Purple Crayon

28th February 2014

Ten days out from my book launch! My books are out for give-away in Aspen, and people have been bringing them to me to be signed, which is all very giddy and makes me feel as if I have almost arrived! The cynic in me says, enjoy it while it lasts, but that voice is not very loud these days, well not today anyway!
I have been getting requests from book bloggers for interviews, which is what I am spending most of my time filling out these days. Being a long-winded person, I probably give longer answers than needed, but it is sort of fun being in the spotlight. All of these requests have come from out of the ether, and I am not sure whether it is this blog or Twitter that has brought them to my door. All I can say to aspiring writers and those faithfully but seemingly unfruitfully slogging away at social media is, keep on going - somehow this machine works and people find you!
From interview to interview the questions are fairly similar: how did you come to write this book;  how much research did it entail; how long did it take to write it? But one interviewer asked the question, What would be the title of your biography and why? I had to think about that one, and this is what I said: There used to be a cartoon by the name of "Harold and the Purple Crayon," about a little boy who creates  his world as he goes along with a purple crayon. Cosy Sheridan turned this idea into a fantastic little song called Grand Design.
Someone once told me that the song reminded him of me, scribbling away at my life according to my notion of things. Let me say as a qualifier that when you are a doing this and sometimes running over into other people's pictures, people are not so kind about the notion. If they don't know you're going to be a writer or chronicler of things, then it is just plain annoying that this person with the crayon is always saying, "No, not like that, but like this!" You get into a lot of trouble and friends are hard to find when you live your life like this. I'm not going to take any credit for it, either, because it is just the way I came out. My own mother was fine with me until I developed enough grasp to hold the crayon and started doodling. In her world full of other kids, having one that insisted on making their own pictures was too draining. My father, on the other hand, being a bit of a doodler himself, was interested in the pictures, and for a while we were doodling together. My crayon was no good, though, when he bowed out of the picture. It might be a magic instrument but it can't bring back dead parents. Or maybe it can and I am not yet accomplished enough to draw that picture. It might take a different sort of crayon.
Anyway, all of this to say that my biography, nay my autobiography should be called "Grand Design." In the long run I hope my life turns out to have been that. One way or another, probably that's what everyone's life is in the end.

Me Love Cookies

21st February 2014

Things shifted into high gear this week when Simon&Schuster told me they were taking out a 12-day ad for my book in USAToday.com starting the day of publication! The same ad will appear on another site called Eyeonromance.com. Also, I was contacted by the historical novel society in Scotland who want to do a review of my book in May. So, you never know, do you, when you are wallowing in the depths of despair how the gears are somewhere changing and moving the story forward? I like that American expression, "Everything turns on a dime," because it really does seem to be so.
I received my forty free books in three boxes from the publisher this week, as stated in my contract.  The copies are beautiful! I was pleased that the cover had a matte finish instead of being shiny like the pre-edition copies. There is to be a fifty book give-away in Aspen starting now and spread out between the library, the Aspen Writer's Foundation office and the local community centre where my book launch is to be held. The venue is a cosy place with a fire that will make me feel more comfortable than I would in a book shop, and besides it holds more people. (Not that I have the remotest connection to Hunter S. Thompson, but this was an old haunt of his.) Woody Creek is also where Joe Henry, author of the much admired book "Lime Creek," lives. It is a the far flung Bohemian section of Aspen. No money, just art, as the story so often goes.
Two and a half weeks until the book launch! Now all I need to do is choose the parts of the book I am going to read for the event. I have already decided on the first chapter, which at eight pages is short, but sets the book and the voice up well, I think. The trouble is that my speaking voice is only good for about three pages,  and then I am reading my beautiful words but sounding like Cookie Monster. That will set me into a  panic, and people will begin to wonder if I really am an epileptic. And who said I was a catastrophiser? These types of things wander about my head around 3am in the dark amidst the sounds of dogs snoring on the bed and cats chasing each other down the hall.
I think I will talk a little about how I came to write the book at the book launch, but I don't want to be reading off notes, because I should be able to tell that story. I know it so well. I was just last night reading an old  journal which shows how this whole saga has unfolded, from my getting my agent in July of 2009 to securing a publisher in February 2011 and finally being published in March 2014. It has been a five-year trek, although the first two years were taken up with a different book that hasn't yet sold. I think it is a bit like giving birth - if you knew ahead of time how long it was going to take, you just would go down a different alley. But once you're on the path, all you can do is sort of squeeze your eyes shut and keep moving ahead to the next hour, the next day, the next month, the next year.
Some authors don't move with such glacial speed. My progress has been about as slow as it gets, I think. So I can hold myself up as inspiration to unpublished writers everywhere slogging away, feeling as though they are going nowhere. And I am not a patient person! I have been feeling like a racehorse stuck behind the starting gate for a very long time. People and horses like that, let me tell you,  are not easy to live with.

