Candice Fox's Blog, page 5

The Life

A young man approached me at a library talk in Sydney a little while ago and asked me what life is like being a ‘famous author’. So I thought for this blog post I might talk about how being an author effects my world on a practical level. This might drown some steadily floating dreams out there, particularly those belonging to young people, about publisher-funded book tours across the globe, being recognised in the street and gushed over, buying a mountain-top writer’s retreat with your first round of royalty cheques. But if you’ve got a more grounded version of the writerly dream still pumping away in your mind, this might confirm for you what you really want, what success for you would really mean. So here are the major points of the writerly life, as well as the debunking of some popular myths.

 

First of all: I’m not that famous. I’ve never been recognised anywhere as being That Amazing Author, Candice Fox. I’m recognised at my coffee shop as the black-coffee-milk-on-the-side-chick. I’m recognised at my local library as being The Fast Typer. I’m recognised at my nail salon as The Chewer. But for authoring – no. If you want street recognition, become an actor. Being an author is one of those jobs you can hide behind, only revealing your true self when you feel entirely safe; kind of like stripping, I guess. It’s not that it’s shameful, but I’ve found that now and then dropping the ‘I’m an author’ bomb in the wrong situation can cause some real dramas. It can cause your audience of new friends to heap reams of Hollywood cliches onto you about your bank account, your work ethic, your arrogance, and in some cases, (quite often, actually) it can inspire them to tell you their own book ideas. The heart-wrenching memoir never written. The fantasy epic mentally built up over decades, just begging to be given life. The breakout Western Shoot-em-up/Gothic Lit mashup ‘like nobody’s read before’! These conversations are usually long, deep, and one-sided, so keeping the author thing under wraps completely can sometimes be a good move.

 

Basically no one lives off their writing. That’s a sad fact. Sure, the money surrounding each book is a great bonus – I used my first advance to put a deposit on a modest Eastern suburbs, two bedder apartment – but there’ll be no Jaguars or private jets, unless you’re Matthew Reilly. Most writers I know surround their authorial activities with writing related stuff, like talks, teaching sessions, online courses and retreats. They are often writing teachers or lecturers. I’m a university lecturer and a PhD student, so I only teach during the semester and only for a couple of hours a week. My main source of consistent income is my PhD scholarship. Throughout my PhD, when teaching work has been hard to come by, I’ve taken other weird little side jobs – teaching kids to swim, freelance journalism, desk girl at a tattoo shop. Each time I’ve gotten a book-related payment I’ve gone out with my partner to celebrate over dinner and drinks, but I’ve stashed the rest for my future.

 

Getting published after the initial publication is easier, but that’s just common sense. My agent is a very good friend now, and she’s always available on the other end of the phone. Having said that, I have pitched her ideas that are not in her field, and she’s refused them – business is business, and friendship is friendship, and the two don’t mix. It’s easier to pitch, though. I don’t have to have a completed manuscript, an interesting bio or a meticulously-constructed synopsis. I’ve also proven a bunch of things to my agent that the pitcher in the slush pile hasn’t proven yet – I’m rational, professional, hard working and I always finish the book. That’s the key. Plenty of people have ideas, and plenty of them write, too, but finding a finisher is difficult. As an established author, the publisher I’m approaching knows I’m a hard worker also, and they’re encouraged by the fact that I already have a fan base and people like my style. I remember the good old days when I’d have to wait three months minimum for a rejection from a publisher, and agents seemed as hard to catch as white tigers.

