sarah eve kelly

Today the amazingly organized and talented Amy Bai examined the mystery of struggling to complete her third novel when writing the first two was so easy (well, I say ‘easy’). It turns out that social networking tips the scales. Maintaining a website and an active presence on writers’ forums and Twitter - well, it’s a time suck. And a good, necessary one, because we need to be out there, months and possibly years (decades?) before our novels are published.

Where I grew up, the books were dusty, leatherette-bound, the pages wavy with damp. We read by lamplight. (One night when I was eight the power went out and my dad lit a candelabra and yes, readers, that’s when I heard ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ for the first time. My dad’s a pretty amazing reader, and I didn’t sleep for about a week.) It was a different world; it was the world that made me want to be a writer.

For me it isn’t just about making time to write; it’s about struggling with being a writer at all when the writing universe I see now is giving me whiplash. I see authors killing themselves to promote their books, and yes, if it were me I’d do it - I’ll do it when the time comes, and with a big fat smile on my face 24/7 - but what I see makes me feel a little old-school. I’m a misanthrope. I like sitting in corners.

I see blog entries with images in them - that terrifies me. Embedded video? Wouldn’t know where to start. This morning I tried to sync my Twitter and Facebook accounts and got stymied at the password stage.

Again, I’m not Cnut trying to hold back the waves. This is the world we live in, and a world I’ve elected to embrace. And it could be that the old-school world I yearn for isn’t one that ever really existed - Anthony Trollope wasn’t just a writer, after all; he was a postal surveyor, too. We’ve all got to make ends meet. But Jesus Christ: Annie Dillard actually writes about writing in a cabin. Drinking tin mug after tin mug of stale coffee. And it makes me want to yell where did all this noise come from? It’s OK to yell sometimes, right?

I remember going to a conference in Oxford last year. The organisers set me up with a room in New College for two nights, and I remember thinking, ‘A dorm room; oh yay.’ But what they gave me was this: a room with a bed, an amazing duvet and pillow, a desk with a kettle and coffee and tea, a bathroom of my own, and - get this - a table with two chairs for playing chess. I could see the beautiful quad from my bay window - the building was centuries old - and I thought aaaaahhhhh and collapsed back on the bed with my laptop.

Wait. Wireless. Forgot to ask the porter about wireless.

Reader, there was no wireless.

For a minute my ribcage closed - a whole weekend without the web? - but then something else happened. I relaxed. No TV; no web. I looked around the gorgeous room. There was nothing for it; nothing to be done. I felt my shoulders descend from my ears. I heard a voice in my head: Jeremy Irons reading Brideshead Revisited, softly saying, It was as if someone had turned off the wireless. Of course he wasn’t talking about wireless-wireless; he was talking about the radio. But the song remains the same: someone had turned off the noise in my head. I sat back for five entire minutes and did absolutely nothing. I went and looked out the window. Then I went back to my laptop.

I wrote. And wrote. And wrote.

The only downside to that weekend is that I had to go to the bloody conference. At least once a week now I lie back a moment and daydream about New College, as though the magic is there and not anywhere I choose to pull a few plugs. But there was something about that place: it wasn’t mine. It wasn’t full of my stuff. It wasn’t adjacent to a hallway adjacent to a kitchen where my dishes needed washing, my laundry doing. It was an empty room.

How many empty rooms are left in a writer’s world?

Stephen King was right: forget about your dream study; forget about your dream view. They’ll only distract you. Think about an empty room. And when I think about the chaos now involved in making a name for myself and eventually marketing a book, I have to remember that I choose to leave my empty room to go to that place: I sign in to Twitter; I write in this space. I can retreat to my empty room at any time. Because what’s the business of being a writer without actually writing?

A pain in the ass, that’s what it is. Fun, yes. Mutually supportive, yes. But a distraction, a sideshow.

Till next time, &c &c.

Yes, I’m aware that I’ve been tagged by the beautiful and talented Amy Bai to come up with a bunch of horrid horrid lies about myself, and that’s coming soon.

But today: introspection. I’ve got my Leo Kottke on; I’ve got my coffee on; I’ve got these awesome slippers. It’s go time.

I return often to this weird binary that I’ve found myself in since October 2008: that I’m doing two things, for no money, that mean a lot to me, viz. my research and my writing. If you’ll recall, I once suggested knitting as an antidote to all that good fortune. But I haven’t done any knitting since Christmas, and I broke the one rule I had for it: I did it for something other than fun. This is what happens when it’s Christmas and you don’t have stock options: you start knitting furiously, anything you can knit, and give what comes of it to the people you love. For me, it was coasters and potholders (with STRIPES), because I can only do squares and rectangles. Around 20 December my knitting became a bit like my typing speed: I could do three or four coasters in a night. My mother-in-law and I raced each other. And yeah, that was fun. But I remember a moment when I thought this: ‘Tonight I have to get that knitting done.’ That’s when I knew I’d broken the knitting law, and that’s when I dropped knitting.

I really hope I pick it up again. After all, knitting is awesome.

This is when I realised that I’m starting to treat these things I love - my research and my writing - like items on a to-do list. When I realised they were so overwhelming that I had to break them down into bite-sized chunks to make them feasible and achievable. And listen, that’s not cool. I’ve spent enough of my life in offices saying ‘This Isn’t What I Do’. Now I’m living in England - something I’ve wanted more or less my whole life - and I’m doing doctoral studies and writing a novel (two things I’ve wanted arguably longer than that). This is my entire remit. Not only is it what I want to do; it’s what other people want me to do, too. My family helps me; my friends take flattering interest. I am pretty much the luckiest girl in the world.

