Happy New Year - and a bit of advice.

2013 was mixed, to say the least. For several much loved friends and a few relatives, it was, not to put too fine a point on it, a pig of a year. I was glad to see the back of it on their behalf and found myself hoping for much better things from 2014.

But there were good points and highlights too, chief of which - for me - was working with the wonderful Saraband - a publisher in a million - to prepare my historical novel The Physic Garden for publication both in paperback and as an eBook. I love the new cover which is from an old sampler embroidered by Janet McNiel in 1819. (And many thanks to Glasgow Museums for permission to use it.)

Saraband won the Saltire Society's inaugural Scottish Publisher of the Year award in 2013. You can read all about it here. But essentially, they judged that Saraband had 'responded to industry changes and moved Scottish authors to the heart of its business.' All true. And as far as I'm concerned they are the most helpfully collaborative publisher I have ever worked with.  A unique pleasure and I very much hope to continue working with them. Meanwhile, the paperback of The Physic Garden will be published in late March, with the eBook being available quite a bit sooner. I'll certainly keep you posted.

On this dark and dreary New Year's Day I've been sitting in a cosy room in our 200 year old cottage, drinking tea, watching old movies, making notes and plans for the coming year's work and occasionally falling asleep. It was a late night last night: an excellent Scottish Hogmanay party, with good food and champagne too. I'm not beating myself up about not putting all those plans into action until next Monday 6th January. I love this quiet time in the middle of winter where you feel justified in going into hibernation mode.

But before I sign off for tonight - here's a little piece of advice for all those friends and acquaintances who keep telling me that they 'want to write' but can't seem to find the time or motivation. This kind of advice is fairly rare for me. I'm always happy to talk to groups and classes about research and the writing process, but I tend to believe that if somebody really wants to write, then that's what they'll do. The late Pat Kavanagh once said to me that she thought people should only write something if they felt they couldn't bear NOT to write it, and I've found myself agreeing with her more and more as the years have gone by.  If a friend says to me that he or she wants to play the piano (something I can do reasonably well)  I'll chat about teachers, but if, a couple of years later, I find that the same friend has done nothing about it, it's no big deal. I'll just assume it was a passing fancy. She might well be perfectly happy playing Chopsticks or busking a tune for her own pleasure - and that's absolutely fine too.

But just because it's 1st January, and the time for resolutions and people are still telling me that they really want to write - here's a thought.

If you write only 500 words a day for  300 days of 2014 (which would give you a pretty hefty 65 days off!) you will have 150,000 words by this time next year. That equates to a doorstop of a novel, or a novel and a half, or three longish novellas, or two novels of reasonable length.

500 words is easy peasy. They don't have to be the best written 500 words in the history of literature. Just part of an ongoing story. Everyone can find the time for 500 words. You could get up an hour earlier, or go to bed an hour later or even - if you're an insomniac like I am, from time to time - get up, make a cup of tea and scribble or type for an hour. Just as long as you put your bum on the seat, put words on a page and go on doing it.

I've already written more than 500 words on this blog post. It didn't take long. In reality, you'll find yourself writing more than that, once you get going. You'll also find that life events sometimes intervene - but then you've always got those 65 days in hand. And you will probably find that once you get to the 80 or 90,000 word mark, (about 180 days) you'll want to stop and devote the remainder of the year to reworking and revising what you've written.

This should be a whole lot easier than trying to find the time and space to write a novel in a month, especially when you're new to the craft. But you'll still finish up with a manuscript by this time next year. And as with every other craft, practice makes perfect.

Whatever you decide to do - good luck with it - and a very happy and successful New Year to my friends and readers and all those lovely friends who are readers, which is pretty much all of them.








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Lucky Sagittarius - Bird of Passage, Good Housekeeping and The Physic Garden. Lots Happening!

On special offer for 7 days!

