Normal progress will be resumed ...

This doesn't happen very often, in fact I think it's the first time since I started this blog that I've had to make this announcement - but as things stand I am 'finishing something' and that means not stopping the work to update you on thoughts and doings, dear reader. Usually I'm able to put work down and pick it up, but this one insists on not being put down. Weird.

Meantime, this is a Dublin paving stone, may it inspire you as much as it has me! I'll see you in a few days when - I hope - this story will be nailed and I'll be free to blog again ...

Zoetrope writer and accomplished eroticist Donna George Storey has recently had her novel, An Amorous Woman, published in the UK and the USA - she's had an interesting journey in many senses, on her way to publication, so I caught up with her and asked how she'd got into the writing business:

How did you get into writing erotica?

That’s an interesting question for me, because my initial response is that I didn’t get into writing erotica—erotica somehow got itself into me. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wondered what happened when the love scene faded to the candle flame, which was exactly when the interesting part was about to start. But I wasn’t comfortable enough with my sexuality or my writing skill to attempt to tell that story myself until I started writing “for real” in my mid-thirties. I quickly noticed that I couldn’t seem to write a story without a sex scene. No matter how hard I tried—and I actually did try to stay “clean”—erotic elements would creep into the story and that’s the part I found most fascinating to write. But still I tried to resist those urges. Then one day, I was cleaning a dresser drawer and found a pretty scarf my sister had given me for Christmas. I was wondering if I should keep it because I’m not an accessories person, and suddenly I was thinking up with all kinds of ways a couple could use it for bedroom games. These daydreams became my first erotic story. I totally abandoned myself to the experience of writing in a way I never had before—I woke up at 5 am to write more, cooked up new scenes as I did dishes, revised it endlessly, made my husband act out some of the scenes…. Eventually editors seemed to like my effort, too. “The Blindfold” (later revised into “Blinded”) has appeared in five publications. I’d found my calling!

Japan plays an integral part in your novel An Amorous Woman – what’s your relationship with that country?

Japan and I go way back. My family used to sing on car trips and my mother had a favourite song which had a line “those faraway places with the strange-sounding names are calling, calling to me.” They called to me, too, and the voices took on a decidedly Japanese accent when I developed my first big crush in high school. The object of my passion was reading James Clavell’s Shogun and since I didn’t have the nerve to actually speak with him, I figured the best way to get close was to read what he liked. The crush faded, but my interest in Japan remained. Later, in college, my favourite place to study was the Asian Languages library—it was practically deserted and the old books with all the strange writing smelled old and mysterious. There I saw a bulletin board advertising a program which helped students find English teaching jobs in Asia. I was feeling very unemployable as an English literature major and thought I’d give it a try. I studied Japanese my last year in college and loved it—the soft sounds, the layered honorifics, the flowing kana and almost martial Chinese characters that made me feel I was learning an ancient, secret code. When I actually arrived in Kyoto and started teaching and having lots of adventures, I was surprised at how “at home” I felt. In Japan, quiet, reflective people are thought to be deep, not boring as they are in the States! I stayed for two wonderful years, returned to the US to study Japanese in grad school and spent another year in Tokyo. Now you may be wondering how much of An Amorous Woman is based on personal experience. (I was, of course!) Plot-wise, the answer is maybe 25%. In terms of the sensual details or what you might call texture, every last bit comes from places I’ve visited, dinners I’ve eaten, people I’ve known both casually and intimately. As I was writing the novel, I was surprised at how vividly it came back to me. I felt exactly the same sense of yearning and loss as my protagonist, Lydia. Like her, I realized I’d had a love affair with a whole country.

What’s the best thing about being a writer?

Getting to sit at the computer in my pyjamas and make up stories stitched together from memory, fantasy, a glimpse of a man’s sexy hand at the coffee shop, a strange adventure a friend told me about last week….

And what’s the worst thing?

Rejection. I’ve gotten better at dealing with it. It took weeks to recover from my first—a nasty rejection of a translation the editor called “wooden.” Now the punch-to-the gut sensation lasts more like minutes, but it still stings.

What’s the one mistake you made, when starting out, that still haunts you?