So whither novel?

When things get too overwhelming, I go under. Not in a bad way - I made it sound dire just there - but I put myself in my own form of sensory deprivation (that sounds dire too). I put my headphones on; I watch TV. I listen to audiobooks. I buzz around the flat like this - balancing my laptop in the crook of my elbow and watching Jack McCoy put the System On Trial, or listening to Alex Jennings reading Nicholas Nickleby - and do the laundry, scrub the kitchen, rearrange the medicine cabinet. I forget I have a phone; I forget I have friends; I forget I have remits, and most especially, I especially forget I have remits that I love. Because that’s the worst of all: if you love it and you’re avoiding it, what in fuck does that mean? I don’t want to know, that’s what.

I’ve got this arsenal of sensory deprivation. I have TV and audiobooks and video games. Mike tells me I keep the flat a little too clean; he comes home and doesn’t know where any of his clothes are. And when the flat is too clean, I know I’m not getting enough work done. I used to think that it was Twitter and Facebook that were eating up my whole life; now I check Facebook about once a month. It’s the TV and the audiobooks and the video games. It’s not procrastination; I’m not really falling behind. But it frightens me that I’m doing what’s expected of me and nothing near like what I know I’m capable of. That I’m sloughing this off - this stuff that I always opined I would give my lifeblood to if I just had the time.

I almost didn’t post this because I thought: hey, it’s lunchtime; time for leftover bolognese and the Season 18 premiere of Law & Order. What a lunch! And then - aha - I see that that’s the problem. I shouldn’t be watching bloody TV with my downtime. I should be reading books. I don’t read enough books. I should be going for walks; I don’t see enough of the world. I should be looking out the window; I should be lying on the floor; I should be sensing things. I should be going back to those places - mental and physical - that made me love reading and writing in the first place. I should be eavesdropping on people down the pub. I should be visiting cemeteries and connecting with the amazing eighteenth-century midwives I admire so much.

Even listening to Dickens is no excuse. It’s all well and good - I recommend it to anyone - but Dickens isn’t what’s selling right now. Dickens tells me about two hundred years ago; I need to either be learning about three hundred years ago, four hundred years ago, or now.

So now I’m surrounded by a mess, a real mess - I can make those really quickly. There’s a sinkful of dishes in the kitchen, a load of linens sitting in the hall, a myriad of Diet Coke cans and books and papers and ointments sitting on my desk. I have to keep the mess. I’m going to spend my lunch hour with my headphones off. I’m going to hear the jackhammer out the window and let the wind in and write. For an hour I’m going to give the world my full attention, just to see what it feels like.

Till next time, &c &c.

GENTLEMEN PREFER SUCCUBI. Tell me that’s a book you don’t want to read. Wait, I have a better idea. Go read the first chapter, and then tell me you’re not absolutely dying to read the rest.

Check this out:

After a one-night stand with a fallen angel and a bite from a vampire, forgettable Jackie Brighton has been changed into a succubus.  Now, she’s turned into a babe, needs sex to survive, and can puts people to sleep with a touch of her fingertips. Sounds great, right? Except for the fact that she’s caught between both the Heavenly and Infernal Host in an ancient turf-war, and now both sides want a piece of her…

How’s a girl supposed to save the world when the enemy is so hard to resist?

How can you resist that? (Quick answer: you can’t.)

Well, good news: GENTLEMEN PREFER SUCCUBI, the debut of paranormal romance author Jill Myles, was released on 29 December by Pocket. Today, this site is the stop on Ms Myles’s blog book tour, and I was delighted to be able to pelt her with all sorts of questions about the role of history and research in her stunning debut.

And readers, this is not only an interview, not only a blog tour, but a CONTEST as well: Jill’s agent, the gorgeous and talented Holly Root of Waxman Literary, is giving away a free query critique to one lucky commenter. Be sure to comment on each of Jill’s interviews (one comment per post only, please), and on January 27, Jill and Holly will reveal the winner!

SK: Welcome, Jill! Thanks so much for taking the time to answer all my fangirl questions. You must be so delighted about your new release! Now, to business: what role do history and historical research play in GENTLEMEN PREFER SUCCUBI?

JM: Inspiration, mostly! I took tidbits of history and yoinked them into my story, for lack of a better term. What’s in my book is not 100% historically accurate, and it’s not all factual, of course. But I used some historical bits as scaffolding for different storylines, especially the villain.

SK: Historically-inspired villains are always the best villains! You’ve said that you like to draw on Egyptian history in your research. Can you tell us a little about how Egyptian history caught your attention?

JM: Egyptian history has always appealed to me. I think I started my fascination with Egyptian history after watching (sadly enough) an Indiana Jones movie. After that, I checked out all the history books I could possibly find on Egypt. It was fascinating to think that so far back in history, there was such an advanced, intelligent civilization. Pyramids! Mummies! God-kings! How can that not appeal to you as a kid? And then when I found out that there were female pharaohs? I was a total goner. Been in love ever since. My favorite dynasty is the 18th, of course.

SK: Well, naturally. But the opening of GENTLEMEN PREFER SUCCUBI is full of hat-tips to urban life today - dumpsters, Burger King napkins, hotel key cards, and ‘beer beauty’. Was it a conscious decision to lay this on thickly to juxtapose the ancient mythologies of succubi, angels, and vampires? What was your approach to creating a setting that was both Jackie’s world and the world of these mythical creatures?

