London Book Fair Fringe at Foyles - Part II

For much of the audience, one of the highlights of LBF Fringe at Foyles was the section of the busy schedule hosted by super-talented, super-inspirational indies Rohan Quine and Dan Holloway.



Audience held captive by Rohan

For those of you not lucky enough to have attended the event, with permission from the authors, we'd like to give you a taste of their presentation.

Starting with the beautiful poem 'Because' which was narrated by its author, Dan Holloway.

“Because”

Because every day a little girl, let’s call her Sarah,
Hears the world condensed into words
And falls in love with a possibility.

That she might fold her life into a gift of syllables and sentences
And hold it out
For all the sisters, misfits, lonely souls and drifters

To open and unfold towards a beautiful horizon they’d always thought hopelessly distant. 

Because her parents see the way she looks and sigh
And go to bed and cry because they know
Tomorrow they take Sarah to a place every other child she knows believes is magic -
A bookshop.

Because they know when she reaches her beautiful black hands to the mirror of the shelf
Instead of herself
She sees my white hands reflected back 

Because tomorrow’s books are written by the choices we make today
Their pages penned by voices we invite to stay
And voices that we cast away. 

Because when we set your sights on our own freedom
The light you see at the end of the tunnel is just a metaphor
Systemically generated by the literary hegemony
To strengthen the advantages of an already charmed existence
To keep others at arm’s length and their chances at a manageable distance

Because what we call quality others call colony
Whose overlords behead the aspirations of others
With ceremonial swords
Of approving badges, nodding column inches, blogging and awards.

 

Because when we pick and choose the facts of writing right,
Dictate the tropes and tools of narrative exactitude
So Sarah loses if she enacts her life
Maybe the syntax we use is wrong.

Because if we want to uncage every song
Be fibres of a fabric where every thread belongs
It is our duty to take this microphone
And these tweets
And empty them of middle-aged white guys like me.
To hold the door as I withdraw
And Sarah takes the floor,
And unrolls a carpet woven with the warp of her words and the weft of her dreams
And waits with open pages 

For all the sisters, misfits, lonely souls and drifters
As their lives unfold towards the heart-lifting, dream-shifting, gloriously glittering stage.

And secondly, Rohan's talk on the need to protect literary fiction and poetry in today's mass media, instant access, market.

“Should Literary Fiction & Poetry Be Protected?”

 This is an exciting era, with new digital possibilities opening up every month, it seems. And that’s fabulous. It sometimes feels as if we’re hardly in control of those developments - and that in itself is fun, and it’s probably good for us too. But we can still influence a few things, to some extent, sometimes. Which means it’s incumbent on us to try to do so, if we can discern a way of steering those things for the better - such as making sure this brave new publishing arena is fully on view and celebrated in all its variety. So here’s a question, just to throw into the mix.

 

One characteristic of this era is that secret and mysterious non-human algorithms increasingly act as virtuous spirals of market power, perhaps more than ever before. But let’s stand back from those less-human processes and consider an equally important, wider question. That question is: how can we ensure the longer-term good health (financial and cultural) of a sector of human endeavour whose richness and interest depend on the flourishing of a diversity of fiction categories, and not just the handful of categories that happen to sell at the highest volume? Solving this would benefit many electrifying writers whose voices would otherwise go unheard; but more importantly, it would also benefit readers and the wider culture.

 

It goes without saying that all fiction categories are created equal in themselves, with equal value and loveliness. But in both independent and traditional publishing these days, titles in literary and cross-genre categories are under more pressure than ever to justify their existence in terms of purely commercial competition with more mass-market genres. Pure market forces are fine, as far as they go. But they do seem to be this digital dynamic’s main source of oxygen, so far; and their nature just happens to ensure that only certain kinds of content tend to get organically promoted, for any given level of time or effort or money that’s available to be expended. And those kinds of content are all fine and beautiful in themselves (just as much as the more literary fiction categories); but the resultant incompleteness in the picture of the kinds of creative output that are really being published is something that should be revealed and addressed.

