …) I left the second one in London with LickedSpoon and am waiting for it to come to me through the post.

So now, beginning a new year and new work I cast around on my shelves and pick up a blank notebook – a present from a friend from the Middle East. This is a wonderful notebook – its cover is a lump of thick hide and its 150 pages in five hand-stitched sections are made of handmade pages pressed with wisps of tiny flowers and leaves.

It takes a small act of courage to mark, to write on such pages.

I see on the front page I wrote New Journal November 2006  Dreams etc and Other Things. Very grandiose. Perhaps fitting for such an extraordinary notebook, there follows some four pages about the death of a great friend and something about leaves on the ground. And about my grandson being away and missing him.

Then, nothing! This notebook has clearly been too beautiful to use - the beautiful pages too precious to mark.

But 2014 is to be the year of courage. So I have decided to use this magnificent object as an ordinary notebook – for writing lists, observations, inspired paragraphs for the new book, for scribbled drawings, and blog drafts like thus

At first it’s like writing my way up a hill, my ink-pen finding its way through a new landscape, dislodging here and there a tiny pressed petal or a strand oif grass. The ink suffaces.

In the end, like many things that seem hard, almost impossible to begin it has been easy. And, as a tiny petal floats off the page it seems like an experience worth writing about. As you can see

I only wish you could feel this paper. Wx

Happy Christmas Dear Friends.

A Heartfelt Happy Christmas Season to all the lovely people -both readers and writers - join me time and again at Life Twice Tasted time and to share with me the oddities that obsessions  that preoccupy my butterfly mind. You are my delight.

Here at LifeTwiceTasted Manor Christmas has arrived 

and at last the tree is up

My good intention for 2014  is

is to shrug off my delight with the idiosyncrasies of grammar. It does tend to split the reading and writing world. Although (as it's still 2013) I am wondering about the subtle magic of prolepsis and litotes ...

Thinking about  2014 I heard this good saying on  - of all things - an American cop-show: 

'If you always do what you've always done you always get what you always did.' 
Makes sense to me. 
So it looks as though 2014 will be a year of change in my life. 

Goody! 

Best wishes for a brilliantly written and well-read year in 2014

Love Wendy

Does The Use Of Colons And Semi-Colons Date Your Style?

This half-year has been full of editorial tasks: editing and completing a novel before sending it to my agent; revising some of my published novels using Createspace to re-publish them on Kindle and in paperback. I

have also been reviewing other people’s work and giving editorial judgements.

We all have attitudes to prose – our own and that of other writers. As for me, I love the subtle energy that colons and semicolons add to prose. They are syntactical tools that act to smooth the progress from sentence to sentence.

Some people do seem to have problems with the use of colons and semi-colons. But really it’s not so difficult: we use the colon to provide a pause before introducing related information, while we use the semicolon to create a break in a sentence that is stronger than a comma but not as final as a full stop.

But there are times when we as writers need to stand back a little.

Recently I asked a friend – a good editor – to cast a final eye over a story I'd been polishing making it ready for a prestigious competition.

My friend said many good things about the story, then hesitated. 

‘What is it?’ I say, with writerly anxiety.

‘Well. The colons and the semi-colons…’

‘What about them?’ I am defensive. I love these subtle tools of syntax.

‘Well, somehow, I’m stubbing my toe on them.’

My eyes narrow. ‘They’re all correct.’ I say.

‘Well somehow they look…’ she hesitates. ‘It’s different with essays and factual. In fiction they look…’

Then it dawns on me. ‘…dated, old fashioned?’

She colours, ‘Well, not quite…’

But that’s certainly what she means.

I hate to think that my style might be dated. I like to think I have an open mind: a fresh view of the world in my work. I like to think my writing reflects this for my readers. I hope it does.

I went through my story again, reviewed the colons and semi-colons and removed two of them. I’m not sure whether or not it was an improvement. I have no answer as yet to this dilemma. We’ll see

.

So, what’s your view of colons and semi-colons? Are they a positive or a negative element in modern writing? 

It would be interesting to know. Wx

Reading Narrative Fiction, Identity and the Humane Society

On our Room To Write Sister Blog I have  posted a report  (Erasing the Chasm Between the Bench and the Dock:  An Experience in Boston, USA) on the visit made by Avril and me to Boston to explore the Changing Lives Through Literature project masterminded by Professor Bob Waxler.  

Now, the presiding genius of that project -  Professor Bob Waxler of the University of Massachusetts - brings us his new book which goes even further in helping us in the wider society to understand the significance  of reading in our present day reductive, impersonalised  culture,

Robert P Waxler of
 University of Massachuset

Bob's new book The Risk of Reading (Great title!) defends  the idea that deep and close readings of literature can help us  understand ourselves and the world around us. It explores some of the meaning and implications of modern life through the deep reading of significant books.

