Alex George's Blog, page 15

Oops.

Yeah, so this is still sitting on my desk.

Deadline, schmeadline.

Time to Read

Last week I received a direct message via Twitter from the lovely Camille Noe Pagan, whose debut novel, THE ART OF FORGETTING, was published this week by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin (US).  Camille was putting together a blog post for the about how and when authors find time to read.  This is a topic of considerable interest to me, as it should be for all writers.

Being asked to write about this couldn't have come at a more apposite time.  Reading has become increasingly difficult for me lately.  I have moved into a new house which I am slowly trying to furnish, I am learning how to be a single dad, and I am still doing the day job… then there's the small matter of ushering my book ever so slowly towards publication.  And oh, yes – I almost forgot the next one I'm supposed to be writing, too.

People have always asked me how I find time to read, and the answer used to easy: I didn't watch any television.  At all.  Ever.

Life was simple back then: I wrote in the mornings, and read in the evenings.  I still write in the mornings – my two hours from 5 o'clock to 7 remain sacrosanct – but these days my evenings are filled with other, more humdrum demands: making the children's lunches, laundry, washing, completing unfinished work from my curtailed day in the office… and by the time all that's done, it's all I can do to drag myself upstairs and flop into bed.

But here's the thing.  I've written before about how writers need to find a routine, and then stick to it.  I'm starting to think the same might apply to readers, too.  It's not enough to blearily peer at the same three pages of a novel every night as I fall asleep with the light on.  I need to read.   That is what writers do.  Words are our tools; they're also our oxygen.  We need them to survive.  We breathe in other people's words in order to produce our own.  If you do not read, you cannot write.

So I'm thinking the time has come to get serious about carving out time to read.  It seems I can no longer take it for granted, the way I once could.  I'm still trying to work out exactly how I'm going to do  this.  In some way the idea of making a plan or a schedule to read sounds antithetical to the joy that reading gives me.  But needs must.  If anyone has any strategies that work for them, please feel free to share.  I'm getting on a plane next week, and all those hours of uninterrupted time should top me up nicely, but I need a long term plan.

For the record, right now I am reading The Bird Sisters, by the lovely Rebecca Rasmussen, who recently came to Columbia to give a reading.  It's a stunning book, beautifully written.  It's one of those novels that you wish you were reading with someone (very patient) sitting next to you, so you can lean over and read bits out to them.  The urge to do this happens on every page.  It's wonderful stuff.  (I accept it is possible that I am reading this particular book slowly because I don't want it to end.)

Anyway, here's the link to Camille's blog about writers reading.

Where Was I?

Goodness, turn around for a half a second, and a week or two flies by.

Apologies for the lack of recent posts; things have been busy here.  The fact that I'm in the office on a sunny Saturday should tell you something.  My parents will be arriving in Missouri on Monday for an extended stay, which I am really looking forward to – but that will also cut down on my writing time, as I will be pouring them drinks and feeding them peanuts rather than slaving away over a hot keyboard.  There is also a great deal of other stuff going on in what I believe is referred to as my "personal life", which is taking up quite a bit of time these days.

Ah, excuses.

Well, two bits of news I wanted to share.

1.  We have sold the rights to A GOOD AMERICAN to Spain, which is very exciting news.  None of my other books were published there, so that is, quite literally, breaking into new territory.  It's very pleasing to have sold all these foreign rights so far ahead of US publication. Fingers crossed that we manage a few more.

2.  I have seen the cover.  And it is beautiful.  Amy sent it through on Thursday afternoon.  I have been showing it to random people (iPhones are great) and the response has been uniformly rapturous.  (Seems like an appropriate word choice today.)  It really is wonderful.  I am so pleased.  It just oozes class.  There are a couple of small tweaks to be made and then I will share it with the world – hopefully early next week.

If, of course, there is a next week.

What My Mother In Law and Ernest Hemingway Have in Common

A while ago my mother-in-law gave me a box as a present, to keep my pens in.  On its side is a quotation from Ernest Hemingway.  I think it's a pretty safe bet to suppose that my mother-in-law is not a big Hemingway fan, but this sentiment obviously struck a chord with her.  The inscription read:

THE WRITER MUST WRITE WHAT HE HAS TO SAY, NOT SPEAK IT.

Please don't all slap your foreheads in synchronized despair, but only recently have I come to realize that she was telling me to shut the hell up.