JM: No! But that sounds really clever and like I did it on purpose, so I’m going to go with that. I think I worked backward, actually. Jackie’s setting and world came first. Then when I started introducing immortals, I wanted them to be really, really old. So that’s when I dug back into history and started pulling out the bits that I loved and incorporating them into the story.

SK: So how heavily do you rely on research? Are established myths written in stone or do you bend them to suit the story?

JM: Totally bend. As for how much I research for the story, it depends. If I’m looking for something specific — let’s say a famous place in ancient Egypt that I can use for the story — I’ll start researching broadly, and usually by Wikipedia. Not as the end-all-be-all, of course, but as a good springboard for where to start. Once I start following something specific, I’ll reference more specific source documentation, university websites, reference books, etc. I was really fascinated by a piece of history mentioned in passing in Herodotus’s Histories, and I ended up reading half of the darn thing just trying to find more information about my one obscure character.

SK: Welcome to the story of my life! I’m glad I’m not the only one who can get sucked into a good story and watch the day fly by. What do you think is more important to your story, the romance or the mythology? If you had to write one or the other, which would you choose, and why?

JM: Oh… poop. That’s a really hard question. It… depends on the book? I wrote a heavily-mythology based urban fantasy (still in my trunk!) and I’ve written romances with zero mythology. So it really depends on what the story calls for and what I’m in the mood for.

SK: Ooh, really hoping for that manuscript to come out of the trunk one day! Sooo… do you ever… you know… use research to procrastinate?

JM: Oh, I’ve been in a Wikipedia trance many, many times more than I like to admit. You know when you go to look up, say, the population of Sheridan, Wyoming, and end up on a page about Edward III? Yeah. That happens fairly often, sad to say.

SK: Again, glad I’m not the only one, though my Wyoming census repertoire needs work. So, in conclusion, I have to say that GENTLEMEN PREFER SUCCUBI has renewed my faith in romance novels. Would you ever consider writing historical romance, succubi or no succubi? If so, where would you set it and when?

JM: Yes! I actually have a straight-up historical romance brewing on a back-burner. No succubi or vampires allowed. I really love the medieval milieu, but it’s hard for me to turn off the part of the brain that says “Using hay in the bathroom is not sexy! No dentistry is not sexy! Black death is not sexy!” so I was playing around with Victorian times instead.  Mostly, I think, because I am fascinated at how lewd some of the ‘innocent’ parlor games were. And bustles. Bustles are fascinating.

SK: Having worn a bustle on my wedding day, I have to agree that they’re fascinating, particularly in the sense of ‘how the hell do you go to the bathroom with one of those things attached to you?’ But hay can be pretty sexy.

Here endeth the lesson - again, thanks so much, Jill, and congratulations on this tremendous achievement!

Because a) it is a free market; b) you have excellent taste; and c) money can be exchanged for goods and services, you’re definitely going to want to order a copy of GENTLEMEN PREFER SUCCUBI or mosey down to your local bookshop and get in the queue. And when you’ve finished and are desperate for more of Jackie Brighton’s exploits as a newly-minted succubus, you can take heart, because the next book in the series, SUCCUBI LIKE IT HOT, will be released later this year (now available for pre-order!).

This site is only one of many stops on Ms Myles’s blog junket this month - if you want to read more (and you do), here are the interviews already done, courtesy of fellow writers:

• Jill talks to Amy Bai about inspiration and the joys of authorhood;
• Dorothy Windsor grills Jill about the harrowing hunt for an agent;
• Jen Hayley gets Jill’s take on the best way to nab a great agent;
• Kerri O’Connell delves into the world of mythology in GENTLEMEN PREFER SUCCUBI; and
• Jill talks to Stina Leicht about the role of mythology in urban fantasy.

Be sure to check out Julianne Douglas’s interview with Jill on the ever-vexing question of procrastination and a writer’s discipline, coming out tomorrow, January 8. For the full roster of Jill’s interviews, Shelli Johannes-Wells has kindly provided a schedule.

And remember to comment on every site for your chance at a free query critique from agent Holly Root!

Most importantly, run out and buy this book!

(I’ve never used this many successive exclamation points on this site. Thank you, Jill!)

Till next time, &c. &c.

It is Agent Appreciation Day. Today we celebrate our advocates, re-experience our astonishment and gratitude that someone so knowledgeable, so hard-working, and so excellently beyond cool believes in our work, and generally raise a toast to the people whose zeal brings us closer to our dreams.

My agent, Jenny Bent, until recently of the Trident Media Group, hung up her own shingle in March 2009 and has been jumping from strength to strength since, as any subscriber to Publishers’ Lunch will know. The Bent Agency has been so successful, in fact, that Jenny’s recently hired on a new agent, Susan Hawk, to handle young adult  and middle-grade authors. Jenny’s online presence is gentle, encouraging, savvy, and very occasionally whimsical. (Ref. a tweet from 18 Nov: ‘So sad that I ate all the skittles. I should have bought the economy bag’, followed up on 2 Dec by this: ‘Because skittles may in fact taste better than skinny feels.’ A woman very much after my own heart.) Her love for writers and writing shines through in her blog posts, in her tweets, in her constant advocacy, and (most importantly) in her emails to me.

The truth is, though, that there are a lot of agents like that. What sets Jenny apart is her willingness to nurture her authors, her awe-inspiring patience in the kind of market that makes editors demand that manuscripts be more or less press-ready, in a market where there’s no time or money or manpower to take the rough edges off the best work we have to offer. Jenny flouts that trend and takes the time.

