Tony Salter's Blog, page 3

Best Eaten Cold

[image error] My new novel, Best Eaten Cold, is now available for purchase as a paperback or ebook. A chilling psychological thriller, It tells the story of a new mother, Fabiola, and the slow, inexorable unravelling of her life.

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Imagine that somebody wants to do you harm. Someone you once knew but have almost forgotten. Now imagine that they are clever, patient and will not stop. They are not interested in causing you physical pain – nothing so clumsy.

They will get inside your head, they will make you doubt yourself, they will make you question who you are, and they will ensure that everyone you care for starts to doubt you as well.

Each perfectly-orchestrated doubt will combine with its brothers and sisters – slowly, steadily building to a crescendo and destroying you from within.

Now imagine that this is real and it’s happening to you.

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Best Eaten Cold is not a story of global conspiracies or nuclear Armageddon. It isn’t a tale of massive fraud or national scandal.

It’s a reminder of the delicate balance of our ordinary, daily lives. A balance that can be catastrophically upset by a small number of seemingly trivial incidents.

Above all, it is a reminder of how quickly – and how blindly – we have learnt to trust in the online world, despite the somewhat ironic fact that none of us really understand it at all.

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Fabiola has just given birth to a son, Sam. She lives an idyllic life in Oxford – beautiful house, adoring husband, happy healthy baby – the coming years will be filled with joy and laughter.

But she has a past. A past which she thought she’d left behind her. When tiny cracks start to appear in the perfect glass bubble of Fabiola’s life, that rosy future becomes blurred and uncertain. Is the past catching up with her, or was it always too good to be true?

Love, obsession, loss and revenge; Best Eaten Cold is both a compelling psychological thriller, and a cautionary tale for our times.

 

Is Big Brother watching you?

Since the Trump election, the media coverage surrounding hacking and cyber-security is soaring to new heights. Now, we find out that the CIA can take control of our TV sets and watch us as we slob on the sofa binging on four episodes of The Affair or Game of Thrones while doing absolutely nothing to consume our required ‘five a day’ (or is it ten?) and swilling down three days worth of alcohol allowance.

Most of us will be vaguely interested by the hacking revelations but, apart from the exotic movie-like nature of the revelations, few people under sixty actually worry about personal privacy. Life is too short and we know that there is no reason why the government should have the slightest interest in our daily lives. We don’t live in a police state. At least, not yet.

We take a small interest in personal security where credit card fraud is concerned; it’s not that unusual and most people will know someone who has been a victim at some point or other. Even then, the banks seem to behave well in most cases and the only consequences are usually a small amount of inconvenience and slight feeling of intrusion and violation. These fade away soon enough, as does our interest in staying more secure online.

None of the salacious media gossip changes the way we think about these things. Phone hacking scandals don’t make us think that our own calls are being listened to; we install spyware on our teenager’s phones without ever imagining that anyone is doing the same to us; we watch films and police series where CCTV and satellite images are used to track every movement of a criminal and mostly don’t spare a thought to the fact that we are on film as well.

We are just ordinary people. No-one is interested in what we do.

The rate at which our lives are being propped up by technology is accelerating at a dizzying pace and the Internet of Things is only just beginning. Soon enough, our fridges and heating and lighting and cookers and door locks and water supply and electricity supply and parking and shopping habits and  driving patterns and everything else will all be wired up and integrated into cloud-based databases.

Will we understand what is happening, how it works and what it means? I doubt it. We don’t understand it now and it isn’t going to become any easier.

But, we’re just ordinary people. No-one is interested in what we do.

That’s the way I’ve always looked at this subject and how I sleep well at night. And, to be honest, I still hope and believe it’s true.

When I started my research for Best Eaten Cold,  however, I began to be surprised and shocked by what I found. I wasn’t looking on the Dark Web or speaking to spymasters, I was only talking to a few people who worked in data security and googling things. The shocking thing was that, whatever sinister twisted requirement I came up with to torment my protagonist, the solution was right there – not expensive, not particularly complex, not requiring a huge government organisation.

