Welcome
I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist. I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.
For the first fortnight of the Sugar and Snails blog tour, I’ve been mostly confined to the UK. Apart from a visit to The Oak Wheel in California, I stayed, like the homebird I am, in my own country until pitching up at the end of last week in Australia. While Norah Colvin might live as far away from me as it’s possible to get, I knew I’d have a warm reception on her blog. Now she’s injected me with the travelling bug, I’m spending this whole week with blogging friends beyond my country’s borders, and greatly looking forward to the trip. I’m starting today in Poland in the Monday Inspirations slot courtesy of former art therapist, writer and fellow broccoli addict, Urszula Humienik, to talk about the books that have inspired me. Tuesday finds me in Pune, India (one of the two calling-off points in this week’s tour I’ve visited in real life) to explore fictional research with Gargi Mehra, software engineer by day, prolific short-story writer by night. On Wednesday I’m off to Ras Al Kaimah (Arabic for Top of the Tent) in the United Arab Emirates to talk attachment with Safia Moore. Recent winner of the Bath Short Story Award, Safia posted a beautiful review of Sugar and Snails on her blog last week AND flew over from her native Belfast on Friday to join the launch party at Jesmond library. On Thursday, I’m visiting another expatriate Irishwoman, journalist turned fictioneer, Clare O’Dea, now a Swiss national, resident in Fribourg, to discuss not knowing what my novel’s about, a follow-up to her own popular post on the topic. Friday takes me back to California with writer of serious prose and humorous erotica, Lori Schafer, where I’m pondering the autobiographical element of fiction with the author of the prize-winning memoir On Hearing of My Mother’s Death Six Years After It Happened. If all that doesn’t show that the blogging community is truly international, I don’t know what would!
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If I was breathless last Monday, announcing Week 1 of the Sugar and Snails blog tour, I must be on the verge of a swoon this week as I begin another round of visits. The first week has gone brilliantly (you can catch up with those first five posts via the links on my blog tour page), so how could I not be excited about the second? I start today under Julie Stock’s Author Spotlight, with a piece about setting part of my novel in Cairo. As a writer of contemporary romance from around the world, Julie has a particular interest in the challenges of setting fiction in real places, the subject of her own post on Susanna Bavin’s blog this week. Tomorrow, Helena Fairfax is interviewing me about where my own life is set, among other things. Helen lives in an interesting place herself, the UNESCO World Heritage Site and former mill town, Saltaire, which you can discover more about in her fascinating post. Then I’m off to chat with my namesake, Shaz Goodwin on Jera’s Jamboree. With her day job as a school Inclusion Lead, I was interested in her interest in novels that tackle a social barrier, as Sugar and Snails most definitely does. On Thursday, I’m on Our Book Reviews discussing the various transformations of my novel from its initial inception as a story of masculinity across three generations. This post arose out of a Twitter conversation after Mary, one half of Our Book Reviews, read and reviewed an advance copy. Obviously, I was delighted to be invited back. Finally, Friday sees me in Australia, quite fittingly discussing the theme of friendship in the novel and in its realisation (extending the theme of my previous post on gratitude) with one of my dearest blogging friends, Norah Colvin. As Norah has already hosted me once before, I know the tour bus will be safe to leave there over the weekend until I get behind the wheel again on Monday. I’m generally not in favour of “update” posts, but I can’t ignore the perspective shift since I posted five days ago. As of last Thursday, I’m a published novelist, and enjoying it immensely. With each review (six to my knowledge so far), with each supportive tweet at #SugarandSnails, I’m claiming more of my authorial authority. I’m even infiltrating the more traditional media, with a feature on Sugar and Snails in the Lincolnshire Echo and a nerve-wracking but not too dreadful outing on BBC Radio Nottingham (my bit is at about 2.15 p.m. and the link expires in about three weeks). The highlight of the last few days was, of course, my Nottingham launch party, which I’ll be sharing more about in due course. But in the meantime, there’s this lovely and unexpected post on the event from The Mole, the other half of Our Book Reviews.
