Thirsty for Bytes?

It’s not easy being an inde­pend­ent author. By inde­pend­ent, I don’t mean ‘attached to an inde­pend­ent pub­lish­ing house’. I mean hir­ing a proofreader, editor, cover designer, and not being invited to pub­lish­ing shindigs. M’colleague Matt F Curran doesn’t think it’s easy either. He is the brains behind Thirst Editions, a new, vir­tual pub­lish­ing out­fit under whose aus­pices Matt, Aliya Whiteley, Roger Morris, Frances Garrod, and Tim Stretton will be put­ting out a title or two. These authors are not all inde­pend­ent by the above defin­i­tion, but they’ve all had work passed over on the grounds of mass mar­ket appeal rather than qual­ity — and with ebooks and the long tail, qual­ity can now count.

There is no ‘i’ in team. There are, how­ever, three in ‘Thirst Editions’.

I think you know what I mean.

If you don’t, take a look at this post, where Matt out­lines the ethos behind Thirst Editions.

Monday, 23rd April is launch day. My novel Proper Job will be re-published as a Thirst Editions book (reserving Writer As A Stranger for the Saskia Brandt books) at the crazy price of 77p, along with Tim’s Dragonchaser and Aliya’s Mean Mode Median. These last two are also cheap-as-chips.

What are you wait­ing for? We’d appre­ci­ate your support.

Roger Morris on Rejection

Roger Morris, guest­ing at Nik Perring’s blog, writes mov­ingly on rejection:

I’ve been writ­ing all my life, and des­per­ately try­ing to get pub­lished for over half of it. What this means is that I have been liv­ing with rejec­tion for years. And years. And years. You know, when you spend so long liv­ing with some­thing, you get used to it being around. When it’s gone, you kind of miss it, even though all it ever did was block out the light like a men­tal and emo­tional eyesore.

Something to think about.

► Nik’s Blog

Roger Morris Speaks

Well, types. The truth is, m’colleague Roger Morris has been inter­viewed by thev­iew­from­here. Parts 1 and 2 are now available.

[…] There was a launch party for the Macmillan New Writing imprint, and I met the reader who had pulled my book out of the slush pile. That was a great moment. She took the trouble to find me and con­grat­u­late me and say how much she had enjoyed the book. Needless to say, I was extremely grate­ful to her.

Back in the day, I reviewed Roger’s excel­lent Taking Comfort.

► The view from here: Interview with R N Morris — Part 1 of 2

★ A Gentle Tweet

As some of you might know, m’friend Roger Morris has joined that Web 2.0 band of authors what seri­al­ise their nov­els via Twitter.

It’s true, get­ting a sen­tence or a frag­ment every hour — that’s how I am now schedul­ing my tweets — is not like sit­ting down and read­ing an exten­ded sec­tion of the book through. You won’t neces­sar­ily remem­ber what went before. The text will work on the reader in a dif­fer­ent way — but I am inter­ested to see just how.

Read more →

Roger Morris: On the Page and in your Ears

My read­ing life has been trans­formed by the dis­cov­ery of audiobooks. There’s noth­ing quite like hav­ing a tal­en­ted actor per­form a text. I pleased to announce, then, that Roger Morris’s book A Vengeful Longing¹ is avail­able in audio format.
Read more →

Live at the BBC

Well, alright, not the BBC. Phoenix FM, actu­ally. M’colleague Roger (of his plog) has released the audio of a radio inter­view from a few days back. You can listen to it here. In it, he dis­cusses the gen­esis of his St Petersburg nov­els¹ and his fond­ness for Dostoyevsky.

Page 123

Paul Raven, over at the Velcro City Tourist Board, has tagged me with a meme. Here’s what the meme, which ori­gin­ates here, tells me to do:

“To par­ti­cip­ate, you grab any book, go to page 123, find the fifth sen­tence, and blog it. Then tag five people.”

So, here goes. This is the fifth sen­tence of page 123 from a book grabbed at ran­dom from my bookshelf:

He asked us where we were going.