We are just ordinary people. No-one is interested in what we do.

That is only partly true. Unless we’re criminals or potential terrorists, as a general rule the government isn’t going to be interested in us. But what about other ordinary people who know us? They have a connection and an interest. Do any of them have an axe to grind?

If people understood more about how easy it is to hack into someone’s life, they might take a little more care about their personal online security and, perhaps more importantly, take great care not to make enemies.

 

Study and Courses

When anyone wants to learn a new skill, the obvious first port of call is often  a formal structured study course. There are certainly no shortage of them in the world of creative writing and opinions of their value range from high to very low.

Amusingly, some of the most negative comments come from creative writing teachers themselves (often reasonably well-known and successful authors) and a more cynical person might say that they are paying lip service to their teaching duties while trying to supplement the limited income that most published authors earn from book sales.

That cynic might also remark on the fact that several of the most prestigious courses are run by publishers or literary agents and their main marketing hook is the access that will be given to their staff rather than what you will actually learn.

But we shouldn’t listen to cynics as they are very drab people.

The problem I’ve found is that the courses I can find seem to be for other people. The prevailing themes are ‘How to start your novel’ or ‘How to finish your novel’.

What about a course for ‘How to make your novel better?’

For whatever reason, I don’t struggle with starting or finishing or even the bit in the middle (although it is hard to keep motivated when the end seems a long way off).

That being said, I do know that my writing isn’t as good as it could be, and would welcome all of the help I can get to make it better. Unfortunately most of these courses only include a tiny number of direct feedback sessions with tutors and those are based on just a few pages of writing.

All writers are different and our styles are inevitably built on the work of the author’s we have read as well as our own life experiences. At this stage, I don’t want be spoon fed received wisdom about how a few other writers have addressed a particular issue. I want as much high quality feedback on my writing as I can get. What works well. What doesn’t. And then maybe a debate on how other writers have dealt with similar issues.

I am taking a course on Advanced Creative Writing from Oxford University in April 2017 so will find out more. I am a little concerned that it will end up being more about academic literary criticism than helping me to improve what I do.

I will keep an open mind and it may open the door to other study opportunities down the line.

Titles. What’s in a name?

Choosing a name for a novel is much more difficult than it might appear. All that work and emotion and then one day, you let it fly out into the world. Once on the wing, it is difficult to imagine calling it back to the nest. What’s done is done.

One problem is that almost every name imaginable has already been used; a quick search of Amazon kills most ideas before they’ve even pecked their way out of the shell.

My first novel, The Old Orchard was originally called Red or Black and I knew it by that name all the way through the first draft and for a long time afterwards. Was I right to listen to my freelance editor and change it? I suppose I’ll never really know, but it was a strange feeling to rename something which has been a part of you for so long.

Red of Black describes the kernel of the central dilemma facing Alastair, the protagonist, but it probably sells the book short by focusing on that single element as the book  is more about exploring the way that a family deals with crisis over a generation. The Old Orchard picks up on the theme of family and the fact that Alastair’s family home is a pivot around which the crisis evolves.

Maybe it was the right decision. Maybe not. Hopefully, the story and the characters will be enough to weld themselves to the name and create that unified association that comes from reading a memorable book. It’s all part of the learning curve.

For my second, I started with a working title, Conspiracy, which I knew wouldn’t be the final choice and which was changed to Best Eaten Cold after a few chapters – once I began to understand how the novel was likely to evolve. A couple of people have suggested that the name is not quite right, but I haven’t been convinced. It has been used elsewhere and is a bit of a cliche, but I think it describes the theme well on a number of levels as we watch the two tales of long-awaited revenge being played out.

Again I’ll have to see.

 

Are there more novels in me?

‘Everyone has a novel in them …’

A lot of people believe that this is true, whether or not you add the second half of the sentence, which is something along the lines of:

‘… but in most cases that’s where it should stay.’

