Genre

Georgie B wrote a blog post this past Wednesday that got me to thinking.  (Georgie B has a way of doing that.)  He wanted to know how we as writers got started writing in our genre. 

I can only compare genre fiction to television.  You know those folks who tell you they never watch TV?  They just don’t have the time to waste.  You know darn well they probably Tivo their way through the week, but they just want to look superior. 

    Genre fiction is the same way.  It  can really be looked down upon.   ”Oh you write commmercial fiction,” they say with a sniff. Or they talk about how something that “transcends” genre.  Worse, it can be disparaged in such polite tones.  “Romance?  (Or mystery or horror or S/f) How interesting.” This is always said with one of those looks that let you know that the person saying it would never pick up a romance novel.  Meanwhile, you’re just itching to examine their closets because you are sure that there is a bag full of Danielle Steele in there somewhere.

   Because, you know, genre is a reflection not only of the writer or the reader but of life.  It tells you something about the society we live in, what we hope for, what we believe in.  We believe in “Space, the final frontier.”  And what about those frontiers anyway?  Those cowboys were strong, and courageous; we’re proud of those guys.  We believe in love and romance, and that all the bad guys, or scary monsters will be caught in the end.

    I told Georgie B that I don’t think writers really choose their genre and I really believe that.  When genre works–when books touch hearts –it comes out of somewhere far deeper.  We writers, when we are writing something that really works, have to be willing to relive the experience, to feel what we want the reader to feel.  That’s what makes it genuine. I’m proud to be a genre writer.

At least that’s my two cents.  What do you think?

Another reason to read a good book

.If you’ve got the urge to write, but have no idea what to write about, how about getting a spot of inspiration from another book?

Books inspire other books. Jane Eyre inspired a ‘prequel’ – Wide Sargasso Sea, telling the story of the first Mrs Rochester, and ‘The Eyre Affair’ by Jasper Fforde – where the heroine, Thursday Next, jumps into Jane Eyre to give it the proper ending – in her world, Jane marries St John Rivers. It’s a fantastic, wonderful book, and gives us Jane Eyre fans a few more amazingly sexy Rochester moments (the Thursday Next series continues with journeys into Great Expectations, Alice in Wonderland, Blyton books, and into the Nursery Crimes series – also written by Jasper Fforde. It all gets a bit confusing, in a wonderful way….)

And there’s retellings – Rebecca is a re-telling of Jane Eyre (and so is Twilight, to some extent) and Bridget Jones is a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, but are both fine books in their own right.

Be wary of straightforward sequels – they usually don’t work. There are a plethora of Jane Austen sequels, and they mostly range in quality from dire to screamingly, achingly awful. The problem is, the authors take the main characters, and try and tell another story in the same style as Jane Austen. No-one writes like Jane Austen, and no-one should try, and the main characters have told, and finished their story.

It’s best to leave the main characters as they are, and tell a story around a minor character – such as Margaret from Sense and Sensibility (someone has written a good book around her, but I can’t for the life of me remember who). These minor characters are created, and have a life and a story to build on, but never get to finish their tale in the main book.

Elizabeth Aston writes some pretty good Pride and Prejudice sequels – and they work because she barely mentions Elizabeth and Darcy – the books are about the children (although Maria Rushworth from Mansfield Park makes a guest appearance, as does Jane Eyre’s father.). Also, she doesn’t write in Jane Austen’s style – she writes in her own.

Equally, most James Bond sequels are pale imitations – but I understand the Moneypenny spin-offs are pretty good. These kind of tales – writing about the minor characters are pretty much fanfic, with the added bonus that the the author gets paid – which doesn’t happen for most fanfics!

So go on – get reading. You’ll get some great ideas! (And may I suggest Dickens – hardly anyone has re-told, or written a sequel too, or told a minor character’s story from him!)

Crunch Time

Since Safe House is coming out next month I am fast approaching freak out mode. There is still so much to do, and no time to do it. My cover is not yet done but people are asking for it to post with their reviews or to post with my guest blog for my blog tour. So I am just putting them off.

