Bird of Passage, Free on Kindle to Mark the Start of Spring.

Cover art by Matt Zanetti

My novel Bird of Passage will be free to download on Kindle from 4th - 6th April. It's another 'island-set' novel. I seemed to go through a period of setting my novels and plays on islands, until I exhausted that particular piece of inspiration, but it still nips away at me from time to time. So the rewritten version of an old novel, The Golden Apple, due for publication next month, is set on a completely different kind of island: a much warmer place altogether, La Gomera in the Canaries. And even The Physic Garden, set fair and square in early nineteenth century Glasgow, has a trip to the Isle of Arran as a central and very important scene.

Bird of Passage, though, is set on a fictional and unnamed Scottish Hebridean island, which could be just about anywhere, from Gigha, which I know well, to the Isle of Skye, or Mull or Islay, or some amalgam of all of them. Oddly enough, the perception of where it is seems to depend on the reader's own experience and that's fine by me. I love that process which seems to go on, whereby the reader recreates the world of the novel within his or her own mind.

Susan Price, reviewing the novel for An Awfully Big Blog Adventure describes how she realized that there was a connection with a much more famous classic novel:
'I was three-quarters of the way through this book – or even more – before it dawned on me that it was Wuthering Heights in modern dress. I was tipped off by a couple of sly and amusing references to twigs tapping on windows and ghosts, and by the hero disappearing for twenty years and then returning a rich man.
It’s not a re-telling, though – it’s a re-imagining. A dialogue with the older book, if you like. It asks, would the same story, the same deathless love, be possible in the modern age, and if so, how?'
Link to the rest of the review here.

A very young me, in Wuthering Heights mode!

Susan is right. I wasn't attempting a retelling. I wouldn't dare. But Wuthering Heights has always been my all time favourite novel. I was born in Yorkshire and was trundled over the moors to Top Withins when I was still in my pushchair, or so I'm told. Bird of Passage is a book I was desperate to write, partly because of my own obsession with Wuthering Heights, but I spent years hunting for the right story, the right setting, the right set of characters.

Reviewing the novel for the Indie eBook review, Gilly Fraser writes:
There are no pat answers in this story and no neatly contrived solutions. Endings are jagged, situations remain unresolved. Yet at the end of the book there is a feeling of satisfaction that things did work out as they should – at least to some extent. I think that makes the story and its characters all the more realistic and credible. It’s hard to pigeonhole this book to a specific genre. It’s a love story, yet sometimes defies the label. It’s contemporary, yet dwells quite a bit in the past. As to its audience – I think this would appeal to readers who don’t need to be led by the hand and who enjoy
challenging relationships. Wholeheartedly recommended.

Read the rest of her review here

One of the nice things about reviews - especially when they are positive but quite analytical - is that they give you as a writer a new perspective on a novel. It's odd how often you're not entirely sure what you've written, or what you might have achieved, even though you've been in the thick of it, even though you may have had all kinds of intentions for the book. 

I'm often asked to describe the kind of books I write. It's a question I find genuinely difficult to answer, and reviews like Susan's and Gilly's help me to find some answers. My books aren't really romances in the conventional sense because they don't always have the traditional happy ending or even the traditional structure. They have a resolution of sorts, and I hope they give the reader a sense of satisfaction, but the characters don't generally walk off into the sunset. Or not often. One reviewer who loved this novel still found it heartbreaking, and people who have read The Physic Garden, even while they tell me they couldn't put it down, still tell me that they simply couldn't bear what happens in the end. I know what they mean because I couldn't bear it either, and I wrote it! 

Whenever I finish a novel, I try to work out what kind of book I've written. I know that may sound a bit daft. But when you're in the middle of a piece of work, you're so buried in the time and place, so deep into the minds of your characters, that you really can't see the wood for the trees. So it can be very helpful to stand back and try to analyse exactly what kind of novel you've produced. At first, I despaired of finding any common denominators within my fiction. Everything I write seems to be quite different: some are historical, some contemporary, some are more literary than others, some quiet, some complex.