It's that time of year again - my birthday, and it comes round hell of a fast these years. Mostly I'd prefer to forget about it. But this year, I have a lot to be thankful for, especially where my writing is concerned.

First though, let me flag up a birthday gift in reverse. I'm giving something away. Well, almost. Bird of Passage is going to be on a Kindle countdown deal (that means it's cheap, albeit not very cheerful) for the next seven days, on Amazon in the UK here and  in the US here. That's from 3rd - 9th December. If you find yourself reading this later on, I'm sorry you missed it but there will be others.  There's sometimes a small delay with implementing these deals, so if you go to the page today, the 3rd December, and find that it's still at full price, do try again later!

An Irish Industrial School

Bird of Passage is a powerful and occasionally explicit story of cruelty, loss and passionate obsession against all the odds. It is also a subtle homage to Wuthering Heights - a re-imagining rather than a retelling. It's a big dramatic read. The horrific background story of suffering in an Irish Industrial School and the way in which a child could be snatched from his mother is very current  - although I first wrote this novel some years ago, and started researching it even earlier. The more I read about the truth of what happened to so many people, the more appalled I became. It's a disturbing story, (it was disturbing to write, too) but many readers like it a lot even though it makes them cry.

Next on my list of exciting events is the publication of my small collection of short stories in eBook form by Hearst Magazines. You can find it here and pretty much on all other platforms as well. This is a small book, but a big step for me, because I'm in such very good company with some fine writers in this series of eBooks. In conjunction with this, the Good Housekeeping website has published a longish interview with me - 20 interesting questions for me to answer - and very enjoyable it was too! I hope you find the answers quite illuminating as well. You can find it on their Lifestyle pages along with all kinds of lovely Christmassy things.

Finally - and perhaps saving the best till last from my point of view, anyway - my new historical novel The Physic Garden is due to be published in March 2014 by Scottish Publisher of the Year, Saraband. (You can read all about their award here.)

I'm more than a little ecstatic about this, as you can imagine. Somebody asked me last week if it was my 'first book' and I had to reply, with a sigh, that no, it wasn't. I did a bit of arithmetic in my head and still got confused. But it will be my eighth full length novel, of which some were traditionally published, while some I published myself in eBook form. Besides that, there are a couple of published non fiction histories - one of them an enormous labour of love called God's Islanders -  a whole clutch of professionally produced and published stage plays, and several collections of short stories, most of which have been published in magazines. Plus a couple of poetry collections from way back. I sometimes get tired just thinking about it all.  But I'm the epitome of a 'hybrid' writer and I'm enjoying it.

I was speaking to a group of postgraduate Creative Writing students at the University of Glasgow last week. I had been invited to speak alongside a couple of representatives from the Society of Authors about the (considerable) benefits of joining. You sometimes walk a fine line between trying to tell people about the realities of  a career as a writer and your desire not to disillusion people. After all, most writers could no more give up writing than they could give up breathing. But I do try to tell people that a writing career is - with a very few lucky exceptions - a switchback, a massive game of snakes and ladders. One year you're up, the next you're down. But if you do find yourself at the bottom of a long and hideous snake, at least you know that there might be a ladder at the next throw.

Meanwhile, my experience with Saraband has been overwhelmingly positive. They produce the most beautiful books. Plus they gave me a brilliant editor. The novel didn't need much editing at all, thank goodness, but the points the editor made went straight to the heart of the few doubts I had and showed me how they might be addressed. I'd almost forgotten what a pleasurable experience it can be to work with a good editor, who loves your book.

The Physic Garden is a about friendship and  betrayal, about new developments in medicine and the tensions between 'physic' and surgery  - but above all, it's about the lifelong effects of treachery on William Lang, the narrator. I loved William. Still do. Even when I was writing the book, even though I was well aware that I was writing in the persona of an old man, remembering a long life, remembering the events of his youth in particular, it still felt oddly as though I were channelling him. I knew what he would say and how he would say it. I knew what he was thinking. It was one of those pieces of writing (I find it happens more with plays than with novels) where you read it afterwards and think 'I wonder where all that came from?'

