F.G. Cottam's Blog, page 6
May 10, 2012
Out today ...
Today marks the official paperback publication of Brodmaw Bay in the U.K. It's gathered some excellent press reviews, which I'm grateful for.
Two things really inspired this book. The first was working about five years ago (as a magazine editor) with a young staff journalist who had taken an archeology degree at university. She told me about the black wax they always found in the vicinity of ancient sites, investigating them as students. These were from rites practiced in secret at night, she said, adding that paganism was rife in modern Britain and she'd often seen the forensic evidence of the fact.
The second jolt of inspiration was witnessing the annual bonfire parade in the historic East Sussex town of Lewes a couple of years later. It's a famously strange, intense and almost tribal ceremony - a lurid and quite disturbing reminder of how insular and even bizarre English communities can be, even in the 21st century.
Brodmaw is on the Cornish coast and has its own mythology and rites. And it also has its dark secrets - there to be revealed to what I hope will be lots of readers ordering the paperback as of today.
Two things really inspired this book. The first was working about five years ago (as a magazine editor) with a young staff journalist who had taken an archeology degree at university. She told me about the black wax they always found in the vicinity of ancient sites, investigating them as students. These were from rites practiced in secret at night, she said, adding that paganism was rife in modern Britain and she'd often seen the forensic evidence of the fact.
The second jolt of inspiration was witnessing the annual bonfire parade in the historic East Sussex town of Lewes a couple of years later. It's a famously strange, intense and almost tribal ceremony - a lurid and quite disturbing reminder of how insular and even bizarre English communities can be, even in the 21st century.
Brodmaw is on the Cornish coast and has its own mythology and rites. And it also has its dark secrets - there to be revealed to what I hope will be lots of readers ordering the paperback as of today.
April 13, 2012
paperbacks out!
The paperback edition of The Waiting Room is published in America on May 1. That's the official publication date anyway - you can already buy it from Barnes & Noble - and Brodmaw Bay is published in paperback in the States on July 1.
This is the first time books I've written have been available in the paperback format and at realistic prices in America and naturally I'm pretty excited about the fact.
I'm all in favour of Kindle and the like and a big fan too of audiobooks; but almost nobody buys hardback books and if you're not published in paperback, you're on a hiding to nothing as an author struggling to make a name.
This is the first time books I've written have been available in the paperback format and at realistic prices in America and naturally I'm pretty excited about the fact.
I'm all in favour of Kindle and the like and a big fan too of audiobooks; but almost nobody buys hardback books and if you're not published in paperback, you're on a hiding to nothing as an author struggling to make a name.
March 3, 2012
Hit and Myth
Went to a book fair in the Dorset town of Shaftesbury this morning. The usual suspects showed up; books about Thomas Hardy (this is Hardy country), books about the rural delights of the West Country and books about antique clocks and watches and weaponry. But what were also there, in disproportionate numbers, were books about myths and legends. There were volumes devoted to Arthur and Camelot and witchcraft and curses and standing stones atop their presumed power grids of neolithic ley-lines.
It struck me that myths answer a need in us, a craving both profoundly deep and a chasm distant from the mundanity of the lives most of us lead.
This is good news, obviously, for a writer like me because it means there is an audience for the kind of subject matter I deal in. It's also quite intriguing to speculate on how much hard fact lies behind these stories that reverberate down the centuries.
It struck me that myths answer a need in us, a craving both profoundly deep and a chasm distant from the mundanity of the lives most of us lead.
This is good news, obviously, for a writer like me because it means there is an audience for the kind of subject matter I deal in. It's also quite intriguing to speculate on how much hard fact lies behind these stories that reverberate down the centuries.
January 21, 2012
forgotten
Alan Bennett wrote in one of his marvelously entertaining volumes of reminiscence that he only really felt like a writer if he was actually engaged in writing something.
That's a sentiment any writer can probably recognise and to some extent share. When I am writing, I tend to be energised by the project, filled with a strong sense of purpose. But the method that works best for my stories is months of cogitation followed by a few weeks of focused toil over the keyboard. I don't see that changing now. There is something slightly bonkers about the 4am starts when the finish is in sight but for me, well - if it isn't broken, don't fix it.
Every writer has a slightly different method. I make a few notes in a Moleskine notebook and then tap the novel out on an old Compaq laptop my son gave me when the hard drive on my iBook expired a few years ago halfway through writing Dark Echo (thanks, Apple - I'd only ever used it as a word processor and still fail to see how it could have got so knackered on such simplistic usage).
