Moving on ...

I was hoping to have my new thriller Paying the Piper out for Christmas. Sadly that's not going to be the case - way too much editing work required, but I want it to be the best it can possibly be, so I'm not rushing; it will be out just as soon as it's ready and I can move on. I'm living in a weird literary limbo right now and I can't quite bring myself to drop this particular ball - I'm not a good enough juggler to manage several projects at once.

But it's given me time to reflect on other stuff. After over 17 years in our lovely Cheshire cottage, we're thinking of selling up next year and moving on. I've never lived this long in one place before and I'll be sad to leave, but it's the right time to downsize, especially if we want to fund daughter's continued stage career! I'm open to anything property-wise and the internet is an amazing tool - where would we be without rightmove.com? Last time we did all this, it was paper-based, getting sent house details in the post and buying property newspapers. I think we'll stay local but whether it will be old house or new build, estate or not, project or ready-to-live-in, I have no idea. Exciting times! So long as I have a study of sorts, I'll be fine.

Heart and Soul

As I've said before - on this blog and others - it's not write what you know but know what you write. And to do that, you have to live your story, engage with your characters, become the people in whose lives you are interfering when you drop crises on them like bombs and expect them to deal with it. So don't you owe it to your characters to suffer with them?

A big 6 editor once told me that my street-kid Lee sounded way too educated. In reality, she said, he'd be at best poorly-educated with a limited vocabulary and wouldn't necessarily have the words or emotional maturity to deal with situations the way I'd written. She had a point. When I stepped back, I realised that Lee was speaking with my voice and while I'd tried to dumb his dialogue down a bit, it clearly wasn't working. It took me a long time to get inside his head and put his own words into his mouth rather than mine. And once you step inside somebody else's skin, even in fiction, you become that person.

As a reader or a writer, to get that emotional connection requires some effort on your own part. It makes you vulnerable when you walk in someone else's shoes, feel what they feel - the good and the bad. It can make for an amazing experience. But you leave something of yourself behind every time.

Guest Post: MA McRae

Not a Man is the first of my books that I considered good enough to be published. But there are so few agents and publishers in Australia, and of those there are, there are even fewer who admit to looking at unsolicited manuscripts.  While I tried them, one by one, each taking months to reply, I wrote a second book in the series, and then a third. Three full-length books – big books.

My family were never interested in my writing, so it was only after I joined the writers’ site run by Harper Collins, Authonomy, that other people read what I had written. To begin with, the reviews were overwhelmingly positive, comments such as ‘Elegant and touchingly surreal,’  ‘Absolutely fabulous writing and story,’  ‘writing of the finest quality,’  and  ‘Absolutely compelling, utterly original.’

But then it was attacked, viciously, as pornography. The comment had me feeling ill and considering taking it down, never to see the light of day again. There were more like that in the next days.  There was even one person who reported it to Harper Collins as ‘abuse.’ 

My story is set in a slum city of a Arabia. It is about a child of the slums, taken to be a bed-boy, and castrated in order that he would ‘stay beautiful.’ Shuki leaves that life at the age of fifteen, but for the early part of the book, sex with his master is a part of his life, the inevitable background to his life.  I only found out about that complaint by accident, as Harper Collins looked at it and dismissed it. 

But there were also those readers who enjoyed Not a Man sufficient that they read it through,  then the second and the third story. People fall in love with Shuki. He is an unusual hero - a person courageous, intelligent and compassionate.

In due course, ‘Not a Man’ gained its position on the Editor’s Desk, winning itself a review. By that time, there were nearly 400 comments. While the Harper Collins review made suggestions for improvement, it was more positive than not. This is an excerpt:

Not a Man is an ambitious and insightful novel; it tells the story of Shuki, a young boy from the slums of Elbarada, a fictional area of Arabia, who is castrated against his will at the age of 10. Shuki’s journey is one of great trial but also incredible strength, courage, and determination, and as a hero, he is fantastic, evoking not only sympathy, but aspiration and reverence. I loved the fact that the operation which is supposed to prevent him from reaching manhood is the very thing that makes him strong and mature. The novel is written in a pared down manner; the narrative reminded me of the prose styling of Paulo Coelho: unaffected and matter-of-fact.

The whole review can still be seen on Authonomy.

By the time of the Harper Collins review, I had an offer from a UK publisher, which I was happy to accept.  Not a Man was published late last year. The sequel, The King’s Favourite followed in June, 2012, and I hope that the third in the series will be ready for publication by June 2013.

The Shuki books have not so far been big sellers, yet, each week, there seem to be a few more sales. So far, the reviews have been overwhelmingly 5-stars, with comments such as this: ‘Outstanding for its originality and depth, M.A. McRae’s Not a Man is an amazing work that will transport you to a foreign world. It will let you experience a lifestyle and culture that is most likely vastly different from any with which you are familiar’ and ‘Shuki's story and the stories of the characters whose lives touch his are still clear in my mind a year later. That's quite a book!’

