Snow!

I know it’s a very sad-Brit thing to get excited about a few inches of snow, but everything looked so pretty this morning. It is still 3 inches deep on the grass here in the Chilterns at 1.30pm, so that’s more than we normally get all winter. Here are some pics for any equally sad Brits who find this sort of thing interesting. I hope you are all now planning to stockpile tinned food in case it happens again…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spread the Word again – a new tag

 Rosy has invented a new tag based on the Spread the Word idea as mentioned in my last post. The idea is to create some word-of-mouth buzz for books that aren’t likely to hit the review pages or get a ton of hype.

Here are the rules, which I’ve cut and pasted from Rosy’s blog:

 

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The rules of the tag are

1. link to the Spread the Word site (if you want to that is) and the blog that linked to you (again, if you feel like it.) (Crumbs I don’t think I’ve got the hang of what a “rule” is somehow.)

2. List the books named by the person who tagged you (to pass on the word of mouth) and then add 3 to 5 books you want to Spread the Word about.

3. Tag five people and let them know these rules.

The next person copies yours (and if feeling generous as many as went before as they wish) and puts theirs. Easiest is just to put a link to their post.

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Details and links for my Spread the Word choices are in my previous post here, but just for a quick recap, they are:

 

Sadomasochism for Accountants by Rosy Barnes (not yet published – due out 14 Feb 2009)

Maloney’s Law by Anne Brooke

Earth Inc. by Michael Bollen

The Book of Love by Sarah Bower

Silence by Josie Henley-Einion

 

So I’m going to tag: Anne, Amy, Irene, Steve and Robin

 

Er… don’t feel you have to take part if you don’t want to, as I know tags can be a pain. I don’t normally like them either, but this one is a really nice idea. I won’t be offended if everyone just ignores me though.

My Spread the Word list

The lovely Rosy Barnes at MockDuck has mentioned that she is looking forward to Kill-Grief. Hooray! Someone on Goodreads added it to their “to read – forthcoming” list too, so perhaps I will sell two copies! Thank you Rosy and person-on-Goodreads.

 

Rosy was talking about the Spread the Word initiative, which aims to champion good books that haven’t had the publicity to reach a wide readership. I know exactly which one gets my vote in the fiction section – Jim Dodge’s Fup. It’s a surreal and moving story set on a California ranch, where the cantankerous Grandaddy Jake and his gentle giant grandson, Tiny, revive an abandoned duckling with moonshine whiskey. At only 89 pages, it’s more a fairy tale than a novel, but it is crammed with humour, beauty and emotion, and it brought the exclamation “Shitfire!” into my vocabulary. I was pretty surprised to see it on Spread the Word, as it was published in the US in 1983 and the UK in 1997, so there must be a reasonable number of people reading it to keep it in print that long.

 

Anyway, Rosy had the great idea of making her own Spread the Word list. I hope she doesn’t mind me being a copy-cat, provided I start with…

 

Sadomasochism for Accountants by Rosy Barnes, due out on Valentine’s Day 2009 from Marion Boyars. It sounds hilariously original and I can’t wait to find out the significance of the penguin on the cover. (If you’ve arrived at this blog by googling sadomasochism, well… er… hi… hope you’re not too disappointed and will stay and have a read anyway.)

 

Maloney’s Law by Anne Brooke (P.D. Publishing) – I mentioned this a while back after reading the excerpt on the publisher’s site, and now I’ve read the rest and thought it was ace. Anne Brooke takes the private-investigator fiction mould and centres it on character – her believable, vulnerable protagonist, Paul, is a delight to spend time with, and while he might not have a great taste in men, he certainly has a great taste in whisky! Looking forward to hearing some publication news for the follow-up, The Bones of Summer.

 

Earth Inc. by Michael Bollen (Picnic Publishing) – This futuristic SF satire is in the tradition of Douglas Adams, with lots of laughs on every page. The endearingly feckless hero, Jorj, and feisty dissident Abi live in a world ruled by SoftCom, a mega-corporation that offers shares in Life Itself. Rogue customer-service robots, ants with human intellects and a disembodied teenage brain threatening to take over the world make for a highly entertaining read. (Disclosure – Mike has the same publisher as me, but if I hadn’t liked the book I wouldn’t plug it – I’d have just had to maintain an embarrassed silence.)

 

The Book of Love by Sarah Bower (Snowbooks) -The title could apply to a run-of-the-mill romance, but that’s not the case at all. This is an accomplished exploration of the theme of love in all its wonderful, painful forms – not least maternal love. Set in early 16th-century Italy, the story follows Esther Sarfarti, a young Jewish woman caught up in the dangerous world of the Borgias. The historical detail is beautifully rendered, but the themes transcend the period setting to lay bare the truth of the human condition.

 

And I haven’t actually read this yet, but Silence by Josie Henley-Einion is on my to-read list. From Legend Press, this sounds like a hard-hitting, gripping thriller. By contrast, I’m also enjoying reading Josie’s new light-hearted 1970s nostalgia blog, Pop & Crisps (I’m hoping she will set up an 80s one too.)

 

Well, phew! All those links took a while… but I have done my bit to Spread the Word.

Six Stupid Ways to Promote your Book Online

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but sometimes it can just be plain tacky. Lately I’ve been starting to think about ways I can help my publisher promote my book when it’s out, but there are some things I just won’t be able to bring myself to do. I’ve seen examples of all of these on the web recently, but feel free to add any others I might have missed:

1.    Join every book discussion group and writers’ forum you can find – the members are waiting with bated breath for you to jump in and tell them about your opus. No need to introduce yourself – there’s no time for that in the modern, fast-paced world of the internet. Your first (and only) post should be:

You all should read The Undertaker by Doug Graves. This hilarious comic fictional novel has been described as Terry Pratchett meets The Da Vinci Code!!! It is for sale on Amazon, or direct from www.dur-brain-books.com. Buy it now!!!