After my academic book got a brief review in The New York Times, Will Allison from the now-defunct STORY magazine called and asked if I had translated any short stories he could consider for publication. I sent a translation and, at my writing group’s suggestion, sent one of my own stories as well, a rather half-baked one. But I’d just won a fiction contest with a piece I thought was really good and I realize I should’ve sent that to show him what I could do. He wouldn’t have accepted it anyway, but as a newbie, I thought I had a chance and I’d get in trouble (not to mention I could’ve withdrawn from the contest if the impossible had happened and he wanted it). His rejection was nice as they go, but I still felt I’d blown a good chance. But STORY is gone and I’m still writing, so I guess it’s okay!

What advice would you give somebody who is thinking of becoming a writer of erotic fiction?

I could go on and on, but I’ll pick two. First, all the rules of good storytelling apply to erotic fiction as well—you need conflict, complex and interesting characters, vivid detail. A touch of humour doesn’t hurt. Beginners are often so carried away by the taboo-breaking excitement of writing an erotic scene, they end up with a blow-by-blow description of a sexual encounter that offers little else. We all need to go through that phase, and then we need to move on.

The second bit of advice is to create a “safe” space for yourself when you’re writing sex. No one is watching you: no parents or teachers or ministers. Not even God—She’s on coffee break. Then when you’re all alone, you can tell the truth and get wild!

And what advice would you give writers hoping to be published in this field?

As in all writing, research the markets, and be honest with yourself if there is a match between the kinds of things they publish and what you write. The Erotic Readers and Writer’s Association Call for Submissions page is where I began to educate myself. It’s an excellent resource. The other thing I still tell myself over and over is to focus on the writing. If you write about things that fascinate you, if you write with passion, editors will eventually pick up on that and they’ll publish you. It may take a while, but persistence does pay off. The business might not pay so well, but it does feel very rich indeed to see your by-line.

Publicising works of an erotic nature can be complicated; it requires you to be sensitive to issues that more ‘mainstream’ writers don’t have to address, like the age of potential views of your material. You’ve put together quite a programme for yourself – can you explain what you’ll be doing to let the ‘right’ people know about your book?

The programme is just beginning—we’ll see how it goes! Book promotion is quite a job. In my case, I do need to tread carefully because there are age issues and some people are offended by sexually explicit material. For the most part I’m approaching reviewers and bloggers in the erotica community, although I do think my novel offers a literary experience as well. To me that means, my story challenges assumptions about sex and intercultural relations in a way that hopefully arouses the mind as well as the libido. My inspiration for the novel, the 17th century novel The Life of an Amorous Woman by Ihara Saikaku, mixes in plenty of social critique and humour with the sex and I tried my best to do the same. So I’d love to get the word out to a larger audience and show them I’m offering more than a one-handed read. If anyone has any good ideas, send them my way.

Is there something else you can see yourself doing if you weren’t a writer?

I’d run a tea room where people could sit for hours, reading, chatting and trying out my “taste test” treats—say three small dishes of custard made with different vanillas or three different chocolate cookies. There’d be healthy food, too, lavish salads and thick soups made with seasonal organic vegetables. Running a successful restaurant is one of the few things more difficult and exhausting than making a living as a writer, so I wish my alternate life was more financially reliable—working as a plumber or something--but I do believe you have to follow your passion!

If you were abandoned on a desert island, with just one book for company, what would it be?

I’d have to pack my NIHON DAI SAIJIKI (Dictionary of the Japanese Seasons), an illustrated dictionary for writers of Japanese haiku. It’s divided into five sections—one for each season and one for the new year season. Each entry has several examples of classic poems and each page has several full-colour photographs or reproductions of artwork. It’s candy for both the mind and the eye. It would certainly take a while to work through all 1648 pages and I’d learn a lot while I was waiting for that rescue boat!

You can buy Donna's book via: Waterstone’s, Maxim’s Murder One, and online at Amazon.co.uk and Blackwell in the UK, while in the USA you can order it from her direct http://donnageorgestorey.home.mindspring.com/aw.html#buy - even before it hits the Amazon.com shelves!

In Dublin's Fair City ...

which is where I was on Sunday and Monday. And it was a truly enlightening experience. Not because it was new - I've been to Dublin half a dozen times in my life, sometimes work, sometimes pleasure, usually a mixture of the two - but because I was travelling with my son, and his Dublin turned out to be a very different place to mine.

You see, I reckoned I knew Dublin pretty well, particularly the parks and gardens, which I've researched in some depth. But Kai's Dublin opened up new areas of the city, and new experiences, and gave me a completely fresh perspective on the place I thought I knew so well.

