Bookouture - The Inside Story

JJ Marsh talks to Peta Nightingale, Head of Talent at Bookouture.

Bookouture, as the name suggests, is a bespoke publishing service. Can you elaborate on what that means in practice?

We are proud to put a lot of effort into the relationship with our authors, and work closely with them every step of the way. More than half our authors are un-agented and we feel it's important to offer the support that an agent would, as well as providing a first class publishing model. We see our authors as a family and they are very supportive of each other. We offer a step-by-step journey through the whole publishing process, treating every single title as a potential bestseller.

What are the advantages to the Bookouture route?
Why is it a better choice than a) going with the Big 5 or b) a small press or c) self-publishing?

a) We acquire world all language rights, and publish globally, attracting submissions from authors all over the world. We welcome direct submissions - as well as those from agents.

b) We have a short product cycle, publishing two to three books a year from each author - all with the same quality of editing, packaging and marketing as any traditional publisher.

c) We use dynamic low pricing to maximise a book's ranking and visibility, tracking daily sales data to ensure that we also optimise revenue.

d) We are obsessed with detail and able to make changes throughout a title's life - including to title and packaging - in order to optimise a book's performance. We use iterative data collection to measure performance and make changes to maximise performance and revenue.

e) We treat every title the same, whether from a debut writer or an author who has sold 2 million copies. Every book starts with the same marketing spend, and there are no tiers or 'lead' titles.

f) We pay a high digital royalty rate of 45% of net receipts, and pay royalties quarterly.

g) We publish direct to readers so there are no sales and marketing teams or retailers to convince. We publish across all digital platforms.

Digital publishing is more than ebooks. You offer Print-on-Demand services for those authors who want paperbacks?

We produce a print-on-demand paperback of every title we publish, as well as an audio edition wherever possible.

It seems you began by publishing commercial women's fiction, romance and chicklit, but have now expanded into crime and psychological thrillers. Why is that?
Do you plan to add new genres in the future?

We publish the genres that our readers want to read. Our current ratio of crime and women's fiction is representative of the bestseller lists at the moment, but we are constantly watching the trends and the shifts in reader preference. Our editors are experienced at publishing a number of different genres and we're always on the look-out for great writing, great characters and great stories - whatever the genre. We will be publishing some fantasy romance this year, as well as some up-lit fiction and some more YA.

How do you know if a book/author is a good fit for Bookouture?

Great writing and a willingness and ability to write fast make an author a good fit for Bookouture.

Do they need an established platform?

It is always an advantage if an author has an established, successful platform. But some authors are less comfortable than others at using social media, and we feel that an author's time is best spent writing great books, than struggling with posts and spending too much time on social media. Our two publicity managers, Kim Nash and Noelle Holten, work tirelessly with and for our authors and offer wonderful support to those who have less experience but would still like to have a social media presence.

Is being successfully self-published a red flag or a good sign?

An author who has written and published a bestseller is always a good thing! Successful self-published authors generally understand the way we work as we also use the KDP publishing platform and online marketing. The key to success here is in successfully gathering the available sales and marketing data and using that to drive publishing decisions and promotional tools.

Where do you find your authors?

We have an online submissions platform on which anybody can submit their full-length work of commercial fiction to us. We also have relationships with all the major London agents as well as many others across the world. I and our editorial team also follow the success of self-published authors and approach them directly. We use any means we can to find and attract the best writers out there!

Is Bookouture able to respond quickly to trends in book market?

Our publishing model - speed to market, publishing direct to readers - allows us to be as nimble and flexible as possible. Because we are always looking at and for new trends, we can respond very quickly - including in developing our own IP projects.

For example, the apparent move away from psychological thrillers and towards 'up-lit'?

Indeed, we are publishing some up-lit this year.

What are the rising trends and themes we'll all be reading next year?

Contrary to what many commentators are saying, the appetite for psychological suspense and thrillers seems undimmed with readers. Perhaps it is the traditional publishers who feel a certain ennui?! That's not to say that there isn't also an appetite for fiction that touches the reader in other ways. For us it is always about quality, so provided there are great characters with a tremendous hook, then we'll want to publish it. And of course we are looking at new themes and trends all the time.

Since Bookouture was acquired by Hachette UK, what's changed?

Nothing has changed in terms of our business model. But through print partnership agreements negotiated with Little, Brown Book Group's Sphere imprint in the UK and Grand Central Publishing in the US, we now have the potential to publish a conventional paperback. We have a continuous dialogue with our UK and US colleagues over which titles might go forward into these programmes, but success in ebook (there is no threshold as such) is the first indicator. The Little, Brown rights department now also sell our translation rights, which previously were handled by the Lorella Belli literary agency. We have also recently appointed The Artists Partnership to represent our authors' film, TV and stage rights. We only acquire rights from authors that we can successfully utilise, and we're really pleased to be able to offer this comprehensive package under the Bookouture umbrella.

What's your personal book of the moment?

We are always on the look-out for the sort of emotional storytelling that really tugs at the heartstrings. I recently read Rhiannon Navin's Only Child and can't believe it's a debut novel. Set in the US in the aftermath of a school shooting, it could have been a political and difficult topic. But her telling of the story in the voice of six-year-old Zach whose ten-year-old brother has been killed, together with her handling of his parents' inability to accommodate their own huge emotions with his, has made for an utterly beautiful and hugely accomplished book.

With grateful thanks to Peta and the Bookouture Team http://www.bookouture.com/

Cosmic Coupling and Sextrology - In Conversation with Starsky and Cox

Stella Starsky and Quinn Cox, a real-life married couple, are modern metaphysicians, cultural commentators and astrological consultants with an international private clientele. They are the best-selling authors of Sextrology: The Astrology of Sex and the Sexes (Harper, 2004) and Cosmic Coupling: The Sextrology of Relationships (Crown, 2009), and have contributed columns and features to myriad publications and sites worldwide, including Vogue, Allure, Cosmopolitan, The Daily Beast, Elle and Glamour. http://www.starskyandcox.com/

Photo by Ric Ide

 To celebrate Valentine's Day, JJ Marsh finds out more.


People have reactions across the spectrum to their astrological sign, from fascination to disbelief. But everyone is interested in sex. You’ve combined a knowledge of the zodiac with a curiosity as to behavioural patterns. That seems to come from an understanding of people and a knowledge of archetypes.

We like to watch. Seriously, our shared interest and ultimate immersion in astrology all began with observation. Beginning in our student days, we noticed that men and women of the same sign were often very different from each other. Such that, as an expression of our own brand of humanistic astrology, we consider the Zodiac to have twenty-four gender signs. Still, unlike work with private individual clients, successfully writing on the subject of general sun-sign astrology requires exposing specific elements of truth about each of the signs.

 
Over decades of observation we have discerned twenty-four distinct archetypes, under which we all in turn fall, and wherein we share, with others of our sign, more than meets the eye. Obvious traits in appearance and behavior unite folks under the aegis of their sign; while there are deeper, more metaphysical motivators at play. You can't escape your archetype, we say, and we credit the symbolically rich Zodiac with offering infinite insights into we the people born under them. And our archetypes don't get checked at the bedroom door: Sex and sexuality are important elements of personhood and so, in our philosophy, our signs likewise determine our intimate predispositions and proclivities.