It’s publication week for Sugar and Snails and I’m breathless with excitement. The buzz is building with two reviews already (from Victoria Best and from Stephanie Burton) and some lovely tweets from early readers at #SugarandSnails. Now, thanks mainly to the generous response to my request for hosts, I’ve made two excursions to other blogs (firstly, to Shiny New Books to share my thoughts on writing about secrets, the false self and insecure identities; secondly to Isabel Costello’s literary sofa to discuss the pleasures of small-press publication), and my case is packed ready to depart on the blog tour proper.
I’m sitting on Isabel Costello’s literary sofa today, sharing my experience of being published by a small independent press. So who better to keep my seat warm while I’m away than Teika Bellamy, writer, artist, publisher and founder of another small press, Mother’s Milk Books? Over to you, Teika. When I became a mother to my firstborn eight years ago, I found it to be a joyful, yet overwhelming time. I was inundated with conflicting advice from health professionals and received very few words of support. I can still clearly remember the sharp reply I received when I asked a nurse for a glass of water: ‘You’ve got a new baby now. You’d better get up and start looking after yourself.’ So I struggled out of bed with my newborn and, weak due to the post-partum haemorrhage and perineal tearing I’d just suffered with, I shuffled down the corridor and somehow managed to extract a cup’s worth of water out of the water cooler. (A difficult task when it requires two hands, you’re holding a baby and it feels like your groin might fall out of your body at any moment!) What can be more excruciating than contacting your favourite reviewers and writers in advance of publication to beg them, not only to read, but to like, a proof version your forthcoming novel, and declare so publicly for all the world to see? Well, quite a lot, as it happens, but please indulge a first-time novelist’s egocentrism, if you can, for the duration of this post!
A couple of years ago, I published a post on the four criteria that make one a writer. Although I can appreciate the differing perspectives offered in the comments, I’m still happy with my description of a writer as someone who edits their work; understands the “rules” (although doesn’t necessarily follow them); has served their time; and has attracted readers beyond their immediate friends and family. Conveniently, this definition of a writer enabled me to claim the title for myself. I didn’t really consider the word “author”, and certainly not as a stand-alone title (as opposed to “author of” such-and-such a work), until I joined The Society of Authors last summer. Even then, it was because I needed advice on my publishing contract rather than to club together with other “authors” – such an old-fashioned term, I thought, that ought to be abandoned in the way that “artists” have now rebranded themselves as “painters”. That changed when, last month, I attended an event on working with the media, led by the award-winning former BBC TV reporter, Alistair Macdonald. Writing last week from the hospital bedside of her dear friend, Charli Mills invited Rough Writers to compose a 99-word story featuring a rose. I immediately thought of a scene from my forthcoming novel, Sugar and Snails, in which the main character, Diana, looks back on her childhood. There’s not much of a narrative arc in this episode, but I thought I’d share it anyway, slightly amended, although it works better in context where it gains an additional layer of meaning: “Don’t think it’s all a bed of roses,” said my mother, handing me the potato peeler and nudging me towards the sink. Since my sister had left home, I’d taken to helping out with cooking and cleaning. I didn’t mind, but I was embarrassed that my mother would think I was hankering after a future as a housewife. It seemed to me that a bed of roses summed up my mother’s life exactly: perfumed petals imprisoned within a tangle of thorns. I wanted to ramble beyond the pot of soil in which she’d planted me. I wanted to bloom. Following last month’s post on reading for my reviews, I thought I’d share a little of what I do with them once they’re written. Obviously the appear on Annecdotal, but where else? Well, there’s Goodreads which drew me in initially as an attractive way of keeping tabs on my reading. Another way I keep track is through the listings on my reading and reviews page although, because I’m better at remembering the book than the author, the alphabetical ordering doesn’t always help. Then there’s Twitter (along with the myriad hashtag days) which can generate some lively discussion and Facebook which, probably because I still don’t know how to work it properly, tends not to. Also, because most of the books I review come from the publishers, I tweet and email them the link; if it’s from one of the Hachette companies involved in Bookbridgr, I also log the review there. That’s quite a lot of admin, but there’s still one glaring omission that troubles me somewhat; it’s not exactly the elephant in the room, but the huge empty space where that elephant should be. Outside self-publishing, it’s rare for writers to have a say in the covers