Laurie Graham's Blog, page 7

This Post Contains Nuts

Recently a reader wrote to tell me that she’d borrowed one of my books from her local library and was enjoying it, but she was disappointed to discover they had no plans to acquire Dr Dan’s Casebook. I know libraries are chronically short of funds so I offered to donate a copy. The library replied, thanking me for the offer but declining. It isn’t their policy to accept self-published donations. No, not even from an author they already stock. A good example of cutting off your nose to spite your face, right?

I’m glad to say that not all libraries have this shortsighted attitude. I’ll maintain my habit of donating to impoverished libraries but of course, what would be even better, is for them to buy copies, whether self-published or bearing the imprimatur of a publishing house. That way, I can afford to eat.

In other news today, I’m now at the formatting stage with Dr Dan, Married Man? so the sound most likely to be heard issuing from my study (kitchen, actually) during the coming week is aaaaaaarrrrrrrrggggh. However it is rather exciting to see the book taking shape. By next weekend Dr Dan may be ready to try on his new e-book jacket.

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Got Me Covered

My very welcome New Year’s gift was an email from a long-time fan offering her design and graphics expertise to create a cover for Dr Dan Book 2. This has turned into the gift that keeps on giving because she has designed a ‘look’ that can be adapted for the whole series I have planned. Over the next couple of weeks we should be at a point where we can try out the design. If it flies I think we’ll then swap out the old Casebook cover and give Dr Dan a new and recognisably branded look. All will soon be revealed. How exciting, and such a turnaround from much of my prior book cover history.

The rule in grown-up publishing is that the author and designer have no contact. The designer, who doesn’t have time to read every book he works on, is given a design brief by the editorial team. The best designer in the world can’t be blamed for a feeble brief and there have been times when I’ve wondered whether the briefing editor has read the book either.

I happened to be in my (then) publisher’s office when the cover for The Unfortunates was unveiled. Those of you who’ve read the book will know that its protagonist, Poppy Minkel, is an opinionated and scratchy oddity with few friends in the world. Which made a cover image of three jolly girls horsing around together a baffling and inappropriate choice. When I saw it I was so overcome with rage, disappointment and frustration that I almost fainted. I remember, a double espresso with sugar was sent for. They still kept the stupid cover design though.

Well now I have the pleasure of a designer who not only knows what she’s doing but also completely ‘gets’ my writing. Yet another bonus of self-publishing!

 

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The Overloaded Plate

A Happy New Year to all you dear readers who’ve stuck with me through thick and very thin. Over the past three weeks I’ve managed to spend time with all of my grandchildren (no mean feat of logistics) and have also had enlightening conversations with two friends who share my tendency to overload. The conclusion: I need to stop it. As I have now added ‘publisher’ to the list of hats I wear and as, no matter how much I rail at the clock, I still only get 24 hours per diem, something has to give. No more overload.

Getting cut adrift without an editor, a designer or a sales force has been a sobering experience. The good news is that it has shown me that Big House publishers aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Sometimes, as writer friends bear witness, they make a very bad job of publishing a perfectly good book. So onward and sideways. Hands up, who’s ready for more Dr Dan? Tomorrow I start the edit. I was aiming to publish in February but my winter dance card has suddenly filled up so I’m now thinking March 1st. St David’s Day seems an appropriate choice for a Welsh protagonist.

My only resolution for 2020: to stop the fruitless drive for perfectionism. I will however continue to iron my sheets.

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Decisions, Decisions

I’ve finished first draft of the next Dr Dan book just in time for me to take a break and wear my other hat: the peripatetic granny bonnet. In the olden days this is the point at which I’d lob the typescript onto my editor’s desk, then run away and hide for a couple of weeks. Imposter Syndrome is something writers self-diagnose all the time. As in, ‘Oh no, now they’re going to realise I can’t really write at all.’

Officially I’ve abjured Imposter Syndrome, denouncing it as self-obsessed tosh, but of course I too get attacks of the screaming FUDs. And now I don’t even have a salaried, grownup editor to assuage my fears, uncertainties and doubts. But I do have some very generous reviews on Amazon, so on I plod. And I’ll come back to Dr Dan with fresh eyes later this month. That’s when I have to decide if I’ve set him up properly for Book 3. Gosh, a series practically.

Being out of the mainstream publishing loop there’s a recent development that had passed me by. Cultural Sensitivity Monitoring. This was brought to my attention by a writer friend who was advised to have his latest book checked before it went for type-setting. Cultural Sensitivity Reading is a whole new profession. You or your publishers pay someone, perhaps an academic working in the field of gender or post-colonial studies, perhaps a non-academic joe with an impressive CV of victimhood experience (gender-fluidity, Jewishness and eating disorders, for example.) to read your stuff and tell you how many people you are likely to offend. My friend, an educated, politically liberal individual, coughed up a couple of hundred quid and was subsequently warned he had scored heavily for ‘unconscious racist and colonialist bias.’