 

It’s often lamented that the variety and quirkiness of places like London’s Soho and Downtown Manhattan have suffered a big diminishment in recent years, as unique venues have been priced out and pushed out by well-lit, well-heated new branches of favourite high-street chain-stores that are already popular and well-trafficked everywhere else too. Echoing that gentrification process, the combination of retail algorithms and the media’s frequent focus on sales-oriented reporting tends to cause commercial fiction categories (beautiful as those are) to push literary fiction categories out of comparable visibility, to a greater extent in independent publishing than in traditional publishing. This is not the fault of commercial fiction authors themselves - of course not. But in any field, if certain categories of activity in that field have a tendency to end up effectively hidden from general view, then the landscape of that field starts looking quite a bit less richly varied than it really is. Unnecessarily so: this doesn’t need to be the case, if we put our heads together to address it.

 

 

Many a Starbucks branch has displaced many an indie coffee-shop. Both make equally excellent coffees and both are equally attractive in their own different ways. But what shall we and the media come up with, in order to make sure that the fiction-category equivalents of the small indie coffee-shop - e.g. literary fiction (including its more envelope-pushing varieties, but not only these) - can remain commercially viable, alongside the Starbucks-level profits that more commercial categories of fiction are already smartly achieving through indie publishing? New organisations, new coalitions, perhaps? All fiction categories are created equal; but in this current exciting era some categories tend to get edged out of visibility, in independent publishing at least, in favour of other ones. And this edging-out is a powerful shaper of the culture: so prevalent, that it’s able to hide in plain view, like an elephant in a room. Dan and I would therefore like to shine a light on this elephant! (It’s over there…)

I’ll close by saying that in urban planning, clever zoning innovations are sometimes introduced, to preserve or adapt the character of a retail district, in order to maintain its variety (but without being too restrictive on businesses large or small). Is some media equivalent of such zoning possible here? These innovations must surely be achievable … and they must be achieved, proactively. We just haven’t found them yet. So let’s find them!

 

Never Give Up by Mark Edwards

A Rollercoaster Ride Through One Writer’s Life

It’s a terrible cliché, beloved of X Factor contestants, to compare one’s career to a rollercoaster. But that’s exactly what mine has been like: a ride with a very long, slow, uneventful build up, followed by a dizzying and frankly scary series of plummets, ascents and loop-the-loops.

I spent my twenties writing novels and submitting the first three chapters of each one to agents and publishers. If I hadn’t almost immediately attracted a few nibbles from interested agents I might have given up quickly. But after writing three novels (terrible, slightly better, pretty good) I finally landed an agent and was convinced that this was it. After half a decade trying, I was going to get the book deal I’d always dreamt of.

It didn’t happen. My agent couldn’t sell that novel, or the next one or even the one after that. I spent a lot of time despairing. Then, in 1999, the BBC decided to make a documentary about aspiring writers, foolishly thinking it would make good telly. They filmed me reading out excerpts from my rejection letters, my pain and disappointment broadcast to an unimpressed nation. I still didn’t get a book deal, but received an email from another aspiring writer who was in the same situation. Her name was Louise Voss.

Louise and I became pen pals - or email buddies - and didn’t meet until she invited me to her birthday party two years later. By this time, Louise had a mega-bucks deal and I was still locked outside the publishing party. One night in 2002, while quite drunk, we came up with the idea for a co-written novel: a thriller written from the points of view of a stalker and his victim. We called it Killing Cupid and I was convinced we would find a publisher, especially as the book was optioned by the BBC before we’d finished it. But it didn’t happen. They all said that it wasn’t quite enough of a thriller or enough of a black comedy. It was that thing publishers hate: a novel that’s hard to categorise. And then the TV option led nowhere.

A few years later, after I’d written two or three more solo novels, we decided to have another go. This time we would write a more straightforward, action-packed thriller. So we wrote Catch Your Death. By this time, Louise had lost her book deal and her agent had retired. We sent Catch to a number of agents but none of them took us on. I even sent it to my old agent - who had dumped me shortly after the TV documentary - who rejected it with a single line: “Just not good enough.”

So I gave up. This was 2006. I had a good job by this point, was starting to have children. I couldn’t take the rejection any more, the endless hope, all those hours spent in front of a screen with nothing to show for it except a pile of yellowing manuscripts.

This is the point where the rollercoaster trundles up to the first ascent.  In 2010, my girlfriend bought me a Kindle. Around the same time, I read about some writers in America who were having success self-publishing via Amazon’s KDP platform. Some of them had even gone on to get traditional book deals. ‘We should do that,’ I suggested to Louise. She wasn’t keen. She was sure we wouldn’t sell any, that it would be embarrassing. But I persuaded her and we spent the next few months re-writing and updating Killing Cupid.

