Three little words

Middle-aged, sensible, a bit turquoise?

Last weekend fellow writer Barbara Henderson and I attended an event in Hawick (rhymes with ‘oik’) here in the Scottish Borders. Nicola Morgan and Sara Sheridan braved the floods to speak about marketing, social media and e‑publishing. It was marvellous to have writers of their calibre visit, and I brought home pages of notes. Nicola also kindly published on her blog some of the resources she had referred to.

One of Sara’s suggestions was that we should all go away and think of three words to describe ourselves. Not ourselves as people though, but (and this is where it gets tricky) as our writing ‘brand’. So, middle-aged, sensible and turquoise-wearing won’t do for mine, although those are the three words which immediately sprang to mind.

Surely you can’t communicate much with just three words? Read the examples below, some of which you’ll recognise, and think again.

TLC for backs (Zerostress chairs)

Spellbinding crime fantasy (my mate Dave Sivers)

Never knowingly undersold (John Lewis Partnership)

Vorsprung durch Technik (Audi, proving the words don’t even have to be in one’s own language to be memorable)

I’m not going to tell you what my three words are. I can’t, because I still haven’t decided on them. When I do, rest assured I’ll share them with you.

In the meantime, how would you describe yourself or your ‘brand’ in three words?

Aspirations

Some things are impossible to explain. Like why I find the Scots accent irresistible, how I can be middle-aged when I still feel 22, and why it’s so important to me to gain something many of you had by the time you really were 22: a degree.

In my early 40s I studied English and Scottish Literature at Edinburgh University. It was a lovely time, unfortunately cut short by a lack of funds (grants had already gone, fees were just coming in, an idiotic bureaucrat ‘forgot’ to process my application for a bursary). I took a job which I hated, and to console myself I started to write seriously in my spare time. Yet that dream of achieving a degree never went away.

Several years later we were a lot better off but I could no longer face regularly driving 50 miles each way to Edinburgh. So I applied to study with the Open University. My time at Edinburgh gave me credits which meant I ‘only’ had to do four courses to gain a BA (Hons) in Humanities with Literature (though sadly without a specifically Scottish element). I was self-employed by then, and could work half the week, study the other half.

I did three courses in as many years, my favourite being History of Cinema and Television. My husband enjoyed all that mandatory film-watching; I hated having to take exams again. My marks were pretty good, once I stopped being pulled up for writing lines and paragraphs which were ‘too short’ (they probably lacked sufficient adverbs and adjectives as well). So I’m well on the way to achieving dream number 2: getting a degree.

However, dream number 1 – being a published novelist – still rules. I took 2011/12 off to complete my first novel, start my quest for an agent and begin writing book two. This week, as June became July, I faced a big decision. Is this the right time to embark on my final year of study, the most important course of them all, the one which decides how good a degree I get?

The answer had to be ‘yes’, even though it means I must be more organised. I’ll have to go back to designating set days for specific tasks, abandon the luxury of fiction-writing every day. And you know what? I think this will concentrate my mind, make me more productive, not less.



Arrgh!

Another choice: which course? I swithered between A300: 20^th century literature – texts and debates and AA316: The 19^th-century novel. Heaney, Woolf, Ginsberg, Du Maurier, Eliot and Brecht versus Austen, Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Flaubert and Conrad. Conrad? Memories of A-level English all those years ago flooded back, of wading through Nostromo and hating every line of it.

The reading list for A300 also includes a Scottish classic, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, as well as sci-fi in the shape of Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Finally, the clincher: while both courses require six Tutor Marked Assignments (essays), only AA316 has an exam at the end of it. A300 has an End-of-module assessment which is done at home at one’s own pace.

Decision made. A300: 20^th century literature – texts and debates, here I come! Eventually, I hope, earning the right to hire one of the fetching gowns seen here for my graduation ceremony.

Nineteenth or twentieth century literature: which would you choose?

CrimeFest 2012

RIP Maillie

It’s a sad fact that we’ll always remember exactly when Maillie, our beloved geriatric, insomniac cocker spaniel had to be put to sleep: the night before CrimeFest 2012. As a result, bystanders on Berwick station the next morning must have thought I was leaving my husband for at least a year when I tearfully said goodbye to him before climbing onto the Bristol train. I was still puffy-eyed by the time I got off at the other end, but by that time elation had also kicked in.