adorning their books. Even, I’m told, authors whose profits match the GDP of a small nation have to take what they’re given. On the one hand, it makes sense to leave it to the experts. On the other hand, I’d hate to have to tout around a book with a cover that didn't fit. (And some can be ugly – just have a browse through my reviews.) Fortunately, for my novelistic debut, I’ve landed myself a publisher who endeavours to put authors at the centre of the process. Much as I loved the spoof cover kindly created for me by writer and traveller, Lori Schafer showing a couple of snails making their way across a landscape of granulated sugar, I’ve been itching to share the real thing. I hope you can see why. My thanks to Vince Haig for creating such a beautiful package for my words. After lots of back and forth, including a panic from me when I realised I’d totally misrepresented it, we’ve also finalised the blurb:
I’ve recently dispatched the acknowledgements page to my publisher for my forthcoming novel, Sugar and Snails, in which I’m intending to thank my therapist. Given that I've decided not to name her, to protect the boundaries of our relationship, there might seem little point. Yet I couldn’t exclude someone who, despite not having read a word of the text, has made a significant contribution to the novel by safeguarding my sanity through the long process of writing and preparing for publication. Nevertheless, I do have some anxieties about flag-waving this contribution so blatantly, when it is my impression that the writing world is, at best, ambivalent and, at worst, hostile towards psychotherapy. It’s well over a year since a book of psychoanalytic case studies made the longlist for the Guardian first book award (even if, sadly, it didn’t progress any further). Stephen Grosz's The Examined Life reads like a short story collection, with lots to satisfy those attracted to serious fiction. Yet, only the week before the longlist was published, the same newspaper featured Charlotte Mendelson’s contribution to the Twitter fiction challenge, a neat cameo that works on the premise that therapy takes away one’s well-being. It seems a shame that many writers should share society’s unease about therapy when there’s so much overlap between the two endeavours. At college in 1996 California, Rosemary has grown accustomed to other people finding her a little odd. But she reckons they’d find her even odder if they knew about the unusual circumstances of her childhood. So, despite having been a chatterer since she knew how to speak, she tends to keep quiet. There’s also much that goes unspoken in her family home back in Bloomington, Indiana, especially regarding the whereabouts of her sister, Fern, who she hasn’t seen since she was five years old, and of her older brother, Lowell, who left suddenly ten years ago. It’s only when she is arrested after a fellow student runs amok in the university canteen that twenty-two-year-old Rosemary dares to look back at her past, beginning with when she was sent to stay with her grandparents and returned to find Fern gone. Lovely, Versatile, Inspired and Inspiring: Some Blog Awards and Breaking News about My Writing10/10/2014 Six months ago, I was so excited to receive my first blog award, I spread my response across three separate posts. Little did I know back then that the seemingly innocuous Liebster could herald my co-option into a coven of bloggers whose every keystroke would be sacrificed to the beast that resides on many a sidebar, gobbling up batch after batch of interesting/amusing facts about the blogger and sending said blogger wandering lonely through the blogosphere to recruit another fifteen initiates to the fold. The fear of losing Annecdotal to the swamp of award-dom, led me to renege on my blogigations, failing to complete my versatile nominations or respond to a third Liebster – no, I can’t remember where the second came from, but I know it existed – or display the badge for a very inspiring or a double one lovely, never mind honour the four nominations for various versions of the my writing process blog hop. My guilt was mounting until I witnessed the endorsement of Paula Reed Nancarrow’s post on breaking the chain of blog awards as well as her witty follow-up on ten reasons to decline. Could it be that in my tiny corner of cyberspace, the beast had been sated, that blog awards were now passé? One of the literary agents who declined my request for representation did so on the basis that she didn’t like the first-person present-tense narration with which my novel opens. While I respected her capacity for clarity about her personal preferences, it did make me wonder about the plethora of good literature she was denying herself, not so much from wannabe novelists like me, but heavyweights like Nick Hornby and Margaret Atwood. I was reminded of this when I came across the concept of the “stolen head” novel in a review by Toby Litt in last Saturday’s Guardian, defined as a novel voiced on behalf of a person (for example, Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye) who the reader knows wouldn’t have the patience or self-discipline to write the structured, perfectly punctuated prose with which they are credited. The real writer has stolen the life