Sextrology, your exceptional bestseller, is far more than A-goes-with-B-but-leave-C-well-alone. It is erudite, witty and draws on a range of concepts, examples, mythology, symbols and well-known icons. It feels full of stories.

We conceived Sextrology to function on a number of levels simultaneously. The Sex- in the title was meant to signify gender first and sexuality second. We definitely wanted to get our original philosophy out there, and really build an argument. But we wanted to temper those more academic suppositions with a supple, straightfoward style. It isn't your granny's astrology. We like to think we read like lively, heady dinner party conversation, at turns serious and sophisticated and funny, comparative in sociology, religion and literature, weaving myths and fairy tales and pop references into something approaching seamless. We want to tickle funny bones as well as challenge minds on the subject. Not to mention have a little stylistic fun with the erotic bits.

We are all full of stories. And, for some reason we can't fully understand, those born under the same sign do share a similar plot. Be it real, metaphorical or metaphysical. As we continue to trace the myths and legends of multiple archetypal figures associated with any particular sign, these stories do serve, in many ways, as parables for those born under it.

In addition to the book, you have written regular astrological columns and advised some A-list celebrities: Mario Testino and Scarlett Johansson are among your purported fans. Everyone seems in awe of your accuracy and insight. How did you develop your expertise?

Through constant practice of our craft and continued exercise of our intuition. Yes, a substantial majority of our clients are in the entertainment, art and fashion industries. As a team we bring different talents to the table. Astrology is a language of symbols and the distinct arrangements of the planets in the various signs and astrological houses. The overall pattern they form, in a person's astrological charts, speaks volumes. There are upwards of eighty-four schools of astrology. We are humanistic astrologers. And we center on helping clients make the most of their potential, providing them tools for negotiating their would-be patterns and pitfalls. We all have them. We work on our craft and the technique of interpretation, focusing on the here and now with our clients; while allowing for occasional, as we say, "off the page" flashes of intuitive insight.

Dividing the Zodiac into 24 signs was groundbreaking. You have a different take on Virgo Man and Virgo Woman, for example, whereas previously one size fit all. When it comes to sexuality, you cover straight and gay males/females of each sign, but how does someone who is transgender or identifies as non-binary read this?

When Sextrology was published in 2004, we unfortunately weren't having the same conversation about transgenderism as we are today. There are many meaningful transgender myths and archetypes —Hermaphrodite, Tierisias and Caenis to name a few—that we dig into, and from whose cosmic power and inspiration individuals can draw.

Most friends who've transitioned have done so in the years since we first published Sextrology. As it was, we had to petition publishers for equal measure of gay and straight content. In Cosmic Coupling, hetero couples are dedicated two pages while gay and lesbian chapters only get one. Cue soundtrack about book size, the cost of paper and affordability.

The upshot is we've come a long way in the fifteen years hence. Now, no sociological conversation can disclude the transgender movement and the stunning effect it's having.

While some astrological partnerships seem better starred than others, your emphasis seems to be on awareness of our own and each other’s habits and tendencies. It’s eye-opening in some ways and familiar in others.

We can only change ourselves. And while, yes, reading the chapters in Sextrology pertaining to loved ones will offer an insider's guide to that individual in many ways, the main tenet of our work is personal development, you doing you, to use the vernacular. In Cosmic Coupling, which treats all possible 300 gay and straight combinations, the character of the relationships become the focus. Two people may form any relationship, still the relationship itself becomes this third entity. There are actually twenty-four relationship-chapters pertaining to any one reader of Cosmic Coupling, while the voyeuristic possibilities are endless in exploring what makes other relationships tick. Cosmic Coupling is a conversation starter for sure.

Self-identification/determination can be positive, yet not always. Is there a concern that typifying a kind of behaviour associated to a birth date could be counter-productive? Eg, I’m a Piscean, I just can’t help myself.

Our brand of astrology is necessarily plastic in its application to people, be they clients or a wider readership. Our astrology is pinioned on potential, optimizing gifts and opportunities while negotiating all negatives, by nature or nurture. We can "see" a client's specific story in their individual charts . While, on the full-populus level, too, the Sun placement presents us with overall themes, which run through the lives of people of one sign versus another. Our Sun placement is our identity—and people do tend to identify quite fiercely with their sign.

We can't tell anyone why astrology, in its myriad forms and applications, works so accurately. But there are a lot of things we can't explain. It would seem that, just as a rose blooms in June and a chrysanthemum in December, so too do people born at a certain time reflect, or literally personify, the energy of that time. One could say the Zodiac, like life, is hinged on paradox, the culmination being the last yin-yang sign of Pisces with its opposite facing fish. And yes, counting Christ and Blanche Dubois among their archetypal order, Pisces people are prone to temptation; but, for the Fish, that's always a two-way street.

Photo by Ric Ide

Let’s talk about examples. Here on your examination couch is a Capricorn female in her thirties. What can you tell us about her?

If this were a client coming to us, she would provide us her birth day, time and place. From that we generate a number of charts that reveal endless things about her, individually. What we have to tell all Capricorn women may be more sweeping, and in more umbrella terms, but it also, paradoxically, gets to the essence of what all Capricorn woman share. As any Capricorn woman, whose archetypes include Mary Poppins, will tell you: It's sensible to have an umbrella (under which any Capricorn woman's unique details still thematically fall).

To call herself a Capricorn means that her Sun placement is in Capricorn; but we don't know anything about the placement of her other planets. So we focus fully on the Sun placement and go deep into the archetype of the sign of Capricorn to increasingly extract fundamentals and every facet, really, of her character. We delve all the crannies of the Capricorn "estate"—its elaborate cosmology and symbology, all associative myths and godheads, the energetic make-up of the sign and its planetary rulership, numerology of the sign, on and on.

There is untold logic in the Zodiac. One might suspect that it is indeed an ancient system. Or as we like to call it: the original twelve-step program.

One element that surprised me is how certain star signs tend to share physical attributes. Just briefly, what would you expect to see in a Gemini man? And a Taurean woman?

It says in Sextrology, written in 2004, that Gemini man has small hands. (The current American president was born on June 14.) That aside, Gemini men tend toward the impish. They are animated, lit up. They typically fire off questions, often driving conversation. They are often slight and agile and retain a boyishness into old age. They are given to juvenile humor if not antics. There's something of the lad and au courant about them. They make endless attempts at jokes. You can often feel their need to be liked. Or that might be their artfully dodging way of charming you. Or manipulating you.

Taurus women prize themselves. Though an enviable quality, they can give off an air of innocent reluctance or reistance. They tend to boast childlike features and large, wide-set eyes. Given to softly colored and textured clothing and comfortable, quality trappings, Taurus likewise avoids brash or stressful environments or people. One of the femmier femmes on the astrological block, she tends to love her girly potions and notions. Taurus has a creamy look to her complexion and she often wears a center part, letting her hair flop curl or feather. Chances are she'll smell of quality, floral-note perfume.

Your Haute Astrology series of twelve books covers the entire year, week by week, for each sign. How did that come about?

Long before the books, we wrote columns and features for magazines, under our present astrological handles, if you will. Then, the books brought us more print and online work, culminating in a weekly column for The Daily Beast. An unlikely place for a horoscope. After, we decided to self-publish, weekly, on our website; and we did this for about five years before putting all the sign's horoscopes into their own yearly books under the same aegis as the original column: Haute Astrology.

Thanks so much for your time and Happy Valentine’s Day!