Here, finally, is my point. About ten years ago, before I began the Moleskine habit, I had this idea for a novel. It concerned a wealthy man who decides to restore his vast estate to the deciduous forest it must have been before England - completely covered in forest in the Dark Ages - began to be cleared for cultivation. He employs an arborealist to transform the land - at the edge of the sea - with mature trees.
In doing so, the landowner violates something ancient and triggers something malevolent and old. And his beautiful daughter is involved. And the arborealist, a young man, is involved too.
Except that when this came back to me, that was all that came back. The rest might return and might not. My rueful point is, whatever type of writer you are make notes. And keep them somewhere safe.
That's a sentiment any writer can probably recognise and to some extent share. When I am writing, I tend to be energised by the project, filled with a strong sense of purpose. But the method that works best for my stories is months of cogitation followed by a few weeks of focused toil over the keyboard. I don't see that changing now. There is something slightly bonkers about the 4am starts when the finish is in sight but for me, well - if it isn't broken, don't fix it.
Every writer has a slightly different method. I make a few notes in a Moleskine notebook and then tap the novel out on an old Compaq laptop my son gave me when the hard drive on my iBook expired a few years ago halfway through writing Dark Echo (thanks, Apple - I'd only ever used it as a word processor and still fail to see how it could have got so knackered on such simplistic usage).
Here, finally, is my point. About ten years ago, before I began the Moleskine habit, I had this idea for a novel. It concerned a wealthy man who decides to restore his vast estate to the deciduous forest it must have been before England - completely covered in forest in the Dark Ages - began to be cleared for cultivation. He employs an arborealist to transform the land - at the edge of the sea - with mature trees.
In doing so, the landowner violates something ancient and triggers something malevolent and old. And his beautiful daughter is involved. And the arborealist, a young man, is involved too.
Except that when this came back to me, that was all that came back. The rest might return and might not. My rueful point is, whatever type of writer you are make notes. And keep them somewhere safe.
November 25, 2011
Surprise
I've written the first novel of a planned trilogy which would best bear the description dystopian. Though it's written in the same style, it varies slightly in subject matter from what the readers of my books would probably expect from something with F.G. Cottam printed on its cover.
I plan, for that reason, to use a pseudonym for this one. But if The Summoning (as it's called) is a critical or commercial success, I am sufficiently immature to want to be able to claim the credit for it. Therefore I have decided that the pseudonym will be a character from one of my own novels. Klaus Fischer or Edwin Poole (both from THOLS) are the current favourites because to my mind, they are names with something slightly sinister and portentous about them, which would suit the dark and calamitous nature of the story.
Since it won't be an F.G. Cottam in the strictest sense, I am thinking of self-publishing the novel in download-only format. Doing this will be a departure for me and to some extent also an experiment. I'll price it cheaply and hope it gathers a bit of sales impetus on word of mouth (what with neither Klaus nor Edwin having any track record as a writer of fiction).
An experiment then, also a bit of a gamble but as the old folk saying goes, northing ventured, nothing gained.
A nice surprise this week was a phone call from the Scottish actor David Rintoul, telling me that he is soon to record the upcoming audiobook of Brodmaw Bay. Having heard what he accomplished with Magdalena Curse and Waiting Room, I was delighted to hear this. He had just finished reading the book and wanted to check on a couple of pronunciations and query the accent he should give one of the principle characters. Quite flattering, really, that kind of attention to detail - but I suppose it's one of the things that makes him so good at this aspect of his craft.
I plan, for that reason, to use a pseudonym for this one. But if The Summoning (as it's called) is a critical or commercial success, I am sufficiently immature to want to be able to claim the credit for it. Therefore I have decided that the pseudonym will be a character from one of my own novels. Klaus Fischer or Edwin Poole (both from THOLS) are the current favourites because to my mind, they are names with something slightly sinister and portentous about them, which would suit the dark and calamitous nature of the story.
Since it won't be an F.G. Cottam in the strictest sense, I am thinking of self-publishing the novel in download-only format. Doing this will be a departure for me and to some extent also an experiment. I'll price it cheaply and hope it gathers a bit of sales impetus on word of mouth (what with neither Klaus nor Edwin having any track record as a writer of fiction).
An experiment then, also a bit of a gamble but as the old folk saying goes, northing ventured, nothing gained.
