Short Circuit Blog Tour, first stop!!

Well, we're off on a blog tour, and it is the gorgeous Nik Perring who hosts an interview on his blog today. (I've always had this thing for younger blokes. Sigh...)
Mrs Gebbie - behave!
Oh, OK then...
We will have some 20 stops, and true to form, I haven't got dates arranged. So if you've been kind enough to invite us to visit, please air the spare room a while longer while I get my act together!
Meanwhile, here's Nik and me, and we natter about Miracle-Gro among other things...

I AM GOOD ENOUGH TO EAT OFF... (!)

Har! Three pieces from my forthcoming micro-fiction collection, Ed's Wife and other Creatures are appearing on a literary placemat in the USA.
I follow in the hallowed footsteps of Nuala Ni Chonchuir, who had a very short story on the debut placemat at Loquacious Placemats, published by er... Twisted Thistle productions.

Loquacious Placemat. The only outlet for literature that you eat off. Deliberately!

NAWE Conference 13-15 November.

The National Association of Writers in Education conference was lovely. More than a hundred writers who also teach writing at universities and schools gathered in a hotel called Chilworth Manor, near Southampton. The marvellous, inspiring company of writers I knew, and the joy of meeting new ones.
Great to spend time with Alison MacLeod, Professor of Contemporary Writing at Chichester University - she of the amazing writing skills, amazing teaching skills, and the generosity to write for Short Circuit. Alison’s website HERE.
Great to catch up with Peggy Riley again from Kent Live Lit, who blogs HERE
Great to see Sarah Butler, erstwhile writer-in-residence for the Circle Line (!) who has a packed website HERE and who whizzed down from London to do a presentation on writing to a setting.
And NAWE leading light Graham Mort, who was winner of Bridport 2007, among a thousand other things including directing the PhD writing programme at Lancaster, website HERE who also contributed a chapter to Short Circuit.
And smashing to meet the dynamic and totally amazing Gilly Smith – pour yourself a large gin, sit down and read about her HERE on her website
Amazing lady. She also teaches CNF at the University of Brighton.

Sarah, Alison and I were all running presentations/workshops at the same time yesterday, which was very saaad as I’d have loved to go to both their sessions. But I did go to some extraordinary ones – I’ll pick out a couple. First, one run by two tutors over from Columbia College, Chicago, who gave such an intense workshop…intended to illustrate the way they conduct their four-and-a-half-hour student workshops… only this was in one-and-a half! Next, a session on the influence of the visual arts on fiction… a look at ‘reality’ as portrayed in art, film, and the use of drawing techniques in fiction workshops. And one on maps in fiction, the importance of knowing your setting well -and how you can map out a real setting, using GPS to introduce a web of sound, accessed by students with iPods as they explore… I tell you there are some amazing influences on the next generation of writers out there.
I ran a flash fiction workshop, for some 25 participants. Funny, so many people seemed to have sidelined their own writing, in order to teach it. (Warning... take note!) That seemed sad. So much of my planned workshop went out of the window as we focussed on super flashes, and I used Tania Hershman's work 'Plaits' as a prompt, which produced some extraordinary and very good pieces. Sold all but one of the Rose Metal text books I had left.
Two whole days of presentations, workshops, discussions and events. Keynote talks/interviews/readings from novelist Graham Swift and poet Wendy Cope. Quite fantastic really. (Actually… V retired to bed before the poetry… and went and wrote her own. I find it so hard to do that at home. Why do hotel bedrooms work?!)
And of course, the launch, for which Jen Hamilton-Emery battled through the high weekend winds to Southampton all the way from Cambridge. The launch of Short Circuit was lovely, in the huge mini-theatre of the hotel… complete with cinema screen, rows of chairs, vast lectern. We had a quality audience and offered them short readings from the book, generously introduced by endorser, the Director of NAWE, Paul Munden. Sales were brisk, orders filled in, and it gave Jen and I a warm feeling to know that our book was winging its way to the best of homes all over the country.

CALLING ALL EYORES...

Susannah Rickards has posted on the thread below to say this:

V, I'm in serious talks with some web designers to see how much it would cost to set up a One Stop Shop website for Indie Publishers, where readers can browse the books and then buy direct from the publishers (maybe eventually buy from the site - but that's down the line.
It would be a place where medium and small publishers can publicise their new titles and existing stock. It can feature interviews, reviews. Much more magaziney and overtly shop-like than T's Short review but with a similar ethos. To support and foster the small presses.
With Facebook, Twitter and writer's forums it wouldn't take long for word of mouth to spread about it and I bet Guardian Review, LRB. TLS would all give page space to the launch of such a venture.
I think it's time for the tinies to fight the big boys in the playground. Strength in numbers....

Susannah would love to hear people's response to this idea, especially from Eyeores who think it can't work, so we can foresee and resolve problems before it's set up.

My response would be this. Fantastic idea. I want to know WHY the small publishers arent doing this themselves?

SMALL PUBLISHERS v AMAZON – THE FACTS

Thanks to Nicola Morgan’s wonderful helpful (and often funny) blog Help! I Need a Publisher, here are some facts and figures about Amazon and how their tactics are helping to close down small publishers. And while they line their own pockets, they keep funds from writers as well as publishers.
Lynne Mitchell of one of the newest and smallest of small publishers, Linen Press HERE, talks about the struggle to keep going, and says:

The financial challenge for a small publisher is formidable. Let me give you some figures:
- One book costs £4 to produce because I do small runs of 1000. I refuse to compromise on quality and I use environmentally friendly paper and ink.
- I charge £10 a copy
- Amazon takes 60% and I pay £1.75 to replace the book. If you do the sums, that's £6 for Amazon, plus £1.75 p&p, and the £4 production costs, so I am actually paying Amazon £1.75 for every book they sell. If readers ordered from my website I would make £6.
- The big book stores charge me 50% mark up get a book onto one of those tables where people stop and browse. If I sell a copy, I make £1.

