What makes YOU take a book from the shelf?

It’s a question that every bookshop, publisher and agent ponders. It’s a question that every writer should ponder too, if they want to make a living from writing. Covers matter, and titles matter. And I'll be talking about covers in a while But when it comes to titles, there are some rules (with their exceptions):

• The Tale of… is a guaranteed way to title a book that won’t get published (except for the curiously similar The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time)
• Single word titles are masculine (apart from Perfume and Chocolat, of course)
• The + verb is for horror (The Shining etc)
• Oppositions work – as in War and Peace, From Here to Eternity, To Have and Have Not, Crime and Punishment …

The main thing to remember is that a title needs to be memorable! And the second, nearly as important thing to remember, is that you the writer will have become familiar with your working title and so it will ‘feel’ good to you. An agent or publisher will come to it cold, and it may not ‘feel’ nearly so good to them. So which do you want - a perfect title or a published piece of work?

Right, I'm sure we agree it's the latter (don't we?) so if your publisher/editor/agent isn’t keen on your title, brainstorm until you come up with a shortlist of six or so and try them out – you may discover that one of them is actually much better than your original.

All of which sounds great, and as if I know what I’m doing, so why am I completely blank when it comes to thinking up alternative titles for my current novel …

Illness strikes

My house is like a plague zone - another Bank Holiday weekend will bite the dust. Back when Florence Nightingaling permits, with musings on titles and covers and what makes people pick certain books from bookshelves.

Illness courtesy of ghindo

Carmel gets her way

As regular readers will know, I have a tripartite writing personality: Kay Sexton writes literary fiction, Ren Holton writes science fiction and a bit of horror and Carmel Lockyer writes erotica.

Carmel’s been having a good couple of months on the quiet: a story accepted by Forum, another by Scarlet, one in the Mammoth Book of the Kama Sutra, which has just been published, and one in the charity anthology Burlesque Against Breast Cancer, where she keeps company with a writer whose own erotic novel has been reviewed here, Donna George Storey.

So what can I tell you about writing erotica that won’t sound like lines from a Carry On movie? You have to love what you do (snigger), it’s important to be able to deliver on time and on target (giggle) and variety is the spice of life (guffaw).

But it’s all true – writing good erotica is as difficult as writing anything else and doing it consistently requires the same kind of dedication as any other writing – but there is one crucial difference and its one that a lot of people simply don’t seem to understand, from the erotica slush piles I read – erotica, by definition, is about good sex. GOOD sex. Not brutal nasty sex, nor depressing miserable sex nor even jokey so-bad-it’s-good sex. For erotica to get into the marketplace it has to allow at least one character, and the reader, to get to the end with a smile on their face. So there. You may now titter.

Erotic flower courtesy of anyjazz65

The second Australian publication ...


… arrived in the post on Friday. Sadly it wasn’t accompanied by another bar of Green & Black’s chocolate so I must accept without equivocation that magazines in which I feature, even if all the way from the Antipodes, do not necessarily arrive on the same day as a free bar of chocolate from the eponymous company. One swallow does not a summer make and one buckshee chocolate bar in the same postal delivery as an Australian magazine does not a trend make. Sad, but true.

Still, nothing sad about Etchings – I like the concept of this issue, ‘The History of …’ and although the only thing I’ve had a chance to absorb so far is a photo essay about a forgotten Australian ballroom by Yenny Huber and Géraud Boursin, I’m well contented to know my work is alongside theirs, and as I already know the quality of writing of this issue's interviewee, Antoni Jach, whose experimental novel, Napoleon’s Double is, well, complex (imagine Umberto Eco’s themes, as written by Raymond Carver and it’s nothing like that, but that’s the best I can do for you) but well worth the effort, I am happy, happy, happy.

Chocolate-free, but happy.

Cracking on

What inspires you to write? Is it the words, the idea, the characters in your head? Deadlines? Competitions? A stunning first line? Wanting to earn money?

Okay, that last one is silly, forget I said it. You’d be better off getting a paper round, as everybody knows, than trying to make a career from fiction. Doesn’t stop us trying though, does it?

The reason I ask is that one of the things that inspires me to write is challenges. It can be something as simple as my son saying ‘Bet you can’t write a story about a tree’ – which led to a novella set in the New Forest and due to be published next year. Or it could be the remote and intangible possibility of something you want very much.

I recently had an essay accepted by a publication I’m half in love with. And then the editor mentioned there might be the faintest chance that I could get a bursary to go and read my essay in New York. It turned out that the week of the reading was a week I was fully committed to spending with A.L. Kennedy and Eric Gill on an Arvon course in the Scottish Highlands, so scratch one trip to the Big Apple.

And then I thought …


Maybe I could get onto next year’s reading schedule?

