I spent many hours wondering about the sense of going alone. I read extensively spoke to many people – opinion is split fairly evenly.

Don’t under any circumstances self-publish – agents, publishing houses only way to go; security, well oiled machine working for you.

Do self publish – keep control of the whole, the book, and the profits.

Would it be stupid to go alone?

Suddenly I realised this is what I do. All my life. Want something, do something.

When I wanted to travel in my youth and found all my friends were after careers, mortgages and security, I travelled alone, for twenty years. I took control of where, what and how I lived. After the first scary months, enjoying almost every minute of it and discovering new friends along the way.

When I came home and still found careers boring I went the craft route and wandered the agriculture and craft shows of the country selling my sculptures and silk clothes. Controlling my work hours and ethics and my enjoyment of work. After the first scary weeks, I enjoyed almost every minute of it and discovered a whole new world on my doorstep that I knew nothing of.

Then, after saying once too often I wished I had had the opportunity to go to University, I yelled at myself to ‘just do it’. Menopausal hiccup or whatever, I did. I was in control of my mind. After the first scary days, I enjoyed almost every minute of it and discovered science and anthropology.

So, coming up to retirement and thinking a little sourly of old age racing towards me, I started wondering about how to try and control the environment and make life a bit safer. Looking around the world of bungalows I decided that, to do what I felt was needed, I had to self-build. Control as many aspects of building as was legally possible. Scary yes and I cannot truthfully say I enjoyed any of the process – very stressful. But living in the new abode? I am enjoying almost every minute of it.

So why should I be scared of self-publishing – okay, it has been, still is, a new learning curve – but surely I could do it. Keep control of my novel, of its production and distribution. And I’m hopeful I shall enjoy almost every minute of it.

www.albertaross.co.uk
www.didyoueverkissafrog.typepad.com

A Time for Grief by Jennifer Jensen.

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Since no one can help me track back to the original source of the quotation, "Fiction is the memories we don't have", I'm going to claim it for my own, because it crops up so often that I'm getting bored with the virtual footnote I feel obliged to add. The original thought started with philosopher and novelist Richard Kearney's book On Stories. He talks about how narrative evolved as an integral part of evolving human consciousness: once you have an understanding of your self and then other selves, as individuals in time, you start trying to understand your relationship to time: what was before - and might come after - Now.

And once you realise that there are individuals who are as much selves to them selves as you are, but who had a Now which you never knew, then you start needing to get a grip on that, too, and myth emerges. Eventually it separates into history - the known bits and pieces of experience which are left for us by what really happened - and fiction: those bits and pieces spun of experience into a new shape, to explore our selves and our world by thinking about what might have happened. In reading fiction we're using the mental (neural?) pathways that evolved before the distinction between fact and fiction was made. Fiction spins the material of individual and collective memory into a new shape, but still a narrative shape. As John Gardener puts it, it's in the authentic evocation of experiences we do remember, that the writer of fiction persuades the reader to 'agree to forget' that the story s/he spins from them never actually happened. Fiction exploits pathways created for actual memory, and the narrative nature of our consciousness, to form something which feels like individual and collective memory, which has the coherence of cause and effect which narrative bestows on a collection of bits and pieces.

Recently I asked a group of writer friends, published and unpublished, whether they first came to writing as a medium for self-expression, or as a means of telling stories.

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Tomorrow we showcase our first story.

More details here.

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Taking stock... I’ve just been going through my Submissions File. I’ve submitted my novel to 13 (unlucky for some) agents. Responses so far: one no-reply, eight standard rejections, three personal rejections (one of which asked to see my next novel) and one request for a full (based only on a synopsis and covering letter) which was quickly rejected when they encountered the actual writing…

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An account of writing, wine and pizzas.

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I probably ought to mention that I have a book launch today! It isn't a conventionally published book - it is a YA novel commissioned by the Stratford Upon Avon Literary Festival. It's called The World Turned Upside Down.

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Circus as metaphor for John Webster's anarchic world has a lot going for it. Intrigue and deceit generate mental acrobatics on all sides. With five corpses piled onstage at the end and a lot of gruesome surprises on the way, the overheated tragedy is replete with spectacle. The Italian setting invites comparisons with Comedia del'Arte and designer J William Davis' set and costumes were convincing. Sadly, they detracted from the overall impact of the play.

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Yesterday I was lucky enough to spend time with a good friend of mine, a great writer who's worked in Hollywood, among other places. I've always found his company inspirational and yesterday was no exception. We talked about Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, Marilyn Monroe reading Molly Bloom's soliloquy, the Scottish tradition of pedantic prose, and the 'sharpening pencils' stage of writing. 'There's no such thing as writer's block,' my friend said. 'There's just bad ideas.'


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One of the hardy perennial frets among aspiring writers is that they hear from various sources that something in their novel will get their submission rejected immediately. They mustn't put too much backstory in the early pages of their novel, or indeed anywhere; they mustn't start with (or use) a minor point-of-view; they mustn't keep the body back till page fifty or start with their main character waking up with a hangover. And then they pick up a favourite novelist's work, and discover any or all of those going on, and more lavishly than they'd ever dare.

Some aspect of this are relatively simple. First, don't believe everything you read online, specially if it's seventy-fifth hand, or springs from a different form and industry. Second, these are things which are often done well for good reasons, but even more often done badly for bad ones. (Or even for no reason at all. Prologues seem to be de rigeur in aspiring fiction these days, but there's usually a better way to do the same job. I saw so many at York that I'm beginning to think that writers feel a book isn't dressed without one.) It's not fair, because maybe you're doing it brilliantly for the best reasons, but the weary slushpile reader sees so many done badly, that the presence of backstory/minor PoV/prologue or whatever becomes for them a marker of something which is unlikely to be any good: your submission is starting off on the back foot. This too, I think, is the source of many of the comments from agents and editors about what puts them off and what they like, which get writers so confused: it's a rare agent who doesn't have several authors who do exactly what they've just said they don't like.

But there's something more complicated going on too.

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