The pleasure is ours. Good to know that Valentine's Day falls into February, which is "Self-Love" Month.

Sextrology and Cosmic Coupling are available in paperback and ebook formats.

Violence against women in thrillers - In Conversation with Bridget Lawless

Bridget Lawless, founder of The Staunch Prize, talks to JJ Marsh.

The inaugural Staunch Book Prize will be awarded to the author of a novel in the thriller genre in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered.

JJ: Tedious tropes of violence against women in crime fiction is an issue I’ve argued against for years but you are tackling this in a far more effective way: a prize for a crime novel work that doesn’t rely on abuse of females as a given. What triggered this initiative?

BL: It’s been a long time brewing I suppose. I’ve written about violence for schools, fought for women’s equality, safety, the right to be treated with respect, etc. But the idea for the prize came out of a moment – my own exasperation with violence against women in books and on screen, coinciding with the Me Too movement, Times Up, real life women expressing their experiences, where fictional accounts suddenly seem tacky and exploitative.

JJ: Yes, we’re experiencing an exceptional cultural shift via the movements you mention. Women and men are finding a platform to name and shame their abusers and the systems which enable them. Is the time right to shake off the mantle of ‘victim’ or ‘survivor’ and take control of the narrative?

BL: I think people who have experienced abuse should be the ones to decide how they deal with it. It’s probably not helpful to have ‘supporters’ shouting from the sidelines telling them when and how to voice it, or how it should be labelled, or to hurry up! It feels like a tipping point, but exciting though these moments are, they can be fragile and collapse. Cause fatigue can set in. Or factions form, then divisions. Disagreements about the way forward. Most of all, we should listen to each other.

JJ: The announcement of The Staunch Prize has met with some resistance. Some see your prize as a ‘ban’ on writing which views gender abuse as a part of our society. Sample quote: “I won’t stop writing about violence against women while it still exists.” 

BL: The prize is not a ban, or censorship. The language around this resistance has been quite florid! Some have said ‘if we’re not allowed to write about violence against women…’ No one is saying people aren’t allowed to write about this or whatever else they want. I’d march for the right for people to write what they wish – but that doesn’t mean I like it, or admire it, or would give it a prize.

But there’s a strange tone to some of the naysayers – as if they have some duty to report (through fiction) things that happen to women in the real world. Or a role as educators. Really? They defend it as ‘telling women’s stories’. But women’s stories don’t wrap up nicely in 400 pages. And those of us who care about what happens to women don’t pick up our information from crime novels. Incidentally, the resistance has only been from crime novel writers, which is one sub-genre of thrillers – though obviously a huge one. I haven’t heard a peep of complaint from elsewhere. And you have to remember, those writers make their living from it.

JJ: Such a prize, in my view, acts as a provocation. Much like Kamila Shamsie’s call for a year of publishing only women, it starts a conversation. But unlike Shamsie, you are not excluding anyone but championing a new approach.

BL: It certainly has started a conversation – more than one – but the people having those conversations aren’t communicating with each other! The crime writers and readers are in their bubble, agreeing with themselves, while over here, my inbox is full of messages of joy, relief, congratulations, good lucks and thanks. I’m championing more original writing which could shake up the thriller genre, and find new stories to tell that don’t involve women as victims. That’s all!

JJ: Power and those who hold it is always a concern. While the hitherto voiceless now have a megaphone, is there a danger in trying the accused by social media? Does Margaret Atwood have a point in reminding us of the systems of law?

BL: Definitely the trial by social media is underway – but it’s also social media pointing out that so far, the accused seem to be getting away with it scot free. Why hasn’t Harvey Weinstein been arrested and brought in for questioning? With so many accusations against him, all in a similar vein, he must be a person of interest. Yet today his lawyers claimed they were deciding whether to sue Uma Thurman for accusing him. He’s still threatening her! Until something gets moving, the law gets moving, social media is going to be the place where those questions are asked.

JJ: Back to fiction. In addition to all the ‘dead prostitute’ as victims, many authors/readers resent the ‘feisty’ heroine detective who overcame abuse in her youth. Do you see this as part of the pattern?

BL: Yep! A woman can’t be empowered unless she’s been abused as a child or raped and seeking redress. Jodie Foster (who played a young rape victim in The Accused) is on record pointing out that rape and abuse are the go-to motivators of female characters. It’s quite possible to have a sense of justice, energy and drive, and be quick thinking without having personal anger and revenge in your tank. It’s like saying women can’t be effective unless really goaded.

JJ: Naomi Alderman’s book, The Power, contains a disturbing scene in which women use their new-found dominance in exactly the same way as some men did in the past. Must the pendulum swing so far in the other direction to correct the imbalance?

BL: Should we fight violence with violence? I don’t believe so. There would be no overall gain if women just emulated the mistakes men made – that makes us followers, with none of the empathy and insights I think we have. I guess it worked for Alderman’s story. But it seems to be true that power corrupts, so it wouldn’t be correcting the imbalance if women used their power to hurt each other or others. But nothing says they’re not susceptible to being corrupted by power. They’re human!

JJ: Fast forward to 2028. What do you hope The Staunch Prize has achieved?

BL: 10 years! It’s hard to think even about this year! I don’t expect the prize to change the world. But I hope in 10 years it wouldn’t be needed. I think people will tire of all this graphic violence in fiction. Through the changes happening now, I think women will feel able to refuse parts in which they’re subjected to physical and sexual violence in adaptations, and hopefully, the genre will move on and evolve, so that this intense focus of women getting hurt, raped, murdered, will be something people want to read or indeed write less and less.

My hope is that it will balance itself out naturally, as it sits oddly alongside the real battles women are fighting, the real violence we face, and to many, many women, reading such fiction, watching such movies, either already isn’t, or soon won’t be something they want to do. I’m not prescribing that in any way, I just think tastes are changing.

In Conversation with S.E. Lynes

By Gillian Hamer.

Hello, Susie, and welcome! Can you tell us a little about you and your writing?

Sure. I’m married with three kids and as well as writing I teach creative writing at Richmond Adult Community College. I used to run four courses, but since getting published, I now run two: Creative Writing for Beginners, and Critical Workshop, which is for more advanced writers. I used to write children’s stories, which I did when I lived in Rome and when my children were little. Two of those stories have since been published in Italy, which is lovely.

About twelve years ago, when we moved to London from Rome, I took a creative writing course at Richmond College called How To Write a Novel in a Month, taught by the fabulous Sara Bailey, author of the novel, Dark Water. That course taught me to write without fear, and to stop criticising myself constantly. It was all about producing quantity not quality and I thought – ah! Quantity I can do! From there I went on to study for an MA in creative writing at Kingston University and started teaching at the college, just one course a week at first. Ten years later, in 2016, my debut novel, VALENTINA, was published by a small independent publisher called Blackbird Digital Books, run by the extraordinary luminary, Stephanie Zia, and it went on to be a success both critically and commercially. I then signed a three-book deal with Bookouture and they published MOTHER in November, 2017. My third novel, THE PACT, is out very soon - 27th February 2018.

You had huge success last year with your first novel with Bookouture, MOTHER, how did that feel?

After VALENTINA, MOTHER was another level due to Bookouture’s immense standing on the publishing world stage. It felt great, just great. The thought of the story reaching and affecting so many people is surreal and joyful and strange and wonderful. The best bit by far is having readers contact me to tell me that they were utterly absorbed in the story and that the story stayed with them for a long time afterwards.

