Sky's been cleared by a good, hard rain; there's somebody callin' my secret name

See? Robert Downey Jr just loves Human Nature

I think it’s established I love Margaret Atwood & Negotiating With The Dead. There’s something so powerfully poetic in the way she describes writing. I’ve also found Norman Mailers’ The Spooky Art. The one book I’m missing & would so dearly love to find is Stephen Kings’ On Writing. I find it ridiculous I haven’t found it yet. I own practically every other thing he’s ever done, but not that. What intrigues me though is how these books have a similar concept of writing being ‘otherworldly’, spooky as Mailer puts it, involving a double like Atwood puts it, or that it has some fascination with death.

A friend of mine suggested on Human Nature’s Facebook page – join it if you haven’t already. There’s discussions and the like – that perhaps it was because it took a little out of the writer each time to write. Perhaps putting the words on paper draws from our own life force, or that we literally make it our blood, sweat and tears. The urge to write ‘beer’ instead of tears is overwhelming. This is due to an obsession with TNA Wrestling & the tag team Beer Money. There’s an untapped field of subliminal messaging there I tell you.

I appreciate the insight but I don’t find it drains me to write, or that it takes anything out of me to put something down on paper. A lot of people have said they find it amazing I wrote a book while studying a full time degree. The truth is, it’s my release. When I have to write 2500 words on childbirth, infarctions or why childbirth shouldn’t involve infarctions then it’s not being creative. Its regurgitating someone elses information and synthesising it. I’d come home, become an insomniac and write Human Nature. Maybe it was because there’s no word limit, maybe because no-one was insisting I reference or just because it’s something I have my whole life wound up in, but it was relaxing for me. It still is.

I recently read an interview with Sydney Somers about how she writes & why she does it. Her answer is probably the closest I’ve ever seen to my own. She explains that she ‘sees’ scenes, just like from a movie, they play out and she writes. I write in much the same way. I get flashes of scenes, or entire scenes that play out in front of me. I can press play or pause, zoom in or flip the camera to see someone’s’ face, their reaction etc, but the scene just appears. When I’m sat there actively trying to think, then I know it’s time to stop writing. It just doesn’t flow then. And I hear voices. In a completely sane way naturally. Don’t call the men in white coats just yet. I hear my characters, most notably Santangelo, like a voice spoken next to my ear. I really don’t have any control over it, when it comes or what happens. But listening to Santangelo & Ronnie got Human Nature completed and I couldn’t be happier with it.

Maybe that’s why I don’t think writing has to do with death
or drawing life from the writer like some kind of succubus. It calms me and inspires me to write. I see these things, these scenes in front of my eyes and my jobs’ to record them the best I can. Sometimes it can be frustrating, when you can hear the creaking floorboard but not describe it. When you know the expression on a man’s’ face but can’t replicate it, no matter how many words you use. Maybe it’s because of that, because it’s things that I see, that given to me, that the muse feeds, however you want to pass it by is fine with me, that I don’t feel it drains. It comes from somewhere else and I’m just the scribe.

I hold with Atwoods’ description still. While writing isn’t spooky to me like Mailer suggests, it holds an element of the dark & giving ‘over to the other’. I’ve sat and asked what I’m meant to be looking at and have locked off every other thought to open my mind up to the story. So it does seem like giving over to me. But not spooky. Revitalising.

Where the way is dark & the bullets cold;

My protagonist (look, a big writing word! My English teacher would be proud) taught me something recently.

Let me introduce him first of all. He’s 45. Italian-American. Dark hair, black eyes, whiskers from here to the dawn of Time & muscle bound. He’s profane & violent. A gangster & a sociopath. Santangelo De Saviero is not really the kind of guy who teaches anything, unless it’s how to meet your Maker, quickly. He’s his own voice.

I have an inspiration board – which is really a piece of canvas with a lot of pictures on it – that I have above my laptop. It faces me whenever I write and is visible from my bed, so it’s pretty much always in my line of vision. It’s covered with pictures of Saints’ face claims, quotes, lines from poems, images of Vin, Maryse, Ronnie and others. It also has a picture of the Vampire Eric for reasons I haven’t yet derived. I tend to look up at it a lot when I’m online because of the angle it’s at.