Believe me, I know. When I started querying I was an agent’s nightmare. I was terrible at pitches, terrible at synopses (my stomach still churns just thinking of them), and my novel - if you’re kind - was rough, rudderless, and not remotely agent-ready. I got a lot of requests for material and they languished until Jenny came along. I queried, got a request within an hour, and within four days I was on the phone with her, discussing at length what a colossal shipwreck my manuscript was.

Here’s the cool thing, though: she still wanted me. She saw the good in the manuscript and wanted me. And over the course of six months, she helped me turn an idea for a good novel into a good novel; she taught me what a story is and made me a better writer. She’s been patient with my questions and my blunders; she’s been effusive over my successes; she’s always written back quickly; and she hasn’t been paid a penny for any of it. With tenacity like that, with belief like that, it’s really no wonder she’s one of the best literary agents in New York.

So Jenny, I raise my glass to you, and hope you get some much-deserved rest over the holidays. It’s very easy for a writer to be colossally self-absorbed, and most of the time I am. But it does me a service to remember, every now and again, exactly where I wouldn’t be without Jenny fighting for me.

Hug your agent. Do it now.

Till next time, &c &c.

Can you love a person whose beliefs are abhorrent to you?

The first thing a freshman historian is warned against is something called the Grand Narrative, sometimes called ‘Whig history’: the idea that history has served no purpose but to lead us to now, the grand apex of evolution. The past, we are told, should be judged within the context of the past, uncoloured by present-day knowledge, understanding, values, or experience. To judge the past in the context of today is called being ‘present-centred’, and it is Very Bad.

It’s difficult to put ourselves and our own worlds aside to understand history as objectively as possible, but we get the knack of it eventually. It poses a bigger problem in fiction. For a reader to truly engage in (for example) a novel, there must be a character to whom we can hitch our wagons - someone we feel sympathy or empathy for, someone we admire, someone whose fate we invest in. This is only a general rule, not an absolute one - plenty of novels reflect ideas instead of characters, and others read like a slow-motion car crash: every character is detestable, but you can’t take your eyes away. Still, though: the swiftest route to home base is with a sympathetic main character, and the easiest way to make a character sympathetic is for that character to share the reader’s values.

I’ve been watching a lot of Mad Men lately. Yes, I know, I’m coming late to the party. I always do: it means I can go on binges and watch an entire season in three days. And Mad Men got me thinking about values. Its critical acclaim has been almost universal: a gritty, unsparing look at the corporate world of the 1960s. As far as I know there’s only one really loud guy speaking out against it, and that’s Mark Greif in the London Review of Books. Of Mad Men he has this to say:

I suppose it does at least expose what’s most pompous and self-regarding in our own time: namely, an unearned pride in our supposed superiority when it comes to health and restraint, the condition of women, and the toleration of (some) difference in ethnicity and sexuality. Mad Men flatters us where we deserve to be scourged.

I have to say I like the show. It’s engaging in that chocolate box, ‘just-one-more-and-then-I’ll-go-to-bed’ kind of way. But because I agree completely with Greif, I’m trying to figure out why I like it.

Admittedly it’s tough not to be present-centred about the 1960s, a decade that suffers from a mountain of misinterpretation owing to the patina that the US poured all over the American Family after the Second World War. The people who thought they were conservative weren’t, in fact, conservative at all: the suburb was a very new thing, and a wife being stuck there was a very new place for her to be stuck. In this particular decade, though, it’s true that there was one generation trying to keep the world in 1952, and another generation - my parents’ generation - standing upside down in a corner on LSD, representing the kind of anarchic change that would destabilise and eventually alter the world.

So how do you make the 1952 guys the good guys? Why are we watching this show? On some level, of course, it’s because we’re mesmerised - in the second episode Paul Kinsey tells Peggy Olson that copywriters’ desks are furthest from the elevators ’so we can’t sneak out’, and I’m left wondering, with Scotch and cigarettes right at your desk, why you’d ever want to sneak out. It speaks (on one level, anyway) to a kind of permissive society that feels about as realistic to me as the underwater world in The Little Mermaid. I’ve certainly never been there.

(There is a post, by the way, to be written about how cigarettes have become a historical tag. Show where, what, and how often people were smoking, and I could probably tell you which decade you’re talking about.)

In a way, though, it’s like watching reality television: gazing into someone else’s office or living room and being able to feel smug. We’re more civilised than that; we’re more enlightened than that. It’s present-centred: the show invites us to view these lives from the point of view of our own lives in a way that The Tudors avoids by a country mile. There is something about the recent past that makes us long to believe that progress has been made, or what we call progress, because the very concept of progress is newer than you think. Greif is right when he says the smugness we feel is unearned. Being a woman in the workplace, for example, is still a tax - it’s just an invisible one now, like VAT. Tot up the numbers and you’ll see how little women are still being paid, and it’s remarkable how few women today are aware of that.

Anyway. Off the point.

Do you watch this show? Do you like the characters? Is there one you’ve hitched your wagon to? Or are they, as Greif asserts, a ‘toybox of tin stereotypes’? For my own part, I haven’t found one that I’m really able to like (always excepting Joan, of course, but she’s not in the show nearly enough) - the overwhelming feeling is one of pity. The wives are trapped, but so too are the husbands; the junior execs are trapped, but so too are the seniors. There is a constant undercurrent of being trapped, and that is present-centred. It’s not possible that everyone was that miserable in postwar middle America; if they were, they wouldn’t have been trying so hard to keep it exactly the way it was.