First - there isn't a damn pub in the city that plays live music and allows under 21s in. So my usual practice of buying a glass of Guinness in a couple of bars and listening to music didn't work - and that was a total pain because one of the reasons we went to Dublin was for Kai to experience some traditional Irish music. I'd never thought of the city centre as being ageist, but after we passed two pubs with 'over-23's only' signs on the door, I really began to wonder ...

Second - if you're a woman alone in Dublin, you get talked to all the time. Not just be men who hit on you, although they do, but by everybody. If one of you is six feet tall, male and has long hair, that level of craic just doesn't happen. I walked through Dublin with Kai in a kind of bubble ... normally I complain about how often I end up trapped in conversations with male drunks or elderly women who want to tell me the history of the city, but not once did we have that happen this time.

Third - we went to different places and saw different things. Usually my practice is to say hello to Joyce (aka the prick with the stick) and Molly (the tart with the cart) on my way round the city, to wave at Wilde through the railings but to eat my lunch sat next to Eire. This time we found completely new statues, in totally different places, which was really the purpose of our visit because Kai wanted to visit his hero - Phil Lynott. (That's me with Thin Lizzy's lead man by the way - and yes, he is gorgeous close up!)

What it all added up to was this. Seeing the place through another's eyes completely changed my perspective. So it is with writing - the Dublin I would have written about before Sunday didn't have all these extra resonances and layers, some good, some bad. It's as if I'd been forced to change genre, write Dublin in my head as a road novel not a domestic drama, and in that enforced rewriting, I saw different truths. Amazing. Quite frightening in a way, to see how blinkered we can be by our own experience. But very interesting ... I think I can see something here I want to turn into a story.

Dealing with reviews

After the Booker judge lambasted reviewers, and my own recent reading of Simon Gray's excellent memoir The Year of the Jouncer, my advice is - don't. Just don't deal with them. Unless you have the hide of The Terminator, the self-belief of a TV evangelist and the waterproof feathers of a duck, you're bettering off not knowing. I know this is provocative but I mean it.

Look at it this way:

1 - the reviewer isn't writing the review to help you, but to help the buying public. A review on that basis will almost certainly sting at some point (often a point where you had no input anyway, but that won't stop it stinging believe me) and won't improve your writing because that's not its purpose (I know, I review for several places, sometimes even under my own name!)

2 - If you read any food writer's commentary you'll find that they loathe certain foods with a passion (eg white chocolate, pineapple fritters from the chinese takeaway etc - okay, Nigel Slater is an exception to this rule) which - oddly enough - are the very foods that an extraordinarily high percentage of the population consider to be their favourite and illicit treats. What does this tell us? Simply that there is one rule for writers about food and another for consumers of food and the same people who love to watch chefs on TV eat the very foods they castigate. In the same way there's one rule for book reviewers and another for book readers and if you confuse the two you may end up writing for reviewers rather than readers.

3 - Your publisher thought the book/story/poem/play was good enough to run with. Why damage your relationship with them by letting a reviewer stand between you? Because - be honest here - if the reviewer says it wasn't good enough, who are you going to blame for letting you go ahead? Yup, the very people who've helped you get this far; agents, editors and publishers. Doubt and blame can corrode any relationshop, but especially a commercial one based on risk. You have people you trust who advise you on your writing, why put your self esteem in the hands of a stranger who may not have your best interests at heart and certainly isn't thinking about your relationship with your publisher when he or she writes about your work. Your publisher will read the reviews, but that's another story - their job is to suck it up and move on. Make sure you tell them you don't want to know, not the bad ones, nor even the good ones, you just don't want to know.

4 - What you don't know can't hurt you nearly as much as what you do know. If your mum rings and says you had an okay review in the Guardian (or the Go-Kart Quarterly, come to that) thank her nicely and say you'd rather not know right now as it might distract you from what you're working on. Your reviews soon become old news for everybody except you and if you can learn to live in ignorance of them, you can spare yourself a lot of pain for some uncertain pleasure.

And what brought all that on? Thanking my lucky stars that I don't write plays - because the way Simon Gray describes attending First Nights as a writer almost brought me out in a rash. The mixture of shame and embarrassment he describes, the horror of hearing his words spoken from the stage, the second-guessing of the critics in the audience ... the depiction is enough to give most average-skinned writers nightmares.