We self-published it in February 2011. As Louise predicted, on day one we sold two copies: one to my boss, another to my mother-in-law. But I quickly became obsessed with trying to sell more copies and spent the next few months working like a man possessed, doing everything I could think of to promote it. My girlfriend was pregnant with our second child and it’s fair to say that I neglected her, spending hours every evening writing blog posts, posting on forums, networking and also re-writing Catch Your Death, readying it for publication.

It was easier back then for self-published writers to break through and by early May, Killing Cupid had entered the top 100 on Amazon.co.uk. Louise and I were excited. I had become a KDP addict, checking the sales figures all the time, like a rat pressing a lever hoping for a pellet. We released Catch in mid May. This was our more commercial book and we had high hopes.

Suddenly, the rollercoaster shot into action. It took me a long time to figure out what had happened, but it seems that Amazon sent an email to the people who had bought Cupid over the previous months and enough of them bought Catch on the same day to send it shooting up the charts. It landed in the top ten. Three days later it was No.1 and Cupid followed it up to No.2.

I was ecstatic. After all those years of getting nowhere, I had not one but two bestsellers. We were even earning some money. We had a crazy few weeks of appearing live on BBC Breakfast, Sky News, Radio 2 and in lots of newspapers. The books remained lodged at the top of the Kindle rankings. Then a few agents contacted us, including one who had previously rejected us. He took us on and within days we signed a four-book deal with HarperCollins.

We thought it would be easy from this point on. HarperCollins planned to release the paperback of Catch Your Death in January 2012. We visited their offices and were met with a champagne reception. We were living the dream. But I experienced the first stirring of foreboding in the meeting afterwards when they told us there was no marketing budget for the book. It seems they thought that the people who’d already bought it on Kindle would rush out to buy it again.

Of course, that didn’t happen. The book’s sales were disappointing, though to be fair to HC they did get it into WHSmith travel and a couple of supermarkets. Killing Cupid was released in August 2012, during the Olympics and at the height of 50 Shades mania when no one was buying anything except erotica. It stiffed.  Our third novel, All Fall Down, was published in January 2013. It wasn’t in any shops. We knew HC had given up on us and they told us that it was highly unlikely that our fourth novel, Forward Slash, would be sold anywhere either.

So this was February 2013 and the rollercoaster was stuck somewhere in a pitch-black tunnel. I had gambled by quitting my day job and spent all my advance (which, between two of us, after tax and agent’s commission, wasn’t a huge amount) on a deposit on a cheap house in Wolverhampton. I was at my overdraft limit, credit cards maxed out, a huge tax bill looming and with a third child on the way. The dream was over and I was having sleepless nights.

But I had this novel sitting on my computer called The Magpies. I had originally written it way back in 2000. I only had a copy because I had once emailed it to my girlfriend and she still had it in her inbox. I had been tinkering with it for a long time. I decided to self-publish it. I’d been successful once. Could I do it again? I figured out that if I could sell 20,000 copies at £1.99 I could pay my tax bill and get my head above water. But selling 20,000 copies of any book is hard.

I sold a few hundred copies on launch day to my hardcore fans. Then it started to slip down the rankings. I was despondent. This wasn’t going to work. But on Good Friday 2013 something wonderful happened. Amazon must have sent out an email to my existing readers. The Magpies sold 1000 copies that day and another 1000 the next. It flew up the chart into the top ten. It stayed there for two months, hitting No.1 and selling 150,000 copies over the summer. (It’s now sold almost 300,000 copies.)

I was back. My bacon was saved. And then Amazon Publishing made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.  Since then, they have published two more of my novels, one of which also reached No.1, and are also publishing my books with Louise. I am finally a full-time writer.

I am constantly amazed that I managed to pull off my comeback. But I still feel as if I’m just starting out and there is a part of me that would still love to see my books in shops, not just on Amazon. But I am doing what I love, writing books, reaching lots of readers and making a living. I’ve had some luck along the way but believe that if you have the talent and determination, it’s possible to be successful. I wish my ride had been smoother, less like a fairground ride, but then it wouldn’t have been half as much fun, would it?

Mark Edwards writes psychological thrillers, including The Magpies and Because She Loves Me, on his own and police procedurals with Louise Voss, including From the Cradle. He lives in Wolverhampton with his young family. His fourth solo novels, Follow You Home, is published on June 30^th 2015.

www.vossandedwards.com

www.facebook.com/vossandedwards

Twitter: @mredwards

Follow You Home: http://bit.ly/followyouhomeuk

60 Seconds with Chris Curran

Chris Curran's first novel, Mindsight, is a psychological thriller. It was chosen as the lead title for Harper Collins' new digital first imprint at Killer Reads. She lives in Hastings on the south coast of England and Mindsight is set in the town.

