Jane Rusbridge's Blog, page 11
May 11, 2012
Interview with Katherine Orr at University of Chichester
Jane Rusbridge is interviewed by K.J.Orr, shortlisted for the National Short Story Award in 2011.
Venue: University of Chichester Details to be confirmed
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Three Sussex Writers at Stoughton Fete
Come along and join all the fun at the fete, where the Three Sussex Writers – Jane Rusbridge, Isabel Ashdown and Gabrielle Kimm - will be setting up a stall with bunting and books. You can Throw a Wellie, bid on a Silent Auction, meet Mystic Meg or enjoy Mediterranean food cooked by Donna and Rami Kabbani at this traditional village fete held in the beautiful Downland village of Stoughton.
Community run, the fete has taken place in the gardens of Church Farm, Breakneck Lane for more than sixty years, to raise money for the upkeep of Stoughton’s ancient church, St Mary’s, which boasts Saxon herringbone brickwork and a chancel arch from the same period. 
If you’re a walker, Stoughton is a great place from which to explore Kingley Vale, and two of most beautiful areas of woodland in West Sussex, Wildhams Wood and Inholmes Wood, to the north of Stoughton. You can finish your day with a cream tea at Stoughton fete, as long as you get there before 4pm!
Jane, Isabel, and Gabrielle will sign and sell copies of their books, and donate a pound to the church fund for every book they sell. They’ll also be running a Lucky Book Dip. So come and say Hi, and have a chat with three local authors.
Read more about the Three Sussex Writers and their books here
stoughton west sussex – Google Maps
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May 6, 2012
GOING DIGITAL: Social Networking & Digital Marketing for Writers
Jane Rusbridge will be speaking at a social networking seminar with PR expert Lucy Middleton, and novelist Annemarie Neary with Vicky Grut (chair) at a London Writing Workshop in October.
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A new departure for London Writing Workshops, this half-day seminar led by PR expert Lucy Middleton is an opportunity for writers to look at the challenges and opportunities of the digital environment.
Writers are increasingly involved in promoting their work – whether they’re self-publishing, or working with a small or a mainstream publisher. The seminar will look at ways that traditional PR techniques can be reinvented, as well as exploring the online tools that allow writers to connect directly with their readers and build new audiences for their work.
Novelists Jane Rusbridge (The Devil’s Music, Bloomsbury 2010, and Rook, Bloomsbury Circus, summer 2012) and Annemarie Neary (A Parachute in the Lime Tree, the History Press, March 2012) will be on hand to talk about their experiences of promoting new books in 2012. (Click on the authors’ names to see their bios.) The seminar will be followed by drinks and networking for participants and speakers.
Lucy Middleton has been in PR, Marketing and Advertising for over 20 years, working with Blue Chip companies as well as small to medium-sized enterprises. She is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and has lectured in Marketing Theory at several academic institutions, including the MBA course at Cambridge University’s Judge Management Institute. She specializes in advising companies on their Social Networking Marketing Strategy as well as Strategic Branding Solutions and Crisis PR.
Cost: £46 includes a handout on Digital Marketing for Writers, tea/coffee break and a free drink at the end. Group limit: 30.
The seminar will be followed by networking/drinks.
Find out about more London Writing Workshops
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Three Sussex Writers at Arundel Literary Festival
Jane Rusbridge will be appearing at the Arundel Festival 2012 
with Isabel Ashdown and Gabrielle Kimm.
The three authors are known as the ‘Three Sussex Writers’, and regularly appear together at festivals, libraries, schools, universities,charity events and book groups across Sussex. At Arundel Festvial, they will read from their books, chat about the writing process, and answer questions. Come along and join the conversation!
At the end of the session, for anyone who wants to try their hand at writing, or spark up their creative energy, there’ll be a chance to participate in some quick-fire and fun writing exercises.
Details for this event to be confirmed
Find out more about the THREE SUSSEX WRITERS and their novels
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May 2, 2012
What do Fiction Editors do?
