A kind of smog of condescending pity surrounds self-publishing, whether you call it vanity publishing or indie.  The assumption is that only not-very-good writers resort to such a course.  It’s true that a lot of poor stuff does get printed.  There’s no quality control in force.  But it’s also true that a lot of polished, skilful and entertaining novels are no longer taken on by mainstream publishers who favour big names or debut writers, as well as subject matter of very wide appeal.  Naturally enough, they need to make money, pay rent, hire editors.

I was never a big name.  I avoided publicity.  I lived on a Greek island, and barely knew what my agent was handling on my behalf back home.  In the 1990s, with seven novels, children’s books and a non-fiction book of natural history with Peter as illustrator stacked up behind me, I spent years training and practising as a counsellor.  When I returned to writing and enjoying fiction, I found I was back at the beginning, knocking on closed doors.

Now I’ve woken up to the reality of the situation.  It’s no good grumbling at rejection.  I’ve taken matters into my own hands.  It’s liberating.

But it does mean I have to do all the tedious work of checking for errors in the writing and then – worst of all – approaching the world with the news of publication.  Selling our wares is not the natural territory of writers.  I’ve been bludgeoning my contact list with self-advertising.  People once met, say on a New Zealand trek or in a New York hotel, are getting emails about the Amazon availability of ‘White Lies’ and ‘A Home from Home’.  I imagine them scratching their heads and asking: “Who on earth is this annoyingly importunate person shouting about their own books?”

When I started this website and these posts, I felt I was standing in the middle of the Sahara whistling to myself – that is, if I could whistle.  I never managed to learn, even when given intensive lessons by a fellow ten year old.  However, this kind of whistling is having results.  I really appreciate the comments that have come in so far.  Ring out the bells at this kind of encouraging contact between fellow writers.

Here’s a request.  If you are inclined to read “A Home from Home” which is now available on Amazon, please let me know what you think of it.

I’ve discovered another nifty feature of the Createspace programme. You can add the possibility for readers to respond to your book. This is the link to the place where a reader can give “A Home from Home” a review. https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1201160
I’ve posted some questions there, too.
It would be good to hear from readers – even if the response is negative, I say bravely.  Well, I should be able to take constructive criticism on the chin.

I don’t dare calculate how many hours, days, months I’ve spent through my writing life not on actually WRITING books but doing all the business attached to writing books. The only really satisfactory part, I find, comes about three-quarters of the way through a novel. By that time, I know it’s going to come good by the end. There’s still enough tension left to continue and make sure it does come good. And there’s a big pile of written pages on the desk to reassure me that the bulk is done. Apart from that patch of time, what else? Hours and hours, days and days of checking, re-checking, re-writing, fiddling, printing out, printing out again with alterations. THEN what?
In my early days, how easy it was: living in the Cyclades, far away from distractions and duties, hammering away in the mornings at a portable typewriter (underwater fishing for supper in the afternoons); then parcelling the typescript up and sending it off. With an eye on the title of this piece, I musn’t forget the years between the original writing of the first novel and the eventual publication and sale of film rights thanks to the agent I found through the art director of the Observer who’d liked my cartoons, recommended by our friend (as she still is!) Katharine Whitehorn, the Observer columnist (again, as she still is). I was lucky from then on. I didn’t have to do a thing to aid the publishers; minimal proof checking, no literary festival circuits. Heady days. I could just write. Seven novels followed, with two mis-shots inbetween.
THEN what? Years of writing, years of rejection. I try to think this has been very character-forming, in the way that Robinson Crusoe had a very good character by the time he was rescued. From my desert island of a study, I’ve been sending smoke signals up for longer than I am brave enough to state. Now I’ve freed myself from such a dismal task. It’s fun to get a book onto Createspace (perhaps they should pay me for all the testimonials I’m providing). But it is worrying, too, without a mainstream publisher behind you. The business of checking, re-checking, proofing, re-proofing takes ages. Then there’s all the kerfuffle of finding readers on your own bat. You suddenly have to become someone you are not: a self-publicity virago.
Once I’ve got my two recent novels and The Cousins’ Chronicle out there on Amazon, I will jump back into my burrow and start writing again. Can’t wait.

http://www.createspace.com/6463366 White Lies by Susan Barrett

I understand that the royalties are better on books sold through Createspace than they are on Amazon.  On the other hand, I reckon it’s easier to find titles on Amazon.