I took advantage of an early-bird offer to buy my 2012 ticket at the 2011 event, so that weekend had been a long time coming. And I wasn’t the only one getting excited. On Thursday 24th May, Twitter was buzzing with people converging by various modes of transport on southwest England. (One morning in the lift down to breakfast I met a lady whose flight from Canada had taken less time than my train journey!)

I remembered to pack my camera but failed miserably to take more than a handful of pictures. None of which recorded any of these highlights: 

- Sharing a taxi to the hotel with Steve Mosby, who seemed surprised I recognised him by his tattoos. He’s far less frightening than his books. You can read Steve’s take on CrimeFest on his blog, although, strangely, he doesn’t mention his encounter with a seagull.

- Meeting lots of people I’d never met before but, thanks to Twitter, being greeted by them as a friend and spending hardly a waking moment alone all weekend. I’m bound to leave someone out, so I won’t even try to list them. You know who you are and thanks for making me feel like I belonged. Although I must mention, apropos of my earlier blog post which asked if Dave Jackson could possibly be as nice as he claims: yes, he is!

- Staying up way past my bedtime every night. I proved this to my husband by texting him at one in the morning, although he claims my message made little sense. Can’t think why.

- Being charmed and inspired by featured guest author, Sue Grafton, author of the Kinsey Milhone ‘Alphabet’ series. This was Sue’s first visit to the UK since 1995 and she came across as a genuinely warm and generous lady (although I wouldn’t have wanted to be her ex-husband!).

- Picking up my prize in person from organiser Sarah Hilary for being runner-up in the FlashBang writing competition, The CWA Anthology M.O. (edited by Martin Edwards).

- Seeing Penny Grubb’s The Doll Makers and buying a copy on the strength of the amazing cover alone.

- Realising at the Thursday night quiz just how poor my knowledge of crime and thriller novels is compared with that of Rhian Davies (who blogs at It’s a crime (Or a mystery …), Martin Edwards and, well, everyone else in our team. But having a great time anyway.

- Talking to Jeffery Deaver about black pudding and Peter James showing me photos on his mobile of his racing car.

- Glorious weather that made eating a delicious Italian meal outside on Saturday evening feel like I was holidaying at a Mediterranean resort.

Charming Scotsman

- Being able to tell the difference between Craig Robertson and Michael J Malone. Okay, so they’re both charming baldy-heided Scotsmen but I still can’t believe people mix them up. I met Craig a couple of years at Harrogate and commend his book Random as one of the best crime fiction debuts I’ve ever read. Michael was at CrimeFest to launch his first book, Blood Tears, and I’ve come home with a copy of that as well.

A different charming Scotsman

 - Getting Tanya Byrne’s Heart-Shaped Bruise in my goody-bag when I was planning to buy it. 

- Hearing Liverpudlian writer Cath Bore so lovingly describe her home city that she made me ache to visit it.

- Attending Professor Sue Black's passionate presentation of the Million for a Morgue appeal. Her backing group - Jeffery Deaver, Peter James and Lee Child - wasn't bad either.

- Being able to tell everyone who’d listen that up here in Scotland we’re having a crime writing festival too: Bloody Scotland, 14-16 September in Stirling.

- Winning a rather fetching Bristol blue glass vase in the gala dinner raffle.

And to cap it all, since I got back I’ve wangled another weekend away in July, so will be attending Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate too. I’m not sure if it’s dignified for a middle-aged woman to get this excited . .

Speaking in tongues

Doris the Editor: Blissfully unaware

I’ve been talking to myself a lot lately. Or rather, reading out loud parts of my first novel. The dogs don’t care, the cat’s stone-deaf and my husband is used to it. However, I find it disconcerting. You see, in my mind I have a perfect Scottish accent and can sound convincingly like any man, woman, child or barking dog. But reading aloud I’m just a middle-aged woman with a received pronunciation (RP) English accent.

Did I say ‘accent’? Like everyone else, my way of speaking sounds to me as if it’s the norm. But now I’m living in Scotland, albeit the part which probably has the highest percentage of English people in its population, so that illusion has been shattered. Two incidents also brought this home to me.