This is the ‘uncorrected proof’ of Rook, sent out a month or so ago by the team at Bloomsbury. Now I’m walking a knife-edge – there’s the hope people will love Rook and maybe respond with a word or two, and then there’s the fear no one will. Book cover ‘blurb’ from a well-known author will give a huge boost to a beginner like me. But imagine Rook on the bedside table of an author whose work I’ve read and admired for years? No. Best not to. Pretend it’s not happening. As Claire King has recently blogged, you can only hope people will be kind.
So far, I have found they are.
Page edits and last minute typos are still to be done before Rook is published in August; much ‘correcting’ – major and minor editing work, countless redrafts of scenes and sentences – has already been done, way too much to recount in detail here.
However, to follow on from Gerald Hornsby’s insightful post on editing a self-published novel , I’m going to outline the way the editing process proceeded for me, as an author published with Bloomsbury.
The beginning:
Late 2008: I’m a ‘myopic’ editor of my own work, changing a sentence as it emerges, fiddling endlessly with detail. As I wrote the first random scenes, I felt my way, word by word. In January 2009, I joined Kathy Page’s Workout for the Novel , an online course which gave me a kick-start, and more idea where the novel might be going. The course involved valuable input sessions as well as weekly online workshops. Feedback from Kathy and other writers raised questions and led to changes. And more editing.
Throughout 2009 there were monthly meetings, with an exchange of feedback with my long-term writing group of four, plus emails flying, in moments of crisis, to other writing friends, like Jackie Buxton. The novel progressed haphazardly. I’d imagined the final scene, but not how the characters would get there. In March 2010, I joined Vicky Grut’s Novelists’ Club , travelling up to London once a month for productive day-long workshops on various aspects of novel writing such as dialogue, plot and structure. With Vicky’s editorial help I worked on a chapter outline. Joined up a few dots. Finally, in August 2010, the very first draft of Rook was sent to my editor at Bloomsbury.
The middle:
I had no confidence in that first draft. It was all over the place. There’d been no ‘perfect storm’ moment which Aminatta Forna so accurately describes. I’d done plenty of line-by-line work, but there’s another aspect to editing a novel – a different skill – which involves being able to take an overview of the sprawling mass of words, to see how best to shape them. An experienced professional editor brings this invaluable skill into the mix. Having previously worked with Helen Garnons Williams on The Devil’s Music, I knew already how much creative energy can spark through the insight gained from a talented editor.
That first wobbly, raw-egg draft of Rook was in fact read by two editors, Helen and her assistant, Erica Jarnes. It was clear from the 7 pages of notes they put together that they saw straight through my chaos of stray plotlines right to the story’s pulse. It’s such a relief to find that your editor ‘gets it’. Helen and Erica ‘got’ Rook before I did, or so it seemed at the time. After a week or two to mull things over, I had some suggestions of my own, and Helen and I met to bounce ideas around. Afterwards, throughout the autumn of 2010, I wrote with clearer vision and renewed energy. Some peripheral drama was cut; one central character had to go. (I’d never liked him, which should have told me something.) This wasn’t tweaking but a major rewrite, one which revealed to me the core of the emotional journey I wanted the reader to travel.
During the spring of 2011, insomnia plagued me as I wrestled with interwoven narratives, secrets and memories, three feisty women characters, warriors and battle scenes from 1066. I was, more often than not, at my desk by 4.30 a.m., prodded awake my ‘wild mind’, as Natalie Goldberg calls it. The narrative came together with the exhilarating synchronicity many writers speak of as essential to the creative process – it’s certainly part of the magic. I was buzzing with excitement when I sent off the second full draft, in June 2011.
Editorial feedback was very positive. All that was needed in terms of structure was some adjustment to the penultimate chapter where fresh preoccupations of mine had crowded in at the last moment – actually the beginnings of novel 3 stirring in the compost of my mind. Out that came!
