Suspension and Falling in Literature and Life

Latest stop on the virtual tour for Too Many Magpies is at the blog of Words from a Glass Bubble author, Vanessa Gebbie, who uses the fact that I recently had a bad fall down a flight of stairs as a thematic springboard for a pretty wide-ranging discussion about not only Magpies but my writing in general.

The Writer's Need for Silence

From a review by Kathryn Hughes of Maggie Gee's memoir My Animal Life in Saturday's Guardian Review:

In one of the most powerful parts of the book she lays bare an awful period in the mid-90s when her editor at HarperCollins turned her sixth book down flat. Part of the problem, he explained helpfully, was that lots of people hadn't really heard of her and, in an age when "profile" counted, this was proving tricky. Gee hadn't been in the habit of going to the right literary parties, preferring to stay at home with her husband and child and simply write. She'd always believed that the work was what mattered and now she was paying the price for her ignorance/arrogance.

I hope that's ironic, that 'ignorance/arrogance'. The trouble is, as Robert McCrum indicates this week, the writing of a novel can need the kind of immersion in solitude which Maggie Gee was cultivating, and with which all those other activities increasingly associated with the life of a writer - networking and marketing - can interfere.

It so happens that similar matters are touched on in my visit today to writer Nuala Ni Chonchuir's blog, for the virtual tour for my novel Too Many Magpies. She asks me about my typical day and how I fit other such things in with writing, and this is part of my answer:

I can only write well to my own satisfaction, I find, when I can become truly obsessed with what I'm working on and entirely adrift on its dream world... My ideal writing day ... is to write from nine in the morning until about half-one, after which time I'm pretty done in and need to stretch and get some exercise ... as well as, most importantly, have some pondering time for the next day's writing bout. Well, I wish! Now I so often spend the rest of the day into the evening on the web doing all the things we writers need to do nowadays to market our books - and end up with nothing else done and the next day's writing unpondered, and feeling really frazzled!

Flying with Magpies: Stop 2

This week's stop on the virtual book tour for my novel Too Many Magpies is at the blog of the thoughtful and erudite John Baker, who reviews the book (very positively, I'm thrilled to say). He also asked me some searching questions about my aims in writing novels and, since this is a theme of the book, our present-day sense of ourselves in the world. You can find his questions and my answers in the comments section of his post.

Selling lit fic to Waterstone's

As I write I am in Waterstone's Gower St again, where on November 16th Verona kindly ordered a copy of my novel Too Many Magpies. When I wrote about this , Salt's Chris Hamilton-Emery explained that bookshops rarely re-order even if they do sell such writer-motored orders, and David Knowles of Two Ravens Press questioned that they were even really ordered in the first place:

But the real value of your experiment will come if you ever manage to find out how many of those 'Magpies' actually got ordered after you left - and, more importantly, how many have come home to roost in 3 or 4 month's time.

Well, I have to report that there is no copy of Too Many Magpies here on the fiction shelves. So was it not really ordered? Or did they send it back double-quick, or did it sell, and it hasn't been replaced?

Do you know, I feel too weary to ask...