A nice surprise this week was a phone call from the Scottish actor David Rintoul, telling me that he is soon to record the upcoming audiobook of Brodmaw Bay. Having heard what he accomplished with Magdalena Curse and Waiting Room, I was delighted to hear this. He had just finished reading the book and wanted to check on a couple of pronunciations and query the accent he should give one of the principle characters. Quite flattering, really, that kind of attention to detail - but I suppose it's one of the things that makes him so good at this aspect of his craft.
November 3, 2011
audiobooks
Until a few weeks ago, the only story I had ever listened to rather than read as a physical book, was Under Milk Wood, the Dylan Thomas verse drama in the celebrated version read by Richard Burton.
This changed when I listened to one of my own novels, read by the Scottish actor David Rintoul, not out of vanity (or because I had forgotten the story) but because it seemed a good way of trying to judge the structural strengths and weaknesses of the plot and the quality of the dialogue, with some degree of objectivity.
Because a reading is an interpretation - and more than that, a performance - it is distanced from the writer in a way I found helpful in identifying the novel's flaws.
I was also totally and unexpectedly blown away by the quality of the reading.
The book was The Magdalena Curse. There is a section in it in which the heroine reads an account of a Scottish witch trial concerning one of her ancestors, carried out in Cromwellian times.
The witch-finder sends his men to hunt a creature with whom the witch has allegedly consorted. Only one of them returns, bringing back with him a grisly trophy and the witch-finder questions him about what it was they so bloodily confronted.
Rintoul's reading was uncannily persuasive. I felt l was listening to authentic voices speaking English in dialects from the 16th century. I felt really privileged to have my writing so brilliantly read aloud.
I'm fortunate that he's also done The Waiting Room. All I need now is a spare 10 hours or so and I can listen to that one too.
This changed when I listened to one of my own novels, read by the Scottish actor David Rintoul, not out of vanity (or because I had forgotten the story) but because it seemed a good way of trying to judge the structural strengths and weaknesses of the plot and the quality of the dialogue, with some degree of objectivity.
Because a reading is an interpretation - and more than that, a performance - it is distanced from the writer in a way I found helpful in identifying the novel's flaws.
I was also totally and unexpectedly blown away by the quality of the reading.
The book was The Magdalena Curse. There is a section in it in which the heroine reads an account of a Scottish witch trial concerning one of her ancestors, carried out in Cromwellian times.
The witch-finder sends his men to hunt a creature with whom the witch has allegedly consorted. Only one of them returns, bringing back with him a grisly trophy and the witch-finder questions him about what it was they so bloodily confronted.
Rintoul's reading was uncannily persuasive. I felt l was listening to authentic voices speaking English in dialects from the 16th century. I felt really privileged to have my writing so brilliantly read aloud.
I'm fortunate that he's also done The Waiting Room. All I need now is a spare 10 hours or so and I can listen to that one too.
October 15, 2011
Superstition
Here's the dilemma. My chapters are about 8000 words long. It's a length I became comfortable with writing Magdalena Curse and I've stuck with it since.
But it means that Brodmaw Bay, at around 104 thousand words in total, amounts to 13 chapters. And so does the novel (at 105 thousand words) I completed over the summer just gone.
Is 13 an unlucky number? Is this a willfully perverse tempting of fate? Many people avoid the number, just as many (me included) avoid walking under ladders.
I've never succumbed to this particular superstition. Maybe, given the ghoulish subject matter my fiction deals in, I should. On the other hand, 13 chapters in a story dealing with malevolent people and the baleful magic they summon might seem peculiarly appropriate.
No dilemma at all then. Though my fingers are firmly crossed ... and I'm buggered if I'll ever put my left sock on before my right.
But it means that Brodmaw Bay, at around 104 thousand words in total, amounts to 13 chapters. And so does the novel (at 105 thousand words) I completed over the summer just gone.
Is 13 an unlucky number? Is this a willfully perverse tempting of fate? Many people avoid the number, just as many (me included) avoid walking under ladders.
I've never succumbed to this particular superstition. Maybe, given the ghoulish subject matter my fiction deals in, I should. On the other hand, 13 chapters in a story dealing with malevolent people and the baleful magic they summon might seem peculiarly appropriate.
No dilemma at all then. Though my fingers are firmly crossed ... and I'm buggered if I'll ever put my left sock on before my right.
October 5, 2011
Invention
In the final chapter of Brodmaw Bay there is a sentence describing my main character's final experience at a neolithic site above the village, a place by this point ominously familiar to him. It ends '... the looming stones screamed dumb questions about themselves to which time had forgotten the answer.'