 

Having written and published a book does not make it easier to do it again. I still have to have compelling characters, a cracker plot and page-turning pace, and that’s not something that just oozes naturally out of your head like earwax. In fact, the pressure to write book two of my series to the standard of book one nearly drove me insane with anxiety. Before my agent and publisher told me it was brilliant, I had no idea if it was any good. As an author, you don’t just discover some secret formula for writing a hit that you can go ahead and follow. You have to be inspired. You have to plot. You have to solve all the problems and make all the twists and build all the tension the way you did the first time, now on a deadline, with the same or better appeal. You HAVE to – or you’ll lose this beautiful and magical thing you fought so hard for for so long; your status as an author. And you will lose it: don’t you worry about that. Authors fall into obscurity all the time, or follow up their first cracker with a mediocre second and fade into the shadows. It’s terrifying, to be honest.

 

But it’s also wonderful. Being an author is wonderful, in all the ways I’ve written about it being wonderful before. The first time you open a box full of fresh new copies of your work. Seeing those fresh new copies become tattered and frayed, over and over, in loving and excited hands. Having a new idea, falling in love with a new potential novel, pitching it and seeing the excitement come over your agent or your publisher’s face – because they know what you can do already and they’d love to see you do it again. Seeing notifications that a new fan has joined the Facebook page – someone you don’t know and have never met. They join quietly, and they watch without comment. Just some stranger in the crowd who likes you.

 

I don’t think the novelty of that will ever wear off.  

Better Read Than Dead, tomorrow, 3pm

Don’t miss your opportunity to ask me anything you ever wanted to know about HADES tomorrow (Saturday 17th May, 2014) in Newtown at 3pm. Be there or be square!

Candice Fox, Wendy James, P.M. Newton rock Glebe

Candice Fox, Wendy James, P.M. Newton rock Glebe

Hi fans, 

Please come along to show your support for me tonight at Gleebooks in Glebe, at 6pm. Tickets are $10 at the door, and light snacks and drinks are provided. Pummel me with your deepest darkest queries and try to snag yourself some previews of EDEN, available this December with Random House. Be there or be square!

 

How do I get to Carnegie Hall?

 

One of the questions I’m asked most in the interviews surrounding my first novel, HADES, is any advice I might have for aspiring writers. My biggest challenge, when I hear this inevitable query, is which piece of advice I’ll choose, because more often than not I’m sitting there on live radio or in a chat room or at the edge of a table surrounded by hopeful and eager writers, and I’ve got just a minute to answer. The truth is, over the years, I’ve collected a mountain of advice for young, ambitious writers, because I was one for a long time, and I grabbed hold of each and every tidbit and applied it, tried to see if it was the key to that huge, heavy, perpetually closed door. I thought I’d make my blog post this time about this advice; but before I set out, I want to make it clear that these few wisps of knowledge are but some of hundreds, and it may be that none of them work for you. I’m sure you know, if you’re serious about this, that the journey is different for everyone. Your chances are low (so much lower than you could ever imagine), and your hopes are high (so high, no one understands them but you). I know. I remember. I’ve made a promise to myself never to forget. So let’s see if I can’t help you along a little, whether I give you the key or simply make you feel like your dreams are worthwhile.

 