Quite a while ago, an agent told me (and I'm paraphrasing here) that my work was too well written to be popular but too accessible to be really literary. She saw it as a fault. The more I speak to my readers though, the more I see that a lot of people out there are looking for stories which are well written and grown up, but accessible too. And I think that's what I write. Mainly because that's the kind of book I like to read. Lots of them are love stories. But I suppose they are 'grown up' love stories. I wish Amazon had a category like that, but they don't yet - and 'adult' has quite a different connotation! Even the Physic Garden, which isn't really a love story at all, but a story about male friendship and betrayal, is a grown up tale.

Bird of Passage is a very grown up love story -  about past damage and the obsessive attachment that is the result. And of course it is, unashamedly, a homage to my much loved Wuthering Heights. If this sounds like something you might enjoy reading, it's free to download for the next three days, here in the UK and here in the USA.

Love Stories: Why Feel Guilty?

Way back when The Curiosity Cabinet (still free on Kindle for one more day) was short-listed for the Dundee Book Prize, I got to have dinner aboard the Discovery in Dundee with the lovely Ian Rankin and the equally lovely Malcolm Archibald, (destined to be the eventual winner)  among other people. The three shortlisted novels were read by a number of Scottish book groups whose members reported on them. The comments on The Curiosity Cabinet were very favourable. But most of all, I remember one reader who, although praising it, remarked that it had been a 'guilty pleasure'. That phrase has stayed with me for years. I was very glad the reader had enjoyed the book, delighted that they had found it to be a pleasure - but at the same time, the idea that they felt guilty about enjoying it made me kind of sad.

Responses to novels are subjective and as a writer, you can't argue with them. You just accept them and move on. But I felt sad that at some point, somebody had given my reader a very definite idea about what he or she should enjoy. I found myself wondering who it had been. A teacher? A literary critic? Another reader?

Now, anyone who has read the Curiosity Cabinet will know that it is - unashamedly - a love story. Actually, it's two love stories, one past and one present and they are very carefully entwined. There are similarities, a fragile web of connections across time, but many differences too. It isn't a novel about solutions, although I like to think it's a novel about ways in which time resolves some things, at least. It isn't a time slip novel so much as a novel about layers of time. It's a 'quiet' story, as somebody else said. That was where it fell at the Big Publishing hurdle, even though it was eventually published by a medium sized publisher. The big editors told my agent they liked it - in some cases they told her they loved it - but they didn't think it was a stonking great story, so they didn't think it would ever be a stonking great bestseller.
They were probably right.

Some readers think it's simple, and some readers don't. That's interesting too. I don't think it's all that simple or only simple in the way that a poem is simple. It's probably no accident that I was a poet in another writing life, and still find myself relentlessly paring things down to their bare bones when sometimes that isn't what a novelist should be doing at all.

But I find myself saddened that a significant percentage of readers seem to have forgotten - or feel that they shouldn't admit - their desire to seek out and enjoy the magic of a well written, thought provoking love story, whether it ends happily ever after or not.

Doom laden?

I've been thinking a lot about the kind of novels I write. Figuring that if I can't describe the kind of books I write then readers will have a hard time finding them.
I'm a mid-list writer, for sure. I write historical fiction and contemporary fiction. I hope it's thoughtful and accessible.
But you know what else?
I write love stories.
Even my recent novel, the Physic Garden, a fairly sombre exploration of friendship and extreme betrayal, ('doom laden' a friend described it)  is also a love story, although it is up to the reader to decide exactly where that love lies, by and for whom.

Two other novels, the Amber Heart and Bird of Passage, one historical and one spanning a whole lifetime, turn out to be love stories too. In Bird of Passage, it's a strange, twisted kind of love, but love it most definitely is.

Ice Dancing - of everything I've written - is probably  the most straightforward love story, although even this one isn't very straightforward, since it's about the disruption of irresistible love at first sight for two honourable people. It's also the least popular of my novels as far as sales go - which is faintly irritating, because I love these two characters almost more than any others I've created and am desperate to write a sequel.  I know what happens next, and that's such a temptation for any novelist. (I'm tempted to beg a little here. Go on. Give it a try. Then I can write some more about Joe and Helen!)

