Legendary Authors

Alert for Eight Hours Authors (and anyone else interested)

If you have an Amazon account (i.e. if you’ve ever bought anything from them), you can upload ‘customer images’ to a product page. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before but at this important time of Eight Hours launching like a rocket into space, we can take advantage of this facility. I’ve uploaded two photos of the Waterstone’s Cardiff launch (they should appear on the Eight Hours product page within a few days). I suggest that you do the same for your launches, as it would be good to get a launch photo gallery going. You can also add a note so that people know who you are. If you’re not mega techie then I can give you instructions or you could even send me your photos and whatever captions you want and I’ll do it for you, though it would be good if they came from a variety of customer accounts.

I look forward to hearing all about the other events, Huckleberry’s especially as I was there last year with Seven Days. Give my love to the owner, and apologies for not being able to make it this year! Hopefully I’ll see some of you at Foyle’s next week.

(Edit: Why do I keep saying 'Eight Days'? erk, well it's corrected now)

Launched into the limelight

This photo was taken by our lovely sister, Sarah. Thanks to our family for coming - mum - Lynette, common law brother in law - Craig, dad - Ray, cousin - Bethan & her 2 children, Sophie & Isabelle, uncle - Jeff and psychologist - Neil. The guy in charge, Jason, was great. He's doing a feature on waterstones' staff with their baby photos & their favourite books as kids. He's asked us & Josie to contribute, so we e mailed him a cute baby photo of us aged 6 months. Our mum wouldn't let us send one of us covered in chicken pox. We were so nervous, but had a great time - met Josie & her cool friends. Passers-by were fascinated & kept walking past the window & waving at us. Our reading went a lot better than we expected & we didn't trip over our words. All our practises with our ducks as our audience paid off. We spent 2 days practising a unique signature, complete with fancy font & a pair of wings. We bought posh-looking pens especially.

Darkest Wishes,

C L Raven

Eight Hours Book Launch, Cardiff

 

It went really well. It was great to meet the Ravens and I had a real blast.

I’ve uploaded a short video of my manic moments before the big event at Waterstones, The Hayes, Cardiff. Warning, there are lots of wh-hoos in this video.

Eight Hours Book Launch 0:52

Added: March 29, 2008

We are all far too busy writing!

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. Why not treat yourself to the latest edition of Casting Pods while you’re waiting (www.castingpods.co.uk). This one focuses on my recent trip to London to do some video promotions for Silence. Here’s the blurb:

I travel to London again and meet David Freedman who runs the Meet the Author website. One video interview with him, a change of clothes and another video interview this time in my publisher’s office. Also being interviewed is Nick Griffiths, author of In the Footsteps of Harrison Dextrose. He carves a face on a melon to use in place of his own head. Great fun.

Writing, publishing, books, fiction, London, interviews, video

I’ve managed to keep it to just over 30 minutes this time, that’s what I’m aiming for as it seems to be the optimum length for podcasts, however sometimes I wax lyrical which can’t be helped.

Novel Experience

Woo-hoo! We did it! The triple crown, the six nations AND the Grand Slam! Could this have been the best weekend ever? Yes! Bendigedig boys. We knew you could do it.

Now back to the writing. We finished a novel each on Thurs, another reason to celebrate. Cat's is called Majesty of Darkness and is a weird humourous take on the land of the dead, Eternius, run by a winged skeleton, Stetian, who's aided by a trouble making, rebellious grim reaper, The Collector. Lynx's is called Darklands and is set in another world called Aradyka. Darklands is their hell and is run by the Kedar Crux (tribe.) The anti-hero is Crimthann, a cross between an Incubus and a Succubus with powers and an evil streak. Now start the rewrites, after we've finished redrafting 4 short stories that are due by the end of March - 2 to America. At what point do you decide when it's time to leave the redrafting alone? We usually go by how dangerously close the deadline is. A bad habit we picked up in school and never got rid of. Though in school we never actually handed the work in, so we're improving.

C L Raven cutting and running

Imagination

I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of imagination this week. I’d describe myself as a creative person, but blimey, I’ve got nothing on my daughter. Our day starts with her bouncing into bed, demanding that we believe 10 impossible things before breakfast. Then she says ‘Let’s play’ with the relish an adult would give to starting a particularly complex but rewarding job

I get funny looks when I tell people I 'see' and 'hear' my fictional characters in my head, but if they talked to pre-schoolers, they'd understand where I get it from. Most days include conversations and tea-parties with invisible friends, role-playing (I spend a frankly ridiculous amount of time pretending to be a sick animal while she plays vet), and the creation of at least a dozen new songs and hums. A walk in the woods can take hours while we hunt for bears and examine every leaf, snail, stick and dog turd along the path. And when she goes to bed at night, she’s still busy creating and rearranging her world; telling stories to her toys, making her blankets into a tent, yelling at lurking monsters.

She’s not unusual; spend any length of time with small children and you’ll be mildly freaked by their wild flights of invention and the magic (and often terror) they find in the everyday things that we’ve ceased to notice. I try to imagine what it must be like for my daughter (and even more so for my baby) discovering the world, having to learn new names and descriptions and meanings every day. I suppose my questions are - how do we nurture imagination, how do we help children keep that sense of enquiry and wonderment, and how do we ensure that we never take for granted ourselves the miraculous nature of everyday things?

