Lifting the lid on the editing process

Today I'm the guest of fellow Crooked Cat author Carol Hedges, talking about the role of the editor.  

If you want to find out more, click here.

Guest of the RNA

Today I have the honour of being the guest of the prestigious Romantic Novelists' Association.  I'm over on their blog, talking about how I came to write The Ghostly Father.

Click here to hop over there and see what I have to say.

STRANGER THAN FICTION

Ten years ago this week, I received, out of the blue, a letter which went on to change my life.  It was to spark off a chain of events which led, a few months later, to my meeting up with the family that I never in my wildest dreams imagined I would ever know.  

It is a long and complicated story, and the whole thing would probably fill an entire book, but the piece that follows is just one small part of it.  During the past ten years I have shared it with family and a few close friends, but now perhaps the time is right for it to have a wider audience.

Tissues at the ready?

THE PHOTOGRAPH

I’ve always been bizarrely fascinated by the kind of stories in which long-lost relatives are finally reunited, and their relationship is ultimately proved, by means of a pair of long-separated objects.  But these stories belong in the realm of fairy tales with unexpected happy endings, not in the real world.  Or so I’d always thought…

As a product of the post-war baby-boom, I was born at a time when money was scarce and luxuries were even scarcer.  For much of my childhood the family didn’t even own a camera, so photographs of my early years are very few and far between.  Hence, the ones which do exist (mostly taken on borrowed Box Brownies) have become all the more valuable.  Which might explain why I’ve kept them all – including one particular picture which, for my whole life, I’ve never really liked.

The photograph is a grainy black-and-white 3” x 2” enprint.  It was taken at my first Christmas, when I was four months old, and shows me (dressed in my best but still baby-bald) sitting propped up on cushions on a dark velvet-upholstered sofa.  I appear to be waving at the camera and half-smiling.  The photo could have been quite pleasing, if it had been a simple above-the-waist shot:

But it isn’t.  It’s a full-frontal.  And thanks to the low angle of the camera and a very unfortunate pose, the picture is dominated by a most unflattering expanse of terry-towelling nappy.

Many a time, when I’ve come across my baby photos during a periodic clear-out, I’ve glared at this pre-pubescent knicker-flasher and reached for the waste paper basket.  But somehow (by divine intervention?) she has always found her way back into the photo box…

*

For as long as I could remember, one of my favourite childhood bedtime stories was the one about how "we chose you to be our very special little girl."  Brought up as an only child, and with little or no knowledge of the facts of life (That Sort Of Thing was just not talked about), I accepted this at face value and had no idea that it was in any way out of the ordinary.  It was only during my first year at secondary school, when adoption was being discussed in a biology lesson, that I finally twigged what that bedtime story actually meant.

The rest of that school day passed in a blur, then back at home I plucked up the courage to ask.  In a way, I suppose I had always known (my adoptive parents were wonderfully frank; they had never attempted, or intended, to conceal it from me), but the inescapable truth still came as a shock.  I was shown the birth and adoption certificates which were issued when my adoption was finalised.  They showed the date of my birth (which I already knew), and that I had been born in Wales (which I didn't know), but contained no other information apart from my post-adoption name.  And for many years after that, it never crossed my mind that I might have had a different name at birth.  Nor did I imagine, at that stage, that being an adoptee might make any significant difference to my life.  I was, and had always been, part of the only family I had known – and in any case, adoption was a one-way ticket.

Or at least, it was – until a change in the law in 1975 made it possible to open doors which had previously remained firmly closed.

And so it was that some time after my adoptive parents died, I made a few tentative enquiries – and eventually obtained a copy of my original birth certificate.  This was when I discovered, for the first time, that my name had not always been Susan.  I had begun life, and had spent the six months before my adoption was legalised, as Edwina.

Further enquiries revealed that my birth parents had subsequently married – and I later discovered that they had even tried, at that point, to get me back.  They went on to have two more children, both boys, and had emigrated to Australia in the 1960s, where my father had died in 1982 and where my brothers (both married and with families of their own) and my mother (who has since remarried) are still living. 

How we finally made contact – and why my parents had not been able to keep me – is another story entirely.  But during the early email exchanges which frequently flew between Manchester and Melbourne, one of my brothers told me that when our mother learned that I had been found, she had shown him a photograph of me as a baby.  I was very moved to learn that she had wanted to keep some small memento of the daughter she had been forced to give away – and even more moved to think that she should still have it, almost half a century later.  He borrowed it from her, scanned it and emailed it to me.  The attachment was labelled “edwina_baby.jpeg”:

Any doubts which I might have had about having finally found my birth family vanished the moment I opened the attachment.  The very photograph which I had always hated had been the very one that my mother had always loved…                                    

Challenging Traditional Views

Today I have the honour to be the blog guest of my dear friend Ailsa Abraham.  I'm talking about how my two novels both throw down the gauntlet to traditional (and sometimes inappropriate) attitudes.  