I particularly love it when they notice the writing because I spend a lot of time trying to make the sentences flow by reading my work aloud and I try to use language in a beautiful way if I can, without resorting to purple prose, so that the reader will enjoy the whole experience of the book, not just try and guess ahead, which always seems to me to be a shame – as a reader I like to simply immerse myself in the story and the writing and let myself be carried forward. It’s important to me not just to tell a story but to tell it in an original way if I can and to explore larger themes through smaller specifics.

What was the inspiration behind the novel?

A friend of mine who is a broadcaster was going to interview a very successful businessman. As she left, she mentioned that his success wasn’t the most interesting thing about him, it was that he had sought out his birth mother and … something had happened, which I can’t tell you here for fear of spoilers.

His story was a very happy one but I write psychological thrillers and am bound always to ask, what if it hadn’t worked out so well? This friend also told me about a friend of hers who had found out he was adopted when he discovered a letter in his mother’s handbag. It was from a convent and the letter began: we write to inform you of a baby boy, born only yesterday. And I used that line in the book.

You have a background in journalism, is that a help or hindrance in novel writing?

I have a background in radio journalism as a features programme maker for the BBC. The main thing about that job is getting the opportunity to talk to people from all walks of life – from anthropologists to wild boar farmers, from ice cream makers to old ladies who make scarves from dog hair. People love to be asked about what they do, as I am loving answering these questions!

I think in terms of my writing, my background provided me with a great many people and stories. I have also lived in several countries and have met an awful lot of people in my life from backgrounds very different to my own. I really do love meeting people. I have no real interest in status or wealth or any of those things – I like to find out what makes people tick and have realised that none of us really know what we’re doing, or whether we’re doing it right; we’re just muddling through. I try to present characters who are as complicated and flawed as the rest of us.

What attracts you to your genre of psychological thrillers?

The thing that draws me to this genre is that, at its best, it explores the dark space between what we think we know about the world and the world as it actually is. That dark space terrifies me. How do any of us know that our perception of even the simplest event is anywhere near accurate? You have only to hear two people relate the same story – how differently they tell it!
Sixty percent of communication is non-verbal – we can sense tension, atmospheres, dishonesty, hate, attraction … how? That something hovering outside of our senses. I love to explore characters and situations where the truth is in that place, somewhere just out of reach.

Would you like to write in a different genre one day? If so, what and why?

I would quite like to write a comedy of some kind, maybe about modern love in all its forms or about parenting in this paranoid world of social media we live in. I use humour in day to day life to cover up for my own pretty impressive social awkwardness and anxiety. I like to send myself up after I’ve performed some heroically painful interaction such as explaining my entire life to the waiter who is just trying to take my coffee order. I’m not sure who said this but art is a process of holding up one’s humiliations to the light and making them shine. I have so much personal material of this type.

What themes interest you as a writer?

What it means to be a human being, how difficult it is to be a human being. The need to love and to be loved. Love, both platonic and romantic. Trust and betrayal. Friendship. The outsider, always the outsider – why is the outsider so popular in fiction? Because we all feel like the outsider at least sometimes. I’m interested in the different ways we are mad and believe that we all are, it’s just a question of how – and that this is why your best friends make you feel sane, and like your reactions to things are perfectly normal. This latest theme underlies the book I’m working on at the moment.

Your follow-up novel, THE PACT, is out next month – how did you cope with the difficult second/third novel?

THE PACT is my third novel, not counting the three in the drawer I wrote during the rejection years, and I wrote it very fast indeed. I wanted to look at parenting and social media, real danger vs the perception of danger. In the information age, it appears that our children live in such a dangerous world and yet they have a lot less physical freedom so should, in theory, be safer. Kids don’t fall down wells but they do suffer increasing mental health problems. I wanted to ask if we are protecting our children too much and in so doing, effectively making them less safe, less able to develop those all-important street smarts.

Kids are aware of their appearance more than ever before due to the likes of Instagram and Facebook – does this mean we are raising a generation of narcissists for whom appearance is everything? I wanted to look at how difficult it is to parent right now and ask questions about whether our children are in more or less danger than before and how we go about keeping them safe, if indeed we can.

THE PACT is about three strong female characters, a mother and her daughter, who live with the mother’s sister. Very soon after beginning the book, I realised that in their alternative family unit, these women formed a triangle, and that it was unclear who lay at the base supporting the one at the top. I still don’t know but what was clear was that it was in this triangle that they found their stability, their strength and ultimately, their redemption.

If you could give three top tips to newbie writers – what would they be?

• Write. Write your head off. Don’t worry if it’s no good at first, it has no right to be, just keep going.
• Don’t compare your first efforts to the books you enjoy – what you’re reading is usually the result of about ten years constant work.
• It is all about the hours you put in. Work makes the writing better and generates ideas. Talent and inspiration are a small part of what it takes.

How would you like to see your writing career developing over the next 10 years – what other writing goals would you like to achieve?
 

I would love for my books to be translated all over the world – especially into the languages of countries where I’ve lived. I would love for one of my books to be made into a film or a television drama. I would love simply to be allowed to keep doing this and to have enough time outside the work to be with my family, catch up with my pals and to go to literary events and meet readers. I love meeting readers.

Learn more about Susie and her books here ....

Facebook: http://goo.gl/fvGGpK

Twitter:     http://goo.gl/WCuhh3

iTunes:      https://goo.gl/hZbQGQ

In Conversation with Lisa Jewell

By JJ Marsh

If I were a bookseller, I’d say you’re hard to categorise. Now you’ve gone and made it even harder with Then She Was Gone. Do you purposely try to stay out of a box/ off a particular shelf? 

I don’t really do anything on purpose. I often wish I did. Then She Was Gone has been such a brilliant success and not only that, almost universally liked by everyone who’s read it that I would love to be able to purposely write something that could replicate that reception. But it’s impossible. Books are so nebulous and I don’t plan or plot so really I just start at point A and end up at point B with no real idea how I got there. I think my publishers have found it quite awkward publishing me at times. I have had a sense over the years of oh God, what have you brought us this time; back to the drawing board everyone! But as a team we are trying very hard now to stay on one shelf which means, I think, that I will need to keep killing off characters so that I can be published in the thriller genre.

Since your arrival onto the literary scene in the 90s, your life has changed in all kinds of ways. How does your own personal development trigger your work?

When I wrote my first novel I was newly divorced and newly in love with someone else, I was twenty seven and kind of directionless. But incredibly, deeply happy. So although I have always loved dark themes – I love reading books about serial killers and skipped quite happily through American Psycho – at that time I was more hormonally and emotionally geared towards writing light-hearted romances. Then I got married again, had a baby, lost my mother, had another baby, went through a long period of time when my husband was physically disabled and of course I got older and more experienced and braver in many ways. So yes, life does definitely inform and shape the things you want to write about and getting older gives you the confidence to push boundaries.

Looking back over my well-thumbed paperbacks, you seem to be less of a ‘write what you know’ author and more of a ‘write what you’re curious about’. A fair assessment?