Anyone who has been to one of those sites will be familiar with that feeling. They were built at a time so remote to us that we know almost nothing about them, or their purpose, or the people who constructed them.
This gives a writer the opportunity to invent. If you write about vampires or zombies, you are stuck with a pretty rigid mythos. The same is true of Satanism. Combating the devil requires soldiers of God.
But if you are dealing with beliefs and rituals from the west of England 5000 years ago (when Stonehenge was begun), you are obliged to make them up.
There are rules, obviously. The myths have to be plausible and resonate in the readers' imagination. They need to be culturally apt in a way that makes them seem almost familiar (in that insidious way that legends are taken for truth). And it helps if they are frightening, or at least unsettling in a way that makes them memorable.
Some writers create an entire mythos with a complex architecture. I have just conjured some Cornish coastal demons. But by the final page of the concluding chapter, I'm pretty sure Brodmaw Bay is not a place you'd really want to visit. You certainly wouldn't wish to live there.
Anyone who has been to one of those sites will be familiar with that feeling. They were built at a time so remote to us that we know almost nothing about them, or their purpose, or the people who constructed them.
This gives a writer the opportunity to invent. If you write about vampires or zombies, you are stuck with a pretty rigid mythos. The same is true of Satanism. Combating the devil requires soldiers of God.
But if you are dealing with beliefs and rituals from the west of England 5000 years ago (when Stonehenge was begun), you are obliged to make them up.
There are rules, obviously. The myths have to be plausible and resonate in the readers' imagination. They need to be culturally apt in a way that makes them seem almost familiar (in that insidious way that legends are taken for truth). And it helps if they are frightening, or at least unsettling in a way that makes them memorable.
Some writers create an entire mythos with a complex architecture. I have just conjured some Cornish coastal demons. But by the final page of the concluding chapter, I'm pretty sure Brodmaw Bay is not a place you'd really want to visit. You certainly wouldn't wish to live there.
September 26, 2011
Brodmaw
I got the hardback of Brodmaw Bay sent to me on Friday. It comes out early in November in the UK and over the weekend, I read it, trying to be as objective as possible about it while doing so. This was possible because I finished writing it in June of last year and so there was quite a bit of distance between me and the characters and plot.
It is the scariest of my novels, in my opinion, since The House of Lost Souls. Maybe there is something innately sinister about remote villages on the Cornish Coast (or at least the idea of them). But it was certainly my intention to make it a frightening read.
This begs the question, why do some of us like our fiction to include fear as one of its principle ingredients? I don't know the answer. I'm just grateful for the fact that we do.
It is the scariest of my novels, in my opinion, since The House of Lost Souls. Maybe there is something innately sinister about remote villages on the Cornish Coast (or at least the idea of them). But it was certainly my intention to make it a frightening read.
This begs the question, why do some of us like our fiction to include fear as one of its principle ingredients? I don't know the answer. I'm just grateful for the fact that we do.
September 12, 2011
Endings
My endings divide opinion. I know that because I read the reviews on this site. My personal take is that anyone who reads a book all the way through has a valid opinion concerning its failings and merits. That's why I read the reviews - as well as to try to gauge the type of readers interested in the sort of fiction I write.
Some of the best paranormal thrillers I've read are those with the bleakest conclusions. Somehow a tragic or bitter ending stays in the mind in a way that a happy outcome does not.
But I don't think this sort of fiction should always end in a mood of gloomy desperation. Characters who endure fearful experiences stoically sometimes deserve their reward, at least in my view.
And there's the element of tension to consider. If you as a reader know it's all going to end in a grim and ghoulish bloodbath, what's the point of continuing to turn the pages?
The challenge is to make the ending plausible without being drearily predictable. But that is precisely the sort of challenge that makes the crafting of the tale worthwhile
Some of the best paranormal thrillers I've read are those with the bleakest conclusions. Somehow a tragic or bitter ending stays in the mind in a way that a happy outcome does not.
But I don't think this sort of fiction should always end in a mood of gloomy desperation. Characters who endure fearful experiences stoically sometimes deserve their reward, at least in my view.
And there's the element of tension to consider. If you as a reader know it's all going to end in a grim and ghoulish bloodbath, what's the point of continuing to turn the pages?
The challenge is to make the ending plausible without being drearily predictable. But that is precisely the sort of challenge that makes the crafting of the tale worthwhile