Tell us a little about you and your writing.

The moment when, as a four year-old, I first understood that those squiggles on the page were words is still vivid in my memory. It really was an awakening and I've loved books ever since. My first job was in the local library and I still feel most at home in bookshops or libraries.

I began to have ambitions to write when I realised that most storybook heroes were male, and females were either too goody-goody to be true or totally pathetic. So I try to feature brave and interesting woman characters - and they don't have to be good.

You're a new name in published crime fiction, why write crime?

As I'm an omnivorous reader the choice wasn't obvious. However, there's something supremely satisfying for me about a good crime novel. I think it's the combination of a strong story, along with sharp psychological insights, and the appeal to the fundamental instinct we all have for righting wrongs.

If you had to swap to a different genre, what would it be and why?

I would love to try by hand at SFF, or a fantasy novel for children or young adults. Again, it's all about the story and I am in awe of the soaring imaginations of people like Ursula Le Guin and Philip Pullman who can create whole new worlds.

What's the best thing about being a writer?

Reading a scene you've written and knowing it works.

And the worst?

Marketing. I love meeting readers, but would prefer to avoid the rest.

Where do you write?

In the corner of our dining room near a window. I stand up to write, with my laptop on a bookshelf just above waist height. Apparently Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway also wrote standing. I don't know what their reasons were, but it allows me to pace as I think and to work out the action scenes by performing all the parts.

What would be your top 3 writing tips to up-and-coming authors?

• Write the book you would like to read.
• When you think the story is complete put it away for as long as you can bear before rereading. Flaws you've never noticed before will suddenly be obvious.
• Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite - and don't submit to an agent, a publisher, or self-publish, until you are certain the book is the best it can possibly be.

Which 3 books would you take to a desert island?

• The biggest compilation of poetry available. I'll obviously never finish to tire of it and it will nourish my world and improve my writing.
• Donna Tartt's, The Goldfinch. It's one of those books that I'm sure could withstand endless rereading.
• It depends which of my favourite crime writers has a new book out when I leave for the island. So maybe something my Tana French, Cathi Unsworth or CJ Sansom.

Which crime author do you most admire?

There are so many, but as Ruth Rendell has just died I have to pick her. In the form of her alter-ego, Barbara Vine, she has been credited with inventing the dark psychological suspense novel and it was Vine's books that make me want to write something as atmospheric and intense.

What are your future writing plans?

I have two novels at different stages of development; both standalone psychological thrillers. The first is about a woman who sister was murdered as a teenager fifteen years before, and their father convicted of the crime. The second is partly set in the 1950's, in the dying days of variety theatre, and also in the very different atmosphere of the Swinging 60's.


Website http://chriscurranauthor.com/

Twitter https://twitter.com/Christi_Curran

FB author page https://www.facebook.com/pages/Chris-Curran/421251721385764?ref=aymt_homepage_panel

YA? Why Not?

By Chele Cooke

Chele Cooke

So here are five elements to consider when asking yourself if you have crossover potential introduce your novel to the YA scene. 

Character Ages

The assumption floats around that in order to have a young adult book you need a young adult cast of characters. Whilst this certainly helps in creating a connection between reader and characters through similarities it is not the be all and end all for young adult books. A diverse cast of characters will help greatly with crossover potential. Take a look at the most popular YA books and you’ll find casts of all ages with protagonists ranging from early teens to mid-twenties.

Sex

There is also the incorrect assumption among many that in order to have a potential YA novel you should have a clean and sex free story. Sex, sexuality, and exploration are often key themes in young adult novels when puberty is throwing emotions into chaos. Whilst YA novels should not venture into the sexually explicit or erotic, many YA novels will have some aspect of sex involved.

Violence, Gore, and Horror

Under the same vein as dealing with the topic of sex, violence and horror should not be filtered out for a young adult audience. Remember that one of the most popular YA novels to date involved an arena of twenty-four children fighting to the death.

Language and Sentence Structure

Some authors believe that their books are too complicated for a younger audience. These are young people who are often reading and comprehending Shakespeare and Bronté. Whilst it is beneficial to have a straight forward, natural prose, never underestimate your audience's intelligence due to their age.

