Thursday 29 August 2013

The Luna Park that is my mind!

Have just returned from a whirlwind five-day trip to Seattle in the Pacific North-West of America, as the invited guest of my publisher Thomas & Mercer. 

It was a crazily-good few days, sleep-deprived, alcohol and fooded-up, travelling from 40 degree heat in Southern Spain to the soft, gentle breezes of the PNW with very comfortable 20 degree temperatures. I was on high adrenaline, socialising like the world was ending and I´d never utter another word again, moving from luxury hotel to luxury restaurant to chauffeur-driven car to dinner with the top in the publishing business. 

It was as surreal as a date with Salvador Dali and just as enjoyable. But at the end of the day, being a sort of grunge person who has real and imagined poverty hard-wired through me, it´s important to look back and write about what I learned from the experience, as a way of reminding myself how much my life has changed in a few short months. 

If this inspires other serious writers to continue in the face of constant rejection (and this was my story for 16 years!), then I will feel all warm and lovely inside, and this is what this blog is about; not shouting from the rooftops about me - but inspiring other serious writers to live and love their talent, regardless of what those strange bods in the publishing biz (and I exclude Amazon from that mini-insult) have to say about their work.

Time to recap on what I have learned. I´ll number the mini-lessons, for ease of reading. Here goes (and I think they are in order of priority):-

1. The Amazon Group is a truly inspirational company and Amazon Publishing is the kindest, most generous, most author-focussed group of people I have ever met in my life.This is the second time in three months they have flown me to America, have requested my company and have treated me like royalty, for no other reason than they love authors, they love publishing novels and they love selling them. They want to be part of literary history, and they are!! Not only because they publish quality, but because the treat their authors like film stars - no expense spared. Their publishing model is what others dream of being able to achieve and yet don´t and they are creative, forward-thinking and always thinking up new ways for authors to sell their work. 

I met 64 fellow Thriller writers at the Thomas & Mercer (Amazon) event, and spoke to nearly all of them. Every story was the same, traditional publishers have never cared enough about them, have never treated them with the same respect. I have never been published by another publishing house so I am just reporting on what others told me, but I get the message. Despite the doom and gloom peddled by the press about the future of publishing, I know there has never been a better time to be published and I´m thrilled that T & M (Amazon) is my publisher.


2. Mini-lesson number 2. The world is an amazing place and not filled with scary, angry people who don´t give a shit! I have never really believed this, but when you´re writing novels for 16 years and agents and publishers reject you over and over, you start wondering if you should become a hermit and go live in a forest and just write stories on the bark of trees, living out your days without any more rejection!!! 

I have had dreams of doing this but I have a family and so that wouldn´t be possible. Still, it had occured to me for my retirement - carve stories on trees and be done with it. Throw away the hundreds and hundreds of rejection letters and live out some non-scary life in tune with nature. None of that is necessary now, because I have witnessed genuine (and I really mean GENUINE) respect and love of my writing, BY OTHERS in the Amazon Group!!! And that is what makes the rides on the Luna Park that is my mind all the more worth it!!!

3. Mini-lesson number 3. I LOVE MY ´job´. It´s an Odd Job or a Non-Job but I get money for it so I suppose you can forgive the fraility of the English language (any other word for job?) and just say the above. Writing stories is my job and it´s an odd job. This is why I have posted up a photo of the cover of my new friend, New York Thriller writer Ben Lieberman´s new novel. He wrote the Thomas & Mercer thriller Odd Jobs, about hachets and work and is a cracking good read. Look him up on Amazon. You won´t be disappointed!

4. Mini-lesson number 4. Cloudy days are good!! When I was in the PNW, it was cloudy and I felt inspired. Cloudy takes me to dark places.....brilliant sunshine has its place but I think I still need that forest and that dark place to get a move on with my next thriller. 

5. Mini-lesson number 5. Is just one word I´m afraid......BERLUSCONI. More on that word in my next blog. 

Thanks for reading. In the words of a Vueling flight on-board napkin - route Barcelona to Sevilla, then Sevilla to Barcelona - RESPIRA YA SE PASA - a literal translation here ´Breathe until it has passed´.



Friday 9 August 2013

Hello Anxiety! I think I love you!



I have to deal with the fact that when it comes to my favourite bit of work - writing - I am not a calm person. I probably should be, but I am not. 