Apart from the likely truism that most of those hidden treasures would probably not be future classics, what about the idea that we have one book, and one book only, inside of us?

This might be true if the book is a non-fiction account of a life, or a part of history, which the author loves and knows with a passion. But, for pure fiction, it doesn’t make any sense to me.

There are as many stories as there are atoms in the universe and they are all there waiting to be uncovered and told by any of us. We can tell one or we can tell many.

What makes a difference is the motivation, desire, concentration and pig-headed stubbornness needed to grind through the process of writing and re-writing tens of thousands of inter-related words and to immerse yourself in the world of your story and your characters.

As to whether the resultant novel will be ‘good’. Well that is a very different matter and, at least partially, subjective. There is no doubt, however, that the motivation required to write a second and a third, will be easier to find if the feedback given to the writer is positive and encouraging.

How many people write purely for the sake of art and without any concern for their readers? I doubt there are many and I doubt even more that I would want to read their books.

Criticism

I’ve never dealt with criticism well. Maybe I’m no worse than average, but I do find it easy to leap to the defensive.

I don’t know how I would have felt if the initial feedback to my writing had been wholly negative – if my readers had told me that I was wasting my time, that my stories were boring, my characters wooden and my prose pedestrian. I don’t know whether I would have argued or refused to listen, but I suspect I would have been sad for a while and then stopped writing,

Luckily, the feedback I’ve received, from both amateurs and professionals, has been generally positive and encouraging, but …

Novels are complex, cumbersome beasts and take a huge amount of training and cajoling to get them to behave.

My readers may have given me positive feedback, but that hasn’t meant that they think that my first drafts are perfect – far from it. Positive feedback is nice, and occasionally instructive, but the really useful feedback is when you are told ‘this didn’t work for me‘ or ‘I don’t believe that character would do that‘ or ‘you can’t just jump from A to B in two sentences‘ or ‘too much exposition’ or ‘your dialogue isn’t realistic, people don’t speak like that.‘ or … The list goes on and on.

The biggest revelation for me is that I don’t mind. No, it is more than not minding. I am very grateful for each and every one of these critical comments and I would guess that 90-95% of the extensive feedback I’ve received has led to some sort of change in my books.

It might not be what the reader expects, and it will almost never be what they suggest, but I am writing for readers and, if a reader tells me that something isn’t right, it is my job to do something about it.

Listening

I have welcomed all of the advice and feedback I have received in my journey so far. I have sought this advice in academic texts, online writing and direct feedback from both professionals and friends/family.

But, and this is a huge ‘but’, third-party advice can only do so much.

It is invaluable to know when a reader is struggling to understand a plot point or to empathise with a character, but the decision as to how (or whether) to deal with each perceived issue should be made by the writer.

The story, the characters and the world they inhabit, are only shared in part on the page. The writer knows  more about all of them than  will ever be explained to a reader and, with the possible exception of a highly-dedicated editor only he, or she, should have the final responsibility to decide what goes in and what stays out.

If I listen to the advice out there, of course, I need to be prepared for that idealistic belief to be dashed on the rocks of the publishing process where artistic vision meets crass commercialism.

Firstly, that will be a good problem to (hopefully) have one day, and secondly, I think I’m crassly commercial enough myself to be able to meet ‘I think this character needs to be feistier/sexier/stronger/nastier’ with ‘OK. How about this?’

Technology

Leaving aside any of the associated technology involved in publishing and marketing a book, there is an initial decision which is critical, and which will have many consequences once made.

What medium shall I use to write the book?

For me, the first part of the decision was fairly easy as I can’t really read my own handwriting and have been happily wedded to writing (and editing) on a screen for a long, long time. Not for me the romance of matching leather notebooks with notes scrawled in the margin. They would end up being illegible, scratched out scrawls with ugly, time-wasting graffiti obscuring anything half-decent.

So, it would be written on a computer, but on what software? Word would be fine, but I didn’t have Microsoft Office on my laptop and had recently moved all of my files to Google Drive. Google Docs would allow me to ensure that everything was backed up and I could write from anywhere.