Boots opened its first chemist shop in 1877. I wasn't there.

My early adult life was spent in London, working in the buying offices of Boots the Chemists. In the late 1980s, Boots decided it was too costly to maintain a London base when it owned a huge amount of real estate in Nottingham. Many of us relocated to the Midlands, generously rewarded for agreeing to live and work alongside people we had previously only known on the telephone. Up there, I made a very good friend who shared my enthusiasm for cats and crime fiction. She said to me one day, ‘We thought you were dead posh at first, talking like you do. But you’re quite normal really.’ Thanks, Barbara, wherever you are now.

At the age of forty I became a mature student at Edinburgh University, studying English and Scottish literature. For the first year we were required to study English Language, including phonetics. I can’t say I particularly enjoyed this, but I found the work on regional accents fascinating. Etched on my memory, though, is the occasion when I was instructed to stand up in the lecture theatre and repeat several phrases as a living example of RP. I was mortified.

The reason why I’m doing a lot of reading out loud is not just for editing purposes, although that is part of the polishing process which everything I write goes through. This week I’ve recorded a YouTube video! I read the opening of No Stranger to Death for the Pulp Idol competition being run by Liverpool’s Writing on the Wall project. And although that chapter reads well on paper and Kindle, did my voice do justice to it? Only the judges can decide that, but luckily the portion I read has only my main character, Dr Zoe Moreland, in it and she’s English. My three minutes were up before the young, male and Scottish policeman makes an appearance.

Beautiful Hexham library

I was lucky enough to attend recently the launch of Mari Hannah’s The Murder Wall as part of Hexham Book Festival. Mari chose to have an actress, Phillippa Wilson, read excerpts from her book, and I thought this was such a great idea (not that Mari couldn’t have done it herself). Phillippa had just the right accent and added so much to the words she was reading.

Robert Burns wrote in his poem To a Louse about our inability “To see oursels as ithers see us”. I would add “To hear oursels”. In a perfect Scots accent, of course.



Robert Burns by the wonderful Peter Howson



That's my Kindle in the fetching turquoise stripey case

I wrote earlier in the year about my decision to take part in the Eclectic Reader Challenge and the reasons behind this. Several months have passed and I admit I haven’t made huge inroads into my list of titles. Which is peculiar, because I always have a book on the go. In fact, all I seem to have done is change the list a bit, and not in a making-it-easier way. It now looks like this.

Genre	Title
Literary
Crime/mystery	The Murder Wall (Mari Hannah)
Romantic	Me Before You (JoJo Moyes)
Historical
YA	Deathwatch (Nicola Morgan) and Pure (Julianna Baggott)
Fantasy	A Game of Thrones (George RR Martin) or The Passage (Justin Cronin)
Science Fiction	Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (Philip K Dick)
Non-fiction	Bluestockings (Jane Robinson)
Horror
Thriller/suspense	The Odessa File (Frederick Forsyth)
Classic	Great Expectations (Dickens)
My favourite genre

I have already written about some of my initial choices, but here’s how I filled in most of the gaps.

A Twitter friend, Rebecca Bradley, recommended Jojo Moyes’ Me Before You as an excellent example of a modern romantic novel, and the Amazon reviews back this up. This is a genre I never knowingly read, but at least I’m consistent: I don’t watch romantic movies either.

I thought I was on firm ground when I chose Deathwatch by Nicola Morgan as my YA read (a genre which didn’t exist when I was growing up). I’m an admirer of Nicola’s no-nonsense approach to getting published, and it was she who persuaded me to sign up for Twitter. However, when I was deciding whether to read the Berwick Book Group’s April choice, Pure by Andrew Miller, I came across a book of the same name by Julianna Baggott which sounded much more tempting than Miller's. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic world where many of those who survived ‘the Detonation’ have to live with whatever they were touching at that moment fused to them, be it a toy, a chair or even another person. Those images alone made me load this book on to my Kindle. So I'll be reading two YA novels.