The setting of the more distant past seems, on some level, to sidestep this fascination with how They are not like Us. There are the little things - we’re tickled by the idea of women using white lead in their makeup in the same way we’re tickled by seeing secretaries smoking at their desks - but by and large, in the world of historical drama (as opposed to history), we’re able to take these characters and their worlds on their own terms. Or is that true? We cheer on the women in the past who jump out of their moulds (there is a reason that Anne Boleyn has been done and done again and can never be done enough: everybody loves her, or loves to hate her), and we scowl at the ones who say anything of duty or restraint. We want to hear all about the wife’s petty rebellions, and we don’t pause to consider that the sisterhood, such as it was, did not self-identify as oppressed until the eighteenth century or better - and certainly didn’t do it with any kind of consensus until the turn of the twentieth century. This wasn’t because they were betraying themselves, or because they didn’t believe in themselves. It was because they didn’t share our values. How could they? They didn’t live in our world. They had vocation, and more often than not (believe it or not) took pride in it. They were three-dimensional human beings, and we don’t realise that by only liking the mould-cracking ones - by feeling pity or contempt for the ones who lived according to the values and traditions of their own time and place - we do them a disservice, and offer them staggering disrespect.

Hilary Mantel speaks of hitching the camera of a story onto the shoulder of one character: it is through that character’s lens that you see the world while you’re reading (or watching). It is the author’s job to make you comfortable enough in that world that you stop thinking like yourself for a little while and start thinking like that person. More often than not we ascribe bigotry or ignorance to the behaviour of historical figures - the best we can say for them is that they didn’t know any better. Is it possible to step off our plinths and truly understand them, or are the best-loved historical novels always going to be about the people in the past who thought most like us?

I ask because I don’t know. I think it would be a tremendously difficult exercise to make any main character of mine pro-life or pro-eugenics or anti-Semitic or any of those things while still making readers love her. It would mean first loving her myself, and I think I could probably do that if I were more of an artist and less a creature of my own time and circumstance. This isn’t a rant; I don’t really have a point of view here. But I still wonder why I want to watch more of Mad Men - who am I invested in? Do I want them to learn something? Do I want to feel superior? Maybe I want to see what things might have been like for my grandmother - who knows. Until the show can make me root for someone (regardless of his or her values), I can’t help thinking it hasn’t done its job.

But now guess what I’m off to do. It’s been a harrowing day, readers, a harrowing day. I spent seven and a half hours fixing my computer (which is to say I yelled at it and pointed threatening cigarettes at it), and even now I’m not sure if it’s OK, and bloody hell, it’s hard to type with your fingers crossed.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

The ever-wonderful Editorial Anonymous posted this week about the fact that editors and agents shouldn’t be able to dash writers’ dreams by rejecting their manuscripts, the argument being two-fold: first, that it’s your manuscript, not all your dreams, that they’re rejecting; and second, that you have to come into this business armed with a better-than-average dose of confidence and thick skin if you expect to get anywhere. The premise is true, and the arguments are dead-on. Someone in the comment thread even likened the entire effort towards publication to auditioning for American Idol: you might feel a little sad for the brutal critiques these contestants are sometimes subjected to, but you must recall that they entered the arena with their eyes open - or, at the very least, should have done.

The only problem I have with this post is that it preaches to the choir. The people who agree are going to agree, and vociferously; and the people who don’t - the people who give all aspiring writers a bad name - are going to fight back with unintelligibly angry rants and manifestos about Talent and Callings and Publishing’s Missed Opportunities.

I was alerted to this post, as to so many things, by Twitter. The tweet called attention not so much to the post itself, but to the ‘defensive, whiny’ nature of the comments. I clicked on the link bracing myself for the kind of mountain of offal that makes all writers look bad, but what I found was this: agreement. From writers. Respect; professionalism. And down at the bottom of the thread, some disgruntled bint opining on how publishing’s got it all wrong, how the wrong people are rejected, and how the industry doesn’t entreat the people who write celebrity memoirs to work hard and play by the rules. There were about forty comments at this stage, and exactly two of them could be classified as ‘whiny’ or ‘defensive’. I pointed this out on Twitter - and after a little back-and-forth that did not raise my heart rate by a single beat - was summarily told to ‘chill the eff out’.

I believe in the rules. Agents and editors, hear me: I’m one of the good guys. I worked hard to get an agent, I take rejection well, and I’m learning to work harder and to work better. My only point was that I’m not the only one. The web has largely succeeded in pulling writers into line, and - for the good guys, anyway - has perhaps even gone too far: most of the writers I know live in terror of offending their agents, and think the most arbitrary and tiny acts could reduce their fitness for publication. These are people who queried properly and respectfully, who followed guidelines, who are stoic, hard workers - and (she says in a tiny voice) are enormously talented. Can we all be published if we do everything right? Of course not; nothing works that way. It’s a painful lesson, but it’s one we know. And we’re perfectly aware too that agents and editors are professionals like anyone else - there are good ones and bad ones - and only the bad ones are asking for unquestioning worship and deference. We know all that.

So I can only imagine that professionals in publishing are perpetually moved to write opuses convincing writers to behave because they see things in their inboxes that we don’t see. There are a lot of idiots out there, and guess what: none of them is going to read an agent’s or editor’s reasoned argument that things are the way they are for a reason. And if they do read, it’ll only be to spit venom in the comment threads and (I say it again) make the rest of us look bad. These are people who are beyond argument, and it’s not worth any professional’s time to attempt to engage them.