My links are not yet final as since the book is not done yet, it is not up at even my publisher’s site yet let alone Amazon or Borders.com. But again reviewers and others are asking for the link to post.
I need to line more blogs up for my blog tour, get some posts written. Joyce and Jim Lavene, I have not forgotten your interview for your blog. I am working on it, really. Linda Hutchinson, I have also not forgotten your kind offer. I will be in touch this week.

I also need to email some of these reviewers myself and ask if I can use a quote to promote the book–maybe on the back of the book? I need blurbs, people. Anyone want to blurb Safe House?
I also need more reviews and need to send our more ARCS, as soon as I get them made!

I have, I kid you not, 516 emails in my in-box–and that is just one of my four email accounts, piling up waiting for me to get time to answer them. But that was because I was stupid enough to take on an extra job doing taxes just as my book was coming out. Silly me! What do I need money for? I’ll only spend it on more promo! Who needs to pay their own taxes and incidentally, eat?

I am overwhelmed. I am out of my league. How does anyone ever do all this? Someone, please, give me a hint now.

Not now, I’m busy!

.Someone, a couple of weeks ago, commented on his muse’s habit of popping up at awkward moments. I wish I had a solution – but I don’t!

 

My muse behaves badly. I have a few spare hours, plenty of paper and pencil, and all my chores are done, and I sit at my desk, waiting for inspiration to strike.

 

Inspiration doesn’t so much strike as limp away, moaning ‘leave me alone, I don’t feel well’. Nothing happens – and as I’ve mentioned before, forcing my muse doesn’t work very well either.

 

However, come a busy Monday morning, piles of work, no free time for hours, and lots to do, and my muse will suddenly pop cheerily up, screaming ‘I’ve got this great idea!’. And it’s impossible to keep the idea in my head until I have a few spare hours.

 

It’s not convenient. And I don’t really know how to control my muse to turn up at the correct time and place. (And truth to tell, I’d rather not do that anyway – I rather like the idea that even though my life is surrounded by rules and clocks and chores, my muse runs free!)

 

I have learnt a few little tricks to keep my muse satisfied. I try to always keep a little bit of paper around me, and a pen – those little notebooks are very handy. Though I have to remember to type them up, or I end up with little scraps of paper stuffed everywhere.

 

I try to always escape from the office at lunchtime, so I can write then. If it really can’t wait, I have been known to quickly escape to the loo for a quick scribble.

 

And if I’m stuck without paper, and without time, and I come up with a really good line, I just keep repeating it to myself (silently!) until it’s firmly stuck in my head.

 

I’m also contemplating getting a Blackberry or an iPhone, so I can quickly type up any ideas I have whilst on the move.

 

But that’s all I have. So if your muse keeps popping up at odd times – I sympathise – but all I can suggest is – get a good memory, and a little notebook!

 

Now I have to go – i had a great idea for a story about 2 o’clock this afternoon – and I have to write it before it disappears altogether.

Porridge

This week has been a positive one on the road to publication. One of the unsolicited queries yielded a full manuscript request.

I’m very happy to report that the pubisher made the request within a day or two of receiving my query. In fact, he commented that the well structured proposal ‘dislodged it from the bottom of the pile to the very top’.  Good feedback to receive.  Of course I sent the full manuscript straight away.

I wait in hope.

Meantime, I’ll have plenty to keep me occupied as I’ve enrolled in a two year part-time postgraduate course and now find myself surrounded by text books and course outlines.  Aside the blog and submissions, my writing will be a little bit academic for a while.  Oh well, it’s all good experience.

What I Use THIS Blog For!