But really, this is a plea for honesty. I know I love films, plays, dramas and novels about relationships, affection, love, passion, friendship, obsession, the feelings we have for each other, feelings that can shape (or wreck) our whole lives. I can't be alone in this. Let's face it, I'm not alone in this.  So surely these things are worth exploring in our fiction. Who on earth decided otherwise? Some of the finest stories ever written have been love stories. Should we feel guilty for enjoying these too?

My most favourite least popular novel! 

Judging A Book By Its Cover

I haven't forgotten about my 'How I Got Where I Am' series, but other things have intervened over the past couple of weeks! I'll pick up where I left off next week. Meanwhile, I feel the need to write a bit about 'cover images' for eBooks. And here's why.

In traditional publishing, you may be consulted about the cover of your book, but you won't have the final say - or, more often than not, any say at all. Marketing, branding, current fashions all take priority. (I used to loathe those headless women covers so much but it's a fad that seems to have faded thank goodness.) As a writer, you will hardly ever be able to communicate with the artist involved.  I liked the original paperback edition of the Curiosity Cabinet a lot  although it was very different from the eBook edition - of which more in due course. As far as I remember, the image of the embroidered casket which the artist used came from the Burrell in Glasgow, where there's a splendid collection of them. (Go and see for yourself!)

There are whole websites devoted to praising or slating eBook covers. There are competitions and awards. I sometimes wonder why we human beings are so darned competitive. Free us up to be what we want to be, do what we want to do, and people will instantly suggest that somebody (preferably themselves) needs to exert some sort of control, judge, make distinctions, create hierarchies. People become so alarmed by the random nature of the emerging eBook market that they suggest a string of controls involving submission and judgement followed by the acceptance and curation of the favoured few, seemingly unaware that they have just reinvented traditional publishing.

Over a long career in writing of all kinds, I've come to loathe that word 'submission' and to consider other models, other ways of doing things. Submission means the 'action or fact of accepting or yielding to a superior force or to the will or authority of another person.' Which only works when that other person really is genuinely superior, a wise teacher, an experienced and respected expert. Writers begin their careers by submitting - we're routinely advised that we need to contemplate scores, nay hundreds, of submissions. We get into the mindset at a time when we really do need a modicum of expert advice, but the trouble is that even when we become seasoned professionals, we too often continue to yield our power, our ideas and significant equity in our product to other people. The fact that quite often those people don't really know their literary bahookies from their elbows somehow escapes us. They tell us how superior they are and we believe them. Relationships which should be creative partnerships become lopsided. Until Amazon came along, there was little alternative.

So where do covers come in? Well, eBook covers aren't really covers at all. They are images, images which you see at thumbnail size on Amazon and other listings pages, images which are enlarged on e-readers, but which can be works of art in their own right. To some extent, this was always the case. Years ago, one of my short stories, The Butterfly Bowl, was published in a glossy women's magazine and the accompanying image was such a small work of art that I bought the original from the artist. But images for eBooks may be an opportunity for creative collaboration of a new and exciting kind.  Let's free our minds from the usual design/marketing/judgmental constraints for a bit. Let's decide that if we want to, we can explore new ways of doing this, too. If we're eBook publishing because we're writing across genres or because what we write doesn't fit comfortably into any single marketing paradigm, then why shouldn't we consider new ways of approaching the images which interpret and reflect our books?

When I decided to publish The Curiosity Cabinet as an eBook, I knew that I needed a new cover image to go with it. A friend, distinguished textile artist Alison Bell - who had read and loved the book - offered to design an image for me. It is her own response to the novel, and a very beautiful one at that. I would no more have looked at it as a piece of utilitarian design than I would look at any other genuine work of art only for what it could bring to the 'pack shot'.

It's an approach which I have largely followed with my other novels, either asking the artist to read the book, or at least talking about the themes in some detail and asking for a creative response, much, I suppose, as one asks a designer to approach a play - discussing the thinking behind the project but then giving them the freedom to interpret, using their own individual  creativity.

The image above for Bird of Passage, by a young digital artist called Matt Zanetti, was a revelation to me. I had discussed the themes, the setting of the novel, passed on some of my own photographs, even  had something in mind. What Matt came up with, though, was utterly unexpected.  But the sheer brilliance of it as an interpretation of the novel, the loneliness of the central character, the sense of his imprisonment in his own past, all of them are there in Matt's superb image. I remember the first time I saw it, it brought a lump to my throat!