Over the past couple of years I’ve started to exist in a world (an online one, anyway) that understands how publishing works: that there are ‘good’ passes and ‘bad’ passes - that being good enough doesn’t mean you get a million-dollar advance, but that you’ll get a certain kind of rejection: the kind that invites further work, the kind that takes a moment to tell you what doesn’t work about your novel. You know who doesn’t know that? Our families. Try saying ‘I got a good pass’ to your mother or your best friend. All they hear is a door slamming; a rejection means that you’re not good enough, full stop. It means ‘She says she’s a writer but she’s just titting around.’ Anyone who’s serious about writing has to contend with this level of completely understandable ignorance in their personal lives all the time, unless he or she makes a resolution (as so many do) not to talk about writing at all. The ridicule to which you open yourself up when you decide to pursue writing professionally - not from agents, not from editors, but from your family and friends - is such that you’d have to be totally crazy to do it, or very serious, very committed, and ready for anything.

(NB: I’ve been ridiculously lucky with my family and friends, who are willing to listen and to understand how this works. But anyone who’s not family, or not a close friend, thinks (at best) that I’m giving myself airs or (at worst) that I’m a criminal idiot.)

The best part of Editorial Anonymous’s post was at the end: ‘We are not your fairy godmothers; we are your colleagues.’ Once again, the stoic, hard-working, talented writers understand this and don’t need to be told. The dissidents will dissent: it’s what they do. And so: if we’re colleagues, we’re colleagues, right? Everyone in publishing deals with rejection, not just writers. Agents pitch and get rejected. Editors take a beloved manuscript to acquisitions and get rejected. Hell, a book gets sold and printed and gets rejected by the public. This happens all the time. Most of the time the rejection is the right decision; sometimes it’s the wrong decision. It’s never not heartbreaking. But we are, as the post says, colleagues. This doesn’t just mean that writers have to take criticism and rejection with grace. It means that well-intentioned writers who play the game and follow the rules have to be treated with respect, whether or not they’re being rejected.

Speaking for myself, I’ve always been respectfully dealt with in a rejection situation - agents and editors have been kind and encouraging, some of them well beyond their remit. I don’t think it’s that system - speaking from my own experience - that’s problematic. What’s problematic is all these ‘colleagues’ mouthing off at the slightest provocation about how unprofessional other people in the industry are: editors about agents; agents about writers; writers about everyone. It gets up my nose to open Twitter and find another lambast against my lack of professionalism, and that of my writer-colleagues. It’s true that one manuscript isn’t the sum total of our dreams, and that no one can crush our dreams but us. But we work so hard - we open ourselves up to so much ridicule - and although we must take rejection and criticism in the spirit in which it was intended, there are few other professions which force its aspirants to eat so much shit when they haven’t done anything wrong. When, in fact, the only reason that they’re bothering to read these abuses is because they’re doing everything right.

No writer is asking for a parade. I’m certainly not. I just want the flow of vitriol to slow a little bit. You don’t spank every bloody kid on the block because one snuck into the cookie jar or broke the hi-fi. Go after the idiots all you want, but cut the rest of us a little fucking slack, all right? With all sincere respect.

Till next time, &c &c.

Ask anyone resident in Oxbridge about something called the X5 and you’ll get two things in rapid succession: a shudder and an anecdote. The X5 is a bus service, the only direct means of conveyance (failing a car or a coach and pair) between Oxford and Cambridge, and follows what’s known as the Misery Route, running through countless roundabouts and stopping in such cities as Bedford and Milton Keynes where, at 6:00pm, if you ask where you can buy a sandwich, the response you’ll get is, ‘What, at this time of night?’

The train is more comfortable, but requires the following (if you’re going from Cambridge to Oxford): a train from Cambridge to London King’s Cross, a tube ride to Liverpool Street station, and another hour’s train to Oxford. A return trip on the X5 is £15; the train will run you closer to £60.

All of this is in aid of saying this: I was in Oxford a month ago for a doctoral workshop. I had gotten there on the X5.

There is a Borders not far from the coach station, and I thought I’d indulge myself with a book for the perilous return journey, so in I went. Sometimes I buy a book, sometimes an audiobook; sometimes I just go into bookshops to survey the landscape. I usually traverse the entire shop some three or four times before I’ve taken everything in and can make a decision, if I make a decision at all.

One reason I take so bloody long in bookshops is my shallow attention span, coupled with the general character flaw of paralytic indecision. The other reason is that about half the time, I’m looking for good historical fiction, and it’s fucking impossible to find in any shop bigger than the palm of my hand.

A friend who used to work at Chapters-Indigo, a major bookshop chain in Canada, told me that historical fiction doesn’t have its own section in bookshops because there is no real consensus on what constitutes ‘historical’ fiction - how far back can you go? Should a novel, written now and set during the Vietnam War, be considered ‘historical’?

(Yes, if.)

Now, I’ve had to have a crash education in publishing, and I confess I know very little of what there is to know. But I’ve gotten this far in life without putting the palm of my hand on a hot element or trying to lick a flagpole in subzero weather, so I credit myself with some minimal measure of common sense, and it strikes me that it would behoove authors, the consuming public, publishing houses and major bookshop chains for said presses and chains to agree on a few simple definitions.

Historical fiction is, very simply, this: a story set before the author’s lifetime. Novels don’t become ‘historical’ novels just because they get old - Jane Eyre is not historical. The Picture of Dorian Gray is not historical. Nevertheless, A Tale of Two Cities is historical, as is Barnaby Rudge - both were set (during the French Revolution and the Gordon Riots, respectively) before Charles Dickens’s lifetime. A simple rule, yes? So a novel set during the Vietnam War could legitimately be called ‘historical’. If.