The final stages happen quite quickly:
October 2011: The draft of Rook was sent to one of Bloomsbury’s copy editors, Audrey, whose meticulous mind helped sort out stray inaccuracies in TDM. Emails flurried to and fro between us for a few days, ranging over a variety of issues such as tying historical dates in with characters’ ages, whether to use ‘Cnut’ or ‘Canute’, and whether rooks eat carrion. In November 2011, a fat envelope arrived containing Audrey’s copyedit manuscript for my approval, with fortnight deadline for any changes to be marked on the pages or listed by email. Just before Christmas, page proofs landed on my doorstep, with another deadline the middle of January 2012. While I read these page edits, another editor at Bloomsbury was checking them too. Whoever it was found an error I’d never have noticed: I’d used ‘Robinson’s’ instead of ‘Robertson’s’ when talking about jam!
Fiction editors are important. They play a central creative role in the growth of a novel, or so I have found. At Bloomsbury, over a period of 18 months, my novel-in-progress passed through the hands of four different editors, all of whom helped shape the novel that will be Rook when it hits the shelves in August. Editing is a fine art.
The View From Here literary magazine has interviewed Helen Garnons Williams, fiction editorial director at Bloomsbury
Part one: Introduction
Part two: Insights into working with authors and Helen’s advice and top three tips for debut authors.
Part Three: Helen discusses the ever changing publishing industry, working at Bloomsbury, and hopes for the future.
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Editing: a fine art.
This is the ‘uncorrected proof’ of Rook, sent out a month or so ago by the team at Bloomsbury. Now I’m walking a knife-edge – there’s the hope people will love Rook and maybe respond with a word or two, and then there’s the fear no one will. Book cover ‘blurb’ from a well-known author will give a huge boost to a beginner like me. But imagine Rook on the bedside table of an author whose work I’ve read and admired for years? No. Best not to. Pretend it’s not happening. As Claire King has recently blogged, you can only hope people will be kind.
So far, I have found they are.
Page edits and last minute typos are still to be done before Rook is published in August; much ‘correcting’ – major and minor editing work, countless redrafts of scenes and sentences – has already been done, way too much to recount in detail here.
However, to follow on from Gerald Hornsby’s insightful post on editing a self-published novel , I’m going to outline the way the editing process proceeded for me, as an author published with Bloomsbury.
The beginning:
Late 2008: I’m a ‘myopic’ editor of my own work, changing a sentence as it emerges, fiddling endlessly with detail. As I wrote the first random scenes, I felt my way, word by word. In January 2009, I joined Kathy Page’s Workout for the Novel , an online course which gave me a kick-start, and more idea where the novel might be going. The course involved valuable input sessions as well as weekly online workshops. Feedback from Kathy and other writers raised questions and led to changes. And more editing.
Throughout 2009 there were monthly meetings, with an exchange of feedback with my long-term writing group of four, plus emails flying, in moments of crisis, to other writing friends, like Jackie Buxton. The novel progressed haphazardly. I’d imagined the final scene, but not how the characters would get there. In March 2010, I joined Vicky Grut’s Novelists’ Club , travelling up to London once a month for productive day-long workshops on various aspects of novel writing such as dialogue, plot and structure. With Vicky’s editorial help I worked on a chapter outline. Joined up a few dots. Finally, in August 2010, the very first draft of Rook was sent to my editor at Bloomsbury.
The middle:
I had no confidence in that first draft. It was all over the place. There’d been no ‘perfect storm’ moment which Aminatta Forna so accurately describes. I’d done plenty of line-by-line work, but there’s another aspect to editing a novel – a different skill – which involves being able to take an overview of the sprawling mass of words, to see how best to shape them. An experienced professional editor brings this invaluable skill into the mix. Having previously worked with Helen Garnons Williams on The Devil’s Music, I knew already how much creative energy can spark through the insight gained from a talented editor.