This is mainly true with some grand exceptions. After The Party was a very closely fictionalised account of the pressures a second baby brought to bear onto my own marriage, Joy’s marriage to George in Vince & Joy was almost 90% the story of my own first marriage and The Girls was set in a communal garden exactly like the one I live on in London. But generally, yes, I feel a sense of curiosity about something and then find a way to explore that curiosity via story-telling. Obsessive hoarding disorder was a perfect example of that. I looked through a dirty window into a hoarded house one afternoon and thought; god, who on earth lives in there, how did they end up living like this and what impact must it have had on their family? Then I went home and started writing The House We Grew Up In.

One characteristic I associate with you and your writing is empathy. Not only do you identify and understand some difficult characters, but you ask your readers to do the same.

Yes, absolutely. I feel sad, for example, that a lot of readers didn’t see the two sides to Lily in I Found You. I tried so hard to make her nuanced and not just a two dimensional cold-hearted witch. But the majority of readers disliked her and found her gaucheness and abruptness impossible to get past. I thought she was really funny and just trying her hardest in a terrible situation in a strange country with no cultural cues to help her. And this was why I took the reader straight into the heart of Noelle in Then She Was Gone. I couldn’t see the point of writing about a person doing a terrible thing unless you could make the reader at least attempt to understand why they might have done it. Otherwise you’re just creating characters to move the story along, not to give the story layers. That seems a wasted opportunity to me.

The trauma behind Then She Was Gone must have put you, as a parent, through the wringer. Did you cry in the coffee shop while you were writing?

No, the traumatic bits didn’t make me cry. I’m pretty hardcore when it comes to things like that and if I can read a book about Fred and Rose West and what their victims went through without crying or feeling traumatised then I can most definitely write about a made-up thing happening to a made-up person without finding it too gruelling. But the epilogue was a last-minute decision. I wrote it after my first big edit of the book and I still cry every time I read the last line.

You’ve got a pretty disciplined routine of 1000 words a day and you say you’re not a plotter, more an explorer of ideas. Do think the real alchemy is in the first draft or the editing?

It’s very much a mix of the two. The first draft is the world you’ve created and if you get that right then you know you’re onto something. The edit is where you make sense of the world, put it all into the right order. I love editing. I don’t do much as I go – apart from the occasional really dramatic excising of thousands of words or a whole storyline – but once I get the manuscript back from my editor covered in post notes and paperclips I get really intensely into it to the point of not noticing what time it is. And yes, that is when the magic really happens.

It’s coming up to 20 years since Ralph’s Party was published. In what ways has the world of publishing changed over two decades, in your view? And is it better for readers and authors?

Publishing has become much more risk averse. No one, for example, would have picked EL James’s 50 Shades books from the slush pile these days. That only got published because of the huge online success it had had. I think of the late 90s, when my first book was bought and published, as a kind of heyday for publishing – there was a lot of money flying about and publishers were really keen to try new things and see what took off. Nowadays they tend to want to replicate what’s gone before and pay less when they do take a risk. But the book world as a whole is incredible right now – social media has brought authors, readers and publishers together into the same sphere and there are so many forums for people to share their passions. Being a reader has become much less of solitary pastime and more of a wonderful universal experience.

E.B. White in Charlotte's Web said “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer”. I suspect you’d disagree, as you have a wonderful circle of authors as friends. How important is it to have an understanding group of writing mates for you?

It is hugely, enormously important and again, a situation for me which has been facilitated greatly by the internet and social media. When I was first published and the internet was quite a fresh, new place, a writer’s husband set up something for a group of us called a ‘chat room’! We’re still on it, twenty years later and out of that core group of people have come more groups and sub-groups and every time you do an event you’re meeting new authors and they get absorbed into your circle and we all use each for support and reassurance and wine and nights out and it is just brilliant. My writer friends are one of the best – and most unexpected - things to have come out of my career. And no, there is no competition between us. Readers buy up to 50 books a year so there’s plenty of the market to go round and the more good books there are out there the better for all of us.

Last question - best of three. Which book affected you most as a teenager? What’s been your best read of the year? Which book is your comfort read?

I barely read as a teenager. I just listened to the radio and wrote letters to pen-pals. But in my pre-teen years I read like an animal, anything and everything, under the covers into the early hours. My biggest passion then was Agatha Christie – I read four of her books a week and once I’d exhausted her oeuvre I sort of stopped reading until I was in my 20s. My best read this year I suspect I have not read yet as I have five amazing books lined up for a week in Tenerife in October all of which I am expecting to completely blow me away. But thus far I have adored The Vanishing Act of Audrey Wilde by Eve Chase and, in the thriller genre, Here and Gone by Haylen Beck. I don’t re-read books so I don’t have a comfort read. If I were to re-read something from the past it would probably be The Country Life by Rachel Cusk; so incredibly funny.


Then She Was Gone is a Sunday Times Number 1 Bestseller – available now (Century Hardback, £12.99)


Read JD Smith's review on Bookmuse

In Conversation with Sam Blake (Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin)

By Gillian Hamer.

Sam Blake is a pseudonym for Vanessa Fox O'Loughlin, the founder of The Inkwell Group publishing consultancy and the popular national writing resources website Writing.ie. 

She is Ireland's leading literary scout who has assisted many award winning and bestselling authors to publication. 

Vanessa has been writing fiction since her husband set sail across the Atlantic for eight weeks and she had an idea for a book.


Hello and welcome! Can you tell us a little about you and your writing?

Hello, and thank you for having me! I write crime as Sam Blake - the first in the Cat Connolly trilogy LITTLE BONES was published in 2016 and was a bestseller in Ireland, it was followed by IN DEEP WATER which is out in the UK in February 2018 and the third in the trilogy NO TURNING BACK will be out in Ireland in 2018 and in the UK in 2019.

Congratulations on the huge success of your debut crime novel LITTLE BONES – how has your life changed since its release?

LITTLE BONES was far more successful than I ever expected, it was No 1 in Ireland for 4 weeks and stayed in the top 10 for another 4 which was totally amazing. Now I get to be Sam Blake as well as me and it’s incredible to meet someone who has read it and loved my books! That never ceases to surprise me!

What was the inspiration behind the novel?

Cat Connolly is a twenty-four-year-old detective who is based in Dun Laoghaire just south of Dublin City and LITTLE BONES is about the story that unfolds when she finds a baby’s bones hidden in the hem of a wedding dress.

Stephen King talks about story being the collision of two unrelated ideas – the ideas behind Little Bones weren’t entirely unrelated but they collided one sunny Sunday afternoon as I was driving back from a Readers Day that author Sarah Webb and I had programmed at a hotel in Dublin Airport. I put on the radio and a documentary was starting on RTE about Kerry born playwright George Fitzmaurice. Fitzmaurice is best remembered for his play The Country Dressmaker which he submitted to the Abbey Theatre. It was such a success that it rescued the theatre after the problems of John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in the same year. Born in 1877, Fitzmaurice became introverted and isolated as he grew older and died in 1963, in a rented upstairs room in No.3 Harcourt Street, Dublin. He was aged 86 years and left no will and few personal belongings – apart from a copy of every play he had ever published and a few in draft form, which were in a suitcase under his bed.

It was Fitzmaurice’s suitcase that caused the collision of ideas.