Rollercoaster Pacing

Most readers want a book that jumps straight in and keeps them hooked until the end. For Young Adults this is even more important. Your book should have a rollercoaster pace to keep them glued to the pages. That means give them great heart pounding scenes but also temper these with quiet scenes that allow them to acclimatise to the plot, characters, and bring their heart rate back to normal.

The Young Adult market is huge and still growing. There are millions of teenagers online creating a fantastic and enthusiastic audience eager for new stories. However, whilst aiming to one audience or another, authors should always be aware of the crossover potential of their novels. How easily can your story germinate from the YA market into the A market or back the other way, and how do you go about crossing those boundaries?

With a focus to identify target audiences and select out Amazon categories for novels, it can often be difficult for authors to spot that they have a story which suits a wide age range. Why not take another look at your novel and see whether you think the young adult market could benefit from your story. You never know, you could be looking at your next generation of diehard fans.


Website: http://chelecooke.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/CheleCooke
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/CheleCookeWriting

The Industry View - Alison Baverstock

Associate Professor Alison Baverstock, interviewed by JJ Marsh

What do you see as the three key changes in publishing since 2010?

The first must be the rise on rise of digital, which has both revolutionised the speed and reach with which content can be made available.

The second is the rise on rise of self-publishing, which far from being a mark of shame is now a badge of proactivity.

The third is the breaking down of publishing structures and the launch of so many new ones - new companies, new services and new formats. It fascinates me to see how many different ways in which content can be shared, supported and commented upon.

And what are the impacts of those?

For publishers, agents and readers, the impact of self-publishing is a vast increase in the amount of content available. The reader is having to make more effort to decide how to spend their time, and we are seeing a real shift in how people access material they want to read.

While the speed with which material can be made available is mind boggling, the same principles for sharing apply - don’t press publish until you are ready to be judged by what you have written. You really can only make a first impression once.

Words with JAM is all about writers, but I imagine the shifting landscape has affected many other areas of the industry.

Yes absolutely. For example, I have just done a large piece of research on how self-publishing is affecting the lives of freelance editors. It’s fascinating. It seems the traditional assumption that the difference between a published and self-published book was the involvement of an editor, is regularly not true. Rather, self-publishers are now becoming a regular source of income to freelance editors. The impact of self-publishing on independent editors is a wider market for their work, a broader acknowledgement of their role - and possibly increased rates of pay.

As an author who’s had a great deal of success via traditional publishing, you seem to have a positive view of self-published authors. Why so?

I decided to investigate the growing significance of self-publishing and researched and wrote a book for Bloomsbury called The Naked Author. I was really surprised to find such a contented group of people - all really pleased to have finalised content that mattered to them. I also like the atmosphere between self-publishing authors. They tend to be mutually affirming and encouraging - and very good at sharing access to suppliers they have found it good to work with.

You offer much wise marketing advice for writers, who often find that the least enjoyable part of publication. How do you, as a writer, engage with readers?

I enjoy connecting with writers on Twitter (@alisonbav) and often find myself picking up recommendations of what to read next there. I have a website although I confess I don’t update it very often www.alisonbaverstock.com My favourite method of engaging with writers is giving talks at literary festivals - I love the question and answer sessions. I also like being asked to write blogs and responses to questions online - so thank you for this invitation, which followed our meeting at a conference organised by Bloomsbury. Sometimes pieces I have written get rediscovered and that’s lovely - for example an article on creative careers several years ago now keeps popping up on Twitter. http://ccskills.org.uk/careers/advice/article/10-tips-for-a-creative-career

Can we talk about the Kingston University MA in Publishing - what do students learn? And what do they go on to do?

I co-founded the MA Publishing at Kingston nearly ten years ago now - and still teach on it. In fact I’m proud to announce (for the first time here!) that in the next academic year we will be launching a module on self-publishing within the degree. I think this shows how far the industry has come. We offer our students a blend of academic thinking and professional practice, and they are now embedded throughout the publishing industry and beyond (there are lots of organisations that need to know how to present information effectively). It really pleases me that our alumni stay in touch with the course and are really supportive of their successors, regularly offering to come and speak or assist by hosting placements.

What makes the UK publishing scene different?

I think our long tradition of publishing is something really special. I have a colleague at Kingston, Judith Watts, who has a passion for Publishing history - and I love listening to her stories of how previous generations of publishers solved problems. Nothing is new.

The digital surge seems to have encouraged a print comeback. Which format do you prefer?