Of course that meant having another essay accepted, and that required writing another essay. Which I did. Which was promptly rejected. So I wrote another, which was accepted, but for 2010. So I’m working on another, and another …

And slowly it’s become a habit to try and write for them, with the side product of a second acceptance, plus an essay that was rejected which I shall try to place elsewhere. And, in the best possible way, I’ve developed a relationship with a great editor which I could never have dreamed of - just because I rose to the challenge.



Very red bento courtesy of the allotment

Never give up – never give in

Crimewave had a story of mine that got put in the wrong drawer. Then they found it again and decided to publish it. Yippee! It would have been better, perhaps, if I’d given them a gentle nudge about six months or so ago, which might have caused them to open that right/wrong drawer sooner, but I always find that life is too short to query submissions: I’d rather tidy the cutlery drawer. I am officially chuffed - Crimewave is a top-gun publication in my book.

On the other hand, an Indian publisher has had a piece of mine (and many other writers presumably) for over two years. Two years! And they just sent me copy edits. Well, they said they were copy edits. I say they were a joke. I started re-editing the copy editors copy edits but found that once again, life was too short. I just did a page to show the commissioning editor why I was withdrawing my piece immediately and without negotiation. To whit:

My original text - She'd flogged all the jewellery, the good clothes, the CDs, everything. The TV, Mum's sewing machine and three piece suite had been left behind when she ran.

Their version - She[KS1] had flogged all the jewellery, good clothes, CDs, TV, mum's sewing machine and three piece suite was left behind when she ran.
________________________________________
[KS1] Nonsensical wording, mine is two sentences that show the TV, sewing machine and suite were left behind, not that they were sold!

My original text - Now she rented a room for cash: no laundry, no cooking (toaster and kettle grudgingly permitted), no visitors, and communal bathroom with a fifty pence meter for the bath

Their version - Now she rented a room but no laundry[KS1] , no cooking (toaster and kettle grudgingly permitted), no visitors, and communal bathroom with a 50 pence meter for the bath.
________________________________________
[KS1]Again, nonsensical, of course she didn't rent a laundry! The original wording shows that she has a room IN WHICH she is forbidden to do laundry, ie she cannot wash her clothes there.

So win one, lose one. But I did buy lots more chocolate to console myself, then somebody (thanks Brian!) facebooked me some, and then a dear soul actually delivered the real thing, in person (you know who you are, sweetness) and so I am chocolate-replete.

PS - that's me, in case you were wondering. Annual photo, just to prove I exist.

Apocalypse and rejections

So, I forgot all about this acceptance until a vibrant copy of Apocalypse Literary Arts turned up in the post. Sadly, it wasn’t in tandem with another chocolate and dried fruit bar from Green & Blacks (but I live in hope that the next magazine publication will repeat the dual delights of Wet Ink and Green & Blacks!) but one can’t have everything.

I do like this cover – nicely designed and full of detail instead of being either blatant or boring (I have ‘issues’ with many literary magazines and their cover art choices) but I could pick a little bone with the typeface used for the interior: it’s just not as black as it should be, and as it’s a sans serif font, it really needs the crispness of good contrast to be an easy read. The content, once you’ve strained your eyes a little, is a nice blend of poetry and short fiction, quite crisp in style and definitely youthful without being juvenile.

The only problem with going on holiday is the rejections – six of them had piled up when I got home! When they turn up one a day, or one every couple of days, it’s not so obvious, but when you get to wade through four online and two postal rejections in an hour, it can dent the psyche. I ate a Walnut Whip and the dent was smoothed out as if a psychic panel-beater had come along and knocked me back into shape!

On the other hand … (and there is always another hand, if you look for it sensibly) I’m reading for Our Stories this year, and it’s an interesting experience. I try to read for a different journal every year, as that exposes me to a very wide range of writers and writing: of course it’s voluntary work so I need to measure the time I give to slush reading against the learning process it delivers to me. Here’s what I’ve garnered from my first month’s reading:

There are new clichés in literary fiction that should be avoided. This year a lot of writers are exploring what it means to visit a foreign country: Russia, Afghanistan, China, Lima have all turned up in my slush – and in each case the protagonist doesn’t speak the language, is going to college, and sees or experiences something inexplicable. Hmmm … does nobody ever go abroad having learnt the language, or to work? Does nobody ever go abroad aged six or sixty? Why are foreigners inexplicable? Bearing in mind that I’m a foreigner myself, and I speak two languages, and lived abroad for several years before I went to college, this world view is as inexplicable to me as foreigners are to the writers I’ve been rejecting. The thing is, all these stories feel the same and read very similarly, and while none of them started with somebody waking up in the morning or the weather conditions (two big no-nos of writing), most of them ended with some event of inexplicability that was very much like ‘and then I woke up’ (the third big no-no) slightly transformed into ‘I saw this weird thing happen and then I went home’.

So rejected on one hand, and rejecting on the other, without any Green & Black’s chocolate (but that’s okay as I don’t have a third hand to hold it in – see how stoic I am?) I am looking forward to August and swimming on Brighton Beach - there's always something to do to get you over rejection!