That first wobbly, raw-egg draft of Rook was in fact read by two editors, Helen and her assistant, Erica Jarnes. It was clear from the 7 pages of notes they put together that they saw straight through my chaos of stray plotlines right to the story’s pulse. It’s such a relief to find that your editor ‘gets it’. Helen and Erica ‘got’ Rook before I did, or so it seemed at the time. After a week or two to mull things over, I had some suggestions of my own, and Helen and I met to bounce ideas around. Afterwards, throughout the autumn of 2010, I wrote with clearer vision and renewed energy. Some peripheral drama was cut; one central character had to go. (I’d never liked him, which should have told me something.) This wasn’t tweaking but a major rewrite, one which revealed to me the core of the emotional journey I wanted the reader to travel.
During the spring of 2011, insomnia plagued me as I wrestled with interwoven narratives, secrets and memories, three feisty women characters, warriors and battle scenes from 1066. I was, more often than not, at my desk by 4.30 a.m., prodded awake my ‘wild mind’, as Natalie Goldberg calls it. The narrative came together with the exhilarating synchronicity many writers speak of as essential to the creative process – it’s certainly part of the magic. I was buzzing with excitement when I sent off the second full draft, in June 2011.
Editorial feedback was very positive. All that was needed in terms of structure was some adjustment to the penultimate chapter where fresh preoccupations of mine had crowded in at the last moment – actually the beginnings of novel 3 stirring in the compost of my mind. Out that came!
The final stages happen quite quickly:
October 2011: The draft of Rook was sent to one of Bloomsbury’s copy editors, Audrey, whose meticulous mind helped sort out stray inaccuracies in TDM. Emails flurried to and fro between us for a few days, ranging over a variety of issues such as tying historical dates in with characters’ ages, whether to use ‘Cnut’ or ‘Canute’, and whether rooks eat carrion. In November 2011, a fat envelope arrived containing Audrey’s copyedit manuscript for my approval, with fortnight deadline for any changes to be marked on the pages or listed by email. Just before Christmas, page proofs landed on my doorstep, with another deadline the middle of January 2012. While I read these page edits, another editor at Bloomsbury was checking them too. Whoever it was found an error I’d never have noticed: I’d used ‘Robinson’s’ instead of ‘Robertson’s’ when talking about jam!
Fiction editors are important. They play a central creative role in the growth of a novel, or so I have found. At Bloomsbury, over a period of 18 months, my novel-in-progress passed through the hands of four different editors, all of whom helped shape the novel that will be Rook when it hits the shelves in August.
The View From Here literary magazine has interviewed Helen Garnons Williams, fiction editorial director at Bloomsbury
Part one: Introduction
Part two: Insights into working with authors and Helen’s advice and top three tips for debut authors.
Part Three: Helen discusses the ever changing publishing industry, working at Bloomsbury, and hopes for the future.
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April 30, 2012
Launch of Arts and Crafts Room at Augusta Court, Chichester
Do come and join fellow Sussex Writers Gabrielle Kimm, Isabel Ashdown and I at a public event to celebrate the launch of a new Art Room at Augusta Court in Chichester. We will be talking about what inspires our writing, reading from our work and answering questions. We will also be signing copies of our books, for sale at the special event price of £5.
Details below. All welcome!
Thursday 10th May at 11.00 a.m.
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April 8, 2012
‘sewn into a weighted sack and thrown’ … How did those left behind survive the tragedy of the sinking of the Titanic?
My father-in-law grew up in Selsey, on the West Sussex coast, and lived in the same area all his life. He knew many interesting stories about local people. In one memory from his childhood, he told me of his parents and other adults discussing, with some disapproval, a local woman who had taken to swimming every day off the beach at Selsey, alone. In 1912 it simply wasn’t the ‘done’ thing for a woman to swim unchaperoned. He recalled that his own feeling, as a boy overhearing the adults talk, was surprise at their lack of sympathy. It was perfectly clear to him that it would be essential for her to swim, every single day, because she had lost her husband at sea, on the Titanic.