Long Journeys

"Frederick loved America.  He loved its big open spaces, the sunsets that drenched the evening sky in blistering color.  Above all, he loved the smell of promise that hung in the air.  Europe, he could see now, was slowly suffocating under the weight of its own history.  In America the future was the only thing that mattered.  Frederick turned his back on everything that had gone before, and looked ahead into the bright lights of the young century.  Here, a man could reinvent himself."

In 2003 I left England and moved with my family to America.  It seemed to many to be a radical move, but I was just following in the family tradition.

My mother was born and raised in New Zealand.  In her early twenties she took a boat to England, met my father, and decided to stay.  A few generations earlier, her great-grandparents had made the trip in the opposite direction, eloping from their English families who disapproved of their union, and hoping for freedom in the wilderness of the southern hemisphere.

Before beginning A GOOD AMERICAN, I had begun, and abandoned, a couple of other ill-fated novels.  Some of the most common advice given to aspiring writers is Write What You Know.  It's a fine theory, but probably only if you have something worth knowing.  As I was pondering this, it occurred to me that the experience of packing up my life and moving to a new country, with no expectation that I would ever return home again, might just qualify.

Finally, I had my story.

In some ways, my experience of moving to America in 2003 could not have been much more different to my ancestors' journey to New Zealand in 1864.  But certain essential elements had probably not changed much: the hope for a better life, the fear of the unknown, and the paradox of wanting to adapt to your new country without forgetting where you came from.  (My mother has lived in England for more than fifty years now, but she still calls New Zealand home.)

One of the appeals of the immigrant tale is its ubiquity.  Almost every family living in the United States today has a story similar to the one I have told somewhere in its past.  Whether ten years ago or three hundred years ago, whether with due process or by way of a midnight ghosting across an unmanned border, whether by slave boat or luxury airplane, we all came here from somewhere.

In Praise Of Eggs

I have developed a peculiar fondness for making scrambled eggs for my son.  I have adapted a recipe I found in Eat Me, the brilliant cook book by Kenny Shopsin, proprietor of Shopsin's in Greenwich Village.  (We were introduced to Shopsin's by our friend Don, who actually appeared in the hilarious documentary about Kenny that was made a few years ago, I Like Killing Flies.  Don knows a thing or two about food – he now owns the wonderful Rabelais Books in Portland, ME, with his lovely wife Samantha.)

There is something profoundly satisfying about cooking eggs.  One of the principal characters in A GOOD AMERICAN is a short-order cook in a diner.  And – thinking a little bit of Kenny Shopsin – here is what I wrote:

"Each morning Joseph took delivery of dozens of fresh eggs from local farms, and by lunchtime every single one of them was gone. There was nothing he enjoyed more than cracking an egg against the side of a hot skillet and watching it cook. He loved the swift metamorphosis from limpid translucence to opaque, wholesome goodness. Poached, over easy, sunny side up, it didn't matter—each one slid perfect from his pan, yolks as rich and runny as liquid gold. He produced glistening clouds of creamy scrambled eggs. He created omelets as light as air. He cooked other things during that morning shift—crisp rashers of bacon by the pound, fistfuls of sausage, tottering piles of pancakes, crunchy mountains of hash browns—but he was a magician with those eggs."

Sometimes it's easier to write about something that to do it.  That's certainly the case when it comes to playing a musical instrument.  You can have your characters play like virtuosi without having to put in all the hours of practice yourself.  The same goes for cooking – much as I would like to, I don't possess Joseph's (or Kenny's) deft touch with the eggs.  But sometimes I do all right.

News Round-Up

Some good news, in brief – we recently sold the Italian rights to A GOOD AMERICAN to Italian publishers Sperling.  It's always fun to sell foreign rights, especially in languages that I don't speak.  (The French editions of my earlier books always bothered me a bit, because the translator took some pretty extraordinary liberties with the text, to the point of including footnotes, changing the characters' names, and adding his own jokes.  All in all, I think I prefer not knowing what the text says.  Much better to have a nice-looking book for your shelves which you can admire from a distance and not understand a word of it.)

Apparently the book garnered all the right sort of interest during the London Book Fair, both from publishers in other territories and also some film and television companies.  I'm not holding my breath, but I will of course report back if there should be any more news.