Several years previously I’d watched an RTE TV documentary about a young Irish girl who was living in lodgings in Manchester. Belinda Agnes Regan discovered she was pregnant before she left Ireland but, unmarried, had no choice but to hide the pregnancy. She delivered the baby herself, incredibly in a room she shared with another much younger girl who apparently slept through her ordeal. Wrapping the baby in a shawl, she crept to the bathroom but when she returned, the baby wasn’t breathing. Hiding the body in a suitcase, she left it under her bed, returning home to Ireland to talk to the family priest. While she was away, the body was found by her land lady and she was arrested for infanticide.

These two stories, quite separately lit a light bulb in my head and on the drive home I started wondering about dress makers and what would happen if the bones of the baby had ended up in a dress – a wedding dress – the crucial thing that Belinda Agnes Regan must have yearned for, for nine long months. At that point I had no idea who owned the dress, or how the bones got there, or WHY…that was the start!

Why did you choose to write in the genre of crime fiction?

I’ve always read crime and I’m fascinated by puzzles and what makes people tick – why they act and react in a particular way. I think most writers write what they read, and I love a good story that keeps me hooked until the end and then surprises me. That’s what I try to do in my books.

Who are your favourite crime authors and is there one in particular you would list as your inspiration?

I adore Lee Child, Michael Connolly and Karin Slaughter. They have all been huge influences. I love the fast action of the Reacher books and the characterisation and complex stories in Michael Connolly and Karin Slaughter’s books. Good stories are all about unforgettable characters and all of these writers characters stay with you. I love Alex Barclay’s Ren Bryce for the same reason.



Why did you choose to write under a pseudonym?

My full name is Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin which is far too long for a book cover and people outside Ireland struggle to pronounce O’Loughlin. The key for any author is that readers can remember their name long enough to find them in a library or on a bookshop shelf - Sam Blake is MUCH nice easier one to remember. Being a B, I’m in great company on the shelf and there is a theory that men don’t like reading books by women, so Sam adds an additional layer of subterfuge...

Would you like to write in a different genre one day? If so, what and why?

Years ago I wrote a romance novel – with lots of intrigue – called TRUE COLOURS, I was between crime novels and had an idea about an interior designer and her lost love. It got rave rejections from publishers when my then agent submitted it, but now I know it wasn’t a big enough story to be a breakout novel, so it didn’t get picked up. It seemed silly to leave it in a drawer so I self-published it, launching it free on World Book Day in 2012 (I think!) it had 25,000 downloads and shot into the top ten in contemporary fiction when it switched to paid, which was rather unexpected to say the least! It definitely wiped its face in terms of costs.

Could you give us a condensed version of your route to publication?

I started writing in 1999 when my husband went sailing across the Atlantic for eight weeks. Obviously I thought the first book would be a bestseller (it was truly awful – the opening chapter is about a doctor returning to Dublin to commit suicide and he’s dead for the whole book) but despite being rejected by everyone on the planet, the bug had truly bit and I kept writing.

By the time I got to book 3 I knew I was getting better but I needed to learn more about the craft of writing. My husband was in the Irish Police force (Gardai) and worked shifts - I couldn’t get to a creative writing evening class so I decided to set up my own intensive one day fiction writing workshops – all facilitated by best-selling authors. I learned loads!

Inkwell grew into a publishing consultancy and I kept writing – my now agent is Simon Trewin from WME who I was working with doing events and as a scout, but whom I had forgotten to tell that I wrote myself. One day I mentioned it over coffee in London and he wanted to see my book immediately (bit of a scary moment) Thankfully he loved the book, which was then called THE DRESSMAKER. He had lunch with Mark Smith from Bonnier on a Thursday, sent him the book, and Bonnier made an offer for three books on Friday!

If you could give three top tips to newbie writers – what would they be?

Just keep writing – best advice I was ever given from Sarah Webb

Finish your book – Liz Nugent’s top tip

And: Read, read, read. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Edit, edit, edit. – the fabulous Monica McInerney’s advice

And read On Writing by Stephen King (sorry that’s four) – EVERY published writer had read it and has it on their shelf. I could quote from it for ever!

Finally, your next book ‘IN DEEP WATER’ will soon be released - how tough was it writing the ‘difficult second book’?
Not as tough as writing book 3! I had an idea for IN DEEP WATER but had a couple of false starts because I’ve now discovered I need to get the crime exactly right before I begin (I know that sounds rather obvious) – once I knew what had happened and how, I flew through writing it.

I know this sounds mad, but as an unpublished writer you have the huge luxury of time to get your first book right – once you’re under contract that all changes and you have to speed up! Because LITTLE BONES was in fairly good shape, I had more time for IN DEEP WATER and really enjoyed coming up with the twist at the end. My editor wasn’t very keen on the multiple points of view that were in the original draft, so that meant a good bit of rewriting – IN DEEP WATER is a much more linear story than LITTLE BONES, but keeps you hooked.

When I came to write book 3, I only had a few months to come up with an idea and get stuck in. I’d forgotten to ask when my actual deadline was and was at 70k words when I discovered it was the next day! I managed to write 30k words in 9 days and deliver almost on time, but after the first edit I’ve decided I don’t like the end, so I’ve just changed it – it’s with my editor now so fingers crossed she likes it (YIKES!)

Social media

For SAM BLAKE
T: @samblakebooks
FB: https://www.facebook.com/SamBlakeBooks/
W: http://www.samblakebooks.com/

For Vanessa/Inkwell
T: @inkwellhq
FB: https://www.facebook.com/people/Vanessa-Fox-OLoughlin/652124128
FB: https://www.facebook.com/TheInkwellGroup/
W: http://www.inkwellwriters.ie/
For Writing.ie
T: @Writing_ie
FB: https://www.facebook.com/writing.ie/
W: https://www.writing.ie/

Instagram for everything!
https://www.instagram.com/writing.ie/

In Conversation with Ruth Hogan

By Gillian Hamer

Ruth Hogan. (Photo by Ben Croker)

Reviews for The Keeper of Lost Things:

A debut to watch for… I was hugely impressed by this flawlessly written, most humane novel. (Ronald Frame, Sunday Herald (Books of the Year))

A charming story of fresh starts and self-discovery that warms the cockles (Woman & Home)

A warm and heartfelt debut. (Prima)

A charming whimsical novel about holding on to what is precious (Red)

This mystical and spiritual tale is a joyous read that will broaden your imagination and warm your heart (OK!)

It’s charming, beautiful and full of heart (Fabulous Magazine)

Magical and moving (Heat)

Hello, Ruth, welcome to WWJ. Tell us a little about yourself and your writing?

I was born in the house where my parents still live in Bedford.
As a child I was obsessed with dogs and ponies (I still am) and wanted to be a vet. I was always reading, and frequently had to be forcibly parted from a book at mealtimes. I read everything I could lay my hands on so it was very fortunate that my mum worked in a bookshop. My favourite reads were The Moomintrolls, A Hundred Million Francs, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the back of cereal packets, and gravestones.
I studied English and Drama at Goldsmiths College, University of London. It was brilliant and I loved it. But then I came home and got a proper job.
I now live in a chaotic Victorian house with an assortment of rescue dogs and my long-suffering husband. I spend all my free time writing or thinking about it and have notebooks in every room so that I can write down any ideas before I forget them. I am a magpie; always collecting treasures (or ‘junk’ depending on your point of view) and a huge John Betjeman fan. My favourite word is antimacassar and I still like reading gravestones.

Your debut novel The Keeper of Lost Things has become a bestseller. Can you sum it up in a single paragraph?

