Legendary Authors

What's a writer like you...

“What’s  a writer like you doing here?” hissed the fierce little poet sitting to my right in the “Writers and the Internet” discussion group  I was devil’s advocate in.

  I got up her ( flared) nostrils by asking if any of the assembled scribes actually sold more books because they had a website.  (Do any of you?) No one claimed to, but almost all felt they were, at the very least, building up a data bank of email addresses of admittedly, potential buyers.

     (One author, currently on the Richard & Judy list, claimed he earned income from booking enquiries generated by his website. He also receives 250 emails a month via it.) That really made me groan and at that I noticed my companion distend her naso-labials like a patch-nosed snake – the one that can spread its nose scales to tunnel.)  I mean,  work emails come in faster than I can hit the delete button (yes of course I leave them unread – it’s faster that way) so I need 250 extra unresponded-to emails like I need  a spade-shaped nose.  

   But bearing in mind Lucy’s exhortation for Legendary authors to go forth and multiply sales by cyber means, I asked a techie friend for advice on setting up a website. “That is soooo, 2006,” she said. “You need to blog or twitter.” (Hilary, look away now.)  An individual blog is more commitment than I can manage, so Twitter, with its 140-character limit is appealing. But have you seen the “What I’m doing now” navel-gazing that’s going on there?  I guess it could be turned into novel-gazing, but wouldn’t that be similarly narcissistic? Maybe a related subject then? There is one Twitterer/Tweeter I’ve found who is posting writing tips, http://twitter.com/WritingSpirit but ... well, see for yourself.  

    So, blog it must be, for me. Have you initiates any advice then?  Something  free, easy and attractive which won’t result in me digging a hole into a snakepit ?  

Road to Nowhere

As the great muse, Meatloaf once said, 'if life is just a highway then the soul is just a car.' In our case, our souls would be permanetly parked on the roadside. If there's one thing guaranteed to take us away from our writing, it's our cars. Pictured are the C L Raven fleet. L -r Reapers, yellow Renault 4 GTL, General Smarticus Pinkington (Pinky) Smart Fortwo and Radar, grey Renault 4 GTL. Anyway, as always happens, the R4s broke down at the same time. Hence getting Pinky. Radar broke down on Thursday on the way back from the vets. He started to smell burning & his indicator panel lights were flashing. Fortunately, there's usually a council estate for us to chug into, which has saved us a number of times. Luckily, he only overheated & his heater blew a fuse, which was easily fixed. We just had to sit and wait for him to cool down. We had our dog, Jack & our sister, Sarah's dog, Misty with us & Jack had just been subjected to an ECG, so he was very upset. He's nearly 17. We happened to be on Sarah's route home from work, so she was able to come & rescue the dogs, while we waited for the traffic to clear.

Then it was Reapers' turn. He hates us. Whenever we're busy, or seeing to Radar, he throws a hissy fit & demands attention. On Friday, we were coming back from Sainsbury's, where we'd managed to pluck up the courage to talk to a fit  cashier, he also happens to be very nice & interesting - he's in a band. Whenever something good happens, Fate puts the boot in & something catastrophic happens. In this case, Reapers ground to a halt in a traffic queue on a busy road & refused to start. The engine would turn over, but he wouldn't catch, which with him, means 1 of 2 things - plugs or points, the bane of our lives. This time, it was the points. They were only changed a few months ago, but that didn't stop the wire from snapping. Fortunately, we always carry spares, so it didn't take long to change them. Despite the fact we happened to break down oppsoite a coach load of Cardiff City fans on their way to Wembley, who thought whistling as us would somehow help us fix him. Serves us right for breaking down in skirts & high heels. The points gap wasn't quite right, so on the way home, it sounded like he was firing a double barrelled shot gun at pedestrians. We sorted the gap today & he's purring again. Except he has his MOT next Thurs, which usually results in a couple hundred quid spent on welding. Our welder's great & hasn't yet banned us from his garage, unlike one MOT centre, who issued a ban when Reapers overheated all over them during the test. The ban also included Radar, which was a bit unfair, as he's normally well behaved.

On the writing front, we've sent a couple of short stories to American magazines, so fingers crossed & a copy of 8 Hours has crossed the Atlantic to California.

C L Raven, writers, grease monkeys & Fate's punch bags.