He  argues that we need "fiction" to give our so-called "real life" meaning and that reading narrative fiction remains crucial to the making of a humane and democratic society.

Beginning by exploring the implications of thinking about the importance of story in terms of "real life", The Risk of Reading focuses on the importance of human language, especially language shaped into narrative, and how that language is central to the human quest for identity.

Bob argues that we are "linguistic beings," and that reading literary narrative is a significant way to enrich and preserve the traditional sense of human identity and knowledge. This is especially true in the midst of a culture which too often celebrates visual images, spectacle, electronic devices, and celebrity.

Reading narrative fiction, in other words, should be considered a counter-cultural activity crucial on the quest to "know thyself." 

Bob Waxler asserts that reading literature is one of the best opportunities we have today to maintain a coherent human identity and remain self-reflective individuals in a world that seems particularly chaotic and confusing. 

This book promises to be a great contribution to the debate on the role of narrative fiction in modern society.

Very highly recommended.

Createspace and Orphans in the Social Media Storm

My recent sceptical post (scroll back two posts) about the use of social media in selling and promoting your fiction has drawn quite a lot of attention. Some people thought I rather had my head in the sand; others applauded my desire to keep the fun in these processes, reflecting my determination that writing has to be a joy in itself and anything that takes away from this joy is a negative for a creative writer.

And then I attended a talk in London by Richard Foreman of the excellent  Endeavour Press.  He is clearly very positive about the function of social media in the selling process for fiction and sees it as important in the present and the future for writers. His rational, pragmatic approach to the whole thing made me think again. He had evidence of successfully selling novels through Endeavour. I would trust Endeavour with my work.

Richard certainly made me think again about the whole thing. An open mind has to be one way to make progress in this approach to selling and promotion.

So, home from London with my mind wide open I clicked into my Amazon account to see what I could do for the five independently published novels on Amazon. These novels trickle out consistently without making any big splash. Suddenly these favourites seem like orphans in the storm who need some care to flourish.

And then, with my independent publisher shades on, I sat down to think of what I can do for these five orphans of mine, and came out with these intention: 

I will take my orphans and dress them in new clothes. My version of this is to revise them again, re-jacket and re-issue them. Make them into sharp children.

Then I will republish them independently as Kindles and Hardback using the excellent Createspace processes. (I had already done this recently with my novel Paulie’s Web – already on Kindle but now launched in paperback.)

I am now working on my novel Cruelty Games. Here is the new cover (much better now designed with the Createspace Cover Creator) and I am halfway through the re-edit and revision of the text. Four more to go...

At the end of this,  with the new versions all in place on my Amazon list I will work on the Kindles publications, following Richard Foreman’s excellent advice:

I will ensure the prices are all very keen. I now understand at last that the level of pricing is important, particularly so  as it now rivals the second hand price of my novels. The fact is that interested readers can buy my full length novels second hand for as little as a penny, plus Amazon postage. (One part of me is still happy that people are evidently still reading my novels.) I see there are some first collectors editions out there for rather more than a penny, of course...

One by one I will go through my Amazon novels and apply the Amazon Special Offer  and Free Day process,

I will keep an eye on the Amazon Rankings, to which I have never before attended, as it seemed an impossible dream to be up there. But now, when I apply these processes to each book this will check out whether my actions have had any impact  on the rankings.

I will try to let people know about my progress using my social media, although I will feel impelled to avoid the in-your-face sell that put me off in the first place - that is before I heard Richard Foreman’s wise words.

Of course all this might come to nothing in terms of getting my orphans out there into the world and giving them a good chance in life. But at least I won’t be sitting there on the sidelines wringing my hands and saying if only I could give my babes a real chance in the world.

After Cruelty Games I will work on A Woman Scorned, then Where Hope Lives  then Lizza, then a fresh one called The Real Life of Studs McGuire. It's not at all like writing. It's a  bit more  like embroidery. It fills in the dark nights of winter and you end up with something beautiful. And your orphans are well clad,

I will report back on this process from time to time here on the blog. I thought it might interest other writers who have their own orphaned novel that they wish to nurture and send out into the world,

Skating, Stanley Spencer and Perceptions of Heaven and Hell

The Christmas tree lights were twinkling and the skaters were already skating at Somerset House when Gillian and I arrived to take a look at the surreal, intricate canvases created by Stanley Spencer for Sandham

Sandham Memorial Chapel

Memorial Chapel to honour the dead.

Inspired by his experience on the Salonica Front and here as a hospital worker caring for the wounded in an asylum used as a hospital, the paintings chart Spencer’s inner and an outer journey mapping the experience of soldiers under fire and in the asylum where the wounded may make their journey of recovery.

I recommend to you the Somerset House Website which gives a good account of this exhibition.  