What is it about fantasy novels that they have to be so huge? Here again I have two candidates, but I doubt I’ll be able to manage them both this year. A Game of Thrones (780 pages) was chosen because my husband loves the TV serialisation and I thought I might persuade him to put down his WW2 non-fiction and read it after me. Then I saw a review of The Passage (765 pages) and it sounded too interesting to ignore. I might have to resort to eenie-meenie-minee-mo.

The recent rumpus about TV reviewer AA Gill being mean to Professor Mary Beard helped me make my non-fiction choice. I read a profile of her which said she used to parody the image of female intellectuals by wearing blue stockings. This reminded me that I had bought myself Bluestockings, which explored the fight for women to get a university education back in the days when ‘doctors warned that if women studied too hard their wombs would wither and die’. I was especially pleased to have chosen this book: as I took it down from the shelf a £20 note fell out, a Christmas gift from an aunt.

Finally, I’ve plumped for The Odessa File to fill the thriller slot, in honour of Frederick Forsyth’s appearance at this year’s CrimeFest in May. I have never read any of his work before, although I’m a big fan of some of the film adaptations. It’s not often I watch a film and read the book afterwards, so this will be doubly interesting.

So that leaves literary, historical and horror fiction, and this is where YOU come in. If you have any favourites in those genres, please let me know in the comments below or tweet me @JanetOkane (I’ve come to realise that unfortunately some folk have problems leaving comments on Blogger blogs).

I promise to make my reading selections based on your recommendations!

Lucky 7: Seven lines from new works

Winter's Gate by Charles Simpson*

My thanks to both Susan Williams and Isabel Costello who have tagged me to take part in Lucky 7: Seven lines from new works. The rules are simple:

1. Go to page 77 of your current MS or WIP
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy the next 7 lines, sentences or paragraphs and post them as they’re written
4. Tag 7 more writers and let them know.

My list of 7 people I’ve tagged is at the end of this post. Who to choose was a tricky decision. In the end, I purposely chose writers who I haven’t followed on Twitter for very long, as I’d like to get to know them better. There’s absolutely no pressure to take part if you don’t want to or haven’t got time.

It’s been fascinating, reading other writers’ excerpts; I hope you’ll get something from mine too. These 7 lines are from my first crime novel, No Stranger to Death, which I’m currently transferring to Scrivener as a training exercise. Assuming I master the software, I plan to write the follow-up, which is at the planning stage, straight into it.

To put these words into context, you need to know that our heroine Zoe is in the pub with her new friend Kate who lip-reads because she’s deaf.

‘No one need hear, silly. You don’t have to talk out loud.’

Feeling foolish, Zoe silently mouthed an account of Hazel and Ray’s argument. Kate waited until she’d finished then, speaking more quietly than usual, asked, ‘Any idea what it was all about?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. But it must have something to do with Chrissie’s death.’ Zoe brought out her purse, preparing to go up to the bar for more drinks.

The front door opened and Neil rushed in.

Over to you, if you’re so inclined:

• @JennyHaddon (http://jennyhaddon.com/)
• @LisaCutts1 (http://lisacuttsblog.blogspot.co.uk/)
• @SusieIvy (http://badluckdetective.wordpress.com/)
• @ChrisLongmuir (http://chrislongmuir.blogspot.co.uk/)
• @MartinFrankson (http://martinjfranksonthewriter.wordpress.com/
• @PeteDomican (http://peterdomican.wordpress.com/)
• @HelenMacKinven (http://helenmackinven.wordpress.com/)

 *Charles Simpson kindly agreed to my use of his image on my blog. I hope one day to own an original. You can see his work at http://www.csimpson-art.co.uk/

A Real Character: Me

After my last blog post exploring whether we consciously manufacture personalities for social media like Twitter, I was interested to read Isabel Costello’s piece about creating characters for fiction. She then (very bravely) set out to bring herself to life on the page by writing about various aspects of her own character and experiences. Susan Elliot Wright followed suit, and #realcharacter was born.

Here is my rendition of myself. If you’d like to take part in #realcharacter, just blog about yourself as we have, then tweet a link, using the #realcharacter hashtag. You’ll be found and retweeted.

Genes/inheritance



Recommended reading for onlies

I’m an only child, born to parents who had experienced the agony of a stillbirth son a few years earlier. So feel free to throw all those usual adjectives – spoilt, over-protected, selfish – at me. I’m old enough now to acknowledge the (relative) truth of them, although this upbringing also means I’m a loyal friend, honest to a fault, and can spell really well.