Plain English

I’m an outdoor woman who loves rainy dog walks, shearing overgrown hedges and growing peonies. Give me a weedy plot and a fork and I’ll grow the best broad beans in the land. I’m also a technophobe and would much rather drill a hole for a vine-eye with a brace and bit than use a power drill, and as for electronically-controlled irrigation systems, I prefer to use a watering can.

But I’m no diehard. I’m not proud of my reluctance to give technology a chance and I don’t write on a clackety old Imperial or long-hand in mauve ink.  I use a laptop, and it’s almost as dear to me as my dog but, apart from emailing and adding to this blog, I use my PC only as an electronic typewriter. I used to think computer technology belongs to people who learned to read and write via a keyboard and who have a tendency to rattle through an explanation of how to format, compress or configure as glibly as I’d detail the process of making good compost. And there’s the problem: ‘experts’ in any field can take too much knowledge for granted and forget that a newcomer to their subject has first to learn its language.

Recently, I went on a day course at a local ICT training centre and spent six hours improving on the basics. My technophobia was glossed over and my confidence spiralled after the tutors showed me that anyone, even rusty bean-trench diggers, can master new tools, language and techniques. Yet what I found most helpful was the comprehensive glossary included in my ICT course pack. I refer to it constantly and am beginning to translate computer terminology into something that makes sense to me.

It’s a beginning and, when my computer hiccups in the future, I may not now tackle the problem with a size 7 gardening boot. I will also take great pains to use plain English if ever I’m asked to explain the mysteries of compost-making.

Hilary Lloyd (Eight Hours)

Celebrating the Seventies with Pop&Crisps

I’m nearly ready to launch my new blog Pop&Crisps – Memories of the Seventies. I need more guest bloggers. The main blogger is myself with the occasional contribution from others. So far, two Legendary authors have contributed, and two other writer friends. I’m planning to up the contributions by publicising the site in the writing press and the national press. I’d like to have a reasonable archive of posts – probably about a month – before the official launch. So when the hoards of eager bloggers come flooding in, there will be some posts for them to read.

So I’m asking, nay begging, you to help me out here with your own memories of the decade. Whether you were already an adult at the beginning or a toddler at the end of the seventies, or anywhere in between, lend me your memory! If you have a story of something that happened, your favourite toy or TV programme, food, brand or anything at all, put it into approx 500 words and email it to me! You can either email me at Josie@popandcrisps.me.uk or leave your post as a comment. As it says on the site, you are very welcome to plug your own book, blog, music whatever in your posts.

See the website itself for more detailed guidelines and topics that have already been posted. I have no objection to you writing about something that I or someone else has already written a post on as the idea is that it will be from a personal perspective. Though I may have to keep hold of your submission for a while if it is too similar to a recent post. I’m planning to hustle some guest blogs from celebrities as well so here’s your chance for the limelight before they all take over.

If you don’t have time to write a whole blog or don’t want to share then I’ll understand, but please visit and comment or send an endorsement.

Two Occupations

My working life is neatly divided between the roles of paid listener and unpaid scribe (unpaid that is until the first royalties for my contribution to EIGHT HOURS come dribbling, I mean flooding, in.) The two jobs share certain things in common, not least the ability to conduct both from the comfort of my own home; a fact which saves on travel costs but means I constantly have to remind myself to get out more. More significantly, both occupations are essentially concerned with storytelling.

As a therapist or counsellor (they're ambiguous, umbrella terms that conceal a multitude of dark, and sometimes beautiful, arts, and more than a little old flannel) I listen to many stories: personal tales of love lost, or given in vain; of betrayals, by parent, spouse, partner, or self; of long-standing chips on shoulders; and of stoic fortitude and forgiveness in the face of whole catalogues of grief and pain. And just when I start to think I've heard it all before, along comes a new one to take my breath away. My current clients range from a 20-something woman to an 87 year-old man. Of course, I do more than just listen, otherwise they might as well save themselves the money, and, like Shirley Valentine, talk instead to the kitchen wall. I suppose my role is a mixture of audience, critic, and editorial assistant. I ask the storyteller, "What's with this title? Who's responsible for the script? Why is this, or that, particular episode, given such scant attention? If you could re-write one chapter above all else, which would it be? What do you make of the main characters in your story, are they really as one-dimensional as you suppose? And what of the narrator, how do you feel about him, or her? What's the moral of your story, and what of the chapters yet to be written? How do you see it ending, and does it have to be that way?