Like Simon Gray I've had the odd experience of having a friend ring me to urge me to read a review saying 'You'll love it' only to obtain the damned thing and find out that it was less than flattering. So reviews can damage friendships as well as psyches. As a writer, I suggest you do without them if you can.

The Taxi Driver Scenario

People sometimes ask me how different life is, now I've become a writer - it's a question I've never really known how to answer, perhaps because what (to most people) were the highlights of my former career: international travel, meeting politicans and business leaders, wearing Armani - didn't thrill me that much.

So perhaps this will explain how life works, for a full-time writer.

On Sunday, coming back from the woods, I was cut up by a taxi driver who pulled into my lane, forcing me almost into the central barrier, because his lane was blocked and while he could clearly see it was, he thought (rightly) he could force me to brake so he could get in front of me, instead of sitting in his lane with his indicator on until there was a gap in the traffic. Given that it would have been either my husband in the passenger seat, or the two dogs in the back, who would have been hit by this maniac, I could do nothing but cede him the road, and hit my horn impotently.

I did get his number though.

Continuing the journey home, I thought about how to make my complaint. Should I ring or write? Write obviously, except ... could they tell who'd been driving the cab? I know that many taxi drivers (two in my street for example) time-share their cabs with family members, so it might be difficult ... and did I want the cab driver to know my address?

From writing a complaint my mind moved to writing more generally. Suppose the driver followed the cabbie? Well, a woman wouldn't, or I wouldn't, anyway, so the driver would have to be a man. They could be a confrontation but that wouldn't be very interesting so ...

Suppose the driver followed the cabbie, made a complaint and then was subjected to a campaign of harassment - cars parked across his drive, his vehicle scratched, his tyres let down, pizzas delivered to his door etc. But no, that was just DUEL without the scenery or, really, the drama.

Suppose the driver was beaten up by the cabbie's mates - and then ... no. Boring.

Suppose the whole thing was done through non-contact, like the original incident. A letter of complaint. A reply. The complainant's drive blocked by cars. The police called. The car owners summonsed. Their non-appearance in court. His house reported as the abode of a paedphile ... hmmm. Not bad but actually, more arty and farty than a story. Too much artifice, not enough plot.

Ah but - suppose he followed the cab driver, and was all set to argue, and she turned out to be an older woman who immediately got the better of him verbally. So he didn't complain because he was embarrassed about being bested by a woman, and she came round to apologise, but they ended up arguing again ... yes, yes, and yes. That's the story I'm writing.

And the point of all this. Can you guess?

In all my ruminations, I forgot the bloody cab numberplate.

Life does not imitate art

So this is my day. Last night (week two of the radio play course) fascinating, rewarding, so much to understand and learn and me definitely with the most to learn as all the other students seem to have much more dramatic experience than me.

Hit the bed with ideas for the first scene of my play running round my head, knowing that I have a heavy day's editing to get through but hoping to snatch a few minutes to rough out (block out, as we drama types say, I discover) the scene.

Instead, at 06.20 I am woken by Tony, telling me the bathroom is leaking. This less than precise statement can be explained by the fact that the bathroom currently has no sink (it fell in half) and no radiator and is in a state of semi-demi-everything. Part repainted, part retiled, part floorboards lifted etc. This is the bathroom we inherited when we moved in - 1930s tiles with 1960s artexing and 1970s baby-vomit coloured wash suite and (for reasons we'd rather not consider) a jaundiced baby-vomit coloured toilet (what happened to the original toilet? We'd probably rather not know). We vowed nine years ago to 'sort it out' - now we have no choice.

I run downstairs, set buckets under the drips falling from the ceiling. Tony locates the leak (radiator pipe) rips up more damp and rotten floorboards, leaves me basic instructions about how to dry the place out, and leaves for work.

I pour tea and open the back door. Out rushes one Cairn terrier, while the other limps apologetically past me, ears flat. Limps?

Yes, the limp that Rebus developed on his Sunday scramble in the woods is back and worse, much worse. So I pick him up and carry him down the garden. Rebus would walk on broken glass without complaint, so any manifestation of injury is worrying.

The rest of the day does not improve. The vet charges me £30 to tell me he can't find anything wrong and we should return in seven days, or if it gets worse. I feel like telling him it already got worse, but I have to go home and wring out towels etc so that I can get the bathroom dry enough to vacuum up the rotten wood and other debris before the man comes round to measure for a new window. So I rush out and return to general clearing up duties before editing duties before writing duties ...