My Mum’s family were well-off Dorset farmers whom she defied to marry a young army chef from Walsall. They relented the day before the wedding, and Dad was accepted, with reservations, into the fold. The upside was he could fuel his car from the farm's petrol pump. But in return he was expected to help out occasionally with the harvest and other tasks. I remember him coming home later than expected one evening from visiting an aged uncle. He was a little pale and dishevelled: he’d had to assist in a calf’s breech birth.

I have 21 cousins on my Dorset side, all but two female. Our last get-together was when our grandmother reached 90; the Reads are a gratifyingly long-lived bunch. This was some years ago, but it was obvious we had all inherited the pear-shape gene.

Environment

I escaped from the country as soon as I could, moving to London at 18 to work in Harrods and live in a hostel run by The Girls’ Friendly Society (yes, really). Back then London was fun, as long you had a job to pay for going out. I loved the theatre, the cinema, the shopping. In my twenties I was, I admit it, a Yuppie who (whisper it) did pretty well under Mrs Thatcher, buying and selling several flats for profit. But at 30, given the chance to move to Nottinghamshire with my job at Boots, I ended up living in a tiny village. My rural roots were dragging me back. Which is probably why I now live in the Scottish Borders, sharing my life with 19 chickens, 3 dogs and a geriatric cat. I’m also on my second husband, and as he’s Scottish we won’t be moving south any time soon.

Habits

As a typical only child I’m rubbish at team games and until a few years ago never found physical exercise at all tempting, except for walking and then only with a dog. But at 50 I joined a gym and discovered weight-training. I go two or three times a week, and although I’m not muscled up a la Madonna, my core fitness has improved to the extent that I now feel worse if I don’t work out. I can’t see the point of cigarettes, excessive alcohol or drugs, and have a pretty low tolerance of those who do. However, I love chocolate, smoked salmon and the occasional glass of champagne.



Monument Valley, Arizona



Despite hating to fly (it’s that rare combination of scary and boring) I love visiting America, especially the wide-open bits like Montana and Arizona. I also adore travelling by train and hope to take my husband to Paris one day.

Do I need to say that my favourite habit is reading?

Personality

Despite, or perhaps because of, my father suffering from depression all his adult life, I am infuriatingly cheerful most of the time. I enjoy my life and appreciate how lucky I am to be able to write every day. I’ve also realised I am an autodidact: I revel in teaching myself new things. Hence starting a degree course at Edinburgh when I was 40 and now completing it via the Open University. And of course writing is one long lesson . . .

I consider myself sociable but am sometimes intimidated by large groups of people and prefer to chat one-to-one. At a recent dinner party I was told by someone I had only just met that I am ‘aggressively nice’. She meant it as a compliment, so I have taken it as such.

Being childless, I am probably living proof of the alleged need we all have to ‘mother’ something. At one point I had 6 cats, now I indulge myself with chickens.

Skills (or otherwise)

Aside from the word-manipulation abilities I possess, I don’t shine at much, especially not physical skills. However, when my husband started working for himself as a stonemason, before he could afford an employee I used to restore the outside walls of houses with him. I was hardly gazelle-like climbing up the scaffold, but once there I showed a talent for chipping out the old mortar and repointing the joints. We both look back fondly on those days.



One of the walls I worked on, waiting to be repointed



And one more thing . . .

About ten years ago I met someone who had a profound influence on my ambition to be a professional writer. Her name was Sylvian Hamilton and she had three books, the Chronicles of the Bone Pedlar, published when she was in her 60s. She lived in a tiny cottage not far from here, with her husband and two Siamese cats.

We met when my husband did some work for her and mentioned I wanted to be a writer. ‘She must come for tea,’ Sylvian said, and I subsequently spent many happy visits talking about books and writing. She taught me that you can write at any age, and that dreams can come true even to those of us who lead humdrum lives in rural Scotland. Sadly, Sylvian died from breast cancer in 2005. She didn’t want a funeral so I planted a tree on our front lawn in her memory. She was in my life for far too short a time, but she inspired me so much I’ll always be grateful to her.