 As for me I tried to make sense of the profound experience of Spencer’s indosyncratic vision as I sat drinking coffe and  underlining phrases that jumped out at me from the modest clearly written introduction to the exhibition.

Putting these phrases together now I seem to have a ‘found poem’ which more clearly expresses my impression of the exhibition than some immodest critique.

In the exhibition, entitled The Heaven and Hell of War, Spencer’s paintings treat  us to images from the Macedonian Front and a home-front camp and Asylum where the wounded and the mentally ill live  separately but side by side. This seems to me to be a tidy comment on the confusion and pain of war. The underlying meaning of the paintings can apply equally to the soldiers and the insane.

So, with apologies, my ‘found poem’ inspired by Stanley Spencer:

Routine chores.

Tweseldown, the camp near Farnham

The hospital serve a  dual purpose during this war

A bus forces its way through rhododendron bushes and

a newly arrived convoy of soldiers settles in a bleak courtyard

The keys connect the painting to its location

Soldiers struggle to flatten out blankets. They live

repetitive insular lives. This one obsessively scrubs the floor,

sorting through blankets and spotted red handkerchiefs

dreaming of respite from unwelcome chores

painting Iodine onto a wound and

painting different materials and surfaces

The lives of mental patients -

they were all padlocked

Young Stanley. Self Portrait

A small figure - someone filling

urns with tea for one of the asylum wards -

in two different worlds.

A scene on the Macedonian front:

‘Stand to Order!’ The officer is camouflaged

with fern fronds. Piles of barbed wired appear

like black thunder clouds,

The resurrection of the soldiers -

each cross serving as an object of devotion

In a mesh of white crosses,

a soldier emerges from a grave

a cross serving to frame

his bewildered face

The Myth of Social Media Selling Novels for Writers

With other writers I was recently asked by Debbie Taylor  of the excellent Mslexia Magazine to fill in a questionnaire about the role of social media in my professional writing life. This made me think more deeply than usual about this issue. Social media have a kind of role in my professional life. I am occasionally on Twitter and Facebook and I do write this blog.

I do know writers who communicate very successfully and with great bezazz on Twitter and Facebook. They write about cooking, gardening, politics, people and all kinds of fun and frolics. They turn a charming and interesting face to an interested cyber world. One friend has built up a following of 40,000 readers by writing warmly and wittily about just this kind of thing. Through her I have learned that writing well in a hundred and forty characters is an art in itself.

But when we come to professional fiction writers  the whole thing is rather more complicated. Many fluid and witty Twitterers and Facebookers clearly do it for sheer fun and delight. They possess 140 character magic. The witty novelist Marian Keyes has the magic and is a joy to follow  just for the anarchic, creative fun of it all.

But the fun seems to have flown out of the window for some writers who are seduced by the growing myth that social media will sell your books. Some aspiring writers do their duty and enter the field like busy bees saying, in one way or another, read my book! buy my book! At first I thought this point of view was valid and I do sympathise with this strategy in a world where publishers invest less and less in promoting and marketing their not-already-famous writers. And - wonderfully - writers themselves are taking up the torch and going down the independent publishing route. Social media must seem like a gift.

The problem is that while I sympathise with the social-media-sells mantra, I have yet to see audits, evaluations or statistics that prove the success of this process for novelists, poets or short story writers in terms of sales. The already best-selling and wonderfully twitterer Marian Keyes hardly needs any cyber-boost.

Perhaps the Mslexia survey will begin to fill that gap?

It seems to me that a degree of success can be traced in terms of  the selling-success of writers who blog and twitter about their publications, which are based on a business model about how to succeed (‘in ten easy steps!’) by using social media to promote your book, or promote your business.

They use their own success in writing on this theme to assert it can succeed for you, the creative writer. I’ve bought some of their publications myself with the idea that they might provide one  answer for the fading fiction market. In reading them I see they all have the same message -  that if you follow their rules you can uses social media to sell your creative work. It clearly does sell their own book-products  but as far as I can tell only provides yet another arena for anxiety and failure for the harassed unpublished or newly- published original writer.

But I have to say that for me the use of social media works on a peculiarly idiosyncratic level. The way in which is works for me – as you will see from this post – is that it is an avenue for fun and a feeling of satisfaction. 

I post all kinds of stuff on here on Life Twice Tasted:  

• scraps of work in progress, or not progressing
•  emerging ideas about the writing and editing process 
•  stories about my novels and books as they emerge 
• reflections on novels I have written in my time
• the vagaries of the publishing world (although I try not to whine - so bo-oring!);
• the vivid and growing adventure of independent publishing 
• reflections on books and authors I admire and who inspire me
• idiosyncratic elements of grammar and syntax
• episodes from my (rather long) life 

I find now that in doing all this I happen to be creating a kind of archive of my writing, and my writer's life. And this  inspires a vague and tentative hope that here at Life Twice Tasted I am able to share some fragments of my writer-self that a wide range of writers and readers may find interesting.