Okay, having posed the question last week asking why people read blogs, I feel I have to be honest about why I write this one. Technically, people– writers, at least, are supposed to write blogs. It’s almost a given now. We’re supposed to write them to promote whatever else we write. And we are supposed to try to connect with an audience. Sounds good, right?
I may have started out with that motive, but now I write this blog for other reasons. I carp and gripe about it occasionally but really, not all that much. Because secretly, it is one of those writer things I look forward to. (Now there is a sentence fragment guaranteed to get me in trouble with the grammar police.)
Writing this blog gets me focused on writing again. I’m not talking about the promo part of writing either. I have to formulate my thoughts. I need to stick to a theme–writing. I need to consider you, my reader, and your needs. Many times I have to do research to make sure what I’m sharing with you is accurate. And the bottom line is I have to write.
Many times, having this jumpstart my brain back into that mode gives benefits in my other writing. Or to be less wordy, this gets me going again on my work in progress. I used to know a woman who wrote poetry for the first fifteen minutes everyday to get herself going. Of course, we’ve all readd of people like Anne Lamott and Natalie Goldberg who recommend we “freewrite” to get going. If not I suggest you pick up one of their books. But this blogs works better for me.
It’s not often in life that we get to like the things we should do. I just wanted to tell you how nice it is that this one of them. What writing chores do you like?

There’s nothing wrong with being short!

.Once upon a time, not so very long ago, short stories were all the rage, and newspaper stands were packed with journals equally packed with short stories. Nowadays (in the UK, at least), those sort of magazines have gone, and there isn’t a market for the short story, seen as the poor friendless unattractive cousin of ‘proper books’.

Yet I think there’s a lot to be said for them. Some writers write technically clever, and brilliant books – but curiously lacking in emotion or pleasure. Look at DH Lawrence – his books are full of suffering and pain, yet his short stories are joyous. ‘Sun’ is practically the only piece of literature to really describe how I feel about sunshine, and ‘You touched me’ is, I think, his best love story. James Joyce’s books are very clever, but none of them move me in the same way his collection of short stories, The Dubliners, did. It’s as if they wrote the books to instruct and inform, and the short stories out of pure pleasure.

And if you have an intense and charismatic figure, he’s best taken in small doses, like fine wine or good chocolate. Nearly all the Sherlock Holmes stories are short stories, and even in the four books, Holmes is only on stage half the time. I think Arthur Conan Doyle knew that such a strong character would fade, and perhaps irritate slightly, given too much exposure at once.

It’s easy to keep an atmosphere going over a short story. Not much happens in ‘Whistle and I’ll come to you’ by MR James (known as the Master of the short ghost story) but the atmosphere of ’something’ approaching is sustained in a way it could not be over a whole book. Edgar Allen Poe can keep us horrified for a few pages – it would be too exhausting to be horrified over 100.

Short stories often concentrate themselves over a short period time – a day, like Mrs Dalloway (I know it’s a book, but it’s so short it’s practically a long short story), or even an afternoon. Katherine Mansfield is the mistress of this, with her enchanting, yet often disturbing stories (I recommend The Garden Party or At the Bay).

A lot of authors use short stories to write something different from their usual fare – such as Dickens writing ‘The Signalman’ one of the very best ghost stories, or Stephan King taking a side step away from his genre to write ‘The Body’ or ‘The Shawshank Redemption’. It’s a chance to walk away from your usual persona, and try another one on for size.

Anne Perry (yes, I know I mention her a lot, but she’s my favourite living author) uses short stories to take minor characters from her books, and give them a story of their own – expanding and illuminating them in a way she would never have time or space to in the books.

So why not try one yourself? There’s lots of advantages. You never have to explain anything – a short story is a snap shot in time – there’s no need for any back story. You just drop into someone’s life, observe it for a while, then drop out again.

It’s a good way to advertise – Stephen King started off sending short stories to magazines, and if you can get one into an anthology, it opens up a much wider reading audience for you.

It’s a chance to try something new – always written sci-fi? Try a quick chick-lit short story. If you hate it, it’s very little time and effort wasted. If you love it – you’ve taken the first step.

It’s a great way to explore an idea you’re not sure will last a whole book. Start writing – if it keeps going, you’ve got a book, it it peters out, you’ve got a short story

And best of all, they’re quick. You get one done in an afternoon. If you type/write fast, you can get one done in your lunch hour (I have…). It’s a great way to dip a toe in for a few hours, to keep your muse amused for a while when you don’t have the time or energy to devote to a whole book.

