Absent

I’m sorry, I’ve been a little absent of late.  I’ve been busy talking to myself.

I haven’t read out loud so much since Magdalene Lower Secondary School when I went kicking and screaming to my role as Lady Rowena in the play which for the life of me I cannot remember the title. I do remember my long, blue cotton dress, however, with its flouncy Edwardian sleeves and a crocheted head band calming my frizzy tresses. And I also recall talking a lot of rhubarb in hushed whispers as my fellow ‘ladies’ and I held court at the edge of the stage.

Destined for stardom I was not.

Yet there is something quite invigorating about speaking out loud.  My characters have taken on a new life again. I haven’t read my whole book in great chunks like this for months, so obsessed have I been with le mot juste, eradicating my abundance of semi-colons (where, pray, did they come from?), checking my indents and crucially extending the white space from two lines to three. 

But these past few weeks I’ve been re-acquainted with my old friends who make up the small society of Glass Houses.  I’ve been worrying about Main Character, Tori, again, crying for her predicament (yes, real tears) and have been reminded that if I wasn’t married to my wonderful man (who lets me write while he does proper work, you’ve got to love him, haven’t you?), Doug would be the one for me.

Submitting is a lonely business, tiresome, I find - all that waiting to hear something, anything.  I swear I’ve developed a nervous twitch in my forefinger, clicking on the mouse every two minutes to speed up Send/Receive in the hope that this time my in-box will display the wonderful words, ‘Yes!  Send the rest of your story now, goddamnit!’

But reading Glass Houses has been great therapy.  It’s reminded me that these characters have a story to tell and that they’d really like somebody to listen.  For their benefit, because I love them all, their foibles notwithstanding, I will keep plugging away.

Happy reading (out loud) everyone!

Dragon’s Den for Wannabe Authors

Last week I practically read my whole book out loud. Yep, (almost) all of the 95,000 words. It was illuminating. People always say you should read your work out loud and boy, does it show up those howlers. It felt a bit weird at first, sitting in my little study, in the empty house, feigning a cockney accent and moving quickly back to one from Northumberland. But after a while I was gesticulating with the best of them, get me a stage and I’d have cheerfully paced every inch of it, throwing my hands into the air in an alternating show of dismay and elation.

My reason for this? I needed to find the best 300-500 words to read out at the York Writers’ Festival during the weekend of 9 April. It took me to chapter twenty one to find a section which I felt had all the requirements: energy, dialogue and a hook to pull the audience into wanting more. A few more runs through on my stage and I was happy. I cut and pasted the extract, reworked my single paragraph synopsis, composed my two sentences to set the scene and emailed them all post-haste to the festival organisers.

Nervous? Terrified! If I get chosen to participate I will be given one of about fifteen, five minute slots on the first evening of the festival, to pitch my book to an audience of a few hundred fellow wannabe authors (happily drinking) interspersed with those magical beings: agents. They say it’s just a bit of fun. But who doesn’t harbour the smatterings of a dream that an agent pricks up his/ her ears and secretly scribbles down the name, away from other eyes because they don’t want you, this sure thing, to be stolen from them?

But human beings are funny creatures. I had mixed feelings about entering. I batted around the question for a few days. After all, this has the potential to give my book that bump up the ladder of writing that it sorely needs. Read badly, choose badly, and I could do myself more harm than good.

But as soon as I found out that I might not be chosen to read, I wanted to be on that stage more than anything. Isn’t the best way to find out whether you really want something, to take it away? It is in my case, if I don’t get chosen, I’ll always wonder. If I do get chosen and make an idiot of myself on stage, I’ll simply have to use a pseudonym, have a face transplant and emigrate to America.