Study writing. This probably wasn’t what you were expecting as number one, but let me tell you, it’s critical. I don’t mean that you need to set out now and enrol for a Bachelors or blow your life savings on a specialist course in the rainforest with bran muffins and wisened beards provided. You may want to do either of those things, or you might just take up a TAFE course. Go to free talks. Read books on the subject. Talk to other writers about what they do, and read with one eye on the techniques your favourite authors are using, what they’re actually doing to make you feel so good. You’ll get two benefits out of studying writing. First, you’ll have a teacher, who will have no emotional or financial benefit in telling you your work is great when it sucks. Secondly, if it’s a good course, it’ll make you push the boundaries of your writing – write out of your comfort zone in genres and styles you’re not familiar with. You may just discover that you’re a natural sci fi writer, when you thought crime was your bag. You won’t know until someone makes you.
Submit. Submit. Submit. I mean multiple times, and multiple works. As soon as you’ve finished a work and it’s doing the submission rounds, forget about it and begin the next (and don’t make it a sequel to the first one. You’ll likely be wasting your time). The amount of times writers who have told me they wrote one book and submitted it to three publishers, got three rejections and contemplated necking themselves before ‘giving the whole thing up’ would make you sick. To me, writing one book and submitting three times is the equivalent of playing one backyard tennis game and crying because no one invited you to Wimbledon. If you really want this, you’ve got years ahead, and multiple books. Yes, some people write one book when they’re eighteen and get signed internationally for what will turn out to be a career-making blockbuster. Some people also win the lottery on the first ticket they ever buy. And we all hate them, so let’s not talk about them anymore.
Take care of your heart. It’s alright to be sad about rejections. It’s a crushing thing, I don’t care who you think you are. When you write a book, you open yourself up – your fantasies, desires, dreams and fears go on the page. You perform. You sacrifice. And when you get rejected, it can be very easy to think that the rejection is about you as a person. If you follow step two, like I did, and submit to everything you ever write to every goddamn publisher in the country, you can spend weeks receiving rejection after rejection like daily kicks in the teeth. You can take it personally, and it’s a combination of things. The vulnerability of the artistic life. The cold, automated rejection emails that teach you nothing. Years of reading shit and knowing you can do better. Rejection can make you angry. It can drive you mad. It can break your heart. Don’t let it. Don’t spend years, as I did, angry and jealous and miserable. Like most negative emotions, your anguish won’t actually get you what you want.
Write what’s in you, not what’s out there. The things I think about are pretty sick. I have a dark mind, so I’m a dark writer. I spent a lot of my younger years being told that what I was writing was too dark, too gruesome, too depressing, too violent. I should have written a romance, I told myself. Romance sells. Vampire romances sell. Sexy vampire romances sell. But I hate sexy romantic vampires. So I kept writing dark stuff. I wrote it with joy, with passion, the way all things should be written, and I learned to write what I write so that it sells. Don’t do what everybody else is doing – do what you do until nobody does it as good as you do.
Foster relationships with people in writing. This means teachers, writers, agents, publishers, authors and people who work on the fringes of the industry. Don’t do this thinking that they’re going to do you a favour if you become their friend. You’ll just end up being some sicophantic whack job pestering people, and they’ll see you coming a mile off. If you talk to people in writing, you’ll realise they’re good people, not a bunch of gatekeepers to a secret club designed just to make you feel like crap, and this might protect your ego. You’ll learn from publishers that they’re excitable, passionate and hard-working people. You’ll learn from agents that they’re hungry, fiesty go-getters. You’ll learn that neither of these groups of people has a personal vendetta against you and your dream. You’ll learn from authors that the club, when you finally enter, is a terrifying and wonderful place, and that they’re just as anxious and hopeful and self-critical as those young’uns who haven’t made it yet. You’ll learn from other wannabe writers that you’re not alone in feeling that your bookish dream is a part of you, of your DNA, a journey you were always on even when you didn’t know it, from the moment your third grade teacher read out your illustrated flip-book story about a catterpillar to the class because it was so weirdly good. Get into the community. The dream will become more vivid.
Decide that you will write anyway. Forget about ‘wasted words’, ‘fruitless pursuits’ and ‘failed manuscripts’. Stop calculating the hours you spent on stories and characters that didn’t make it. Your good characters will never leave you. No professional ballerina spends her career counting the practice hours she spent before the audition she wasn’t selected in. She doesn’t count the times she fell down, strained something, made a fool of herself. There’s a certain amount of practice and preparation required to make it at anything – being a doctor, learning to sew, playing tennis, ballerina ness… ballerina(ing)? Ballerination. Just because you can count your words, manscripts, years spent and rejections received, doesn’t mean your training was any different, or any less necessary, than that required for all worthy dreams.

 

Happy writing, everyone.

 

Candice Fox on YouTube

Hi there everyone,

Follow the link above to watch my interview with TheReadingRoom. Everything you wanted to know about my process, my inspiration, my journey. Hope you enjoy! Please comment below with any questions you would have liked answered. I’ll collect these and answer on the blog.