And as a reader – I adore short stories. I don’t see them as the poor relation of books – I see them as a form of literature all on their own, and I love them.

What do you use blogs for?

Recently I read that American newspapers are hitting the dust because many of us are getting our news online now–specifically, this source said, from blogs.
Now I am an avid reader of blogs, especially since I’ve been trying to do this one and put my own blog tour together. I use a blog aggregator called Netvibes that comes up as my home page with all of my favorite blogs already loaded on it. I can see at a glance if they have updated and if I want to comment on them. But I never see news there. I get occasional news updates from Twitter–but it’s the stuff like, did you hear So and So died.
I still tend to get my news from CNN or MSNBC. That’s not why I read a blog. And my favorite blogs might comment on news–but they don’t really revolve around news. I read writers’ blogs, because I don’t get enough professional interaction with other writers. Or sometimes I read hoping to pick up the occasional promo tip, or writing insight. I read to be amused and to get relaxed.
So now I’m wondering as I try to get this blog tour thing going, maybe I should be aiming to do something. Maybe I should figure out why folks read blogs so I can try to meet the need. So I’m asking you–Why do you read blogs?

Bring on the sunshine

. I barely wrote at all last year – and I blame that Umbrella song of Rihanna’s.

You see, I have a sensitive little muse (I do intend to talk about my muse as a separate entity. That little spark that writes my tales often seems to lead an entirely separate life from me, and is not entirely under my control.) She only likes to come out in the sunshine – and not even the sunshine of a cold, yet bright day. It’s got to be the warm sunshine of summer.

I can’t write on a cold damp day. I can’t even write in a warm room, if it’s still winter outside. I have to feel the warmth on my skin, the heat burying deep into my bones, strolling slowly down the street in something floaty and flighty, not scurrying down the street, every inch of me swaddled in wool, thinking only of the next heater. (this is why my Christmas story never really got done. I was too cold to write).

Last spring, it got hot early. At the beginning of April, I was joyfully running around in strappy, skimpy dresses, drinking in the sun. And I wrote. An idea and a character popped into my head. And not just a short story – a fully realised book. I wrote and wrote. Everywhere I went, I scribbled. I wrote on the cliffs above Hastings, the fields around Battle, a tiny cafe in Arundel.

My book was almost finished, and I liked it. Then that Umbrella song got to number one in the UK chart – and that day it rained. And it continued raining. Every day that song was at number one, we had three different kinds of weather in Britain – heavy rain, not quite so heavy rain, and torrential downpour. And my writing stopped, my book unfinished.

That song was at number one for nine weeks, and the rain never stopped. I got soaked in Stratford Upon Avon, shivered in Guernsey and was chilled in Lincoln. And my muse ran to her little hole and hid.

I tried dragging her out and forcing her to write. It was a sad and pathetic failure. Every word was a struggle. And every word was dross. What I wrote was so bad, I ceremoniously burnt it (in the kitchen sink, to be safe).

I could have gone somewhere sunny – but I don’t get paid very much, so no trips abroad for me. I had to face facts – no sun, no writing. And by the time the rain stopped, it was autumn.

Two weeks ago, there was a hot sunny day. Spring was coming. And I wrote, and I liked what I wrote for the first time in months. And then it got cold again – but at least I learnt that my muse hadn’t disappeared, she was just hibernating. So I hope, for the sake of my sensitive little muse (and my unfinished book), that this summer will be long, and hot and sunny.

Post-it note

I’ve always been a fan of the post-it note. When I had an office job, my computer screen was surrounded by them. This week’s entry is a post-it note (or would that be a note-it post?)

The hunt for a publisher for the non-fiction MS continues. I still have two partials out (one solicited, one not). This weekend I’m going to prepare two more submissions, one to a large Australian publisher and one to a small independent group.

I made a follow-up phone call to the recipient of the solicited partial. They haven’t read it yet. *sigh*

This is such an exercise in patience and persistence. I’m learning…