experiences, the sensual perceptions, the vocabulary, of someone beneath or beyond the day-to-day deskishness of writing. Stolen head books are great for giving us very young, very angry or very damaged-first person narrators. With another choral concert in the offing, I’ve been conscious recently of my far-from-perfect pitch. Alas, it’s not just musically I’m challenged, but I’ve been struggling with pitching my fiction since an agent workshop around eighteen months ago when I failed dismally to reduce my oeuvre to three sentences, despite my novel being in a not-at-all-desperate state of health. Although I’ve improved dramatically since then, I still find pitching difficult and I’m reassured when bloggers such as Clare O’Dea confirm I’m not alone in this. We don’t all possess the talents of Fay Weldon, coining and promoting advertising slogans like Go to work on an egg alongside writing literary fiction but, in this highly commercialised era, it’s incumbent on writers to try. While a pitch to publishers and agents is not the same as a blurb, and both are distinct from a 140-character enticement to click on the link to a blog post, I’ve learnt a bit on pitching from observing how others market their work on Twitter. It takes a lot of discipline and focus to whittle down the gist of one’s outpourings into a few captivating words. But the ideal pitch isn’t solely down to the writer’s capacity to précis. I don’t think I’m making excuses when I say that some fiction is easier to pitch than others. In an effort to convince you this isn’t only me being precious about my own stuff, I’ll illustrate this but by comparing my Twitter pitches for two of the stories I especially enjoyed from a recent anthology in which my story “A House for the Wazungu” also appears. I’m interested in your views, but I think my first pitch: Any writer submitting her work for publication is supposed to know which genre tick-box it fits. Lucky for me, the rules aren’t so rigid for short stories, as I’ve got a fair few wacky ones I’m not sure how to categorise. My novels are literary-commercial but my short stories vary with the weather and/or my mood. Many are darkly serious, but there’s a smattering of lighter stuff, and sometimes I even raise a laugh. I also have a growing collection of stories which step outside real-world logic, and I don’t know what to call them. Launching my virtual annethologies page at the end of last year was my cue to try and sort them out. The absence of a proper nomenclature didn’t matter so much when there was only Tamsin, the woman who woke up on the morning of her wedding to find her neck had grown as long as her arm. Then Selena started being stalked by unnaturally large footprints and plastic took over Jim’s allotment, not to mention Adam waiting in the wings for his publication call. But now Sam, an ordinary soldier in a time warp where all the wars of the past century are happening simultaneously, has made his debut, I’m duty bound to give more thought to where they all belong. The what-if nature renders these stories speculative, although without an entire alternative scientific or mystical world they don’t qualify as sci-fi or fantasy. For want of an alternative, I’ve been labelling them slipstream, a position midway between speculative and literary, with elements of strangeness and otherworldliness. The word feels right for that gentle slip-sliding into another stream of possibility, another dimensional laid across the familiar world. All fiction asks readers to suspend disbelief to a certain extent; slipstream, as I’m choosing to interpret it, asks them to go a step further, not only to care about made-up characters as if they were real people, but to accept a situation where a single law of physics or history or biology has been turned on its head. By my reckoning, The Time Traveler’s Wife meets slipstream criteria, as does Never Let Me Go, both novels where critics have disagreed over genre. After all, we can’t slip physically back and forth in time to revisit different versions of ourselves (although we all do that in our minds). And, the demonisation of the poor and disadvantaged notwithstanding, people aren’t cloned simply to furnish body parts for the elite. Well, what do you think? Is slipstream a genre with which you are familiar and, if so, what does it mean to you? Does genre matter anyway? And do share your thoughts on Sam’s desire to be a hero if you can. I’m not someone who goes out armed with a notebook and pencil, ready to snatch snippets of dialogue from an innocent public. It’s not so much, that like Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, I’ve had people challenge the real-life stuff as unbelievable, or that I’d draw the line at stealing for the sake of my art. It’s not even that, with repetitive strain injury, I’m one of those writers who (physically) doesn’t write if she can help it. It’s more that, as my head’s already crammed with other people’s stories, I tend not to go searching for more. But sometimes a story is offered to me on a plate (if you read the story, you’ll see how apt is the cliché), and I feel I’ve no choice but to take it, which is exactly what’s happened with Peace-and-Quiet Pancake, just published on the website Flash Fiction Online.