So now it’s decision time for him. Does he trash his book? Does he, chastened, take it apart and rewrite it very carefully? Or does he stand by it and say, ‘Heavens to Betsy, it’s a novel. I’ll publish and be damned.’

Meanwhile, the biggest decision this carefree self-publisher faces today is how many shoes to pack. An even number would be a good start.

Merry Christmas, all y’all.

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Apostrophe Wars, The Epilogue

It’s a dark, dark day for guardians of the English language or, as we are now regarded, archaic and irrelevant, nitpicking pedants. The Apostrophe Protection Society is pulling down its shutters. John Richards, the man who founded it in 2001, has admitted defeat. ‘Ignorance,’ he says, ‘and laziness have won.’

I’m glad that my husband, though still living, is no longer aware how far the rot has spread. He began his own sterling work in aid of the then already endangered apostrophe in 1996 and I was often at his side, dispensing vinyl apostrophes from a peel-off sheet, whenever he found a sign in need of punctuation. In one of his prouder moments he was warned off a second attempt at punctuating a sign outside Parkside police station in Cambridge. He was told he risked being charged with vandalism. Fortunately, as well as being an ardent advocate for the apostrophe, he was also a connoisseur of irony.

Some of his contributions to this worthy cause survived for years. As far as I’m aware this example, pictured with one of our granddaughters earlier this year, is now the lone survivor of his three year campaign that only ended because we moved to Italy, a country where apostrophes simply don’t exist.

What next? If the apostrophe, which makes clearer the meaning of a sentence, is now considered  dispensable, can the comma be far behind?  As demonstrated on a birthday card I received recently  –  Let’s eat Grandma? No, let’s eat, Grandma  – commas save lives.

Heck lets get rid of punctuation altogether no one has time for stuff like that dont know about you guys but were busy people

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Let Us Now Give Thanks

for freedom of speech, while we still have it.

A British TV presenter, Eamonn Holmes, has been criticised for using the word ‘uppity’ in connection with the Duchess of Sussex. Apparently the television company received a complaint (singular) and that’s all it takes these days to get you pilloried. Just one Outraged of Budleigh Salterton, or wherever. According to the complainant, ‘uppity’ has a racial connotation. Well not in the UK, it doesn’t.  In the UK it is synonymous with ‘uppish’, a word that has been around longer than the United States of America, and we should feel free to use either. Unless you’re an ITV presenter, in which case ‘uppity’ is now forbidden.

Watch out. The language police are about. A word here, a word there. They are nibbling away at our freedom, and don’t depend on broadcasters and publishers to hold the line. They are a craven bunch.

Thursday is Thanksgiving or, as it’s now known, ‘the run up to Black Friday.’  I applaud the sentiment behind the feast: the world can use more gratitude. My sisters-in-law will be cooking up a storm but I’m kind of relieved not to have to eat another Thanksgiving dinner. I wish I could remember which sage and wit it was who said, ‘let’s face it, the best pumpkin pie you ever ate was only marginally better than the worst.’

 

 

 

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On the Couch

Bear with me while I do a bit of navel-gazing. Writers sometimes try to explain where their writing comes from and I’ve often been asked how or why I decided to become a writer. The short answer is, I didn’t. I fell into it. Then someone told me I was quite good at it  –  a powerful piece of flattery –  so I just carried on. Now I just can’t stop. But, okay, where did the ‘quite good at it’ come from?

One theory that caught my eye recently is that fiction writers tend to be people who feel ill at ease in the real world. They are in it but don’t feel of it. I certainly recognise this in one of my grandchildren who is autistic. She struggles in places where children are supposed to thrive, such as the school playground, but is at her most comfortable sitting alone and writing a story. She was once suspected of deafness because she failed to write on the theme that had been agreed by the rest of the class, a kind of creative writing by committee project, but there was nothing wrong with her hearing. She simply preferred her own idea for a story.

It was never my dream to be a writer. It was my dream to be a dancer, a career for which I was too short, fat and asthmatic. Instead of ballet lessons, my parents gave me a portable radio. ‘Portable’ in the 1950s meant something the size of a Ryanair-approved carry-on with a battery that weighed a ton. That radio was my second best friend, runner-up only to my library ticket. So that was my childhood: reading books and listening to the radio. Did that draw me towards words while everyone else was out roller skating, or was the observing and writing tendency already hardwired in me, the chubby little wheezer no-one wanted on their sports day team?