Coyotes

February 14th 2014

I wish I could be like Nora Ephron, with wise and witty things to hide my face behind. As she says, if you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you, but if you tell someone you slipped on a banana peel, the laugh is yours. It's one way to stay in the game, to stay on the rolling log and not belly flop into the water. Robert Lupone (Broadway star and producer and brother to Patti Lupone) was here in Aspen last week, and he was talking about surviving in NYC as an up-and-coming performer. He said you have to do what it takes to protect the vital you, the creative centre, so that when you get rejected for the thousandth time, you can pick yourself up and go on to the next one. As the Chinese proverb goes: Fall down seven times, get up eight.
Still, I don't want to fall down anymore. I gave up skiing recently for that reason  - after thirty years of skiing and finally running into a tree and finally breaking my shoulder, I said enough. And I have paid my literary dues - by writing unpublished for twenty years, by writing in the goddamn cupboard under the stairs; by getting enough rejections to paper a good sized bathroom. I don't want to have to lay myself out before the reviewers. I might just not be tough enough.
I think I might have to become an American citizen just long enough to make like Woody Allen and just not listen; I will take the fifth amendment rights and remain silent. I have always known that reviewers were harsh and how a writer needs to grow an extra layer of skin to cope.  But I didn't take it seriously. After all, my work has been criticised before: I attended a local writer's group for ten years, where we were brutally honest. But this is something else. This is people commenting who don't have to look you in the eye, who, if they like, can rub you into the dirt and never look back. And the good reviews don't really make up for the bad. The wounds inflicted by a callous comment or two or three or, geez, a whole paragraph, are never outweighed by the same number of soothing whispers. They go right to the heart, and there's nothing you can do about them.
During the storm whipped up in Woody Allen's life by a vindictive ex-partner, he received a valentine's card from her with a knife and long pins stuck into a picture of their family. (Shades of Fatal Attraction!)  But that's how it feels, dear readers, who are in the blissful era of churning out art behind closed doors. You will eventually have to walk around with daggers sticking out of your chest, and that isn't something you can easily hide.
When the arrows started flying at Steinbeck from reviewers in this country under the consensus that he should never have been awarded the Nobel Prize, he never wrote another word. (How wrong they turned out to be!) Steinbeck had Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat and any number of masterpieces under his belt, but it hurts, by god. It wounds, and you bleed out.
So I think I am just not going to read reviews, good or bad. I am going to close the envelope and turn down the flap on the arrows.  I have failed the humour test and the tough skin test. Whether my book sinks or swims will depend on how many copies it sells over about a year. That's all. That will have to be all. A published friend of mine has figured out that the publisher only needs to sell about five thousand copies to recoup a small advance and their costs. To me that sounds like a lot of copies, but he tells me it's not. I have another published friend who has just passed the hundred thousand mark.
So, anyway, enough of that. There's a rabbit that sits on a bank of snow outside my window for about two hours every morning. Due to a large coyote population, rabbits don't last very long around here. But there she sits (let's say it's a she and let's hope she's a muse.) It snows, but she sits on until the two hours are up and then she is suddenly gone the next time I look up. The next morning she is back. Today I bought a bag of Timothy hay to keep her going over this endless Narnia of a winter. You need your muses and you should do everything it takes to nurture and protect them.
Coyotes be damned.
                                                                             

Just For the Record

February 7th 2014

It is very easy for an author to get lost in the publicity and promotion surrounding a book launch, so I want to state for the record now how I see my book Veil Of Time, aka Dunadd, just about five weeks out from publication.
I remember thinking last year about this time, when I found out the publication date had been postponed until February 2014 that it was too far in the future to even think about. I sat on my chair in my office, head in hands and cried. I lost sight of the big picture for a moment. But here we are. Time waits, as the proverb tells us, for no man nor woman nor anything here under the sun.