Personally I love a well-produced hardback (with a good reading light, an open fire and a glass of wine). But I am very nerdy about the condition of my books, so always take off the dust jacket while reading. I am ashamed to say I never lend my books, although I regularly buy additional copies for people who ask if they can borrow something.

Would you ever consider writing fiction?

I have had a go, but it did not get published. I have written a memoir, which I will think about whether to publish sometime in the future - for now I am just glad it exists - and children’s fiction, based on my eldest son’s love of dinosaurs. I will maybe dust that down and think about revising it when I eventually have some grandchildren. So no rush…

Will you leave us with a top tip? Best book of last year?

I just loved Stoner. I can’t think how I had missed knowing about it for so long, but having got around to reading it, I found it completely engrossing - and very relevant given that I now work in a university. I also reread Paddington, having seen the film. The book and film were quite different but I enjoyed both. Paddington is the first fiction I can remember owning - my father bought me a boxed set of four Paddington titles with a book token he had received for his birthday, and I vividly remember him reading it to me. I can also remember questioning the books as objects as well as thinking about the stories - and wondering why none of the covers had any red in them. I was clearly a would-be publisher at an early age!

Alison Baverstock and Gill Hines, co-authors of Later!

Special offer from Alison

The fifth edition of How to market books is just out. Words with JAM readers are welcome to benefit from a special offer! Look on the Routledge website http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415727587/ and gain the discount by inserting the code SRK92 at checkout. You also get free postage and packing.

Snapshots from... Sydney

In our regular series, international writers share some snapshots from their part of the world.
This issue, Morgan Bell tells us about the writing life in Sydney.
By JJ Marsh

What’s so great about Sydney?

Sydney attracts a lot of international artists and entertainers with world class venues that are easily accessible for local people. It is a cultural hub for local theatre, dance, music, film, and authors. There is a thriving gay and lesbian scene and a lot of ethnic diversity, which leads to a rich dining palette at pubs and clubs and restaurants. It is a city of villages with significant urban sprawl and close proximity to the Central Coast, Newcastle (where my family is), Port Stephens, and the Hunter Valley wine region, so there is a broad cross-section of people working, living, and visiting in the city at any one time.

Tell us a bit about the cultural life of the place.

For authors and readers we have the annual Sydney Writers Festival in May, held down at the piers near Circular Quay, The Rocks (Sydney Harbour). Newcastle Writers Festival has been held in March-April the last two years and has been a thriving success. The month of February is the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras cultural celebration, with theatre and film and art, and then culminating in the gay pride parade. We have the short film festival Tropfest in December in Centennial Park Sydney, and the Spiegeltent season of burlesque and vaudeville in January in Hyde Park Sydney. During our summer we have daylight savings hours so it’s a big time for home barbeques and outdoor dining at cafes and restaurants.

What’s hot? What are people reading?

All The Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld, Already Dead by Jaye Ford, and recent hit novels by Claire North, Gillian Flynn, and Michael Faber. Speculative fiction is really popular. Fantasy by Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Haydon, Lauren Beukes, Terry Brooks, Robin Hobb, and Margaret Atwood, is being consumed at a high rate. The Divergent series has been popular, as has the Game of Thrones series. We read a lot of local talent within speculative fiction, and everyone kind of knows each other, in a six degrees of separation kind of way: Kate Forsyth, Margo Lanagan, Garth Nix, Janeen Webb, Thoraiya Dyer, Jack Dann etc

Can you recommend any books set in or around Sydney?

Candy by Luke Davies (film version stars Heath Ledger and Abby Cornish) is a based on real life story of romance and heroin addiction. He Died With A Felafel In His Hand by John Birmingham (film version stars Noah Taylor) is a based on real life story of a man living with ninety-odd different people in share-houses in major cities in Australia, including Sydney. Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta and Puberty Blues by Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette are a couple of classic coming of age novels set in Sydney, the former in the 1990s and the latter in the 1970s.

The Harp in the South by Ruth Park, and its sequel Poor Man’s Orange were set in Surry Hills, Sydney in the 1940s. They were family dramas about an Irish Catholic family living in the slums of the time.

Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (film version stars Cate Blanchett and Ralph Fiennes) is set in 19thC Sydney and involves a pair of eccentric gamblers attempting to transport a glass church to the north coast.