And so, I started in Google Docs.

After about ten chapters (of what would be forty-five), I realised that I needed a method to navigate between chapters as the story evolved and I realised that I needed to go back and forth to make changes.

Not a problem, I downloaded an index plug in which allowed me to jump between chapters. Problem solved. I carried on.

After a while, I wasn’t able to remember which chapter was which and so I added a brief description underneath each chapter heading to make that clear. That issue resolved, I carried on.

I wrote the whole first draft that way without too many traumas and, right to the end, felt that this was probably a good way to work.

But it wasn’t really the end. The first draft was only a beginning and I started to learn how many hundreds of times I would need to make changes and re-export the file in Word, ePub or Kindle formats. The technology to export or Save As was there, but I hadn’t thought the whole process through. Every time I wanted to send it out, I needed to go through every chapter and delete the notes from the title. All forty-five chapters.

It didn’t take long for me to realise that this was never going to work and I looked again at the alternatives. The answer was a piece of software called Scrivener which saves all of the scenes and chapters as separate files which are easy to find, describe, edit and create. It is only when you want to send it out that you bring them all together using a flexible Compile function which allows you to build your own preferred preset styles for each format type.

It was a bit of a pain to learn (and a big pain to import and reformat my existing draft), but completely worth it. Scrivener is designed for writers and it does exactly what it needs to do.

 

 

Literary Agents

This is probably the trickiest area for all new writers. As the publishing industry has become tougher and tougher with more books on release, and most of them selling less and less, the process of getting noticed has become increasingly challenging.

An increasing proportion of sales is coming from celebrity-based non-fiction, often ghost-written memoirs. It is difficult to imagine that publishing books like these is why most publishers started in the business, but ‘needs must’ and these books come with a pre-packaged fan base, receptive media-owners and a huge amount of ‘free’ marketing.

I can remember this dilemma from my years in the music industry. We all wanted to break unknown bands, to be part of creating a legend and to leave our mark. Our reality was, however, driven by budgets and targets and we knew that career success would be driven by Queen’s Greatest Hits, the new Oasis album or the NOW 36 compilation.

My observation of the book publishing industry is that it isn’t so different from the music business and, for every new ‘discovery’, there are thousands of people trying to make it and struggling to be heard.

I’m not one of the many people who believe that all of the people working away in the shadows are as good as those who become successful. As a general rule, I believe that talent will rise to the surface and the gatekeepers do know what they are doing.

But that doesn’t make it quick and it doesn’t make it easy. It seems that every big name has a story of rejection to tell – most recently JK Rowling who published a few of her rejection letters to drive home the point. When I worked at EMI, I knew the people who rejected ABBA out of hand and who sent the Sex Pistols packing. It’s easier than you think when new ideas and proposals are coming at you from all directions.

Publishers will almost never look at unsolicited manuscripts any more; they simply can’t afford the time and resources. Literary agents have become the sole gatekeepers and, for most of them, business is tough as well. They are all looking for the next big thing but the costs of reviewing hundreds of submissions every week is prohibitive. Most will receive a cursory look from a junior employee at best.

As an author, you need an edge in today’s market which normally involves knowing someone or, at the very least having a strong writing CV. Anything to move you out of the slush pile into the super-slush pile.

In my experience so far, I have mostly had rejection after rejection apart from an early ‘bite’ for my first novel which, in retrospect, was pitifully incomplete. I blew that chance and should have known better.

The other more-constructive relationship I have comes via a friend of a friend doing me a favour.

Asking a busy agent to read an entire book is a huge ask, so it needs to be a very good friend. My writing hasn’t yet found a ‘fit’ with that agent but, a year after the original favour, two of their agents read and reviewed two full-length drafts of Best Eaten Cold with very positive feedback.

At the end of the process, they decided that the book wasn’t a fit for them but I am sure that they will look at my future books and give them a chance. If I had more relationships like that, I have no doubt that the process would be much easier.

What I need is more friends …