As a writer, of course, I am the storyteller, and, like many emerging writers, I began by writing my own story. Born on the Monopoly board, albeit down at the cheap end, above a baker's shop along the Old Kent Road, I was the product of an unlikely coupling between a 50 year-old English Protestant baker, and an auburn-haired, Irish Catholic barmaid, a generation his junior. Early one autumnal morning, not long after my fourth birthday, I awoke after my father had gone to work, crept into my mother's room and snuggled in beside her, as usual. Except it wasn't as usual. Her tired body was impervious to my vocal pleadings or the rough persuasion of my boy-arms and fists. I couldn't wake her up. To make sense of it all until my father came home, I told myself stories: that this was like the Rip Van Winkle fairy-tale, or the Sleeping Princess, or a pretend game like the one she used to play when I was tiny, and that if I waited long enough she would spring into life like jack-in-the-box. She didn't, and by the time I was 12, my father too was dead. Losses leave scars, and gaps. But they also create compensations, one of which being the development of a large inner world of imagination and feeling, where rust and rot do not set in, nor burglars come to steal. Not bad soil for the roots of a therapist, or writer.

I moved on from writing about my boyhood, to writing fiction, about relationships and therapy. Therapy is such a grand setting for drama, with its artifical and closely defined structures, the absurdities of its language, the small rituals and paraphernalia of the therapy room, and its mercurial capacity for healing and growth; and also, of course, the uncomfortable parallels between it and prostitution. The results? A short story, FIFTY-MINUTE HOUR, published in Legend Press' new collection, EIGHT HOURS ~ about the experience of a 30-something police officer, who, after a violent altercation with his teenage stepson, is dragged along to Relate by his female partner in one last, desperate attempt to save their ailing relationship. And, an as yet unpublished novel, LISTENING IN, about the conundrum of authenticity in the relationship between therapist and client, and the impact on a therapist's professional self when the cracks in his private life widen such that his very foundations start to tremble.

The best fictional short stories about therapy (other than my own!)? Definitely Irvin Yalom's 'Love's Exectioner'.
The best movie about therapy? Definitely 'Ordinary People'.
If you haven't read or seen them, catch them both whilst waiting for my novel to appear!

Kevin Chandler

Where does the Muse come from?

 

One of the things that never ceases to fascinate me is instantaneous inspiration. I don't mean the kind of inspiration one works at through, for example, the exercises that can be used to beat writers' block. I  mean that kind of inspiration that suddenly appears, completely unsought, from nowhere.

If you write or paint or compose, you probably know the kind of thing I mean. It's a normal day and you're doing the same kind of things that you'd normally do, when suddenly Bang! you see something differently, a word/sound/picture sticks in your mind, you're struck by a surprising similarity between two seemingly very different things... It doesn't happen to me as often as I'd like, but over the years it's sparked poetry, short stories and scenes for my would-be novel.

Today, for me, it was a dandelion clock. We've been passing them daily over the past few weeks on my son's walk to school. Most of the time I know they're there but don't really take it in, like most of the walk, to be honest. My sons will often even pick them up and blow them, without me paying much attention. Then suddenly something in me today focussed in on them. They were the perfect metaphor for a poem on a subject I didn't even realise I was going to write about! Why that should strike me at all, let alone there and then I've no idea. Of course, it's also too early to say whether or not they will visibly remain in the final draft. But I find the creative process, and in particular such stimuli, absolutely amazing.  So what inspires you? And where do you think it comes from?

Sarah James  - poet and short story writer

 

Time and Silence

Natascha Kampusch has discussed the similarities between her own experience of being incarcerated in a cellar and those of the Fritzl family. When asked what Elisabeth and her children, who had never seen daylight until a week ago, need right now, she said that they need ‘time and silence’.

What’s this got to do with me? Well nothing at all, no more than any of these abuse stories have to do with anyone apart from the people directly involved. I think that with the word ‘silence’, Natascha is hinting that they need the media to shut up about it and go and poke their noses elsewhere. And time is what we all need to get over the tragedies, small and astronomical, that occur in our lives.

Today I noticed the front page of The Sun as I was buying milk. A blurred image of a young boy in church. Turns out that this child is one of Elisabeth Fritzl’s children who were permitted to live in the main house and had no idea that his mother and siblings were underneath him. So it seems that the media have not got the hint from Natascha that the family need to be left alone.

The whole sorry story is tragic but how much more tragic is it becoming by this intense scrutiny? If the media can make a pact not to broadcast information about Prince Harry’s part in the war, surely they can leave this family to their privacy? That’s my say and now I’m going to shut up about it or I’m adding to the media frenzy.