Frightening, isn’t it? READ THE WHOLE POST HERE

I’d like to see all writers dropping their Amazon adverts and links, please. WHAT are we doing??? They aren’t helping anyone but themselves, they aren’t good employers, nor are they ‘green’ in their practices. For the sake of a penny or two, writers. DROP THE LINKS. And pass on this message, and the facts above to all the writer-types who blog.
Anyway, if you want a copy of Short Circuit or Words from a Glass Bubble please go straight to the publisher HERE. And get a 20% discount on the price, which for once is more than the dreaded monster chargeth.

ENOUGH OF ALLTHIS DEPRESSION...HERE'S CALLY

Did you know...when you die you go to Limbo, which is like Oxford Street, policed by an angel called Bob, who looks a bit like Bob Hoskins...?!
What was I reading last week to stop me biting my nails and worrying that Short Circuit would be lost by the printers, or the delivery lorry would burst into flames, or the books would self-combust on exposure to the air?
A chick-lit book. Heaven Can Wait, by Cally Taylor. (here, V. waits while the ghost of her late librarian mum, picks herself up of the floor)
I’m happy to admit I would probably not have picked it up in a bookshop, and bought it because I sort of ‘know’ Cally, as we were both ‘hedjicated’ about writing by the same tutor. And I much enjoyed her book, acherley. So there.
Received wisdom says we are completely different writers, Cally and I. But are we?? I don’t reckon so, at base. Working on different 'stuff' maybe, but we both love what we are doing, and get on with it. We create stories… characters with problems, and weave stories round those characters’ struggles to overcome them. We have both been taught ways of making characters live on the page, and here in Heaven Can Wait, I think it shows in spades.

Heaven Can Wait is a romping entertaining read. I was caught up in Lucy Brown’s problems far FAR more than I got caught up in the characters of that blockbuster Da Vinci Code. Why? because Cally convinced me, whereas DVC’s characters never became more than two-dimensional. As I was reading, Lucy Brown was ‘real’, and I wanted her to be OK…I ‘cared’. OK, I didn’t particularly 'like' the farty bits, but hey! She’s real, she’s flawed and she’s in trouble. What a good starting place for a novel. I turned the pages of DVC to skim for plot. Not because I wanted to know anything about characters...I read Heaven Can Wait because it was totally intriguing, and I wanted to know what happened to Lucy.
Nice one, Cally! I also want to know how on earth you dreamed this story up, and what you have on your cornflakes in the morning. ( Eg, as above...: When you die you go to Limbo, which is like Oxford Street, policed by an angel called Bob, who looks a bit like Bob Hoskins...)

Cally and I have something else in common. She went to Ellerslie School, in Malvern. And so, for a few weeks, two summers running, did I! A long time before Cally… my school in Brighton used to take over Ellerslie for the summer. I remember I was in a dormitory called Stow on the Wold, and the school had an unheated swimming pool, a concrete pit surrounded by rose bay willow herb…
Heaven can Wait by Cally Taylor is published by Orion. HERE it is on Amazon

AFTER-SHOCK

Right. I'm going to call this aftershock. I've been so busy, caught-up in collating, persuading, organising and then editing Short Circuit, that my own writing has been squeezed. So I was really looking forward to getting back to it, to my town, my characters, my strange storyteller.
But even though I now have a second book on the shelf with my name on, albeit as an editor, and ought to feel high as the proverbial kite, I don't. I feel flat. Tired. Low.
Maybe that's just me. I used to feel seriously low after placing at a comp, and couldn't understand it. I remember talking it through with friends, who said, 'me, too, sometimes. I suffer from a sort of aftershock.'

But then this comes along. A seriously depressing article in the Guardian, sweeping the blogosphere. Publishers are getting rid of many many established writers whose work is broadly like mine. So why would they take on a me?

HOW WATERSTONES KILLED BOOKSELLING - LINK HERE
Some quotes from the article follow:

** there is no new generation of British literary talent to follow the likes of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan.

**"There's been a slow bonfire of literary authors in the last 18 months," says Hamilton. "Publishers are sending out to pasture established literary novelists because they realise they aren't going to be sold by the chains. The complaint now from publishers is that most of their quality books hardly get a look in at all. In the past, sales for many literary novels were never very high, but now publishers are cutting down on their lists in desperation."

**"The emphasis given to the few is staggering," says Mark Le Fanu, general secretary of the Society of Authors. "It's our mid-list authors, who may not write the most commercial books but who often write the best, who are suffering. The big corporate publishers dominate the shelves and squeeze out smaller publishers."

**Hilary Mantel's agent Bill Hamilton worries that books are being sold like shampoo. "In retail, if you are selling a new shampoo you would expect to pay Boots, for instance, for a promotion, to make sure your shampoo is more visible than other ones. That pattern has been copied by Smith's and Waterstone's to an extent that has never been seen before in bookselling: you pay for almost any presence in the stores, you pay a huge amount for special promotions in the front of the store, and you go on paying every week even if the books are selling strongly anyway.

**"There seems to be a frantic scramble in the book retail world to rush downmarket in order to compete with the challenges of Amazon, the supermarkets and next the ebook. Publishers have to fight their corner, year after year, against ever more aggressive demands for higher discounts from the chains, but seem at a loss to know how to cope with the underlying problems they face. They fear speaking out about how their books are being sold."