I’ve just heard that my novel, The Making of Her, will be published this Friday. Even as I write this, it’s at the printers being turned into A Real Book. I’ve never had a baby, but I guess this is the nearest I’ll come to it. So please bear with me, because I’m going to blog about its story. Not its plot, but the story of how it came into being.


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A couple of posts ago, in Nothing but the truth, I found myself saying

new writers and unconfident writers, paradoxically, seem to gravitate towards... well at one evening of short fiction readings, nine out of the ten stories read were centrally, chiefly, about death. And competitions sifters say the same. I used to think crossly that it was just a cheap thrill - some instant gravitas - but I'm a slightly nicer person these days.

and a blog reader got in touch, because she's neither new nor unconfident, but often writes about death. Is it really such a Bad Idea? Such a marker of a writer who doesn't (yet) know what he or she is doing?

So I raised my head from the sum I was doing, about how old my main (orphaned!) character's long-dead beloved would be if he'd lived, to say the following:

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Thirst eDition Fiction is a new e-publishing venture that launches today April 23, with the release of three titles: A Proper Job by Ian Hocking, Dragonchaser by Tim Stretton and Mean, Mode, Median by Aliya Whiteley. Future titles include Basic Theology for Fallen Women by Frances Garrood and a re-launch of my own The Bridge That Bunuel Built (interest declared). The man behind Thirst eDitions is Matt Curran, who as MFW Curran is the author of the Macmillan-published fantasy novels, The Secret War and The Hoard of Mhorrer.

RM: Matt, I called Thirst eDition Fiction an “e-publishing venture”. How would you describe it?

MC: Hi Roger, “an e-publishing venture” is probably the best way to describe what we’re doing here. Or perhaps a “self-e-publishing venture” to be more exact. I’ve heard it being called a writer’s co-operative, or a “writer’s group with added benefits” even. But it’s easy to get hung up on definitions. What we’re doing here is working with commercial authors on non-commercial projects, or projects trade publishing deem as too risky to get behind under the current financial climate, but it’s the author who is driving the publication. In essence it is self-publishing but with a whole lot of support from other, commercial authors.

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The smelt have finally started running here in the U.P. For my readers from other locales here is the backstory. The Upper Peninsula is a wilderness that is difficult to describe. Wild, yes. Rural, yes. But there are many parts...Read More Here

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I suppose it came to me while I was walking the dogs. We have two of them, both lively and requiring a lot of exercise, so I spend a good deal of time out in the countryside around my home, in all weathers, alone with my spaniels and my thoughts. It’s actually when I’ve done a lot of my best ‘writing’ over the years, for all that I carry no notebook or pen: I’ve constructed dialogue, solved log jams in plots, and reached understandings of my characters’ motivation.


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It's been a bit quiet here lately, for which I apologise. I tried to get Jerusha Cowless to stand in for me, first while I was going full-steam-ahead with re-building the first 100,000 words of the novel, and teaching an OU tutorial and a six-week Writers Workshop online course in Self-Editing Your Novel. And I tried to get in touch with Jerusha again just before I headed off to France to research the novel (6 days, 2 planes, 1 dead & 1 live (hire) cars, 10 novel-settings, 270 photos, 1100km, ∞ bad French/good food/great ideas...). Eventually I got a message carved on a coconut shell saying that Jerusha's been slightly wounded while in hand-to-hand combat with a wombat she was trying to interview for her next job ghosting Dr Seuss books.

But now I'm back, and just as I was psyching myself up to tackle the Open University marking which descended while I was being sunburnt and then snowed on in the Pyrenees, I heard a friend, whose book is being published by a very small press, saying how hard she's finding it to do the promotion which is basically up to her. She finds it excruciating to stand up (or write/phone/email/blog/Tweet) and talk about herself and her work. 'Twas ever thus, to some degree, but although I don't think the barbarians are at the literary gates in the least, it's undeniably true that because publicity budgets are contracting, and the possibilities for promoting your own work are expanding, authors feel they must do it themselves more than ever. And lots of them find it extremely daunting.

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Many words have been used to describe my e-published collection of short stories, The Bridge That Bunuel Built: bizarre, quirky, surreal, dark, weird, certifiable, brilliant (that wasn’t me who said that, but someone did, I promise!). Now we can add “free” to the list. That’s right. For a few days only this stylishly designed and durable e-book will be available on amazon for a cost so low it is literally not a cost at all. It is free. So it’s a good time to buy it. Or not buy it. Because it’s free. Steal it, legally. It’s okay. You can even put an eye-patch over one eye and pretend to be a pirate if you like.

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Today one of my poems is published at Every Day Poets. It's the second of three pieces they have accepted. (The third poem will be published May 21st.) The folks there are serious about making poetry available to everyone, every day. It costs nothing and...Read More Here

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Thanks once more to all those who have followed along with the daily episodes. Flight began as a 50 word flash fiction piece that I was going to submit to an online zine for publication. During rewrites and polishes I wrote another series of episodes which were eventually posted here on the blog as a seven episode thriller. Many of you asked for more and over a week I wrote another seven episodes which will conclude today. That will be it for a while. I am revisiting poems that were written last autumn and...Read More Here

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It’s been over three months. Jennifer whispers concern. I know, Jen. They stopped taking blood...Read More Here



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