I've now got to go and put in a day's work pretending to be a Panda with a sore paw. I’m actually getting off lightly; one of my daughter's friends has an imaginary dog who goes absolutely everywhere with her, and even has his own place at the dining table…

Emma Seaman (Short stories and imaginary friends a speciality)

Cold day in hell

Just come back from giving our iguana a bath - it's good for his kidneys apparently, but he doesn't see it that way. Unfortunately our bathroom's been ripped out so he gets to travel in one of our Renault 4's to our grampy's house for a bath. Always fun. We've been out in the cold taking new photos of ourselves (yes, this photo was taken today in freezing Cardiff before rugby kick off. Thanks mum). Not only do we have the launch of 8 Hours to look forwards to but Wales WILL win the 6 Nations AND the Grand Slam. C'mon boys, we did it in 2005. At the moment we're writing stuff to send to America, we reckon we're well suited for over there. They're big on horror, which we love, and if we're gonna topple Stephen King in 5 years, where better than his own country? You're going down, King. We're happy to share the accolade with Dean Koontz, who totally rocks, and we don't wanna destroy our hero.

Signing off to watch Supernatural.

C L Raven, fading to black.

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards

I haven’t wittered on much about the ABNA to Legend folks, mainly because I was never longlisted so didn’t have to worry about Penguin offering me a huge advance and contract. Plus I found out that Legend wanted to publish Silence just after I wasn’t longlisted. But right near the beginning of it all (October last year) when I submitted my Viking adventure novel Leif the Runtling (didn’t submit Silence because Legend were already considering it), I went on the ABNA forum – I’m such a chatroom whore I know – and met a great guy called Dwight. Well we hit it off straight away, he’s a gay man in Chicago and I’m a lesbian in Cardiff, so we have a lot in common. The main thing we chatted about was how to market yourself as an author, how to become a ‘known name’ when celebrities are the ones who are more likely to get published. I often make these connections with other writers around the globe, and I think this is reflected somewhat in one of the characters in Silence who is only ever seen in chatroom transcripts and emails.

When I found out that Dwight was in the first cut, I was very happy and reviewed his extract straight off. I reviewed quite a few others too, but Dwight’s was always my favourite. Uncannily predictive, in my review (still available at www.youtube.com/amazonreviews as the first vid uploaded) I said that Dwight should get into the next round. Well he did. He got into the top 100 at which point I did online impressions of a cheerleader (you should have seen my pom-poms) and then last week I found out he’d got into the top ten! OMG, I know a famous author. I predict that even if he doesn’t win then this book is going to be picked up and made into a film and all those cool things that we writers always dream about.

Anyway, don’t take my word for it. Go to Amazon.com and read the extract yourself. You can either read a 5000 word extract or a longer one of 50 pages. The Prospect of My Arrival by Dwight Okita http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00126589O

The review I posted today should be available on the book’s page in a few days, but I always upload to www.youtube.com/amazonreviews as well.

Loveable Innocent Outsider Meets The World

Key points of my review: This fabulous book is shortlisted for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and is destined for great things. I reviewed this earlier in the competition but now I’ve been able to read a longer extract I’m even more impressed. Hear me waxing lyrical about the humour, poignancy and depth in a unique premise handled by an expert.

Josie

Walking the walk and talking the talk

I am always Mummy, always Wife, and sometimes a Marketeer, but I reckon that when they cut out my heart, they will also find ‘Writer’ running through it like a stick of rock.

Last night I went to a book launch. The nice lady on the door offered me wine and told me to enter the auditorium at 6.30pm as “the authors will be reading from their stories”. I didn’t have the nerve to tell her I was one of the booked authors.

The book is volume 2 of the Riptide Journal, and my story's in stellar company; Joanne Harris wrote the intro and Michael Morpurgo a great short. Unfortunately they weren’t there last night, probably avoiding people like me who lie at their feet and gush how much we love them. The MC duties therefore fell to the next-most-famous; poet/author/critic Luke Kennard, who came across like a younger, brunet version of Boris Johnson and complied with my every assumption about modern poethood.

The lovely and hardworking editors, Ginny Baily and Sally Flint, talked about the editorial process (a much more complicated job than I’d appreciated!) and then the writers read their stories, alternately offering the audience tearjerking (Nel Boswood), unsettling (Jane Feaver) and a fantastic deadpan Brummie humour that could even make the Yellow Pages sound hilarious (Robin Sidwell).

Then there was the Absolutely Terrified (me). The combination of newish-mum exhaustion and free red wine on top of migraine pills meant that I did my reading leaning against a piano, offering my performance a rather more louche aspect than I had intended. Actually, my vertiginously high heels didn’t help my trembling knees either (black patent, red sole, that new slightly conical heel. Yum.)

Anyway, it’s always nice to get out, and it made me think hard about the dichotomy between the public and private aspects of being a writer. The work itself is the bit I love, and essentially very private and personal; wrestling those characters from my head and my heart, turning myself inside out to get them onto the paper as clearly as I can see and hear them. Then there is the public act of ‘being a writer’; getting up on your hind legs and ‘performing’, and thereby meeting or disappointing peoples’ expectations of what a writer should be. And without these public events, one fears the books will not sell and therefore not be read and so there will be no point to it all.

I’m not quite there on marrying up the dual aspects of the writer yet. When I registered my baby’s birth last year, they asked for my profession. As I had no other gainful employment, I offered ‘writer’. It’s there on the birth certificate now in black and white, and I take it as a kind of promise to my children and to myself, that one day, it really will be so.

Emma Seaman (The Remarkable Everyday / Seven Days / Eight Hours)

Congratulations to Boy A!

Thanks to Salt & Honey supporters. It didn't win World Book Day's One To Talk About title, but oh, how gratifying it was to get comment on it during the course of the competition. That, more even than publication, gave meaning to those years of isolated writing and re-writing while I struggled to become competent enough to tell Koba's story.

Boy A sounds a worthy winner in that it did generate debate - sometimes furious! And I was intrigued to read in The Guardian report that the promotion generated more sales for the tilte than the TV dramatisation of the book.

My wish for Legendary authors then, is a shortlisting.  May your book put our publisher on the map!

cm