Life is pain!

Life is pain. I am one person split by responsibilities, desires, insecurities, feelings; who walks through the day's hours with aching hurts and frustrated plans, punctuated by bursts of happiness (every now and again). 

I go through routines, battered by duty, crippled by the pain of trying, desperately trying to find solitude in a life that has handed me a clearly-defined role to play; that of a female, in a world that is crowded and noisy and never lets up, never offers serenity, never celebrates female-ness, only seeks to define it and cage it. I live in a world that has defined the role of female as 'this' and 'that'. But I don’t want my femaleness to ‘tag’ me. I don’t want to play the role of female anymore. I want to quit.

I am chaotic but I love order and patterns; I hate violence but love writing about it; my novels are filled with male characters whose bodies I inhabit, but I am staunchly pro-women’s rights. I live in a writing world of inner debauchery but in real-life I am appalled by it. I am loving, but I loathe society’s expectations that females should be ‘nice’ and ‘kind’ and ‘submissive’. I love my female-ness and hate it too.

These schisms cause inner pain and this pain bleeds outwardly every single day.

I write to ease this pain and the novel-building/writing helps to soothe the lesions in my inner life. I am in full-on writing mode now…. in between the pain of living. I am writing about a woman whose analytical mind and utter ruthlessness makes her one of the most violent killers this country has ever seen. Her violence thrills me; the way she manipulates and metamorphoses from femme fatale to the testosterone-fuelled aggression any man is capable of, in the blink of an eye. I love her ability to feel absolutely nothing, but see everything, and to plot and scheme and her razor-sharp intelligence. 

Hezba, in The Hidden - http://tinyurl.com/pjhnuwe -  had plenty of this ruthlessness, this driven desire to break down the gender tag imposed on her. My new ‘femme’ character (as yet unnamed) is there, in my mind, smiling at me. She’s beautiful! Why? Because I love male and female beauty – the more unconventional the better - and want to live inside the mind and body of a beautiful person.  But what is making her so exciting to me, as she grows before my eyes, is the fact that she has within her a love of violence that I am trying to understand. And she will make me understand her……

A big rush of energy and ecstasy in Seattle, USA!

I have just got back from Seattle, in the USA’s stunning Pacific North-West, as a guest of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA) 2013. My novel The Hidden was selected as the winner in the Thriller/Suspense category of the ABNA. 

The trip was incredible; the landscape, the people, the ABNA ceremony…….it was five days of bliss. I met my fellow finalists, Rysa Walker, Ken Moraff, Evelyn Pryce and J. Lincoln Fenn, as well as the Amazon team who are such warm, down-to-earth, creative and on-the-ball people. 

We finalists were treated like royalty, showered with gifts, taken out to lunch and dinner, hosted at the event and wrapped in this gorgeous warm blanket of respect that I, as an author, have never, ever experienced before. Rysa Walker won the Grand Finalist award for her novel Timebound – congratulations Rysa! But the message from Amazon was clear; all of us five authors will be treated equally in terms of time, marketing and support by the Amazon Publishing team. This is great news for all of us.

I have always been an Amazon fan because I am an obsessive book-buyer. I adore bookshops but when I scour bookshops and they don’t have the books I am looking for I always go to Amazon and have done so since they started out. I am impatient and I want books, I have to have them. Amazon always meets this burning need.

I had no opinion at all of this massive corporation before I met the people behind it, other than it was a great service that fulfilled my obsessive book-buying needs. I wasn’t prepared for the human ‘face’ of this global company, for their obvious love of authors, for their incredible creativity in trying new things in the world of digital and mainstream publishing and selling, for their complete intuitive understanding of my novel, for their vibrancy, normalcy and their incredible positivity and upbeat energy.

My entire writing life has been a roller-coaster of ‘yes, we love you, but……’ to ‘no, your novel is not right for us…..’. I have two folders on my computer labelled ‘lovely rejections’ and ‘standard rejections’. The bottom line is my experience has shown me that publishers are cautious, inward-looking organisations who only appear to ‘risk’ investing in established names. I was blown away by Amazon’s forward-thinking philosophy when it comes to authors, based on their respect of them.

I don’t want my blog to sound like an advert for Amazon. I am just diarising my experience in Seattle, five days I will remember for the rest of my life.

But I will say I love companies like Amazon, who take risks, who are super-creative, who drill down deep into ‘what people want’ and provide them with it, and companies who dare to challenge old and tired market models and try something new. My love of this type of creativity extends to solo-operators – writers, artists, musicians, photographers, designers, illustrators – all creative people, and businesses or non-profit organisations, small or large; in fact anyone who challenges the status quo.

While I was in Seattle I went to the EMP museum http://www.empmuseum.org/ next to the Needle. I was enthralled by the story of Nirvana, the post-punk ‘punk’ band who was from the Pacific North-West region. I got totally into the story of these types of musicians who did everything themselves in the beginning; from booking their own gigs, to designing their own posters and magazines. There’s a great energy in Seattle. I adored it and hope to return one day.

On the plane back I wrote some more notes on my next thriller, writing notes in pencil in my Moleskine notebook. I’m excited now about having my feet on the ground and going back inside my head into the dark world of thriller-dom.

While I write this novel you can pre-order The Hidden which is going to be published by Thomas & Mercer in Seattle, from Amazon here…..http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hidden-Jo-Chumas/dp/1477848193/ref=sr_1_2_bnp_1_pap?ie=UTF8&qid=1371732758&sr=8-2&keywords=Jo+Chumas

It will be out on October 22 2013. When you’ve bought it and read it, write to me, talk to me. I love my readers and will listen to what you have to say, I promise.