I keep telling people Saint is his own character, his own person and I just get to write him. When I sat staring at the board recently I realised he really is his own person. I can’t write something in there if he doesn’t like it. I can’t make him cry because he doesn’t. I can’t change him to suit me (although I adore him as he is) or anyone else.

So why do we change ourselves to suit everyone else?

If Santangelo, whom I love, can’t be changed without compromising who he is, if I can’t take something from him without removing him, then why is it okay for me to do that to myself? Why do we constantly check ourselves against other people and wonder if we’re doing okay? Recently someone came back into my life that I’d rather stayed out of it. Once I knew they were back, it kind of threw me. I wondered what this person would think if we met again. We probably will just because we have this common thread. I knew they wouldn’t ‘approve’ and it annoyed me. Why did I need them to approve? I don’t need anyone to approve Santangelo. I don’t care if people love him or hate him. I’d like you to love him ‘cause I’d like to sell a book someday, really I would. But if you don’t, he sure as hell won’t shed no tears over it. But if don’t need anyone to approve him, why did I care what this person thought of me?

I like me. I do. I’m a writer. I have an insane sense of humour that often sees me cracking myself up, leaving everyone else looking at me dumbfounded. I’m someone who loves Dr Who, Star Trek and any other kind of sci fi you throw my way. I get addicted to things like Watchmen & The Losers & Supernatural & True Blood. I read obsessively. Most of my room is a bookcase. I love wrestling. I grew up with it & it’s a part of my life. I love muscle cars. I don’t act very ladylike. I will wear heels until my feet bleed because they look good, who cares if I can’t actually walk. My music taste stopped in the 1970’s. I actually like poetry. I would rather watch an action or horror movie over a romance any day. I don’t tolerate deceit. I can’t stand when people promise one thing and do another. To me, it smacks of what Paul describes in the Bible. People whose faces and voices say they love God but people whose hearts are far from Him. I really have a problem with that. I try so very hard to be a good witness, to be someone whose walk & talk match. I don’t always make it. A lot of times I get angry, a lot of times I get frustrated. But what you see is real.

So it burns me when I see people who seem to have this whole double thing going on. This particular person is one of those. They may or may not actually live that double life but everything in their actions screams it. This person is not a person I want in my life, not someone I want influencing it and someone I would keep at arm’s length, if they had to be spoken to at all. So when I discovered I was stepping back, just because I didn’t want to come into contact with this person, it upset me. I was almost hiding because I didn’t want to talk to them, to say what my life was like or what I’d been up to because I didn’t want them to judge me like I knew they would.

Santangelo made me realise I was being a wimp. A lot of people in Human Nature don’t approve of the Mob Boss. A lot of people are extremely vocal about it. He pays attention to the person that cares about him and shuts out the rest because they don’t matter. I read somewhere that the people we spend the most time worrying about are not the people who’ll be there in the end. I’d been pouring worry and energy into this person because I was almost afraid to go show them who I was.

I thought about how I liked who I was. After November/December last year, when everything changed - it was like I finally stepped into the destiny God was holding out for me – I felt complete, like I’d picked up the missing piece of my personality. I do enjoy the morbid and the arcane because it feeds what I guess Margaret Atwood would call ‘the other me’. I wrote a book I loved a series I’m still writing, stories that play out like movies in front of my eyes. I met great new people and I actually enjoy learning how to promote my book and myself as a writer. I love who I am right now. A 23 year old – 24 in 31 days – who was destined for more. Yet I’m limiting myself, stepping back from this person because I was worried what they might say, their reactions, of what might hide behind the plastic smile. Santangelo made me front up to that, to realise that I couldn’t fully step into everything if I was still hiding.

To quote my Mafioso, ‘F*ck ‘em. And the horse they rode in on’.