I'm always pleased when my work finds a good home, but this feels extra special because I’m actually being paid for it (very rare for short stories on the web). Now, this post is about ethics, but I'm not asking you to advise me on whether to declare this small amount of income on my tax return. (I'm not at all ambivalent about paying tax, just what it's spent on.) My discomfort relates to whether the story is genuinely mine to sell. Don't get me wrong. I wrote the words and assembled them in the right order. I devised the plot and structure, such as it is. But the content, the central event isn't entirely fictional and, what's more, while I was present as it happened, it didn't happen to me. So in a sense, it's the little girl's story not mine. Do other writers worry about things like this? A writer is someone who edits, not just culling the dross but being brave enough to throw out the good stuff if it isn't earning its keep. All that waste would horrify Selina, the central character in my newly published short story, Fat Footprints, whose close relationships are in jeopardy due to her taking the mantra of reduce, reuse, recycle to the extreme. So it's on her behalf I'm asking if there's ever a way of reusing those unwanted words. Like taking our fashion mistakes to the charity shop and wilted vegetables to the compost, is there ever life after death for our redundant sentences? My husband bought a limited-edition print and went to get it framed. Not being particularly enthused by the frames on display, he asked if there was anything else on offer. I only stock what sells, came the reply. The framer might just as well have said, I only sell what stocks. So much for customer service. I can see the picture now as I sit at my desk and it looks fine to me, outlined in plain beech, but my husband wanted something more inspiring to complement his purchase. And, in an age when we can choose who supplies our electricity, and when a trip to the supermarket constitutes an exercise in decision-making, he should have been able to get it. As it happens, our car is black, and I'm with Henry Ford on the unimportance of some consumer choices. Even I'm not so stupid as to blame a mechanical breakdown on plumping for the wrong colour. But when it comes to aesthetics, in matters of art and literature, it's an insult to be fobbed off with second-hand choices. Tastes differ, that's what makes us human, yet it sometimes feels as if the book world thinks we're all clones of some zombified Stepford-wife reader, drooling over the latest ghost-written celeb novel. Some may want to lay the blame on publishers, others – like Howard Jacobson's alter ego in his novel Zoo Time – readers who would rather be writers themselves. I don't know, maybe we've got what we asked for, maybe this is just how capitalism works. Like it or not, we're all complicit: as readers, buying our books at knockdown prices; as writers, however reluctantly, turning ourselves into a brand. Said husband (of course it's the same one, I'm not a bigamist) was appalled when I bought The Night Rainbow for less than half price at Sainsbury's, but, with the nearest independent bookstore fifteen miles away and my pathetic boycotting of Amazon, I didn't consider it a compromise too far. (He doesn't know I went back later to snap up a couple more as presents.) And at least they were stocking something a bit more inspiring than Fifty Shades of Grey. But it shows that good books are still out there, it's just different to how it used to be. And, in consequence, I'll soon be bringing you the annethology interview with Claire King, author of The Night Rainbow. Here on annecdotal, I'll be blogging soon on what looks like my read of the year, a chilling account of a state that doesn't do capitalism, Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son. What do you think of the muddle that is early twenty-first century publishing? As a reader, or as a writer, have you sussed how to navigate your own way through? There's an opportunity to pitch your novel to an agent for free.