This is taken from Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, which is a lovely, life-affirming travel book that scared the hell out of me with all its talk of heights.

I’m going to tag: Debra Hamel, Roland Hulme, Petrona, Roger Morris, and Scott Pack.

I can’t res­ist see­ing what’s on magic page 123 of my own novel. Here it is:

It killed Shimoda outright.

Lists and the creative process

I once read that, before sit­ting down to write The Stand¹, Stephen King put a single sen­tence on his notice­board. It was enough to put him in the space where he could write the novel.

That sen­tence was:

Randall Flagg is a dark man.

If that sen­tence doesn’t con­jure an entire world in your head, it sounds as though you’ve haven’t read The Stand. The only thing to do is pootle off and read it.

Via Roger’s Plog, I’ve just come across a list by Rachel King, author of the Sound of Butterflies, in which she places all those items that she needs to ‘fall through the hole in the paper’.

I thought it might be inter­est­ing to come up with a list of the things that some­what describe the ‘feel’ of my novel. Desert Island Objects, if you will, with the desert island being the novel itself.

• Soselo’s poem about the moon
• The Amber Room
• John Wayne walk­ing off at the end of The Searchers
• Horner’s Enemy at the Gates soundtrack
• Memories of a tour around a con­cen­tra­tion camp in east Germany
• The Julian Calendar; does any­one else find it creepy that other places have other dates?
• My sketches of Joseph Stalin as a young man
• Powell’s soundtrack for The Bourne Supremacy
• Anna Karenina

Oh, and the synopsis.

UPDATE: Roger’s list is in the com­ments of Rachel’s art­icle, a couple of other lists too…

Paragraph of the week

Roger Morris has been awar­ded ‘para­graph of the month’ by the Chicago Tribune. A very curi­ous award, but well deserved for this little vign­ette in A Gentle Axe:

Inside the yardkeeper’s shed it was as if the objects of his life were shap­ing them­selves around the fact of his death, around his phys­ical absence. There was an old paint-spattered wooden chair, pol­ished by many sit­tings. It was crammed in next to a fold­ing card table, the baize thread­bare and stained. The sam­o­var on it seemed to pos­sess an air of mourn­ful dis­ap­point­ment. Chipped cups milled around it without pur­pose. The saw­dust had settled on the floor, around an assort­ment of bricks and logs. The bot­tom of a bar­rel was propped up against one of the shed’s sides. Life con­tin­ued only in the cob­webs that grew heed­less over the tools and tins of his occupation.

I’d love to read this book, and Roger’s other St Petersburg books, but I’m writ­ing my own St Petersburg novel at the moment and I’d feel hap­pier about steal­ing from non-fiction sources. I’ll cer­tainly be get­ting around to it once the first draft of mine is completed.

(Via Roger’s plog.)

Light Reading

Macmillan New Writing is an imprint whose founder, Michael Barnard, wanted to cre­ate a spring­board for tal­en­ted, unpub­lished writers with work that might be over­looked by the more behemothic play­ers. When MNW was cre­ated, there was sig­ni­fic­ant broo-hah-hah and palavery. Hackles were raised and tea cups rattled home to their sau­cers through­out London. “It’s the Ryan Air of publishing!”

Barnard wrote a very slightly odd but inform­at­ive book on his battle to cre­ate the imprint, which I reviewed on my blog here. (Note Michael Stephen Fuchs’ com­ments to that art­icle.) I’ve also reviewed both of Fuchs’ MNW efforts, The Manuscript and Pandora’s Sisters, as well as Taking Comfort by Roger Morris. To make mat­ters more com­plic­ated, Aliya Whiteley, a MNW author, served a stint as an editor for the UKA Press. There she edited my first book, Déjà Vu, for which Herculean effort she will forever be in my good books — or at least the one that is good.