The Old College of Glasgow University.

I'm told the proof copies are with the printer! Excited? Moi? You bet!

The Hybrid Writer

Paul's Himalayan Musk Rose (Not a Hybrid!)

The following is reblogged from my April post on Authors Electric. I thought it was something worth repeating here, on my personal blog,  because the links may be useful to other writers while the idea of some writers doing all kinds of writing, published and produced in all kinds of ways, not just a particular genre or a particular form of publishing, may be interesting to readers as well.

Hybrid is, apparently, the new buzz term. 'You're going to be hearing about hybrid writers a lot soon,' remarked a colleague gleefully. Actually, the term was first invented (I believe) by the excellent Bob Mayer, some time ago but my colleague was absolutely right, and I already had been reading about it here, there and everywhere. I noticed it because I rather like the idea. It's one I'm comfortable with for various reasons and not just because I love roses, hybrid or not!

Now I know that a percentage of new authors self publish in the hope of being noticed by traditional publishing, big or small. Nothing wrong with that either if that's what you've decided you want. The slush pile has all but disappeared, having an agent no longer guarantees publication - nor has it for some time - and stories of traditional publishers trawling Amazon for successful novels are legion. Although if you do hit pay dirt with a best-selling eBook, the deal on offer would have to be pretty good to compete. I've had some good relationships within traditional publishing and production: excellent and committed small publishers, producers and directors who have taught me plenty over the years. Some of these relationships are still ongoing and I'm very glad of them. But I have also experienced the exact opposite in all its hideous misery.

These days I self publish very happily, love the experience of being a 'writer as publisher' and I'm certainly not publishing my work digitally in the hope of being 'noticed' or only by my readers and potential readers.  I'm also publishing in order to make some money. But I'm not totally independent and I doubt if I ever will be. Only some of us on Authors Electric are. Many of us have a foot in both camps. The truth is that (to mix my metaphors a bit) as a hybrid author, you can now have a finger in just about as many pies as you have fingers, especially when you write an eclectic mix of all kinds of work. With me, it isn't just fiction, long and short, but plays and non fiction too. And even with my fiction, there's no single genre and some of my novels are - I suppose -  more 'literary' than others. That's part of the fun of it. Not being tied down any more. Not having to shoehorn yourself into a tight little category because that's what your single publisher wants. Being able to say, 'let's do the show right here,' with some degree of success, being in control, but also being open to partnerships or the occasional traditional deal, whether it's for a story or an article, a review or a play, where what's on offer seems reasonable and non-exclusive.

The problem in the olden days of publishing and production wasn't just discoverability. It was maintaining professional visibility. Even people with whom you have worked successfully and happily in the past tend to forget about you if they don't see or hear from you. It's one of the reasons why so many playwrights camp out in theatre bars. Show face. Chat. Socialize. Now, I find that social media have been an undoubted factor in my rekindling some old professional relationships and that's an unexpected but welcome by-product.

Perhaps the simple truth is that writers have almost always undertaken a mix of work not just in order to survive, but in order to grow and learn and hone their craft. The number of writers who have moved smoothly from creative writing course to literary acclaim is vanishingly small but they also tend to be the most vociferously indignant and embittered about the new state of publishing. Perhaps they just feel threatened by change.

I think many of us would settle for being happily hybrid, writing, talking, teaching if that's what floats our boat, undertaking the occasional piece of contract work for a variety of outlets, aiming to thrive rather than just survive. Thriving is something that has been on my mind recently. Money doesn't buy happiness but it sure makes living a lot more comfortable in all kinds of ways.