Three months ago, my world changed; I went from being a writer of articles published by newspapers and magazines in various countries and a writer of novels - rejected by agents and publishers in most countries - to a novelist with a publishing contract. 

My life prior to three months ago was full of anxiety of the 'will-I-ever-in-my-lifetime-find-an-agent-who'll-in-turn-find-me-a-publisher' kind. 

You'd think winning a massive competition (in my category) like the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award would be enough to soothe the old anxiety, but no - now I've found another reason to be anxious, and it's this: I am just one writer in a world full of talented writers, millions and millions of them. How will I ever persuade people to read my novel The Hidden? It seems like a task of such enormous proportions, I just feel completely overwhelmed. I've never felt overwhelmed by novel writing, the plotting and planning and writing so this new 'state of overwhelm' is a kind of Alice in Wonderland scenario for me. 

How do you deal with this feeling of anxiety, a feeling that says 'you have the longest, hardest road ahead of you.....you are going to have to help persuade many, many, many, many people to read your novel and you're going to have to accept all the things they say about your story - good and bad. Not only that, while all this is happening you're going to carry on writing your next thriller 'A Strange Girl' and the plot must be brilliant, clever, perfectly formed and all this must happen in the next six months.'

Tonight I have been thinking about this, and thinking deeply about it too. I have been thinking that I am probably a little bit addicted to anxiety, or rather that quite a long time ago - when I was a young girl, anxiety became the default definer of my life. And that without it, I am a little bit lost.

Was it John Lydon of the Sex Pistols, who said 'anger is an energy'? I think it was, though correct me if I am wrong. (Sorry I am not going to Google it!)

So maybe that's it! Maybe I shouldn't get anxious about anxiety, I should say 'hello anxiety, I think I love you'. 

I still adore my story, The Hidden. When I read it, I feel this lump in my throat because I remember so vividly the emotion and anger I was feeling when I wrote it. 

I wrote it for all women who are caged by a life they do not want, as a kind of therapy for myself, because at the time I was writing it I was going through a particularly devastating, horrible period in my life. I was trapped geographically, physically and emotionally as well as financially by an awful set of circumstances. My life at that time was filled with anxiety, but my anger was my energy and writing The Hidden was my release.

Hezba was the essence of all I was feeling; Aimee possessed the coolness and dignity I wanted to have at that time, but didn't have. The Hidden is an angry story but there is resolution, and in that resolution calm is restored......for the time being.  








Saturday 3 August 2013

Dancing the flamenco with my readers


















Yesterday, after hours spent wandering the streets of Sevilla, eyes wide at the beauty of this city, I came home to my apartment to spend my allocated hours doing the final, pre-publication proofing of my novel The Hidden.

It was a strange sensation; feeling in every pore of my being the sultriness of this city with its heat, flamenco bars on every corner, and super-talented Spanish guitarists busking for austerity euros, as tourists and locals alike drink their cerveza and eat their tapas; and then diving back into the proofing of my novel - set in Cairo with its spies, terrorists, prostitutes and wannabe dictators, with its raw life on the streets, a sort of mirror image of life here.

I got to thinking there is a remarkable similarity between these two narratives going on at the moment; the real-life, in-the-now Sevillano narrative and the fictional Cairene narrative of my novel.

And then something happened.....

I connected with and came across a small group of readers, through social media, who told me how much they loved my writing. At that point, everything made sense.

This small group told me they loved my stories, and thanked me for 'taking them away' into another world, a place where they could learn about life from an electric perspective, raw to the bone.

I fell in love with this group of readers; these wonderful individuals who took time to tell me what they thought of my writing and my stories.

So I am dedicating this blog post to them. I don't want to name names, because I don't want to embarrass them but now is the time to get personal and write them a little message, within this 'message'.

So here it is:-

"To my dear readers, thank you for loving my stories, thank you for reading them....I used to write novels with no reader in mind, just this crazy, driven desire to understand the world by running a microscope over the minutiae of human experience, in different locations, in different times. I was always driven to do this and it was probably a selfish experiment, something to do with therapizing my own inner craziness, trying to come to terms with why I am such a traveller, in need of foreign languages and foreign cultures, like a junkie in need of heroin.....

"But now, I am going to write all my future novels with you people in mind and dedicate my writings to you. Thank you for dancing the flamenco with me."