Last Thursday, Aliya launched her second MNW book, Light Reading, at Goldsboro Books. Is Macmillerati a word? No? Good. It would be silly. (Macmillistas?) But it was nice to see a good turn out from Aliya’s fel­low authors, as well as oth­ers in the loose net­work that has sprung up around her. Aliya gave a little speech and we all bought cop­ies of the book. Goldsboro Books did a fine job of the host­ing. The shop, on Cecil Court just off Charing Cross Road, seems to be part of a col­lec­tion of spe­cial­ist and curi­ous book shops.

(As we were leav­ing the do, my coha­bitual over­unit spot­ted a tour group enter­ing the road. Before I could stage whis­per, “Stop! We haven’t paid!” she had skipped over to join the back of the throng. Directly we over­heard that Cecil Court had been used in the Diagon Alley sequence for Harry Potter and Philosopher’s Stone. One lives; one learns.)

It was great to catch up with Aliya. One of the curi­ous things about meet­ing people that you’ve only pre­vi­ously known elec­tron­ic­ally is that, while you know them in the sense of hav­ing lots of inform­a­tion about them, you aren’t really famil­iar with they way they talk, their man­ner­isms and so on.

For example, few people expec­ted me to look like such a scruffy bastard.

A big shout out to Matt Curran, whose writ­ing is going strong. He’s the author of The Secret War. We chat­ted about the per­ils of writ­ing full time — i.e. I get all excited with the post­man comes, and some­times dis­cuss plot points with my ger­bils. Matt some­what con­vinced me that Lulu might be the way for­ward for one of my nov­els (that gets lovely feed­back from edit­ors and then a couple of lines about how full their lists are). Roger Morris was there, too, and he’s every bit as per­son­able as his plog sug­gests. As he has men­tioned on said plog, we’re both strug­gling to write St Petersburg nov­els (though Roger has two in the bag already). Roger has always been quick to answer my quer­ies on eso­teric Russian things, like the name of the equi­val­ent ‘detect­ive’ rank in the Russian police force.

Also bumped into David Gardiner, who is now help­ing out at the UKA Press (the pub­lisher that put out my first book, Déjà Vu) and the troubadour Jon Stone (and his girl­friend whose name, I’m afraid, I didn’t catch). Neil Ayres and his girl­friend (mup­petly, I’ve for­got­ten her name as well; memory like a) were also there, and it was great to meet Neil, finally. Back in the day, he pub­lished an early short story of mine called Afterlife in his online magazine, Fragment. Neil wrote a very inter­est­ing book called Nicolo’s Gifts and is now co-writing an epis­tolary sci­ence fic­tion novel with Aliya, which I look for­ward to.

This industry. Nothing hap­pens for long peri­ods. You’re on your own when you write a book. The sense of point­less­ness is some­times over­power­ing. Even if you write some­thing that you’re happy with, the fic­tion pub­lish­ing busi­ness is so small that you need a good dose of luck to get the bloody thing actu­ally out there. As we were mak­ing the two-hour trip back to Canterbury, my girl­friend remarked that I should try to write some­thing really main­stream. I had to sigh. She was say­ing this for my own bene­fit; she knows that I’m los­ing the will to engage in the pub­lish­ing game and wants me to get some motiv­a­tion back. Well, I got some motiv­a­tion back from talk­ing to Aliya (she’s a good writer; pub­lish­ers will buy her stuff; she illus­trates that the route is pos­sible) and the other Macmillan New Writers.

I was struck by their esprit d’corps. They are quite unique, I think, in being a group of writers pub­lished more-or-less sim­ul­tan­eously within the same list. They rep­res­ent a cohort whose mem­bers are at the same point in their careers; there are no egos (in evid­ence) and the sense of a team is palp­able. They have not been selec­ted because they are journ­al­ists with media con­nec­tions; or because they’ve trav­elled around Moldova with a min­i­bar; or they have a tie-in series on Channel Four. No; the books they sub­mit­ted for pub­lic­a­tion were just good, that’s all. MNW, for all the broo-hah-hah, is ana­chron­ist­ic­ally meritocratic.

You can buy Light Reading from any book­shop, or online. Aliya has a web­site, a blog (co-authored with Neil Ayres), and even a book trailer.