 

Google+ Hangout LIVE with Candice Fox

Hi guys,

Don’t forget, in a mere four hours time, you can watch me in a live interview with TheReadingRoom’s Simon McDonald and three devoted HADES fans. Register at the link below. See you there!

https://plus.google.com/events/ccessghhprpub8f1fv2prj6tpt8#events/ccessghhprpub8f1fv2prj6tpt8

The Hunger

It’s about time I blogged! Things are very busy right now. I’ve just handed in the first draft of my second novel, EDEN, Book Two of the Bennett/Archer Series. While I wait for a structural report on that, I’ve begun book three, which is titleless at this point, and refocused the majority of my attention on my PhD. Semester one is about to start, so I’ll go in soon to find out what I’m teaching over at the uni. Aside from that, I’m bombarded daily by promotional activities for HADES. It’s a real juggling act here, people. But no excuses! I’m back, and I’m here to speak.

When considering what I might blog about this time I decided that I have the most to say about the second novel experience. Most good writers write all the time, so the chances are that the second novel experience for most people comes when book one is doing the rounds. That’s the way it is for me. The most difficult thing by far is ignoring criticism of the first book. There hasn’t been much of a negative variety, thankfully. But reflection on what fans enjoyed or wanted more of in book one reaches my ears daily, and threatens to steer me right off my path in the upcoming books. It would be so easy to bend to requests for my main characters to get together, to reveal their secrets, or in some cases, to disappear completely. But I think resisting these requests is critical to writing something I’ll enjoy – and when I enjoy the writing, you seem to enjoy the reading. I always tell my writing students to forget trying to write to the market, as so many AskHow instructional lists on How to Get Published – Quick! will advise you to do. Do not browse the New Releases section for inspiration. Vampires, zombies and werewolves come and go, as do apocalyptic teenage love dramas and life manuals by desperate housewives. You have to write who, and what, is in you first and foremost or risk fading into a wash of trend novels with no publicity, rather than sticking out as the best new thing to come along since God knows what. It takes heart, not business sense, to win at this game. Don’t let Goodreads reviews direct your work, either, an author friend told me recently.

For every Goodreads reviewer that has the time and inclination to put down their thoughts, a hundred and fifty don’t, so what you’re catching are leaves in the wind rather than echoes of any widely held truth.

Like any novel, the first steps are heavy. The road ahead looks long, barren and lonely, and when it’s a second book the path is darkened further by the pressure to do what you did the first time as well, or better, with the same characters. The challenge has been to prove what I did with HADES was no fluke, and that there’s a career writer in me – one who can shock, surprise, and captivate over and over. It’s terrifying, as failure is to most people. But I’ve gotten around this by remembering that I started this thing with one dream, to be published, and that’s happened. Everything from here is bonus time. What’s important is the writing, the delicious, delicious writing.

I’ve made a commitment to myself not to write unless I feel excited about what I’m putting down.

It seems what I’ve been doing is working, because both my agent and publisher raved about the first draft of book two. I spent most of my time at the keys enjoying the process, and I have faith in what’s on the page. My advice to second book writers would be to remember that what’s important is that moment you began writing all those years ago, when all you knew about words was that you liked putting them together into stories, that you found you could escape, excite, entertain yourself with nothing but your computer and your mind. You felt empowered. You felt free. First books, second books, publishing contracts and international rights deals should be on the shelf, and your hunger for the worlds you create should be on the desk.

Never get the two mixed up.

Anatomy of a Candice

What has been different about getting an international multi-book publishing deal than how I imagined it in my girlhood fantasies? Well, I’m glad you asked. The answer is most things, and most for the better. The things that are bad aren’t bad at all – they’re just difficult, a challenge. I guess I’d always thought that if this ever happened to me the work would be done – I’d clap the dust off my hands triumphantly, adjust my belt in satisfaction and wander off into the sunset. There is, however, unexpectedly, a lot of work to being an author. There’s also a lot of doubt.