Silence as the title of my novel refers in part to the unhealthy silence that we keep about the traumas in our lives. The skeletons in our closets, bodies under the patio or babies in the freezer. The scars we bear from what has been done to us or the memories of desperate actions of which we may be ashamed. At some point it needs to be let out, but generally not directly after it has occurred. There must be a period of cogitation and processing. Depression can be positive, and has been recently been categorised as a useful tool in the human psyche, a forced episode of reflection after which we feel more in touch with ourselves.

As I’m waiting for Silence to be published, I’ve begun on the sequel (working title: Screams). I am currently charting Jim’s backstory, which is hugely traumatic but also cathartic. If Silence is about repression then Screams is letting it all out. Ironic, though, that one of the themes is incarceration.

What I find totally chilling right now is that there is a very brief mention of Jim’s backstory in Silence (which I completed a while ago), that she was held captive in a cellar and had a child by her abuser. I wish I wasn’t so prophetic. But this theme regrettably will always be current. Over thousands of years of oppression of women, there are countless untold stories of this sort of abuse. We should be shocked, but it’s unfortunate that we are not surprised.

You don't have to be mad to work here...

It’s one of the great clichés isn’t it? The hoary old myth that links creativity with madness. Every so often it gets revived in a magazine article, always using the same authors as reference; the poor sacrificial victim that was Sylvia Plath, the brilliant alcoholic Dylan Thomas, the crazed-as-a-loon and barked at the moon Edgar Allen Poe.

It’s an enduring idea, probably because it appeals to creative and non-creative types alike. For non-creatives, it explains away and pigeonholes the ‘otherness’ of those peculiar arty people. It’s car-crash entertainment - witness the recent fascination with the travails of Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse. For the tortured creative types themselves, it rationalises self-indulgent and self-destructive behaviour as somehow integral to their Art. Being essentially middle-class and probably rather repressed, I have always been suspicious of writers who buy into that idea too whole-heartedly – especially the guys who feel they have to join the Ernest Hemingway two-fisted-drinking school of creative writing (well, he was rock and roll before there was rock and roll…)

Another part of the legend is that you must have endured a dreadful childhood to stand any chance of becoming a creative adult. This used to worry me, for although my parents gave me a generous assortment of kinks and twists in true Philip Larkin style (‘they may not mean to, but they do’), I had an essentially happy childhood. Then I read some of those misery memoirs currently in vogue (you know the thing – ‘I was raised by wolves and beaten by nuns’) and realised that a thoroughly miserable infancy is no guarantee of writing talent. And most successful authors these days seem to (need to) run themselves as a brand or business, and leave the hell-raising to the musicians.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, the reason for all this cogitation on mental disorders is that I was recently diagnosed with postnatal depression. I’d actually known for a while that All Was Not Well – a tendency to burst into tears, cling to my husband’s legs as he was leaving for work and sob ‘But I can’t go on!’ was the giveaway. I resisted doing anything about it because admitting to depression felt somehow disloyal to my adored daughters, particularly to the baby who is the ‘cause’ of all this, as she’s the sweetest, smiliest, easiest little girl one could wish for.

After suffering clinical depression in my 20s, I was also extremely reluctant to use anti-depressants again. They made me feel as if I was living my life behind a thick wall of impenetrable glass - able to see and hear but not react or interact. Not a particularly desirable sensation for a mother, or indeed for a writer. My GP reassured me that was a long time ago (thanks Doc!) and that the new generation drugs wouldn’t zonk me out. Oh no. In fact they have the opposite effect, because now I barely sleep at all. It seems particularly cruel to give a sleep-deprived Mum a course of guaranteed insomnia – though oddly, the effect is like speed, in that I don’t actually feel tired… My poor husband says it’s like going overnight from living with Eeyore to living with Tigger, and can he please have his little Piglet back?

So, keep on buggering on, as they say. My past experience of depression is that while the weird thoughts and feelings make great writing ideas, they come to fruition further along the line; while I’m actually down, I don’t write so much. Mind you, all these non-sleeping hours are giving me loads of useful thinking and plotting time…

And I guess I’m not alone - scratch the surface of a Legendary author and I’m sure there’s a seething mass of neuroses, issues and general strangeness. (My apologies, of course, to those of you who are certifiably sane.)

Emma Seaman (seething away nicely, thank you.)