Tim by Colleen McCullough (film version stars a young Mel Gibson and Piper Laurie) is about an unconventional love between a beautiful builder’s labourer with a learning disability and an emotionally brittle lonely “spinster” (she’s 43, but it was the 1970s) in a rich part of Sydney. The Vivisector by Patrick White is often viewed as a veiled autobiography. It is set in Sydney, and was published in 1970. It posed the question as to whether it was possible to be a human being and an artist at the same time via shrewd analysis of the lifelong struggles for truth, and creative journey of an uncouth fictional painter.

Who are the best known local writers?

Kate Forsyth, Margo Lanagan, Garth Nix, Jaye Ford, Wendy James, Greg Bastian, Pamela Freeman, Kirstyn McDermott, and Kaz Delaney are all big local names in Young Adult and Genre Fiction.

Some of our national treasures include David Malouf, Andrew McGahan, Tim Winton, Peter Carey, and Patrick White.

Is the location an inspiration or distraction for you?

In Sydney the main roads are gridlock during peak hour, so I catch the train into work in the CBD. The trains are packed full of commuters, and I’m a fairly anxious person, so my friend put me on to listening to audiobooks on the Audible app on my phone using headphones. I get to focus on a good story and shut out all the hustle-bustle. Sometimes now I just put the headphones in and don’t play anything, I just think about my own stories.

It has been a bit of a distraction being disconnected from my Newcastle/Hunter writers scene now that I live and work in Sydney City, but I am branching out and attending more write-ins and groups and workshops, and I can still make most Newcastle/Hunter things that are held on weekends. Its funny when I lived in Newcastle I always thought I was missing out on things in Sydney.

What are you writing?

My debut collection of short fiction was Sniggerless Boundulations (2014), which I am working on the audiobook for now, with voice artist Jon Severity. I am currently writing the last couple of short stories for inclusion in my second collection, Laissez Faire, which will be out this year. I just finished a speculative fiction short story for the Novascapes (Volume 2) anthology. I am also very slowly plotting a speculative fiction novel called Daughters of Mallory, a trippy feminist dystopia with a pile of literary, fairy tale, and folklore references.

Sum up life in Sydney in three words.

Hectic, degenerate, opportunity.


Morgan Bell is a traffic engineer, technical writer, and linguist. She was born in Melbourne Australia in 1981, currently resides in Sydney, but calls Newcastle home. She is a member of Hunter Writers Centre, Newcastle Writers Group, and Newcastle Speculative Fiction Group. Sniggerless Boundulations is her debut collection of short fiction. Her companion collection, Laissez Faire, is due to be released in 2015. Her story “It Had To Be Done” was first published in the Newcastle Writers Group Anthology 2012. Her story “Midnight Daisy” was published by YWCA Newcastle in 2013 as part of the She: True Stories project, being awarded a Story Commendation at the exhibit launch, with live readings on ABC 1233 radio and a Newcastle Writers Festival panel in 2014. Her story “Don’t Pay The Ferryman”, an anti-travel piece, was shortlisted for the Hunter Writer’s Centre Travel Writing Prize 2014. Her short story “The Switch” was published in Novascapes, a speculative fiction anthology from the Hunter Region of Australia, in 2014.



Social media
www.facebook.com/morganleighbell
www.twitter.com/queenboxi
Website
http://sniggerlessboundulations.webs.com
 Sniggerless Boundulations
http://www.amazon.com/Sniggerless-Boundulations-Morgan-Bell-ebook/dp/B00HVYLVU6/
Novascapes (Volume 1)
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/472433

Marking Time by Anne Stormont

Writers as travellers in time.

How do you like your history? Do you prefer it linear or layered?

As writers we get to move freely through time. We can set our fiction in the past, present or future and our characters can even move from one time period to another as we allow time to shift or slip around them. If we write non-fiction, it can be a personal record of the past by way of a biography or memoir, or an analytical record of past events; it can involve speculation about the future by extrapolation form where we are now, or  it can chronicle the present as, for example, so many bloggers do.

Then there's creative non-fiction. Writers in this genre can really blur the timelines. Some blur them beautifully as they muse on past and present - H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald and On the Shorelines of Knowledge by Chris Arthur - being two fine examples. My current personal favourite is Robert Macfarlane who just writes so beautifully about the etching of time on our landscape, in its high places and in the rocks beneath our feet.