Then the vacuum conks out.

So today is not one of my vintage days. There will be better days and I hope they start tomorrow, but as far as 11 October goes, it can't end fast enough.

So - I have a story live ...

Which means published online, as if you didn't know, as opposed to published in print.

I don't know what goes through other writers' heads when they get something published, but I'm about to be honest about what goes through mine ...

Is anybody going to read it? Does it look good on the page; are there typos, or horrible illustrations or - even worse - crappy adverts that make me and my story look bad? Is the other work published with it good, better than mine, worse than mine, awful? Do the stories complement or trash each other? Has the editor made minor changes without telling me (or even major ones - it happens) and am I happy with them? Is anybody going to read it?

Well, I'm happy to say that on this occasion I'm filled with good thoughts, not bad ones - I've been reading pulp.net for a long time, so I knew I was comfortable with the editor's approach, and I love the idea of grouping works around a theme, something like a mini-anthology for the iPod generation, the illustration pleases me, the other stories are good to read and the only changes that were made to my work were good ones and shown to me in advance for comment ... so having said all that - are you going to read it?

http://www.pulp.net/53/the-baddie.html

Readings (the other side of the story)

I have a terrible confession, especially after my blog about people who don't read. I don't read poetry! I'm a lazy tyke and I find poetry on the page is quite hard work, so I just don't read it. However, I'm not entirely without hope, because I do love to hear poetry and I could happily sit and listen to poets reading their own work all day (and all night, but that's another story). So when I know a poet I admire is giving a reading, I will generally break my reclusive habits to go along.

This is John McCullough, reading from his new collection Cloudfish last night at Joogleberry's in Brighton. It was a short but very intense reading and because I already knew John's work, I was prepared to grab a table right at the front and sit with my eyes closed, because his poems are dense with ideas and visual images, and require quite a bit of concentration to get the most out of them when they are being read aloud. I'm indebted too, to Ellen de Vries, another poet, who condensed my fantasy about having a poet in every room of my home, ready to read aloud, into the phrase 'poets in cupboards' which explains why she is a poet and I am not!

I came home on the bus, still enthralled by 'Tropospheric' - a poem that explores how clouds view the land, and looking forward to my next poetry reading ...

Reading for writing

I'm involved in a number of discussions, in a number of forums, about the value of reading for writers - and my views on this are vehement.

Let me put it this way: if a writer tells me they 'don't read' I'm immediately suspicious of their writing commitment.

This is not to say that reading isn't more difficult when you write. It is. It's like picture framing (bear with me, that does make sense) when you're an artist. I have two friends who both paint and make the frames for their paintings. When we go to a gallery, their attention is divided between art: the painting/sculpture/installation - and craft: the frame/plinth/stand. This means that they struggle to focus entirely on the value of the artwork because they are aware of the underpinning practicalities, "that mount's badly cut" one will say, and the other will add, "yes, but the moulding quality is first rate."

So it is with writing - as a reader alone you look on the novel, play or verse as an artform. When you write as well as read you become aware of all the craft aspects: the layout on the page, the paper quality, the words the writer uses too much or not enough, the tropes and themes and stylistic tics, the work of the editor and whether it's heavy-handed or too light ... and all that interferes with the way you enjoy the writing as a whole.

But that's no excuse. There are plenty of good works in good formats with which nobody could find fault, and if the idea of excellence exceeding your own capacity depresses you, you're in the wrong business: you should read for an understanding of the best that is possible in the world of writing.

You should also read for fun (I read crime novels for pleasure), for an understanding of your chosen field of work (which means science fiction, erotica and literary fiction for this writer) and for craft (books on writing) as well as reading for research (my current research pile includes Dutch royal gardens, Victorian automata and the history of Sri Lanka, for example) - if you don't do this; if you only write, you're not a player. Instead, you're sitting in the corner, sucking your thumb.

I do mean this. Why should anybody read your work if you don't read anybody else's? How can you be sure you know where to submit your work if you don't read the places you send your work to? Which editor should devote time to your masterpiece if you've never even glanced at the quality of their craftsmanship? Above all - how do you locate yourself in the big, competitive and exciting world of fiction if you don't know where the other players are and what they are doing?

You don't have to read fast, or master all the classics (although it's good to read the classics), you don't have to make notes or have impressive opinions - but you do have to swim in the sea of literature, if you want to be a player.