In the meantime, we are collecting some wonderful quotes from fellow writers to put on the back of the Advanced Reading Copies.  People have been incredibly generous with their praise and it means a huge amount to read such kind words from authors I really admire.

I've just completed a review of the copy-edited manuscript, and have emerged with a new-found admiration for copy editors everywhere and the extraordinary job that they do.  The depth of their knowledge of arcane grammatical points and their willingness to double-check my sloppy historical research is amazing.  It must take a certain, very special, kind of person to do that job to such a high standard, day after day after day.  I am thinking that I may have found a career for a future character that I haven't written yet…

Foreign Rights

Earlier this week I tweeted and posted on Facebook that we had received an offer for UK and Commonwealth rights to A GOOD AMERICAN.  This is obviously wonderful news for me personally, since I am English, and it would have been a little strange to have written a book (even though it is an "American" book) that wasn't published in the UK.  Even better news for me is that the offer was made by Fig Tree, an imprint of Penguin UK, which is a wonderful imprint and I am very excited to be published by them.  My editor-to-be in the UK, Juliet Annan, also published mega-seller THE HELP by Kathryn Stockett, who is a fellow Amy Einhorn author, and she did it wonderfully well.  The book is scheduled to be published in the UK next summer, after the US publication.

So that's all very exciting.  A number of people have asked how all this works, though – they had assumed that since Amy Einhorn Books purchased world rights, they would be publishing throughout the world.  In fact AEB will only publish the novel in the United States – but they now have the right to sell publishing rights to publishers in other territories (rather than those rights remaining with me.)  So it's actually Penguin/Putnam who did the deal with Penguin UK.

It's particularly serendipitous timing, because next week is the London Book Fair.  This is the annual shindig where publishing houses and literary agents get together and do exactly these sorts of deals.  The foreign rights team from Penguin/Putnam will be trying sell right to other foreign territories.  With a bit of luck having a UK sale under their belt might create some momentum for further sales.  We shall see.

Covers and Blurbs

Very interesting piece up at The Awl about the trials and tribulations of novelists when it comes to the choice and design of their book covers, and the sometimes painful process of asking other writers for blurbs.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, we are deep in that process right now, and so far, fingers crossed, touching wood, etc., etc., things seem to be going smoothly enough.  Everyone I have cringingly approached has responded with simply wonderful generosity and grace.  The one blurb for the novel that has actually landed on my publisher's desk so far is utterly extraordinary.  I'm blushing just thinking about it.  Does it help that it's from a New York Times bestselling author?  Um, yeah.

I have been speaking with my publisher about possible covers for A GOOD AMERICAN, and am looking forward to seeing what the Art Department (I'm assuming there is an Art Department, and not just some guy called "Art", which is how Amy refers to them) come up with.  My friend Eleanor wrote a very funny post about her own experience with the cover for THE WEIRD SISTERS, which you can read here.

So, all good stuff.  I'll keep posting news as and when.

Book Looks Like Book for First Time Shock

So, this is how it works.

You sit alone, for hours and hours, and years and years, creating characters, telling stories, imagining lives.  You live through the good days and the bad days.  You slog away, you persevere, even when everything seems utterly hopeless and you think you'll never write another word.

Finally you have a book.

Except that it's not a book, not really.  It's a very long Word document, perhaps.  It may be a vast stack of paper, liable to topple over and get messed up with one clumsy swipe of a forearm.

However, this week, I received this from the FedEx guy who delivers to downtown Columbia:

This is an unformatted, unproofed galley (no fancy cover, you'll notice) of A GOOD AMERICAN, which my publisher has put together to send to early reviewers, foreign publishing houses, and the like.  And for all its slightly unprepossessing appearance, I adore it.  Because after six years, I finally have in my hand something that actually looks like, well, a bloody book.

There is a weird disconnect here, I realize.  Generally speaking, books are not important as objects.  It is the stories and characters and ideas that inhabit their pages that give them meaning and value.  Good books can enrich us in a deep, but deliciously intangible, way.  But for all that there is something very special, as an author, when you see the manifestation of all your hard work in physical form.  Being able to pick it up and flick through the pages is a rather wonderful feeling.

It's strange, this sudden objectivization of my efforts.  Over the next several months my words will be reformatted and copy-edited.  Their look and feel will be re-designed.  A cover will be created.  The story I have told will not change, but the book will grow into something else, something wonderfully new.   I can't wait to meet it.

Watch this space.