As I say elsewhere in this issue, I studied history as part of my MA degree. My other subject was psychology. So I suppose it's not surprising that I'm fascinated by the nature of time, by how we humans measure it and perceive it. And I've also noticed as both parent and grandparent, and of course as a teacher, how children often perceive time in a more intense way than adults, but also in a more fluid way. The year between a seventh and eighth birthday is much longer than the year between a fifty-seventh and a fifty-eighth one. Last week is as far away as a decade ago. It's no accident that so much of children's fiction involves flexibility in the laws of time and space.

On the subject of time and space, I was equal parts enthralled and bewildered by Professor Brian Cox's BBC television series on quantum physics and its relation to time. But what the programme did confirm for me was that there's more to history than the linear approach.

When considering history whether in terms of personal, national or world events, we tend to think in terms of a timeline. Even when going very far back to pre-history and the beginnings of human life, we still tend to view all that has happened in a one-event-after-another sort of way. Days in history in one long line.

In each twenty-four hour period things happen, have always happened. Some of these things are considered important enough to be noted down. Long ago they may have been recorded as cave paintings, chiselled onto stone tablets or scribed on parchment scrolls. More recently they'd be published in newspapers, journals and books, and of, course on the internet.  And those recorded events provide reference points on the timeline. They're there to be read, understood and interpreted. They're there to give structure and meaning and a bit of an underpinning to our lives.

I find it fascinating, in a weird sort of way, that there's a date every year that will become the anniversary of my own death. Yes, I'm at an age where I'm aware of time passing, of my own mortality and the end to my own personal timeline. It's not something that scares me exactly, but I don't want it to come around just yet.

I try to make each day count, I try not to waste time and I try to be mindful of this day in my own history. I strive to enjoy the gift of the present and to leave my own tiny, but positive, marks in time.

This day in history, its moments, its joys and disasters, it's all we ever truly possess. However, we can be so pressed for time that we often experience our days as fleeting. We wish we could fit more in, wish we had more leisure and more time for our loved ones. On the other hand, on some days the hours pass too slowly, filled with yearning for days gone by, or perhaps with impatience for days still to come. 

So, what of all those other days? Days of past and future history. Are they truly inaccessible; the past behind us and the future further on up the line? What if we imagine history as layered rather than linear? So instead of looking back, or even forward at a particular day in history, we look down and through.

Time for some lateral thinking.

We live on a small but beautiful, very old planet that spins in an ancient and vast universe. Contemplating history and the passage of time on a planetary or universal scale is truly mind-bending.

Astrophysicists view time as a fourth dimension. They suggest not only that time can bend, but that it flows at different rates depending on location. They posit that its rate of flow is relative to the other dimensions of space and to the amount of gravity that is present.

The everyday, human version of time is just a construct. A useful construct, and one that facilitates the organisation of our lives, but a construct nevertheless. Our clocks and calendars measure something that is relative and is organised in neat lines and circles by a shared understanding and agreement. But it's not fixed and it's not absolute.

Supposing I left the Earth today and travelled on out of our solar system and our galaxy. Suppose I went through a wormhole - a bend in time and space that would let me travel hundreds of thousands of light years in a blink, perhaps even to another of the possibly many universes - I would be far away, not just in spatial terms, but in terms of time as well. And then, after maybe a couple of years holidaying on a far away world, I return to Earth. I would be two years older but it's theoretically possible that fifty, a hundred, maybe five hundred years would have passed here. My days in history would be very different from, and totally  out of step with, those of you who remained earthbound .

I don't fully understand the astro-physical concept of time and space, but I like the idea of it. I find it comforting that time isn't fixed and that the atoms that make up our bodies have existed since time began, and will always exist in some form as long as time continues to be.

I love that when I walk the Earth's surface my footfalls connect me with all the layers of life and time on our wee blue planet. Layers of geology, topography, ancestry, experience and time. Layers not limited by days, months and lifespans.

I love the possibility that all my days could exist simultaneously and forever, all of them layered up, down and through the planet's physical layers and throughout all the multiverses. I love that I might magically get a glimpse of these other days. I love that, even if it's just in theory, there could be places in time and space where my days in history have other and infinite possibilities.

I love that time is immeasurable, and I love that the marks we make on it are immeasurably small.

I love that as writers we can, at least for a short while, make time do our bidding.

Anne Stormont is an author-publisher. She can be a subversive old bat but maintains a kind heart. As well as writing for this fine organ, she writes fiction for adults - mainly of the female-of-a-certain-age persuasion - and for children. She blogs at http://putitinwriting.me  - where you can find out lots more about her.