Two more novels have covers designed by another young Scottish artist, Claire Maclean. The Amber Heart is a big book, a sweeping love story, set in nineteenth century Poland. I wanted romance on an epic scale. It's a story of a lifelong and passionate love affair. Claire, with a deeply romantic imagination seemed the ideal choice and she produced a cover of such warmth and beauty that I had no hesitation in asking her to work on my next novel, Ice Dancing, as well.
But this was a different proposition.  Ice Dancing is grown up, sexy, quirky. An intelligent love story with a dark side.  The hero plays ice hockey, for sure. (The title is a metaphor for relationships that extends through the whole book!) But it's really  a story about an exotic and charismatic interloper in a small Scottish village - and love at first sight.. The idea of  hockey as 'fire dancing on ice' - the sheer, intensely physical sexiness of it, certainly permeates the whole novel, and that's what Claire seized on. Once again, the image practically took my breath away.

Now, Alison has read, and is meditating on the ideas in The Physic Garden, my next book, a historical novel set in Scotland in the early 1800s. She has remarked that it is a deeply melancholy tale (it is, I'm afraid) and - unerringly - she has honed in on a passage which is absolutely central to the novel. I await her interpretation with interest.

When it works well, we need to acknowledge that the symbiosis between artist and writer can create a piece of art which illuminates and comments on the writer's work. All of this is such a creative pleasure: a new and unanticipated benefit of inde publishing. The odd thing is that, although the covers have been created by three different artists, there is a 'look' about them which seems somehow to reflect my own voice as a writer. That voice is the common denominator and it shows.

Dear Emily Bronte - How To Make Your Lovely Novel Better

Last Tuesday, I wrote a blog post for my regular slot on Authors Electric, titled Dear Emily. A 'previously undiscovered piece of literary correspondence', this was a letter from Humongous Publishing (look out for more from this unique company in due course!) asking for edits on Wuthering Heights. Today, checking the stats, I see that there have been more than 800 page views in that short time and a lot of interesting comments, many of them from writers saying the same thing: this was very funny, but all too horribly true.


It was all too horribly true, I suppose, because I lifted a surprising number of the comments directly from letters and emails I have received over half a lifetime of writing and submission. In fact I think I'm about to take a vow not to 'submit' anything - with its sense of relinquishing control to another - ever again. I always think of myself as a forgiving kind of a gal, so I was amazed how - once I began - all of them just came boiling to the surface. 

But it set me thinking. I've also had some good editors and artistic directors in my time, not one of whom would have written anything like this - so what was it about this string of  'helpful suggestions' which rang so many bells with so very many writers?

I think it's something that demonstrates a total misunderstanding of how the creative process works, but we all encounter it from time to time. Good editors will ask lots of difficult questions. But they will always be questioning the book you have written, the book (or play) that exists. They will be forcing you, the writer, to examine it more closely, to find out more, to tell the tale you want and need to tell. Or even more accurately, the tale that wants to be told.

As soon as somebody starts to suggest glib alternatives - why don't you do this? Why don't you do that? Can't you make him or her do this? Or be like this? - the red mist descends. Or it does for me. Because I can't 'make' anything do or be what it doesn't want to be.  

When I was writing Bird of Passage, I spent months knowing that there was something in Finn's background about which he could neither speak, nor even think. It was something so traumatic that it must account for the way he was, in himself and in his relationship with Kirsty. The trouble was, I didn't know what it was and Finn couldn't remember. Some hypothetical editor might have said 'why don't you make it...' but I couldn't do that. I couldn't make it anything. Instead, I had to find it out. And I did. In the middle of the night. I woke up thinking 'oh - that's what it was. That was what happened to him!'

Strange as it may seem, it was as if the story had existed somewhere all along, as an entity outside myself. I don't know whether other writers feel this way, but I suspect a lot of them do. And I suspect that's why we find it so maddening when somebody else tries to manipulate our fictional reality with inappropriate suggestions.