Don’t let anyone stop you being who you are. Don’t put up with people who bring you down. Surround yourself with people you love and forget about the people who don’t. Those people might have to be in your life for whatever reason; it doesn’t mean they have to own your life. You’re always going to have haters. People who disapprove of you, of what you do, what you say, what you wear, what you write, what you draw, what you sing, how you do all that. You will never match up to what their expectation of you is. You don’t have to.

God made you unique. He carved your name on His hand. He didn’t carve you as a hyphen attached to someone else.

Be who you are.

The Ancient Mariner Defence

‘But still the fates will leave me my voice
& by my voice I shall be known’ Ovid

While trying to appear like I was actually doing something at work yesterday, Alex asked me how I wrote. After responding in my usual asinine way and saying “With a paper and pen” she repeated the question & said she didn’t know how someone made themselves sit down and write, why they would or what they’d write about. She put me on the spot & made me answer the question properly.

I plead The Ancient Mariner Defence: Because the story took hold of me and wouldn’t let me go.

I didn’t think that one up all by myself. In keeping with my love of everything Margaret Atwood I’ve been poring over Negotiating with the Dead, her work on writing. So many books I’ve read on getting yourself ready for agents/publishers and the like are almost mercenary and force you to think of your book as a product. Atwood reminds us why we write & redefined my whole belief in myself as a writer. I adore her to bits and would staple myself to her if this were not both disturbing and illegal. Dear Margaret Atwood’s lawyer; of course I’ll stay 100 yards at all times. She used the above quote as an explanation for why we write.

For those of us who did not have Coleridge shoved down our throats in high school (a fact for which I am eternally grateful. CJ Cherryh however is another matter) The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner is an epic poem focusing on a mariner doomed to tell the same tale over and over. It involves Fate, an albatross, lots of dead sailors reanimating themselves but mostly, is about how the mariner is taken over by the story. It compels him and won’t let him go until he’s told it.

So I answered Alex the same thing. Because the story took hold of me and wouldn’t let me go. My two main characters both have voices (naturally. It’s not a book on mutes) but they’re voices implanted in either ear that whisper. Santangelo’s is loudest. I tried to explain to Alex what it was like; that I have a Mob Boss in my ear whose voice I can hear like he was slouched against the wall next to me, cigar in hand and boots clicked together. That I don’t really get any say in what he wants to do or say. His voice is his own, he talks and I write. Ronnie’s the same. I don’t sit down and think right...here’s what I’m doing. I should have a beginning, middle and the end. Somewhere there should be conflict etc. I don’t get that. I get scenes that make me reach and scribble no matter what I’m doing, I hear Saint talking and I go to write. My muse is a lovely, mussed up, sociopathic Mob Boss with dark eyes and grizzly whiskers that I wouldn’t change for the world. My muse is an ice cold woman with golden eyes that I love like I love myself. And I do.

That’s why I answered with Margaret Atwood’s line and why Atwood’s right. I know why I write – because the story takes hold of me and won’t let me go.

Alex replied, “Spoken like a true writer.”

It's Life Jim, But Not As We Know It

I read this brilliant post by Kylie Griffin about 'World Building' in writing. It mentions how important the setting of a novel is & got me pondering. Actually pretty much anything gets me pondering. It doesn't take very much at all for me to drift off. I'm convinced I live in my own head. But the post made me think about the settings/worlds that inspire me.

Everyone, but everyone should know Terry Prachett. And everyone including the long dead Ancient Egyptians should read the Discworld series. This setting is so intricate I'd like to jump ship and live in Ankh Morpork, reside at the Unseen University (how I wish mine was unseen, particularly by me)and hang out with Death. Pratchett manages to create a setting thats the most intricately designed yet easy to understand one I've ever seen. The Discworld is logically flawed, impossible but undeniable. I'm convinced somewhere out there it exists. Its fantasy written by a master & I'd read him all day if I didnt have to do things occasionally, like breathe.

I fell hard and fast for Margaret Atwood when I was in Year 12. We were given 'The Handmaids Tale' for our text and told to read a chapter a night. I read the whole thing in a day. Gilead was frighteningly real and still is. The setting was as shocking as OfFred's tale. A future we could potentially inhabit. One of her newest - 'Oryx and Crake' scared the living daylights out of me with its setting. A new race of genetically created humans peacefully exist while the remaining humans advance themselves out of existence. Archaeology turns to rubble and one man is left watching all the pieces of brilliance shatter. The setting is terrifying and it shadows through all of Jimmy's thoughts.