Most of us write for love. Well, there's nothing wrong with that either. Nothing wrong with loving what you do even though it's hard work. Even though there's a certain dour mindset which subscribes to the belief that if you love it, it can't possibly be work. But even when we write for love, we can publish for money, especially now. Anyone seriously contemplating a career as a writer might think about doing some kind of business course if only to avoid exploitation. I remember what an eye opener it was for me, the first time somebody pointed out exactly how I ought to go about costing my time. (If you want to know more, you can download a guide from Glasgow's Cultural Enterprise Office, here) And the shocking perspective it gave me on major commercial organisations which still try to tell us that there's 'no money in the budget' to pay the writer for all kinds of extra work. I once found myself trekking through to Edinburgh from Ayrshire for a radio script meeting on my own time and money because there was 'no money in the budget to pay for travel expenses.' Back then, I put up with it. Many of us did. My favourite story from that time was of a friend who had something published in a magazine devoted to cats for which she was paid £5. Not a lot, even in the 90s. They also sent her a copy of the magazine and subtracted the price of the publication from her fiver!

These days, I'll do the odd gig for good causes, but I tend to subscribe to the Harlan Ellison school of thought where paying the writer is concerned. (But then it's a long time since I fell off the turnip truck!)

Meanwhile, I'd like to know how many college and universities offering Creative Writing or Creative Industries courses also offer detailed modules on the self employed business side of writing, everything from simple accounting and tax issues to branding and marketing. I'd lay bets not many of them do. Only last night I heard a contestant on Britain's Got Talent (I know, but it was a VERY quiet Saturday night and I was too tired to do anything except be a couch potato!) saying that he had started a music course at college, but his father had changed it to a business course. And I thought - surely, he would need both.

THE PHYSIC GARDEN, my new novel, now on Amazon's Kindle Store, here in the UK and here in the USA with a beautiful cover by Scottish artist Michael Doig. 

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! 

Antique Textiles and Embroideries - Stitching Fiction

I have been mad about vintage and antique textiles for as long as I can remember. When I was a child, my mother - who avidly collected china and porcelain - used to haunt jumble sales. After we moved to Scotland, she would go to auction houses and she would often take me with her. Later on, when I became old enough, I would even go along and bid for her from time to time. I found it all very exciting. But the things that excited me most of all were the old textiles of all kinds - wall hangings and embroideries heaped into odd corners of the saleroom, the ancient shawl folded on the table at a boot sale or antique market, the heaps of linen, crammed into cardboard boxes and sold in bulk, just as they had been removed from drawers and chests.

It wasn't too long before I found myself buying some of these things for myself when I could afford them - and I often could afford them, because back then, nobody much wanted them. It's different now, of course, but there are still occasional bargains to be had. Then, I found myself writing about the textiles in my fiction. There was something about them that seemed to lend itself to stories, the sense perhaps that somebody, some woman somewhere, had stitched emotions, hopes, fears, into a hanging or a garment, a handkerchief or - in the case of the Curiosity Cabinet - a heavily embroidered box, a casket in which a woman had kept her most precious possessions. The Curiosity Cabinet isn't really a cabinet at all. (And yes - I know that a real curiosity cabinet used to be a case in which some collector, usually a man, kept specimens of all kinds.) But at some point, I think, I saw an embroidered 'raised work' casket in a museum with its contents displayed alongside, and it struck me that the contents were all 'women's things' - uniquely and powerfully female. And as all writers do, I started to tell myself the story behind them. A story of my own invention. 

Later on, I acquired my own fairly extensive collection of old textiles and for some years spent part of my week dealing in them. It was  - and continues to be, albeit less intensively - what allowed me to buy time to write, even when cash flow was a problem. No surprise then, that in my new historical novel, The Physic Garden, embroidery also plays its part - a key part in the story. I'm no seamstress myself. My late mother was a fine embroiderer, but I'm afraid I've never had the patience. Instead, I try to stitch words into something worth having - just as the lady who originally made the embroidered casket in The Curiosity Cabinet tried to stitch something of her own story into a small work of art, making it for herself and her own satisfaction, but also - I think - with some thoughts of other people enjoying it in the future.