See, this is what bothers me. Agents invite queries from authors of historical fiction, a solid category of fiction. Agents then pitch to editors who invite pitches for historical fiction, still a solid category. A historical novel is sold because it meets a given standard and sparks interest or pleasure in an editor at a press and his or her superiors. Throughout this entire process - writing the novel, the query process, the pitching process, and the acquisitions process - the work itself remains a work of historical fiction.

The happy ending for this novel is that it goes into bookshops and gets lost.

Philippa Gregory has done historical fiction an enormous service by sparking renewed interest in the genre with her novels. Sarah Waters and Hilary Mantel, both nominees (and Mantel the winner) on the Booker shortlist this year, have performed similar feats. Historical fiction is a big genre right now. But what if the reader’s interest is sparked and he or she wants to read something else? Where to turn? People who like historical fiction are no different from people who like crime fiction or science fiction or fantasy fiction (all understood categories in bookshops), and yet they have to sift through massive FICTION sections in bookshops to find something that might maintain this interest. The end result is that it’s very difficult to break out in historical fiction, because people know to look for Gregory under G, but can’t browse for anyone else without getting lost.

The reason I started this post with a pointless anecdote about Oxford is that in the Borders I browsed through (ultimately buying nothing), there was a section taking up half of one wall called TEEN VAMPIRE NOVELS. I can tell you I just about lost my shit. I am friends with people who write books which will end up on that shelf; I respect them and like their writing. I also understand that ‘teen vampire novel’ is a category not requiring a lot of deduction or ingenuity to define. But seriously: historical fiction doesn’t require that much more ingenuity. If an author and a press together decide to market a book as historical fiction, doesn’t it just pants everyone involved if the book can’t easily be found by its target audience once it’s on sale?

The best readers of historical fiction can do at the moment is share their finds: my favourites, for the record, include Suzannah Dunn, Hilary Mantel, and Patricia Finney. Historical fiction isn’t by any stretch all I read, but when I want to read it, I’d like to know where I can find it.

And so ends my shabbos rant. Till next time, &c &c.

Seriously: that’s the best I can do. I am bad with titles.

Herewith:

First and definitely foremost, author and mightily gifted graphic artist Realm Lovejoy is doing a series of interviews with authors who have novels either due for publication or on submission to editors. Realm’s interviews come with a twist: a portrait of one of the author’s characters. Last Friday I and THE FIDELITY TRIAL were up for the chop, and her portrait of one of the novel’s main characters, an unsure maid of honour named Isabel Ascham (for more on Isabel, read the teaser on this page), made my breath catch in my throat. Seeing one of your creations come to life under the hands of another creator is an entirely unique feeling, and one I highly recommend.

Realm is tremendously generous with her time as well as her talent, so if you’re an up-and-coming author, do yourself a favour and visit her page to see if you qualify for an interview. You won’t regret it.

A few of the links I’m promulgating today are shamelessly pinched from Katharine Beutner, whose novel Alcestis will be released by Soho Press in March 2010 (this is definitely on my TBR list). First off, Megan Crewe’s analysis of what will get your novel published (hint: it’s not having a friend In the Industry), backed by impressive numbers, crossing all genres, and topped off with candid observations from published authors. Well worth a read.

Next, the Telegraph’s review of Paula Byrne’s Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead. I especially like the closing thought:

[Byrne] notes that “all Waugh’s fictional people and places are subtle transformations, not direct portrayals, of ‘reality’” – the true gift of the artist. The epitaph to Brideshead still stands: “I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they”.

I am a Waugh devourer - though I’m rather relieved I’ll never get the chance to have a pint with the man - and this book would make an ideal birthday present for me. My birthday’s coming up, you know. Please and thank you.

Katharine also happens to be a fan of cartoonist and fellow Canadian Kate Beaton, and now is as good a time as any to announce that Kate Beaton is pretty much the best ever. She is actually an historical cartoonist. See here. See why I love her.

Those in query land must read the sound and unredoubtable advice of my wonderful agent, Jenny Bent, on what most impresses agents at conferences. It’s probably not what you think!

Finally, writer Jan O’Hara collects wisdom - dashed liberally with some of her own - on coping with rejection in the publishing industry. Highly recommended reading.

And that about does it. Posting links is tiring, man. But in these cases, worth every repetitive stress injury.

Till next time, if God wills it &c &c.

Getting some feedback from the current work-in-progress, I’m noticing that my main character is far more reactive than she is active. Our lady of Althorp needs to do more. This is the consensus.

This is my first effort writing first-person. Like all good and fair-minded people I take criticism from those I respect very seriously, and am looking over my first chapters and finding ways of pushing things forward. It’s good to catch these things early. But it had me reflecting, last night, on what the purpose of first-person really is.

I started the novel in first-person with the intention of creating an intimacy between my reader and my main character that isn’t quite possible in third or close third. I wanted my reader to see Hampton Court Palace and the rutted roads to Staffordshire through the eyes of Elizabeth Spencer. At the same time, though, I find that if you’re going to go the rather ambitious route of writing well in first-person, the main character with whose voice you speak must, by nature, be an observant person. She must be interested in the world - and the people - around her. Otherwise - unless you’re writing something brilliant and ambitious like, say, Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost, whose foundations are on a series of highly unreliable narrators - your reader will experience a very narrow view of the world you build.