To my dismay I see that a very large number of other writers have trampled this path before me with the very same title.  There’s another Susan Barrett at work, too.  Should I start my writing life again with a new name?  If so, what would I choose?  That’s a tasty morsel of a thought for an idle moment: Hilda Prendergast comes immediately to mind.  What’s the betting that there are hundreds of Hilda P’s out there with a long list of novels to their mutual name.  Otherwise, why did it come to mind?  Go on, google her.

White Lies, my latest novel, will be out in paperback on Amazon within a few days.  It’s a story about an adoption seen from three angles.  The image continues on the back cover but in the Kindle version, shown above, the white band for the title makes it look as though it’s floating in space.  Maybe it’s appropriate for a white lie to float.

I’ve also discovered that several writers before me have called their novels White Lies.  Will this help or hinder potential sales?  I should have researched more carefully before deciding on the title – but never mind.  The much more problematic doubling-up is with my name.  I’m not the only fiction-writer called Susan Barrett.   Perhaps the other SBs are as put out as I was when I realised a doppelganger had snuck up beside me.

The story:-

Beth is a guest at a wedding.  The bride is Tess, her natural daughter, who’d been adopted as a baby.  During the moments leading up to the marriage ceremony, Beth recalls the lifetime events that led to her present state of sick fear.  Recent revelations have made her suspect that the bridegroom is the first child she’d given up for adoption, and therefore Tess’s half-brother.  Will she speak of this impediment to matrimony or, as invited by the priest, forever hold her peace?

White Lies gives the answer in a way that reveals the complexities of truth-telling in the context of adoption.  It is a story told from three perspectives: that of Beth, the natural mother; Liz, the adoptive mother, and Tess, her adopted daughter.  The reader’s sympathy is engaged with each woman in turn, as the intricacies of the plot demonstrate the joys and sorrows of adoption and how nature and nurture interplay in the formation of personality.

How is it possible to check and re-check and check again and still find mistakes in printed material?  I’ve found 42 errors in the proof copy of White Lies, the novel I’m bringing out on Amazon.  Forty-two!  The number is so huge, it needs spelling out.  I’ve now corrected the proof and it’s quivering on the brink of publication … but maybe there’s a 43rd typo still lurking there, a grinning little gremlin of a mistype or stupidly blind mistake.

This latest novel is a story of adoption seen from three angles.  The fictional adoption in question took place in the late 60s as that’s the period I know from personal experience as an adoptive parent.  I’ve dedicated the book to our children, now middle-aged:

For Sophie and Ben

who are not in these pages

but in our lives

with love, gratitude and respect

How lucky we were.  Nowadays, adoptive parents take on the far greater challenges presented by older children, often with histories of neglect or abuse.  In fact, in some cases, parenthood is an impossible task.  A severely damaged older child needs special care, beyond the means of a parent to provide it.   The burning wish to heal and love such a child causes heartache without possible resolution.  As difficult as it may be to say, some children should not be placed for adoption.  They will do better in foster homes where the expectations are not so weighty, so intense, on both sides.

 

A villanellian song : “Let’s gather our friends.”

Let’s gather our friends while we are able,

For no-one knows if our days will grant us

Many more evenings around our table.

 

I’ll weave, as though in a magic fable,

Our talk into these verses curious:

Let’s gather our friends while we are able.

 

The lives we lead mix white and sable,

In dark days we doubt Fortune allows us

Many more evenings around our table.