No! I’m really bad at writing short synopses so I’ve pinched this bit from the summary on Amazon.
Meet the 'Keeper of Lost Things'...
Once a celebrated author of short stories now in his twilight years, Anthony Peardew has spent half his life collecting lost objects, trying to atone for a promise broken many years before.
Realising he is running out of time, he leaves his house and all its lost treasures to his assistant Laura, the one person he can trust to fulfil his legacy and reunite the thousands of objects with their rightful owners.
But the final wishes of the 'Keeper of Lost Things' have unforeseen repercussions which trigger a most serendipitous series of encounters...

After a decade working in human resources, it took big life changes in your personal life before you became a full-time writer – what gave you the confidence to take the plunge?

For years I’d clung to the security of a sensible, well-paid job. I had a mortgage and bills to pay, and writing was just a hobby. But in my early thirties I had a car accident which left me unable to work full-time and convinced me to start writing seriously. I was still working part-time as a receptionist, but writing became my main focus. Then in 2012 I was diagnosed with cancer and that was a game-changer. I vowed that I would take every opportunity that came my way and if I ever got the chance to become a full-time writer I’d chase it as hard as if my pants were on fire! I was extremely lucky that the initial publishing deals for KEEPER paid well enough for me to give up working as a receptionist and concentrate on being a full-time author. The rights for KEEPER have gone on to sell in 19 territories so far, so it was a risk that proved to be well worth taking.

What one piece of writing advice you’ve been given do you find invaluable and would like to pass on?

The best piece of advice that I’ve been given was by an agent who rejected KEEPER. She told me to remember that this (meaning the publishing industry) is a ‘business of opinions’ and although she didn’t feel that my novel was for her, there might be someone else out there prepared to take it on. She was right.

Where do you find inspiration for your novels?

Everywhere! Wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, I’m always watching people and the situations they find themselves in. Whenever I see a striking building or landscape, I always think ‘how would I describe that?’ I’m also a documentary junkie and forever cutting news items, personal ads (and occasionally obituaries) out of newspapers and magazines.

How do you set about creating your characters? Eg, where did the character of Anthony Peardew and his lifelong obsession come from? 

Anthony was inspired by a former neighbour of mine who became an extreme hoarder after his fiancée died. I have a notebook for potential characters. Whenever I see someone interesting or get an idea for a character, I describe them in my notebook. I also use other people’s photography as inspiration for characters – for example Diane Arbus, Martin Parr, Doisneau, Tony Ray-Jones and William Eggleston.

What’s the hardest thing about being a writer?

The hardest part is the time spent waiting. I’m not a patient person at all, and when my work is out on submission to publishers I find the waiting excruciating. I have to keep myself distracted by finding lots of things to do!

And what for you is the best thing?

Everything else. It’s my dream job/life.

What three books would you have to take with you to your Desert Island?

UNTITLED by Diane Arbus, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE by Jane Austen and a book about how to survive on a desert island.

Which author do you most admire?

It’s impossible to choose just one, but the man who made me want to write was Eric Malpass after I read his book MORNING’S AT SEVEN.

Can you tell us anything about your next novel?

It is essentially a story of empowerment, hope and redemption. Masha, a woman in her early forties, has suffered a terrible loss and we follow her journey from a very dark place through to a completely new life. She’s inspired to change by two of my favourite characters in the book; an old lady who feeds the crows in the park and sings opera in the local cemetery, and a seventy-year-old amateur dramatics diva and roller disco fan who’s dating an undertaker named Elvis. Some of the darker themes explored in the book were inspired by my own experiences, but there’s also a healthy dose of humour and a cast of eccentric (and hopefully!) loveable characters. And, of course, there are dogs. It will be published by Two Roads Books in May 2018.

Thank you, Ruth! Good luck with your writing.

See our Bookmuse review of The Keeper of Lost Things HERE


Find out more about Ruth and her books:
ruthhogan.co.uk
instagram.com/ruthmariehogan
twitter.com/ruthmariehogan
facebook.com/ruthmariehogan

In Conversation with Jason Donald

Jason Donald was born in Scotland and grew up in South Africa. He studied English Literature and Philosophy at St. Andrews University and is a graduate of the Glasgow University Creative Writing MA. His debut novel, Choke Chain, published by Jonathan Cape, was shortlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award and the Saltire First Book Award.

His second novel, Dalila, published by Jonathan Cape/Vintage, was published in Jan 2017. Film rights have been optioned and the screenplay is being written by Christopher Hampton (Atonement, Dangerous Liaisons). He has also published short stories in various literary journals, including The Astronaut for BBC Radio 4 and Puerta Galera for the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
He lives with his wife in Switzerland. 
https://www.jasondonald.org/

Interview by JJ Marsh

The first thing I want to ask is about how you create your characters. Twelve-year-old Alex growing up in Pretoria could hardly be more different to asylum-seeking Kenyan Dalila, but you enable the reader to get right inside their skins and feel their emotions personally.

At Glasgow University my tutor, Janice Galloway, said to me, “Don’t be afraid to get as close as you dare to your characters!” I’ve always toyed with this advice.

On the one hand, Alex and Dalila are deliberately constructed fictional characters, I assigned them attributes, I made them up. I employed straightforward writing techniques to make the characters appear to stand up on the page and stretch out the knots in their necks.

On the other hand, if the characters are being invented by me, where exactly are they coming from? How aware am I of that corner inside myself from where the characters came? Am I brave enough to go there? If the writing stalls, can I return to that corner and discover new things about the characters? Can I take what I find and somehow put it on the page? Writing characters is a combination of self-discovery, of empathy and of technical adjustment. The hope is that if I am exploring ways to connect with my characters, then readers will feel invited to join me in this effort and perhaps even discover things for themselves.

Both characters are on the cusp of change, at a metaphorical fork in the road. Taking Choke Chain first, and the character of Alex, there’s a constant brooding threat of violence underpinning this novel. That comes partly from a young adult’s frustrations at his own lack of power and articulacy, his father’s volatile bullying and the glimpses of South African society in the 1980s. But for me, Alex on the precipice of manhood (and what kind of a manhood that might be) is the central tension.

Yes, you’re right. Alex’s decision about manhood is the heart of the story.

Alex’s father, Bruce, is a bigot: someone who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his opinion. Bigots have iron clad egos and bolshie attitudes which shove others aside, making the bigot appear to be getting ahead. They present themselves as charismatic winners and everyone else as losers. On the surface, bigotry can be quite alluring because it masks itself as confidence or strength of will.

In the short term, some of these tactics seem to work but in the long term, bigotry is a disaster for the bigot and those around him. Since human beings are a mass of contradictions, and the bigot is blinkered to his inconsistencies, he’ll automatically blame the ‘other’ rather than accepting accountability for anything that doesn’t go his way. The ‘other’ might be an individual or a whole different race or gender or religion. I believe bigotry underlies sexism, racism and religious intolerance.

This kind of self-important ego eats at relationships, it destroys families, pulls communities apart, divides the sexes, scapegoats religions and oppresses entire races. But it’s also self-destructive. With the bigot continually defining himself as the winner, he isolates himself. He avoids introspection. If others don’t eventually turn on him, he becomes a man alone on a self-constructed podium, with no adoring crowd to congratulate him, a calcified monument to himself.