Then move on to the next forum and wait for the money to start rolling in.

 

2.    Just think of how many thousands of people you’ve ever encountered in your life – it’s pretty easy to Google their email addresses or find them on Facebook. Won’t they all be impressed to hear that you’re now an author just like J. K. Rowling? There’s nothing they’d like better than to receive a mass communication telling them to buy your book. This includes all those stupid agents who rejected you – the joke’s on them now!

 

3.    Did some ignorant Amazon reviewer only give your book three stars? Don’t worry – you can turn this to your advantage. Use the comments facility to say: 

Three stars? Raaaargh!!!

Wow, did I upset you in a former life, you moron? This is not *supposed* to be great literature – are you too stupid to see that? Anyway, I know where you live, so if you keep telling people you only found my book “fairly amusing,” you’d better watch out, OK?

 

 

The reviewer will be so scared he’ll give your next book five stars, and everyone else will be so in awe of your feistiness that they’ll all place an order straight away. Result!

 

4.    Put a SIGNED FIRST EDITION!!!!! up on eBay. The key to success is to have at least ten identical auctions running simultaneously – you wouldn’t want anyone to miss out now, would you?

 

5.    Some writers get friends and family to post great reviews on Amazon – what amateurs! The inspired way to do it is to review your own book under several different pseudonyms. You can also go to the bestsellers in your genre and tell the reviewers “If you liked this, you’ll love…..” Don’t forget to leave your real name visible in the depths of your profile.

 

6.    Plug your book in the comments section of blogs. Don’t just stick to book blogs, either – you never know who might be interested:

This sounds like a fun lake to go carp fishing – if you like that sort of thing LOL! I might write a book about carp fishing one day. By the way, if you’re interested, my latest novel “The Hound of the D’Urbervilles” is a pacey thriller featuring Tess as a jaded detective and Angel Clare as her bumbling sidekick. It’s available from Amazon for only £17.99. Happy angling or whatever you call it!

 

Centres of Gravity

 

My favourite writing rule is the one that says you shouldn’t use the verb “to be.”

 

EVER.

 

Got that? Go through your whole book and circle them all, then restructure the sentences in a convoluted fashion, OK? Being is just existing. It’s boring and passive. Your verbs as well as your characters should take charge of their own destiny. “Was” and “were” are particularly nefarious. You have to strike them out, otherwise you’re not A Proper Writer.

 

When I started writing seriously I spent many an hour zapping was-es and weres, chopping up adverbs and making characters just “say” things rather than hiss, interpolate or opine them. But… (oh yeah, you’re not supposed to start a sentence with but either)… there came a point where every time I read a book I thought: Hang on a minute, this Famous Author doesn’t stick to these rules. Is it the case that really good writers can do what they like and scum-sucking wannabes like me have to do as they’re told?

 

I don’t think there’s one rule for Famous Authors and another for first-timers. I think what’s really going on with The Rules is that the writers of how-to books (and presumably creative writing tutors too, though I’ve never done a course) see the same heart-sink problems over and over again and want to warn others against them. That’s admirable and helpful. Often, however, there’s nothing to catch the writer before she tips too far in the other direction. I’ve tried to make sense of The Rules in my own mind by equating them with something I actually have a clue about – riding.

 

When first learning to ride, many people subconsciously feel safer if they hunch their shoulders forward. The ground seems comfortingly nearer. It happens that the act of tipping forward makes the rider point their toes downwards without realising. This whole posture looks ugly, but more pertinently than that, it’s not safe at all. Shifting the centre of gravity over the horse’s neck messes up your balance and it only takes a wobble and a little help from Newton before you’re breathing up a noseful of dirt.

 

That’s why anyone who had riding lessons as a kid will remember some demotivated, weathered fag-ash-Lil of an instructor bawling “HEELS DOWN!” every five seconds. So you concentrate hard on keeping your heels down, and then she bawls “HANDS DOWN!”, and when you start thinking about the hands, you don’t notice the heels creeping upwards again.

 

I’m not a “natural” rider, so any ability I have is down to nothing more than 30 years of trial and error – mainly getting bolted with, falling off and for some reason feeling compelled to get back on. As a pony-mad but very nervous child, I was a prime target for the “HEELS DOWN!” shouts. Eventually, I started remembering not to let my toes point at the ground – hooray! I’d got the hang of it! Or so I thought.

 

I pushed my heels so far down that I ended up leaning back like a water-skier, with my feet sticking out next to the pony’s shoulders. Just as off-balance as I’d ever been, but in a different direction.

 

Some years later, I had a light-bulb moment when a new instructor told me: “The soles of your feet should be parallel to the ground.”

 

So that was it! Pretty simple, eh? Why hadn’t anyone just said that in the first place? They didn’t mean “Heels down,” they meant “Heels not so far up!”

 

I think the same is true for The Rules of writing. They are there for a reason – going against them altogether makes your work ugly and ineffective. But blind adherence to instructions is just as likely to send you toppling into the dirt. In riding, recognising your centre of gravity becomes instinctive. It’s more difficult to achieve that with writing – maybe because it’s not literally a matter of life and death – but I think it gradually becomes possible to recognise when The Rules have a point, and when they’re tipping you off balance.