Click here to hop over and take a look!

Not the Booker Prize

I've just been told that The Ghostly Father has made it to the longlist for the Guardian 2014 Not the Booker Prize award!

There's some pretty stiff competition out there, and I'll be very surprised if it gets any further.  But all the same, I'd like to say a big THANK YOU to everyone who nominated it, and to everyone who (I hope) will cast a vote for it before the deadline of midnight on Sunday 3 August.

All details (including how to vote) can be found here.

In the meantime, I'm off to pour myself a very large drink...

Goodreads Reviews

I haven't looked at Goodreads for a while, but I was pleasantly surprised to see the lovely reviews for The Ghostly Father.  Thank you everyone! 

WHO WRITES ABOUT PLACE? - A guest post by Miriam Drori

Today I'm honoured to welcome on to my blog my great friend and writing buddy Miriam Drori.  

Miriam and I first "met" back in 2012, when we were students in the same online romance-writing workshop.  Since then we have met in person twice, when Miriam has visited the UK.  And our novels from that workshop have now both been published by Crooked Cat.

One thing I noticed particularly about Miriam's novel, Neither Here Nor There (set partly in Jerusalem and partly in London), is its wonderful sense of place.  So I asked Miriam if she might like to write a blog post about place.

Over to you, Miriam…

 

Who writes about place?

This is the first of two posts I’m doing about place. The second will probably be on Tim Taylor’s blog (although he doesn’t know it yet).

Place is important for us all. It defines our roots and our bases. It goes a long way to defining who we are. It affects everything we create, whether it’s writing, pictures, music or anything else. Off the top of my head, I came up with several song lines about place:

Songs using the word ‘place’

·         There are places I remember – Beatles

·         I had to find the passage back to the place I was before – Eagles (Hotel California)

·         There’s a place for us – West Side Story

Songs about home

·         I’m coming home, I’ve done my time (Tie a Yellow Ribbon)  - Tony Orlando & Dawn

·         The Green, Green Grass of Home  – Tom Jones

·         Homeward Bound – Simon & Garfunkel

I can think of songs about specific places: London, Marakesh, Paris, California.

Of the songs I know in Hebrew (my second language), there are some about Tel-Aviv, Beit She’an, Galillee, the Dead Sea and of course Jerusalem. Also London, San Fransisco, Cairo and other parts of the world. Other songs that invoke place are: Things you see from there, you don’t see from here and Closed kindergarten.

So what about place in writing? Several writers have been quoted as saying, in different ways, that without a place there is no story. The place in question can be real or imaginary, as small as a room or as large as the universe. Whatever it is, our job is to make the reader see it and understand our story in terms of it. So one answer to my question is: all writers write about place.

While that is true, place features more strongly in some stories, even becoming an additional character, while in others it is not so important. Writers who delve deeply into place, it seems to me, are those who have moved countries at least once, or those who have travelled widely.

Last year, I attended an Arvon course in a wonderful setting in Devon. Both the course tutors, and the guest tutor too, have travelled. Ben Faccini has lived in three countries, giving him the right background to write The Water Breather, a novel about a boy and his family who are constantly on the move. Jean McNeil moved from Canada to the UK and has travelled extensively. Her stories are driven by settings all over the world. Anjali Joseph, who is from India, has studied in the UK, and her novels also span countries.

One of several writing seminars I attended this year, called “Wish you were here,” discussed writing about place. The Israeli tutor, Ayelet Tsabari, now lives in Canada and is very conscious of place in her writing. She gave us plenty of good advice, and also mentioned one problem when she read out a scene from one of her stories. She said Canadian and other audiences find the Israeli scene exotic while for us (those attending the seminar) it would seem ordinary.

I had the same thought when I described the setting of my novel, Neither Here Nor There, as exotic. There will be some for whom the setting of Jerusalem is not at all exotic. However, seeing a familiar place through strange eyes can be enlightening, too. Things you take for granted can take on a different light.

Esty, the heroine of Neither Here Nor There, sees familiar places from a very different perspective, now that she has drastically changed her way of life.

 Machane Yehuda Market, Jerusalem, one of many places featured in Neither Here Nor There

Miriam Drori was born and brought up in London, and now lives in Jerusalem where her daughter has left her to hold the female fort against three males.

Following careers as a computer programmer and a technical writer, Miriam has been writing creatively for the past ten years and has had short stories published online and in anthologies. Neither Here Nor There, published on 17 June 2014, is her first published novel.

Miriam began writing in order to raise awareness of social anxiety. Since then the scope of her writing has widened, but she hasn’t lost sight of her original goal.

Miriam’s website: http://miriamdrori.com/

Neither Here Nor There is available from Crooked Cat Books, Amazon and Smashwords