Before I proceed, though, I'm going to give a nod to a friend of mine who jumped off a bridge this last weekend. Whether you knew him or not, we should all take pause, because except for the smile of fate and the graces there go we. He was a fine journalist here in Aspen, someone who had given generous time and space in his writings to me and mine. In fact, the last article he wrote, which came out on the day of his death, was about me and mine. He had recently read my book, and he described it in the article as a dark family drama. It isn't, though. The darkness must have been in him. But I didn't recognise that darkness, and never pegged him for the kind of person who would go to such desperate measures. But, even though no man is an island (and I will stop with the clichés soon), individuals can often act like them. And I suppose feeling isolated like that with no hope of rescue, a person might opt out. I can't get there even conceptually myself, but I cannot judge him either. Stewart Oksenhorn, friendly, upbeat, handsome, driven, with a quiet presence. You leave it hard for me to breathe. 8am in the first break of sun on a world just buried in two feet of snow, you took off your jacket and left it with your backpack on the bridge. And I keep wondering, perhaps because my mind has nowhere else to go, why did you take off your jacket?

So Veil Of Time is not a dark family drama, though it has elements of that. It is not a Romance, though it has elements of that, too. It is not Time Travel Fantasy, though, of course, that is part of it. And it didn't even end up only being what I started out to try and write, which was just some kind of homage to this magical place called Dunadd in Argyll, Scotland, a place only a few miles from where I grew up. Dunadd was for me in those far-off days a school bus stop where a couple of boys got on. I was more interested at the time in the boys than in this ancient fort that loomed behind them. Like most teenagers, the ancient past was only a blur around the edges of my world. But, of course, Dunadd stuck with me. When I moved to America, all these remnants of the past that had been shouting out to me down the years suddenly came into sharp focus.
Dunadd is a hillock, like an elephant's back in a flattened-out valley studded with rings of standing stones and marks in the rocks too ancient for anyone to know anymore what they mean. If you climb up the path to the top of Dunadd, you walk through a narrow slit in the rock that you don't know was where the great oak gates were once hinged, but you begin to feel the presence of the people that erected them and even more so as you walk around the rubble of the once ten-feet thick walls that ringed the hill. There's the ornate Pictish boar carved into the rock and a stone footprint. On the very top is a partial wall of a once round shelter built into the side of the hill, and from up there, the wind rushing up from the sea makes you gasp. But on any clear night from Dunadd, just around sunset, you can see the islands set on a wash of brilliant reds and oranges. It is probably the most beautiful sight in the world. In my world it is. So, I wanted to write about it. That was the impetus for Veil of Time.
As I wrote the book, though, other things started to push their way in. The first was Sula the druidess. These people were matrilineal, and I don't believe just druids once ruled here. And I started to think about where that line of wise women was going to go - to the stake eventually. When I considered  why this was so, I had to think of the advent of Christianity in Scotland, eventually to John Knox and his Calvinism, which brought with it these insane periods of Scottish history when councils of men were out to eliminate any hint of women-once-in-control. Our evangelist John Knox wrote "The First Trumpet Blast against the Monstrosity of Women Leaders," and all hell broke loose.
So, druidesses, Christianity, the interface between the two, and time, of course. That's where I disagree with anyone nominating this fantasy. Time travel isn't fantasy to physicists these days. Time is smoke - who can say definitively what its direction? Newton and Kant thought time was a thing. But Einstein said, No, No. It's not. In the quantum world, it is just part of the soup.
So all of this crept in. By the time I was writing the sequel, these elements had pretty much taken over. I let them because they need a voice. In this material world, we need a new paradigm if we are to go on living. So, that's what I am about in this trilogy. That is my raison d'être.

Stewart lost his for a moment there.  But let's not forget. It's the crux we all struggle with, the allure  of a bridge on a sun sparkle morning in the snow.