 

Good friends, in wine we may mimic Babel

And in villanelles delve into poems spurious.

Let’s gather our friends while we are able

 

For we are bound with the lightest cable

That links all the friends who’ll come to dine with us

Many more evenings around our table.

 

Sing out, as you can from the highest gable,

The song we’ve sung with voices glorious:

Let’s gather our friends while we are able

Many more evenings around our table.

 

26.8.16, with salutes to Dylan Thomas

“Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”

and for Christine who googled the pattern for me:

 

A1 b A2

a b A1

a b A2

a b A1

a b A2

a b A1 A2

 

and for those around our table on August 24th 2016

Peter, Lu, Tony, Marcus

Arthur Koestler asked Freud if he could answer the first question of this post’s title.  The second question is the one I thought I might lodge, in some form of words or other, with the bishop of our county’s cathedral (see previous post).

The answer that fits both questions is “Human nature.”  This is an answer that begs many other questions.  What was it that made our species so different from our closest relatives, that we are capable of horrific atrocities, human on animal, and human on human; that we wage endless wars, and insist on the truth of so many, varying and unprovable beliefs?

I am about to order a book which was reviewed in last Sunday’s Observer.  It’s written by Richard Holloway – “famously a bishop who stopped believing in God”, says the reviewer Peter Stanford.  Holloway was once the head of the Episcopal Church in Scotland.  Now he’s agnostic.  I’ve always been relieved to call myself agnostic.  When I say the word, I think of it in Greek:  άγνωστος,  unknown, obscure, unverified.   Gnosis is knowledge.  The ‘a’ in front makes it ‘without’.  I am without knowledge.

The title of Holloway’s book is “A Little History of Religion” and he starts his history from 130,000 BC, a rough approximation of the time when we first started burying the dead in a way that showed we believed in an afterlife.   With talismans, we could magick-up immortality.   Magic – imagination.  Can a chimpanzee imagine?  Yes.  It can imagine the consequences of an action.  With the widest possible spectrum of ability over aeons of evolutionary time we can go from hitting a lever that will deliver a banana to putting undesirables to death.  And our imagination can turn the sounds of raindrops on forest trees into symphonies.

The development of our brains has led us to imagine more and more extraordinary ways of using our animal abilities.  We can imagine a harmonious time when everyone around us will agree with us – so let’s get rid of those who don’t agree, right now.  We can imagine what it must be like to lose a leg or a parent and what it must be like to be flayed alive.   We empathise and give support but what will stop me flaying my adversary alive?   Oh, I know: God.  God will punish the bad and reward the good.  Without our idea of the revengeful God we might have destroyed ourselves, the human race, long ago.   War and God mean survival despite and because of our nature.

This notebook – these posts – are scribble thoughts, being tried out for size.  “I write to be read,” I said the other day, when I talked about self-publishing.  But that was in relation to my books.  Here, in these posts, I’m finding it liberating to write without any thought that my thoughts will be read.   Irresponsible, I know.

 

A neighbour walking his dog alerted us to the news that the county town’s bishop is coming to our village hall to answer questions.  The question I immediately thought of asking – that is, if I were to go to the meeting – would be “Do you believe in God?”   I imagine the audience would gasp, reel backwards, blench, go beetroot, with a host of different horrified responses to such a question coming from their midst.  The audience is likely to be drawn from the local church-goers, for one thing.  They must all believe in God.  They surely trust that their bishop also believes in God.   How could a fellow member of the audience ask such a stupid question?

Yet I think it is a valid question to ask of a religious leader.  It would surely elicit an answer that would go some way to explaining why anyone who has risen to a position of leadership in his chosen career in the 21st century can promulgate the thought patterns of a particular band of people from the extremely distant past.  It’s the question that tortured Darwin when he kept asking it of himself.  And that was more than 100 years ago.

I shall go on with these thoughts when I have the time.