I expect you've seen Emma Darwin's post on preparing for the one-to-one sessions (shame on you if you haven't) but have you looked at my interview with Shelley Harris, winner of the Friday Night Live session the year before last which led to a choice of agents and a subsequent publishing deal? There's another rags-to-riches conference story on Rachelle Gardner's blog across the pond, but you needn't be the one whose foot fits the glass slipper to benefit from the networking, workshops and feedback sessions at one of these writing carnivals. Dive in and enjoy the ball! Don't know what I'm on about? Don't care? Call back tomorrow or the next day for a post on writing smells, or a little later for what my harvest of the vegetable garden makes me think about my writing. Like sex, you can do it on your own, you can do it with one partner dominating the other, but when two people approach the business of editing with an open minded desire to do nothing but improve on the writing, it can be a truly creative process. Having yet to publish a novel, I don't have a vast experience of being edited and, I must confess, I feel slightly panicked when an editor wants to suggest some amendments to my short story. I don't know why – apart from the fact that it's not so common in the world of short stories – because my experience of this has been largely positive. Someone who appreciates my work enough to publish it has now read it so closely they've thought how to make it better: what's not to like? Well, bad experiences do linger in the mind: once I chose to turn down the chance of publication because an editor (I've conveniently forgotten the magazine) edited and amended my short story beyond recognition and wouldn't brook any discussion. I suppose everything hangs on one's understanding of the term editing: Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information through the That editor presumably understood her role as correction and was probably quite upset that I wasn't grateful for her hard graft knocking my story into shape. But some time later another editor was happy enough to publish my original version, so it can't be all that bad! I don't want to make too big a deal of this – it was only one short story – but it still feels like a missed opportunity: that if we'd been able to really work together on it, we might have been able to come up with an improvement on the original.
It seems I'm not alone in the experience of having edits imposed on me. And it doesn't just happen in the world of fiction. Back in the days when I was publishing academic papers, I once had the laborious task of undoing the work of a copy editor who didn't understand what my text was supposed to be about, and I had to go through all those proofreading symbols to reinsert the meaning back into the piece. Fortunately, I've been able to work with other editors who have applied their creative and human relations skills to make this a truly collaborative process. It might be sorting out a clunky sentence. It might be nothing more complex than word order and punctuation. Once it was rewriting the story's ending. I find if I'm free to say no, I'm more likely to say yes to an editor's suggestions, but it's often when I say maybe that it gets interesting. That's when we find the in-between space, the ideas that neither of us would have thought of on our own. After the isolation of writing, it's lovely to find that connection through getting the work published, but it's especially lovely to have a positive editing experience first. So here's to Annie Rutherford my latest valiant editor, and my short story A Man Is Swinging (it's in The Back of Beyond). I was moaning recently how I wasn't content to be a writer, I wanted to be a published novelist. I still do, of course, but on the days that that seems an impossible dream, this amusing short story from David Howard is beautifully reassuring. Who wants their novels to go on sale for less than the price of a bookmark? Do take a look at my author interviews for debut novels that have done rather better and, to mark the latest interview with Charlotte Rogan, author of The Lifeboat, my next post is on three ways to make life harder for your protagonist. I won't even pretend I've got anything to say on this but merely refer you to
Rachelle Gardner. Who says I can't do economical? Once again I find myself urging another writer to publish his short stories, directing him to my website and the links to stories here. Afterwards I worry I might have come across as more hectoring than helpful (although I’m incubating a post exploring the notion that there may not be as wide a difference between the two as we like to think) and he’ll be disappointed at the dearth of information as to how to go about it. Time perhaps for the annethology guide to getting published? Counting up, when A House for the Wazungu and Peace-and-Quiet Pancake are released by their respective publishers, I’ll have thirty-seven short stories at large in the world. Perhaps I’d have had more credibility if I’d hung on for a nice round forty, but I was inspired by a recent post from Rowena reminding me of the beauty of primes, so I’m resolved to celebrate their quirkiness when I remember from now on. Either way, it’s more than the two dozen I’d had in mind, suggesting I might know something (if only in the sense of more than nothing) about short story publication for the nonprofessional. So, without more ado, here’s how: |
entertaining fiction about identity, mental health and social justice
Annecdotal is where real life brushes up against the fictional.
Annecdotist is the blogging persona of Anne Goodwin:
reader, writer, slug-slayer, tramper of moors, recovering psychologist, struggling soprano, author of three fiction books. LATEST POSTS HERE
I don't post to a schedule, but average around ten reviews a month (see here for an alphabetical list), some linked to a weekly flash fiction, plus posts on my WIPs and published books. Your comments are welcome any time any where. Get new posts direct to your inbox ...
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