The Soft Underbelly

31st January 2014

I cleaned my house today, a task I normally avoid as much as possible. But I am on edge. I haven't sat down at my desk to write in months. I am not at ease at all in this waiting period as we inch towards publication date, March 11th. I am on trial for my creative life and the verdict will be slow and laborious in coming. It will amount to numbers of rating stars and percentages and money generated. It is me distilled into this thin liquor, poured into a cup for everyone to see and touch and swill.
In the evil days of witch hunts, there was a man called a "witch pricker," whose job it was to detect witchy women by how they responded to the prick (we'll take that as an apt Freudian metaphor!) See above image. If you were pricked and didn't bleed or bruise, you were ipso facto the devil's accomplice. (I researched witches for my current book and even more for its sequel where the extermination of the wise women gets its due.) So, we know I'm not a witch, because I have been pricked and bled all over the place. But like the witches, I have no rights now. I must remain silent, because, again as in the case of accused witches, the very act of protesting proves my guilt. And as in the witch trials, it is always the worst of the rabble that pick up and throw the first stones.
So I'm feeling a little vulnerable and in a way I hadn't anticipated. Not to this extent. But it's worth noting as a part of this writing/publishing process. A writer writes in her own little cocoon, ferreted away in her office or (as was the case with me for some years) in a cupboard under the stairs. It's a struggle painting paper with words and seeing how the picture comes together, but it is your little world and no one intrudes. It's a glorious self-absorbed struggle, and when it is finished, you pack it off and send it out to agents and editors and, if you're lucky, they scribble notes on it and you go away and make fixes. But you are in control. The voices are soft and encouraging. And then one day before publication, your book is on-line and some people that you don't know are still whispering, but others are yelling and picking up stones, and all you can do is turn into a hedgehog and protect your underbelly. Because that underbelly has to live to see another day. It is the soft underbelly that did the writing in the first place.
So, that's where I am: a hedgehog, waiting for the noise to stop, waiting to get back to what hedgehogs do best - snuffling around among the leaves looking for worms.

When my kids were little I used to tell them a story I made up called Dreamboat. Well it's less of a story than a way to get your kids' minds to sleep, but apparently they liked it - my son even wrote a song about it (available on ITunes.)
I'm not going to give away all the details of Dreamboat because I entertain hopes of one day making it into an illustrated children's book, but suffice it to say that it pictured waking life as a stroll down a leafy lane that ended up by a lake where sat a boat of many colors. Going to sleep was a trip out on the lake, up and down on the small waves until you couldn't keep your eyes open. It's a pretty picture, and I suppose that at bottom my image of life is a little like this, a fairly sunny world painted in pastel hues.
Lately, though, it's felt more like being in a very small dinghy on a tumultuous sea with sharks taking jabs at this inflatable craft and threatening to sink it.
Am I tough enough to stay afloat?  I guess the jury is still out on that question, too.
I think I liked the lake better.

Year of the Tattoo

January 24th 2014

Simon and Schuster put my book up on Goodreads.com for giveaway two days ago. There are 25 copies and 350 entries so far. So join up! You never know. Winners are selected randomly. Two reviews so far: the first lamented how different my book was from Diana Gabaldon's Outlander (some good soul responded, "So what?") The second was fairer, but neither liked the book and gave me only three stars out of five. I think I will limp now into my office and commit literary hari-kari. Eloi eloi lama sabachthani? (Well, I'm an artist with a flair for the dramatic!)  I know it is too early to tell how this thing is all going to come out in the wash, but this is not what I was anticipating. I sort of thought that trumpets would sound and people would be bowing down to kiss the street I walk upon (ditto.)

Maybe this isn't the right thing to be posting on a site that is supposed to be promoting my book, but I set out to log the process, and perhaps this is part of the process: I shared the glory of getting a publisher, of being assigned a publicist, all those things that had me hopping for joy. But there is no joy right now. There is self doubt and a clutching feeling in my chest. There are tears and vows that I will never write another word. I will come out of it. Human buoyancy predicts that I will bob back up on the surface after a period of time.

On to other things. 2014 being a big year (both for me and Scotland), I decided to do something radical and get a tattoo. My ancestors in Scotland were called "picti" by the marauding Roman army when they first encountered them on the Scottish border. "Picti" means "the painted ones," so we can assume they were fairly well tattooed. In my book set in the time of the Picts, nearly everyone is tattooed, so I thought I should reach back into my DNA and pull up a pictish symbol to adorn my arm. This is what I came up with:

