Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Monday, 16 April 2012

Lucky 7 Scan

I have three children. I'm not talking about my daughters here, no, the children I refer to are my paper ones. The ones that have a beginning and an end and about a hundred thousand words between. 

Number One, I am sad to say, I'm greatly ashamed of. In fact, I'm so embarrassed by her I can't even bring myself to look at her. I had her when I was much younger, when I was naive and clumsy, when I wrote before I thought. I wasn't really ready to have her, and well, she wasn't quite right: poorly formed, over-excitable, a bit simple, and on occasion deathly boring. I had to shut her in the attic and lock the door. As the old adage goes, out of sight out of mind. Don't feel sorry for her, for all our sakes, it's best this way.

My second child, Number Two, I love very much. She's special to me. All my hopes were once pinned to her and for a while I thought she was 'it'. My glory girl. The one who'd look after me in my dotage. Finally, I thought, after all those years spent nurturing her and her attic-bound sister, I would get some reward. She was my X-factor auditionee. She did well in front of the panel of agent-judges. One was particularly taken with her and picked her for her team. After a fairly extreme makeover (a head-to-toe edit, two rewrites, and a lot of spit and polish) she was perfect in my eyes. Sadly, she didn't make it through to the live final. Now she lives under my bed, her beauty gathering dust, her voice ignored. I know, I'm a dreadful, neglectful mother, but what could I do? By then I had a new baby and I didn't have time for both.

I'm not supposed to say this, but Number Three is my favourite. We shouldn't have favourites, should we? It's just this one is that much more successful than the other two, and well, I find it difficult not to love her the best. Her debut is in August and we're both terribly excited. I'm nervous too - though I would never say this to her face - and every now and then (in fact, more often than not) I panic: I worry she's not that great after all, that, perhaps, when paraded in front of the world she might let me down. But my fingers are crossed. 

I'm right behind you, baby! 

Good luck, poppet!
 
And now I'm pregnant again. I know. I know. What was I thinking?! Don't I ever want to sleep? I've just got my life back and, BAM!, I'm doing it all over again. What can I say? I'm a floozy. I can't keep my pen in its lid. I just love the creational process. (And innuendo, I love innuendo, too.)

So when my friend, and talented writer, Cathy Dreyer tagged me with the Lucky 7 meme, which asks authors to provide an extract from their current work-in-progress, I thought, what better opportunity to share the first peek of my infant child. This is the equivalent of a twelve-week scan: 50,000 words in, narrative structure in place, and if you look carefully you can see a tiny heartbeat.

[The rules of the Lucky 7 meme are:
Go to page 7 or 77 of your current manuscript
Go to line 7
Post the next 7 lines or sentences, exactly as they are - no cheating
Tag 7 other authors to do the same]

He drew his eyes away from Jess and locked them on Will. Will's heart thumped, the heat of the midday sun beat down on him; he felt faint. It couldn't be him, could it? But there he was, standing right front of him, infecting this easy Sunday lunch with that darkest part of Will's past. Marcus smiled and held out his hand. Will didn't move.

"What a coincidence!" Amelia said. "When did you last see each other?"

I know, she looks like an alien mush - there's a lot of growing left to do - but I hope (fingers crossed) that she'll be pretty and healthy when she arrives. 

If not, there's lots of space in the attic with her older sister...

Monday, 31 October 2011

Dead Pets Society

What is read without doubt influences what is written. What is read in childhood, those first words that strike a chord, that ignite as yet unexplored emotions, will be fundamental to the development of a writer. My own writing is rather dark - families dealing with tragedy, battling to recover, desperate to cope again. Shortly after my book was accepted for publication Mum asked to read it. A few days later she handed it back to me, silent, her face downcast. I felt a stab of disappointment.
     "You didn't like it."
     "No, I did. It's good..." Her reticence was painful.
     "What's wrong with it?"
     She looked forlorn. "I just don't know what I did wrong. You seemed such a joyful child." She was right. My sister and I had very happy childhoods: we wanted for little, our opinions counted, and we were loved. We were fortunate.
     Poor Mum.
     I blame my reading material. My first memorable book (after the Enchanted Wood, the Famous Five, and every Asterix book I could lay my eight-year-old hands on) was Susan Cooper's monumental The Dark is Rising Sequence. I quite literally climbed on to her magic carpet and let her fly me to a world  of seventh sons of seventh sons, The Light versus The Dark, amulets, runes, Old Ones, Walkers and Sleepers. My heart raced and my hands scrabbled to turn the pages as I ate up her words. A year or two older and my need for that adrenalin hit took a darker turn. Bypassing the Judy Blumes and Jilly Coopers (okay, maybe I did read Riders, but wasn't that on the curriculum?), I landed upon Virginia Andrews. Her twisted, sinister writing found the dark nooks and crannies of my teenage brain and fed them incarcerated children, sibling incest, abuse and torture, and then finally the mind-altering paragraphs that described the family dog, tethered and dead, a bag of bones, sores around its neck from desperate attempts to reach the bowl of water left just inches beyond its reach. That hit me hard. We had a menagerie growing up. We have our own now. A life without animals around me is unthinkable. But I haven't yet written a story that doesn't include a dead pet.
     There's something vital about the abuse of a helpless animal, something that cuts through us, our humanity. Those trusting eyes, the unconditional love, the unwavering loyalty. Dead pets stir emotion. Think Glenn close and that poor boiled bunny. It’s such a powerful device, often used at the peak of the drama, when things have got really bad, when the last threads of decency have flown. It's not illegal to kill a pet (humanely, at least). And cruelty is rarely punished with anything more than a fine. Yet animal abuse is linked to psychopathic behavior with many serial killers admitting to it as a child. Put it this way, if your husband-to-be tells you he used to cut the tails off field mice as a boy, however gorgeous he is, I advise you to start backing towards the door, and when you get there, turn and run as fast as you can.
     After Virginia, Stephen King and James Herbert were my next beloveds (it was an 'open' relationship, my love divided equally between them), and both know a thing or two about using animals to ratchet tension. In King's The Dead Zone a Bible salesman beats a barking dog to death with a bible and in doing so we learn all we need to know about the man. In The Magic Cottage, Herbert conversely uses the miraculous recovery of a half-dead thrush to establish a feeling of elated happiness (his subsequent transformation of the cottage in the story from love-filled haven to menacing epicenter of evil, in my opinion, is a master class in tone and mood). Now, I don't write horror. I don't even read it anymore (though having just written this post I might well go and blow the dust of The Magic Cottage). The pets in my books aren't starved or beaten to death, but I have been known to run one over and have it lie undiscovered for a day or two. Thanks to the lessons I learnt as a child, there's nothing I find as symbolically emotive as a dead or dying pet. 
     So, Mum, do you believe me now? My fascination with grief and loss, and the appearance of the occasional maggoty cat, has absolutely nothing to do with you...unless, of course, you blame yourself for having such poor control over what I read. I mean, Virginia Andrews? Good God, woman, what on earth possessed you to leave me alone with her?