Anne Rice and I met some long years back with Interview with the Vampire. The Godmother of Vampires (no, not Meyer. Go sit down. Blasphemer)takes our world, right now, the heartbeat of every city and succinctly opens up the supernatural the same way we open up a tin. Unless you're me, in which case you do it with plenty of swearing, elbow grease and finally hand it over to someone else. Vampires slip into our world and the setting becomes somehow sharper, somehow prettier when its viewed through immortal eyes. I love her settings as much as I love her Facebook updates.

Reading through the link, it shows just how important the settings are. Like a separate voice for someone who never shows their face.

Why Finding Mr Right Is Easier Than Finding An Agent

Or – give me JDM & a pen:

It’s true; finding Mr Right is much easier than finding an Agent. Especially for me as I was sadly born without a heart. It doesn’t bother me but it does make ECG’s hard work.

Finding Mr Right can be done by going to your local pub/club/watering hole/Church (not that Church should be in the same sentence as pub)cinema/shopping centre/anywhere you have people of the opposite species.

Finding an agent however is only done through long trawls through Google, especially if you, like me, have an addictive Facebook habit & a fantastical need to see if Wikipedia has anything on the latest Dr. Who. You come away with a list of agents finally & the realisation you just saved 30+ pictures of Matt Smith to your laptop yet they all look the same.

Once you’ve spent forever working on your baby (5 months in my case), pulling late nights, talking about your characters like they’re real, wondering if taking on their personalities – which considering mine are an Ice Queen and a sociopath is not a good thing – will help you pass uni this semester, you enter the world of the agent. Finding Mr (Or Mrs, lets not be sexist here) Agent is hard. The literary agency websites are designed to make you give up right there and then. Your manuscript must be double spaced, single line spaced, all spaces between words removed, no paragraphs, we want paragraphs every which way. Don’t tell us how many words is in it, we want to know how many words, commas and full stops you put in it. We want a synopsis, we want a query letter, we want your 195,000 baby in 20 words or less. We want your life story, we want your target audience, we want your comparable titles. Writing the application is longer than writing the manuscript.

At first I felt like crying when I saw the first rejection letter. Bear in mind none of these (3 so far) have said “Your work is God awful. Kindly stop breathing”. It’s been the wrong genre, not the type the agent specialises in or in the case of one very special agent I was not enough of an internet “celebrity” (his word) to have a book published. Because clearly my internet credibility, clearly an oxymoron to begin with, is more important than whether I can string words together in a sentence or whether I simply copied The Bible and changed Jesus to Edward. I’ve looked at other writers in my position and unfortunately they suffer the same kind of letters. One book on writing included the authors’ quote that she’d been “rejected by everyone in the known universe”. One had their work rejected because there were no vampires. Another, too many vampires. One particular bloke because the work was so well written the agent didn’t they could market it. Yes, I’m still puzzling that one out myself.

Then I got one particular rejection letter where the agent praised my writing. I read a beautiful passage by an amazingly talented woman I’ve only just met – Denise Parton Plunk – who, between her and Isaiah 55-63- taught me to let God be in control. I read Isaiah 60 and Isaiah 61 and felt full of faith. I took my dog for a walk in the dark and felt God wipe away the doubts. This is who I am. This is what I do.

Finding an agent is hard but without it I’d never have learnt the lessons I’ve learnt in the past few weeks. That God is in control & my part is to meet Him. It’s our book. That I can fight and scream all I want but if the agent is wrong, the way the whole deal goes down will be wrong. That you don’t get knocked down because someone doesn’t like what you do. Case in point Stephanie Meyer got 9 rejections. 5 never replied. Alexandra Adornetto got 23 rejections. JK Rowling was rejected by more than that. You trust. You believe. We’ll make it.

Finding Mr Right is much easier.