I couldn’t stop thinking about this woman and my father-in-law’s intuitive interpretation of her actions, so I began to read about the sinking of the Titanic. My reaction to the devastating detail in contemporary newspaper reports, and the language used to describe the disaster, was so strong I knew I had to write about it myself.
Here is my story, inspired by a bereaved woman in Selsey – whoever she was – who swam everyday, alone.
Note: ‘Ship of Dreams’ was first published in Riptide Journal 4, ed. Jane Feaver (2010)
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'sewn into a weighted sack and thrown' … How did those left behind survive the tragedy of the sinking of the Titanic?
My father-in-law grew up in Selsey, on the West Sussex coast, and lived in the same area all his life. He knew many interesting stories about local people. In one memory from his childhood, he told me of his parents and other adults discussing, with some disapproval, a local woman who had taken to swimming every day off the beach at Selsey, alone. In 1912 it simply wasn't the 'done' thing for a woman to swim unchaperoned. He recalled that his own feeling, as a boy overhearing the adults talk, was surprise at their lack of sympathy. It was perfectly clear to him that it would be essential for her to swim, every single day, because she had lost her husband at sea, on the Titanic.
I couldn't stop thinking about this woman and my father-in-law's intuitive interpretation of her actions, so I began to read about the sinking of the Titanic. My reaction to the devastating detail in contemporary newspaper reports and the language used to describe the disaster, was so strong I knew I had to write about it myself.
Here is my story, inspired by that woman in Selsey – whoever she was – who swam everyday, alone.
First published in Riptide Journal 4, ed. Jane Feaver (2010)
First Prize, Ilkley Literature Festival Short Story Competition (2005)
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April 4, 2012
Lucky 7: seven lines from new works
'Lucky 7' is something of a displacement activity … but, hey, it's also fun! Trish Nicholson tagged me. She's a writer who lives in New Zealand and blogs from a treehouse. I met Trish on twitter, where you can find her @TrishNicholson
The instructions for Lucky 7 are:
· Go to page 7 or 77 in your current manuscript
· Go to line 7
· Post on your blog the next 7 lines, or sentences, as they are – no cheating
· Tag 7 other authors to do the same
My 7 lines come from page 77 of Rook, currently in uncorrected proof form and out visiting other authors. It's also being passed around various members of my family for the first time. 'Uncorrected' indicates, of course, that it's still a work-in-progress – and it is. Only last week my OH found one or two 'blips' to add to my own list of page edits required before the novel is published later this summer, on August 2.
Rook is my second novel and is one of nine launch titles in Bloomsbury's new literary imprint, Bloomsbury Circus. Set in the ancient Sussex village of Bosham - the place where Cnut is said to have turned back the tide - Rook explores the mystery surrounding Harold II's burial place, the hidden histories of the Bayeux Tapestry, and the connections forged through three women's secret stories, past and present.
The 7 lines focus on the bird itself, named 'Rook' by Nora, who finds him in a ditch. Harry has just suggested that they should try to help the baby bird but in such a way that it does not become a pet. They must allow Rook 'to be wild'.
'Nora nods, although part of her resists the idea. Harry makes it sound as though it's just a matter of giving permission. What if, after the plummet from a high nest and the suffocating rush of air, Rook can't be wild? His beak flips open readily enough for food but so far he has not let out any sound louder than a wheeze or putter. Perhaps the baby bird fell from his nest and squawked or cried or peeped for his parents until the muscles of his parched tongue and the throb of his scarlet throat were strained beyond the ability to produce any more sound. A silent rook would not survive.'
The Next Seven:
The 7 writers I have chosen represent a range of genres, some published, some about to be published and others soon to be discovered! They are:
Jackie Buxton @Jaxbees
Voula Grand @VoulaGrand
Isabel Ashdown @Isabel Ashdown
Sanjida O'Connell @SanjidaOConnell
Isabel Costello @IsabelCostello
Alison Wells @AlisonWells
Susan Elliot Wright @Sewelliot
Hope you enjoy reading their 7 lines from new works …
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