Does it contain too much sex? Sex is a part of life, and sometimes, for whatever reason, it is needed as a part of the story. Not a Man is not close to pornography – the Harper Collins editor reviewed it as Literary Fiction, but all the same, when I started a different book, I put the sex firmly off-screen.

The Penwinnard Stories: Two of my Penwinnard stories have been published so far – Angel No More  and You Gotta Have Manners.  These stories are set in a Boys’ Home, one that its manager claims to be the best institution of its type in the UK and possibly the world. Its residents are welfare kids, orphans or victims of poor parenting, but the stories are not of faceless victims - they are of Jay and Bob and Sid and Gerry – lively boys full of personality, sometimes of mischief. The stories are much lighter in nature than the Shuki series, shorter, each less than 100,000 words, and the sex is firmly placed behind a veil. 

Which is my best book?  Not a Man is my best book, without question. I made no compromise with Not a Man. It is an emotional journey, not easy to forget.

 

http://mamcrae-author.blogspot.com.au/

Roots of a Writer?

I'm feeling like some fantasy right now after months of gritty crime stuff. Time, I think, to go back to where I started, maybe?

I used to edit British Fantasy Society publications. Lots of them. For a long, long time. The BFS website used to have pages of covers from past publications (all lovingly scanned in by us oldies who have huge collections going back to the year dot) and a store where you could buy them. When I went to look for them for this blog post, those pages no longer seem to exist, which is a shame as they are not only part of BFS history, but also had some amazing artwork commissioned for the covers, and the books launched (or played a part in launching) the careers of many of the fantasy and horror writers around today. The delightful Nina Allan even mentioned me in her interview in the BFS’ latest journal – things like that make all the hard work worthwhile.

But there used to be an occasional column called Roots of a Writer, where different authors gave their take on writing and how they started out. It was interesting to read what inspired their love of fantasy fiction and what made them start writing it.

So my own personal roots began at university when the small paperback library was obviously stocked by fantasy fans and I devoured such things as Stephen Donaldson and other doorstep trilogies whose names I forget now. I’d grown up reading Heinlein and Wyndham, so it was an easy transition into the fantastic. Then I met a guy called Sean – we were never boy-and-girlfriend, but I can say that apart from my husband (and father/brother of course), he was probably the most influential male in my life as he introduced me to the whole fantasy sub-genre – all the books and the people who loved them. The wargames crowd at university, D&D, live role-playing and everything that fired my imagination from there on in and made me the person I am today. From there it was a simple step into the British Fantasy Society, where I was deeply involved for many years.

I read and write a lot more mainstream now. Since the BFS has aligned more to the darker side of fantasy and horror these days, I have less in common with it, although I remain a member. But I do still write fantasy. I have an almost-completed sequel to YA Edge of Dreams which I think I might go back to, and an adult fantasy I started writing with input from an editor at Orion many years ago. What do you think?

Paying the Piper

Coming very soon to an ebook store near you - well near to your computer anyway ...

This is a follow-on from Hamelin's Child, and is set six months later on Michael's 18th birthday.

Michael is piecing his life back together. But it's hard and sometimes other people's troubles can seem easier to deal with. When he meets Amanda at the cashpoint, it's a chance to focus on someone other than himself, and finding Amanda's missing husband and baby may just be his salvation.

But the shadows of his past won't let him go. The bank account they've set up for him is full of easy cash and Eddie's old boss Carl can help Amanda. And suddenly Michael is in deeper than he ever imagined possible.

If you'd like me to let you know as soon it's available, leave a comment or drop me an email.

Changing Distribution

If you're here because you're thinking of buying one of my books - apologies! I'm in the middle of changing my distribution to sites other than amazon, so some books may be unavailable on other platforms. They will all be back for sale as soon as possible! In the meantime you can continue to buy from amazon (in kindle format) and smashwords (in all formats).

The Enemy of My Enemy

I was going to title this post Shades of Grey, but I reckon we're all a bit sick of grey, aren't we? Although it would be just as apt a title.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Allegedly. Or in other words if you are working towards a common cause - or taken in its literal sense, to defeat a common enemy - you must both be on the same side. But what if there are shades of evil? What if you align yourself with the lesser of evils to defeat the greater of evils? What if you're not sure which is which anyway?

I've done it again with my current WIP Paying the Piper. Yet again, what starts out as black and white soon dissolves into shades of grey, when the bad guys start exhibiting good qualities and the good guys decide that actually the police aren't really going to be of much help here, and annoying little details like the Police and Criminal Evidence Act just get in the way. The police have to make sure that an arrested person gets proper meals and sleep and legal advice. The bad guys just beat the shit out of them and get their information much quicker. Now if you're running out of time and you have a choice, which option are you going to go for?

So Amanda has to decide. Let correct legal proceedings dictate the time it takes to get account information from an internet forum, or ally herself with the charismatic Lenny, who may be more interested in the large sums of money at stake and possibly preventing a star witness from turning up at a drugs trial that's been twelve months in the making. And Michael may just be stuck in the middle.