And although - as you see here -  I have designed Life Twice Tasted to be a kind of showcase for all my novels and it enjoys an average of five thousand page-views a month, I have no idea whatsoever whether or not this blog increases my book sales in any way that is not merely incidental. My book and Kindle sales do go up incrementally but they might have done this anyway. And now many of my books are on the second-hand carousel of Amazon and other on-line sites. How would I know how many of them are re-sold in this way? I am delighting at the thought of these novels having a second reading - a second life -  although there is no profit to me.

I can hear business-model gurus groaning at my un-business-like approach, I disobey other rules as well. We are told to write short snappy posts – kind of bite-size pieces for those of short appetite and attention span. Well, as you see here, my posts are longish and essay-ish and don’t underestimate the intelligence of many of my readers. (If you have read this far you are one of them…) Also my posts - though they frequently focus on the writing process -  cover a wide range of themes. Apparently that’s another taboo.

But, even though I don’t have the 140 character magic (mentioned above) I do go on Twitter and Facebook as well -  posting occasional casual and quirky elements from my daily life, I will also mention it  if I have a book out or a book launch in view. I will also post there the theme of the current post on my blog. If Twitter folk  are interested they might click through to take a look at Life Twice Tasted. If not they will click on to other possibly more enticing things. Fair enough.

So, if it’s not about selling books, what is a writer’s blog about? Whatever happens, the medium must be the message. A writer’s blog should be well written and interesting in itself – seriously interesting, seriously funny and seriously original. If - by the by -it sells a few books, in tens, hundreds or thousands, that for me is just a bi-product.

So for me writing posts for the blog is an end and a pleasure in itself and it must stay that way. Once it becomes a means to the end of spurious fame and fortune then it becomes tatty as an over-used apron. I think the notion that exploiting social media to achieved worldly success for creative writers is at best wishful thinking, at worst a damaging myth.

Definitely a work in progress...

I am not being disingenuous when I say that truly, I love writing on Life Twice Tasted for its very own sake. For me the blog is a living, growing thing, like a forest that becomes more intricate in time. Like the thousands of less-than-famous essayists of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries I write my pieces for for personal satisfaction and very small reward.

For me it is a respectable, if not profitable, occupation … 

in addition to writing the novels, of course.

And here are some very different blogs that demonstrate the qualities I admire 

The writing-wise wise and wonderful Writing Junkie 

The wittily toothsome Licked Spoon /

The lyrical gardener and cat lover Pablo's Friend 

The wise, witty and humane 60 Going on 16 

Sexual and Emotional Freedom in the Blitz

The spurious intimacy
of the underground bomb shelter

Last night I had the pleasure of  watching  the tousle haired James Runcie presenting on The Culture Show discussing the invigorating creative effect of the experience of the London Blitz during World War Two, on upper middle class writers who used the profound experience to inspire great novels.

Alongside Grahame Greene (The End of the Affair), writers Elizabeth Bowen (In the Heat of the Day), Henry Green - Real name Yorke - (Caught), Rose Macaulay (Towers of Trebizond) all used the insights offered by surviving in London under severe bombing while 'doing their bit' as fire wardens and fire fighters. During this time they actually lived and worked shoulder to shoulder with a class of people who had been invisible to them in the pre-war security of their upper class literary lives.

With wives and partners safely in the country,  life in the Blitz offered sexual and emotional freedom,  where there seemed no accountability other than writing, packing in as much life as possible in  today, and surviving until tomorrow

The terror, passion and immediacy of the Blitz, (which Rose Macaulay referred to as 'a sample of total war')  was compared by Henry Yorke (in the mind of one of his characters): 'War, she thought, was sex.'


I was interested to note that the programme leaned heavily on an excellent book by Lara Feigal  called The Love Charm of Bombs I really enjoyed reading   this well-researched 500 page book, (I had read it earlier this year; it had  been given to me as a Christmas present). So I was very pleased to see Feigal on the programme and also in the credits as consultant.

 I found the programme quite compelling. But if you want to empathise with the anarchic feelings and the literary and sexual acuity of those times I would recommend making some time to read the book.


On the back of her book Feigal aptly quotes Grahame Greene: The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakeable engine ("Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?"), the bomb-bursts move nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love charm.'  

And now I have to declare an interest here, on two counts.
First, I have been told that I was conceived during the massive November blitz of the city of Coventry. Secondly I wrote a novel built around my parents' experience of that Blitz. Of course, being of the invisible class (see above), they were not acquainted in their provincial city with  upper-middle-class writers 'doing their bit' for their country while they enjoyed the anarchic freedom of 'total war'.

When you think  about it though,  my mother and father made love in the Blitz and at the same time made a writer for the next generation.

My own novel emerging from all this is
called Land of Your Possession. You can see it here on my sidebar...