As is often the case, quite a few concepts of masculinity get tangled up with bigotry. So, instead of being confident, boys are taught to be winners, instead of being secure, you’re taught to be rigid. This is the world Alex is born into. This is the kind of man Bruce is teaching his son to be. At the age of twelve, Alex, like many young boys, has to navigate these concepts and choose what kind of man he wants to be. He doesn’t have to defeat his father, he has to somehow prevent himself from becoming his father.

The political situation is part of the background but not overtly examined. You’ve made the point before that it was possible to live in a white suburban environment and be unaware of some of the effects of apartheid. Could this book have been set anywhere else?

During Apartheid, South Africa had a tightly controlled media. Many atrocities were kept from the public and multiple abuses were buried until they were later revealed during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. So, there were some specifics that the public simply didn’t know about.

That being said, I am always surprised at people’s ability to refuse to look at an issue right in front of their noses. There is a cognitive dissonance in believing a country is wonderful place to live while driving past a shanty town where a targeted and oppressed majority of the population are forced to live. This same cognitive dissonance can exist in families where abuse is taking place: you’re aware of the abuse, you know who the victims are, yet you choose to believe that everything is going to be ok. Psychologically, it’s a very uncomfortable position to maintain. It’s stressful and people will go to extraordinary lengths to mitigate that stress without abandoning their contradictory beliefs. As a writer, this fascinates me. It seemed to me that what was going on in Alex’s family was psychologically similar to what was happening in the country.

Holding of contradictory beliefs is a human trait that has expressed itself in many communities throughout history which is why I think Choke Chain could have been set almost anywhere.

In Choke Chain, there are victims and victors, but most have an element of choice. Whereas Dalila’s situation reflects the exact opposite. She must wait till the system swallows her or spits her out. That’s a different kind of powerlessness and presents quite a challenge to an author. But the book completely grips the reader’s attention. How did you go about conveying the inertia of the asylum-seekers’ existence while maintaining the narrative drive?

Some asylum seekers wait for up to eight years for their papers to come through without being allowed to work, study or travel. Think about that! To reflect this, I wrote a lot of scenes where Dalila is in limbo. Lots of walking or waiting. Lots of sitting around the flat. Lots of brooding. The first version was too weighed down with these scenes and needed to be reworked.

While redrafting, I saw that Dalila actually does have an element of choice. Yes, she is completely at the mercy of the system and much of her personal autonomy has been taken from her, but she still has agency. She’s alone and afraid but staying at home is a choice, facing her fears is also a choice. Therefore, choosing to leave her flat and walk through the city is an act of bravery. Choosing to help others while her own safety is in jeopardy is an act of heroism. No matter what constrains are put on Dalila she must still choose what kind of person she wants to become. Her dignity is something she must claim.

I think the trick to engaging the reader is to convey how tremendously important these small choices are for the character. While Dalila’s actions are small and limited the consequences of her decisions are enormous, they are life affirming. That’s where hope is to be found.

A while back, I interviewed Christos Tsiolkas about inhabiting characters not of your own gender, sexuality, race or ethnicity. His response was that if he couldn’t write from the perspective of a woman, or black person or old man or teenage girl, what the hell was he doing writing? The whole cultural appropriation row blew up again last year. Did this atmosphere of judgementalism about who’s allowed to write what make you nervous while writing Dalila?

I believe it’s possible to empathise with someone who is different from yourself. Assuming the opposite dehumanises everyone who isn’t exactly like you, because you relegate them to a place outside of human connection.

That being said, there’s a lot of homework to do when creating a character and you need to approach the task with a deep humility. I went to a lot of different people and asked them to read my early drafts, to guide to me, to challenge my assumptions, to inform me of things I’d never considered, to reveal nuances and to also point out where my portrayal was working.

And even after all this work, I’m forced to admit that Dalila isn’t perfect. It’s merely the best portrayal I could do at the time. Readers will judge for themselves how well the character works on the page. I’ll strive do a better job next time.

Technical question. Choke Chain, first person, past tense. Dalila, third person, present tense. Both seem powerfully effective. What was your rationale for choosing that way of telling each story?

In Choke Chain, Alex is only twelve years old. Writing in first person from his perspective enabled me to create an naive narrator who has a sense of things changing around him while not being able to articulate what he is experiencing. However, the reader should be able to immediately spot abusive parenting, social conditioning, racism and what not to give a child for his birthday!

There is a ‘click’ motif in the novel, where the boys are taught to observe something, close their eyes and whisper ‘click’ to themselves. That’s how they store a memory. I viewed each chapter as one of Alex’s ‘clicks’. It’s a memory he is re-examining as he tries to make sense of what has happened. Using he past tense was crucial to this re-telling nature of the story

Writing Dalila, I decided early on to use the third person. It gave me the ability to get close to, or pull back from, the protagonist. Sometimes I draw the reader in they are intimately involved in Dalila’s dreams, concerns and motivations. But when Dalila is being processed by the Home Office - going through security or various form of bureaucracy - I pull back from the character, lengthening the narrative distance. I pair back the voice and use blunt declarative sentences to narrate what is happening. Character, processes, machines and systems are given equal weight and attention. In those moments when the system reduces Dalila to a mere case study, to a statistic. The idea is that the prose reflects what is being stripped away.

I began writing Dalila in the past tense but after seven or eight chapters I discovered it wasn’t working. The events felt like they were being narrated from some secure point in the future, so I changed it. The present tense is constrictive, it traps you in the moment without much perspective. This felt better suited for story. I wanted the reader to be following (and sometimes observing) Dalila through a system without knowing what to anticipate.

Both your books and the short story you wrote for the Edinburgh Book Fair, Puerto Galera, make full use of their settings: a poor white neighbourhood in Pretoria, the streets and tower blocks of Glasgow, a holiday beach in the Philippines. I was struck by how you use the characters’ (un)familiarity with their surroundings to convey layers of meaning. How important is place?

Ooft! You know, I’m surprised by how difficult this question is for me. In all my writing I’ve never deliberately set out to write about a place, I am much more interested in characters. I’d even go so far as to say that I view place as an outward projection from the characters. I don’t expect depictions of place to be taken literally but to be understood metaphorically as a barometer for what a character is feeling. For example, in DALILA Glasgow is almost entirely depicted as windy, damp, cold and cloud covered. This is because Dalila herself is lonely and she comes from Kenya which is on the equator, so from her perspective Glasgow seems depressing and freezing. But, of course, the real city is quite friendly…and sometimes even sunny!

Getting back to your question, it’s interesting to me how often readers remark on the vivid sense of place in my writing. Maybe place features more prominently than I am aware of? Which could perhaps mean that place is, in fact, more important to me than I think it is?

Hmmm. I need to mull this over a bit more.


Having organised and taught writing courses for years, I often encounter the regular old adage ‘creative writing can’t be taught’. As someone with a Masters in the subject and a respected tutor yourself, how would you counter that?

In one sense, teaching creative writing is simply showing people how to use a set of tools. If you apply the tools correctly, your writing will improve. Yet most people who set out to write are attempting to do something more profound than displaying their linguistic toolkit. They may be exploring their voice, or even voices. They might be trying to understand the world by shaping into something new. They might need to tell us something important. A lot of trial and error is involved. I think it’s important to give new writers a secure, judgement free space where they can experiment and say whatever the hell they want. Yet, at the same time, they need to be given the respect of holding their writing to the highest standards. While the bar must be set high, the criticism needs to be directed at the writing and not the writer.

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