Derned if I know. And so ends today’s session on the couch.

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A Funny Old Week

It’s been a funny old week. The first thing that happened was an indecipherable item on my To Do list. I’m an inveterate list-maker because experience has shown me that I need order in my life. I accept that there are people for whom chaos is a seed bed of creativity, but I work a lot better if I know what I’m doing come 9 am on Monday.

That said, my lists can be a bit random. Stuff jotted down as I think of it and distilled later into various sub-lists. Thus, Worcestershire Sauce may appear alongside ‘flu shot, Norwich train times, telangiectasia (check sp.) and Mr Muscle. All perfectly clear. But last Monday morning there was an item that baffled me. Frieda Rootboost. What the?

An idea for the name of a character, perhaps? No, definitely not. I spend a lot of time (too much time, arguably) choosing names for my characters, even minor ones, but Frieda Rootboost would never have made it past first base. The mystery plagued me all day, then solved itself as I was drifting off to sleep. It was the abbreviated name of a hair product, the only thing that saves me from autumnal hat hair: John Frieda Rootbooster. Such a relief.

The following day, as I was travelling into Dublin to buy my chronically hypothermic husband some new thermals, I overheard the following conversation. I swear. I scribbled it in the margins of my Spectator so as not to forget it.

First Lady:  Had she been ill long?

Second Lady: Not at all. In fact she was supposed to go to the hairdresser’s that afternoon. But then…

First Lady: Did you go to the funeral?

Second Lady: No, just the viewing. She looked very nice. Of course she’d have looked a lot better if she’d made it to the hairdresser’s.

Straight out of the Cissie & Ada playbook. And people wonder why I prefer public transport.

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I’m a Bear, Damn it.

Please excuse me for just one moment. You’ve caught me in the dying twitches of an existential crisis, but it shouldn’t last more than a couple of paragraphs and I promise to mop up afterwards.  

One of the jobs on my self-publishing To Do list has been to decide whether to spend money on advertising on Amazon. On the pro-side, sales can always use a boost after the publication week surge. On the con-side, it’s now the crazy season. If it’s not a vegan cookbook, a sports celebrity biography or something with a cat theme, you might as well pack up the travelling book wagon until February.

Then, by chance, friends of mine spotted a book on, ta da, mastering the science of Amazon ads. It was in a charity shop (and deservedly so) and as it was only 10p they bought it for me. The author is apparently a high-earning indie writer of sci-fi and thrillers. His advice, I thought, should be worth an hour or two of this low-earning author’s time.

Uh-oh. With barely a handshake he bundled me into a world of click-through rates, ROI and cost per click. I wanted to leave, but I persevered, until this:

Mastery of Amazon adverts, he advised, requires above-average competency in Excel.

Now, I have heard of Excel. I’ve even seen a spreadsheet. My husband made me look at one once. And what I know is that those very words make me want to run screaming from the building. My comfort zone is a place of whimsy, where characters may do the unexpected and two plus two sometimes make five. If a person can expertly straddle the worlds of fiction writing and Excel spreadsheet management, I am awestruck. I just know I can’t do it. I’m not wired for it.

So it looks like I’m back to business as usual. The To Hell with the Money, Just Do Your Thing and Ain’t Life Grand Method. Maybe I should write a book about it.

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The Long and the Short of It

When I first looked into the possibility of self-publishing, I was astonished at how prolific many indie novelists were, bringing out six or seven books a year. Then I figured it. Their books are short, as in 25 or 30 thousand words. What I would call a novella.

Book-length fashions go up and down like skirt hemlines. My early novels ran to about 60,000 words. Then, like my waistline, they expanded. When I wrote the first draft of Dr Dan’s Casebook it was 75k long and my agent, preparing to offer it around the Big Publishing Houses (pause briefly for sardonic laughter), advised me to get the length up to north of 80k. Which I did, trying always to be mindful of Elmore Leonard’s Tenth Commandment for Writers: thou shalt not perpetrate hooptedoodle.

Hooptedoodle is a technical term for padding a book with descriptions of trees, weather or the personal ruminations of a minor character no-one cares about. How I miss Elmore Leonard.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I’m rattling out the next Dr Dan book and although it looks like reaching 85,000 words, I now realise that its length is entirely up to me. I no longer know nor care whether long books or short books are ‘in’. Neither do I test weigh my novels for diversity, inclusivity or currently acceptable language. I’m just a story-teller. If my readers would like my books to be longer or shorter, I expect they’ll tell me. If they want them faster, tough. I have flapjacks to bake.

 

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