I guess I never realised how much the world needs to know about you when you make something people like. I know diddly squat about my favourite literary figures (except for Plath – but who doesn’t know that one), so I guess I assumed I’d just be one of those mysterious, aloof types with hunched shoulders in the corner of the cafe, the one people whisper about. Not so. Over the last few months I’ve conducted a real autopsy on my entire existence, bringing out and weighing and cataloguing experiences even I’d forgotten I had in an attempt to uncover what made me this way. The joy of it is being asked to describe what type of character I am in all my writerly glory, the way that I used to write character profiles in baby writer class. When asked why I write, as I have been many of times now over publicity meetings, magazine meetings, coffee meetings, blog meetings, I’ve discovered that I share some characteristics with people who have become great at this thing, and that’s a relief. I began writing as a way to flee my childhood bedroom on wordy wings. I struggled to find a voice I liked the sound of. I wrote pages and pages of garbage for years upon naive years. I tried to stand on great shoulders and fell off because I was too small. The last few months have been a very enjoyable self-examination, something I don’t think you can really do without learning something important about yourself. I think I’ve learnt that I was always going to be this way. That writing was a seed I was born with that was always going to grow.

I never realised how immobilising self-doubt can be. I’m talking actually feeling sick at the idea of putting any words on the page. I wrote HADES in the raw hot joy of personal literary escape and now I’m writing EDEN (almost finished draft one!) under the hammer of public expectation. According to people who have snaggled a bit of EDEN off my desk, the weight on my shoulders hasn’t affected the quality of my work in any way, but damn, has it made things slow. I’ve got to really think about who these people I’m playing with are, because their own histories and motivations and desires are being eyeballed under the microscope, as well as me. And I love them all so. Every one. I think my lesson going forward will be to let go of the need for everyone to love everyone in the Bennett/Archer series as much as I do, because one of the most common misconceptions about life, psychologists will tell you, is that you have to be approved of by everyone you meet for all things you do at all times. People are going to hate Frank, Eden, even Hades. I’ve got to live with it.

I’m surprised how long the guilt can last when people ask me what I do and I tell them that I’m an author. I’m still struggling with that, but seeing myself in the paper might help. I’m surprised at how comfortable I can be filling out interview questions on the screen but how awkward, confused and twitchy a camera lens can make me. I’m awed by the electric excitement that emerged out of a low-level ’well done!’ when people started seeing actual pictures of my book on my various author pages – something that was once an idea now an object, a thing I made that could be bought and enjoyed. I’m lucky enough to have some of the funniest, weirdest and most giving people in my life right on board behind the book, so I’ve been very grateful for that. I wasn’t prepared for all the book-hungry fans who have popped up on the pages who have no connection to me or my friends whatsoever, random people from all around the globe who are just happy to hear about a stranger’s success and eager to get a bit of good old Aussie crime in their lives.

I guess I’m glad the publication process is so much longer, more complex and more difficult than I first imagined; because I’m more connected to it. With every phone call, interview, email, sales figure, every fan who wants advice on how to get published, every Like, every tweet, I’m there in the moment, relishing in what I have done. If I’d been offered the deal and stepped back into the shadows, there’s no way it could have been as character-developing as this.

And I’m into stuff like that.

Win a copy of HADES

Would YOU like to win a copy of my debut novel HADES this Christmas? Then let’s have a follower drive! Have your friends Like the facebook page http://www.facebook.com/candicefoxauthor or follow the Twitter page http://www.twitter.com/candicefoxbooks and comment or tweet your name. I’ll count the tally on Monday at 5pm and award my very best follower gatherer. Go go go!

Who’s Number One?

Who’s Number One?

Have a look at my position on the Publisher’s Picks chart. Not too shabby