Because I have recently read, reread and read again Brideshead Revisited, I think of Charles Ryder, its narrator and main character. Ryder does things, and things happen to him, but he is more in the nature of an observer than an actor, and it isn’t unfair to ask whether or not the story would have changed without his intervention. I think of Wodehouse’s Mr Mulliner too, who gives his picaresque tales his own voice, but takes little part in them.

I have no intention of writing such a novel. I have great plains for my own main character to be both active and reactive. But the world she sees, that particular time and place and series of events, is what I want to create. Elizabeth Spencer is neither incidental nor irrelevant, but she is not the only person in the story, and she, at least, is aware of it.

Speaking of which, I promised myself I would finish my fifth chapter today. Pip pip.

I’m a member of a writing group. There are no hacks in this group, no one who doesn’t have a chance, and we’re all somewhere in this blasted writing-to-publication process, either debuting or waiting on editor feedback or querying literary agents. No one in this group complains about the process, or ignores its guidelines, or misbehaves. I cannot describe how alone I would have felt in this universe over the past year without them. And from them I learn: there are bad days, very bad days. Sometimes this is prompted by circumstance, sometimes by a crisis of confidence, sometimes both.

Yesterday I had a bad day, a very bad day. I was angry at my novel and angry about the economy and generally feeling petulant and petty and all the other bratty p-words. It was rough going. But this morning I woke up, feeling like shit, and had a small epiphany while brushing my teeth: the sinkhole economy is, in a way, a gift. Why? Because we - writers, trying to break in - have to be really, really good. If you can sell a novel in this economy, if you can convince strangers to spend money taking a chance on you, you’re gold.

So there it is: we have to be really, really good. It means taking what you thought was good enough and bashing at it until it’s better, better, the best you can make it, and then going back and making it better still. This economy is making sharp artists of us, because no one’s going to pay attention unless you’re better, better, better than everyone else.

There really is no use whining about it; that’s not going to get you on shelves. Yesterday I whined about it; today I determined to do something about it. Hence this teaser. I wasn’t going to post one today, because it seemed too difficult a thing to do, putting myself out there again. But screw it: that’s what we have to do, and keep doing.

One more thing: in this climate of having to be better than everyone else, of constantly honing and improving and pushing your art to the top of the pile, it is a bloody miracle that my writing group - this group of extraordinary, patient, supportive, gifted people - can even exist. So thank you, Purgatory: I dedicate this gloomy and non-uplifting teaser to you.

Now, back to our Elizabethan adventure. Here we find our heroine, Elizabeth, testing the boundaries of her marriage. Enjoy. Comments and lambasts are &c &c.

&&&

Silence for a moment. His cheeks are pink now; there is some satisfaction in that. ‘Stop it,’ he says. ‘I am tired. You are my wife. You will behave. I needn’t defend soldiering to you.’

I have behaved! How I have behaved! ‘Sufficeth this to prove my theme withal!‘ I shout. There are poems about war: writing and soldiering, joined in two lines from Gascoigne’s Posies, a new discovery. ‘That every bullet hath a lighting place!‘

He crosses the room to me in two strides. The back of my head is in one hand, my shoulder in the other, his grip strong enough to leave a mark. ‘You do not shout at me,’ he says in that same low voice. ‘You do not raise your voice to me, or to anyone. Do you understand? I will not have you raise your voice. I do not do it; you will not do it. There will be no more,’ he says, steadily, ‘no more shouting.’

I stare up at him. I have made a game of this argument. I have treated him as I might have treated Edmund, years ago. I wanted this, I think. I asked for this.

He seems calm, yet his eyes are larger now, unblinking, looking down at me. He jerks my head. ‘Do you understand?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ I reply, in a voice as low as his - in my reading voice. ‘I understand. I am not a child.’

He lets go of me by pushing my head and shoulder from him. My hood falls from my hair, drops to the floor; in backing away from him, I step on it. It is ruined, I see when I pick it up. George is still standing close, too close; he sees the hood and takes it from me. ‘See what you’ve done,’ he says, holding it up, and I am surprised to see that he is close to tears. ‘No shouting. No violence. See what you have destroyed.’ Again he looks at the hood, a plain thing, a few shillings. ‘Act like an animal again and I shall cage you.’

Did I know that my arguments would bring about such a reaction? I think I did. But the hood surprises me: a thing of no great value, easily replaced, and he holds as if it is a dead child, his eyes red-rimmed. Not once has he raised his voice.

‘I am not an unkind man,’ he says. ‘I am not an unfair man.’ Still he holds the hood. ‘I would be a good husband to you, Elizabeth.’ How long has it been since someone said my name? ‘I would be a good husband, but you mustn’t raise your voice. Not ever.’

‘I am sorry,’ I tell him, and mean it. ‘It will not happen again.’

‘Then I am pleased,’ he says, and that crooked smile - the one he wore when we first met - finds its way to his mouth. ‘I am pleased. Do something with this.’ He hands me the hood. ‘I don’t want to see it again.’ He touches my shoulder gently - my sore shoulder - and kisses my temple. ‘I will sleep before supper, I think,’ he says. ‘It’s been a long journey.’ He kisses me once more and leaves the room.

This is what we do, when we marry: we look for sores to pick at. We find ways to hurt each other, because it is of great value to do so. I stare after my husband. He has shown his hand to me; I learn and remember: I cannot shout; I cannot destroy objects, however small their worth. I know how to cause pain.

You mustn’t think that I enjoy such a thing, that I seek to inflict pain. I don’t. I am kind, if heartless - I cannot love this man, any more or less than I could love Edmund. I have no desire to hurt him. But it is good to know how, just in case.