On the inside of my forearm. I have never in my life done anything like this. Call it a mid-life crisis. Call it a move that floored the people who know me. I didn't even really know how to go about it. But the place I picked should have been a warning: The Dingy Cupboard. I ask you. I arrived at the appointed time and passed a woman outside drawing heavily on a cigarette. "Please make that not the tattoo artist," I prayed as I went inside. But she was. I had even researched her: I knew she had a degree in art, but nothing was said about nicotine addiction. She walked in after a while smelling of cigarettes and booze and a little jittery, I thought. I showed her my picture of the above symbol.
"Can you do this?" I asked.
She assured me she could. We decided on the place on my arm she would draw the tattoo, and then she asked to be excused for a quick smoke. I could have run then. I could have called the whole thing off when she came back in and had me sit in the seat and said, "You can moan, you can bitch and you can whine. But don't fucking move."
Believe me, I didn't move. The tattoo needle painted on the tattoo like a sewing machine running up a hem - though more slowly. More agonizingly. She was wiping away black ink and getting her face very close to her work. Every so often I stole a glance, and damn if it wasn't coming together just as I imagined. I had initially asked for a coloured-in tattoo, but once she had made the outline of the sign in black ink and filled in the swirls and inner design, I was thinking it looked just about right the way it was. My artist lady told me to take a few minutes to think about it, while she went outside for a fag. I strode up and down in the dingy cupboard looking at my arm in the mirror, thinking I was a pretty cool-looking middle-aged women and wondering how my children were going to react.
"I'm going to stick with this," I told her when she came back in. Credit due - she did a great job. I am very pleased with my tattoo.
Which just goes to show you: sink or swim, things don't always turn out the way you expect them to. Not in the publishing world. Not even in the tattoo parlor.

Putting Your Tail To The Ground

17th January 2014

I found my book reviewed in my alma mater's magazine at Oxford (called Christ Church Matters.) Nice to think of those fellow students who looked askance at me in those days noticing and saying, "But, God, she was so odd..."  Therein you have one of the less noble reasons writers write. Oh well, only human.
I received a form letter from my publisher a couple of days ago noting that it is only eight weeks until publication, and I had better plug into my Author Portal and make sure I'm doing everything I'm supposed to. I was on the phone yesterday to my agent, talking about such things. He bemoans the fact that there is no forum for book clubs to go to for reading ideas, because a book like mine could surely use one. It's odd that in spite of our high tech age, the movement of any given publication still relies on word of mouth. It's just that word can spread more quickly. But you still need those people in the first place using their mouths and lips to say to their neighbor, "I've just read such a good book, Darling!" He thinks we need to make inroads into communities of readers, like those of historical fiction, feminist and fantasy fiction. I have been attempting this sort of thing very clumsily on Twitter.
Meanwhile, two different book blogs, The Qwillery and My Bookish Ways, have asked to put my book up on their websites and conduct interviews and post guest blogs from me. They must have found me through my blog!
Meanwhile, I have submitted the title of my talk for Muses and the Market Place for May 4th in Boston on Grub Street: Art from the Heart - Getting out of the Way of Your Writing. I think we've been taught to overthink our role as artists instead of just listening, because the first requirement of any writer is to have good hearing. It's what Nietzsche called "psychological antennae." You have to have your ear to the ground, picking up the slightest pulse. The slightest pulse can be a moment of shattering insight. It's when we try to pull our art out of ourselves, particularly out of our heads, that our hands come up empty or sticky with dross. We have to be connected, like the shaman is, like the people in Avatar are when they connect their tails to the mother tree. Carl Jung would have loved that image - it's what he meant by the Collective Man (in the same vein as the collective unconscious. The writer as any other artist is an artisan whose medium is the collective unconscious.) So you can't get caught up in yourself - if you do, you end up blowing out your brains figuratively and in a few cases actually.  So you connect your tail to the tree of knowledge and you listen.

I am really getting out of the way of my writing these days. In fact I am so out of the way, I haven't sat down at my desk in my office since I finished the sequel to Veil of Time. It's been months, and it's beginning to wear on me.  It's not a case of writer's block. It's a case of being caught in the headlights.  I'm not sure which direction to turn, and I am a little frozen in place, waiting for the juggernaut to pass.  It would help if one of the many drivers of this publishing machine would put their head out of the window and shout out a word of encouragement, even the suggestion that I hop on the back and enjoy the ride. But I seem fixed down here at the side of the road, such a peaceful rural country road where I can usually hear the birds singing, the background hum of grasshoppers.
It's at times like this that you need the agent. You need him to say, "It's okay, let's have a party." Which is what we're going to do in Boston in May. A party for my book and for the Boston literati. I will put on my silk frock and sip cocktails and be full of what my book is and isn't and how long a writer like myself sat in the wings waiting for a party to be celebrated at. And then I will pick up my backpack and head back to the country road, smooth out the dirt and hang boxes in the trees for the birds to nest in. I will be quiet and lay my ear to the good earth and the good mother from which all proceeds.

Painting by Steven Cronin: www.steven-cronin-art.com