#onwriting
Wow, what a great end to the year. My novel, I CAME TO FIND A GIRL, has been included in The Telegraph’s Best Crime Fiction Books for 2015. The review and full list is here.
And more good news, LONDON TSUNAMI & OTHER STORIES received an amazing review from literary website Literogo. Happy days.
Meanwhile, I spent quite a while queuing at the Post Office to send off copies of I CAME TO FIND A GIRL to the winners on Goodreads. Fingers crossed they all arrive safely. Happy New Year!
Up early: wake kids, wake kids again, wake eldest once again (probably shouting), walk dog (unless it’s raining – he doesn’t do rain), make massive coffee and check Amazon, Goodreads, Twitter and Facebook. Write diary and plan day.
Write, rewrite, edit or blog until lunchtime. Brief break for lunch with other half (he also works at home). Watch the news – risking boredom, depression or incredulity depending on severity of news items.
Back to work: check Amazon Author Central, Goodreads, Twitter and Facebook and respond to messages and emails. Write, rewrite, edit or possibly format depending on where I’m at with a project, and keep going until there’s a need to shop for food (always out of something). Walk the dog again.
The teenagers return. Cup of tea (I am British), and more of the same until it’s time to cook, 
read or watch TV (choosing either low-brow or high-brow, but nothing in between), whilst checking Amazon (cue excitement if I have any book sales) and Goodreads (again, happy to gain any reviews). Take the dog out in the garden (I have to accompany him because he is so small and there are foxes that might eat him), read and bed where, in my sleep, I solve all plot issues and devise brilliant promotional campaigns (if only), and wake ready to start again.
You wait a while for a review and, what do you know, two come along at once.
Book reviews – the buses of publishing – can take a book elsewhere. The preferred destination: discovered, bought, read and enjoyed is clear, although there’s no guarantee any book (however good) will make it.
‘Bussing it’ – catching a bus and staying on wherever it takes you – has its fans such as teenagers with free travel cards, OAPs and even rock chick Chrissie Hynde. It’s more about the journey, the opportunity to travel and discover unexpected places along the way that may, and often do, prove to be more interesting than the final destination.
Independent book blogs are the bussing-it-style trips compared to the straightforward journeys on offer via the book review pages in the mainstream media.
Book blogs, through their willingness to read widely and without prejudice towards self-published works, offer the chance for other voices to be heard and new, possibly more unusual books to be discovered. As Haruki Murakami says, ‘If you only read the books that everyone is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking’.
Thank you to Book Fabulous and Published Moments.
Available from Amazon / Kobo / Smashwords etc
Nottingham, London and Lee-on-Solent – three places that are unlikely to have featured in the same novel, until now that is.
I Came to Find a Girl is a psychological thriller set in Nottingham (with the odd excursion to the South Coast and a London finale), in which young artist Mia Jackson looks back on her recent past.
While studying art in Nottingham Mia meets famous artist Jack Flood, a man who compulsively films everything he sees. After a date that takes a twisted turn, there follows a battle of wills as they both try to gain the upper hand.
The story plays out in a climate of fear. Women are going missing and the culprit is yet to be caught.
Why Nottingham? Could the story have taken place elsewhere?
‘Write what you know’ is a quote frequently repeated, and all the locations I’ve used are places I know well. Nottingham was where I spent three years studying textile design and so it made sense to use my experience of student life as the backdrop to the trials that face my protagonist Mia Jackson.
Write what you know, but also write to find out what you really think. Novels can evolve from a single image, or an unshakeable idea, or perhaps a short story that demands more attention and development.
For me, there was a desire to revisit Nottingham by night – its buzzy club scene, and its contrasting edgier side. And at the same time, I was thinking about the naivety of youth and what if, against your better judgement, you find yourself alone with someone you know little about?
‘One place comprehended can make us understand other places better. Sense of place gives equilibrium, extended, it is sense of direction too,’ Eudora Welty states in On Writing.
Nottingham is integral to this novel. It’s a dark portrait of a city I love. There’s no room for Robin Hood, but it does play on Nottingham’s reputation for violent crime – where better to set a suspenseful, psychological whodunit?
For Amazon UK click here.
For Amazon US click here.
Also available in paperback and from Kobo / Barnes & Noble / Smashwords
Photo: Nottingham Council & Old Market Square by Ray Teece
“This is an excellent collection by an excellent writer… with the very real potential of joining the greats.
“I appreciate the author’s artistic voice, and her ability to see the dramatic emotional turmoil of ordinary everyday life.”
Thrilled to receive this review from fellow writer and book blogger Victor A. Davis on his literary website Mediascover. The full review is available here.
Shortlisted for The Virginia Prize for Fiction.
I Came to Find a Girl – a “poetically written” psychological thriller.
“I was happy to hear Flood was dead. I wasn’t as happy as I thought I’d be, but I was happy all the same.”
A complex game of cat and mouse in the seedy streets of Nottingham ends in death. Young artist Mia Jackson is compelled to watch the posthumous video diaries of Jack Flood – controversial bad boy of the London art world and convicted serial killer. Can Mia allow Drake Gallery to show Aftermath in their retrospective of his work? Muse or victim, why was she allowed to survive?
Available now in paperback or ebook:
Amazon UK / Kobo / Barnes & Noble / Amazon US / Smashwords
Most writers have to supplement their income from time to time. My working life started at Buckingham Palace but it wasn’t an altogether pleasant experience. You can read about it on the excellent book review website Literogo.
The prophecy stated that following a spate of problems with my car, I’d sign a publishing deal in June. Well, that prediction came years ago.
I’ve had my palm read twice. Once when I was 19 and backpacking in India where a guy in a jewellery shop said I’d nearly die at 35 (I think he was irritated that I wasn’t buying his gold), and secondly by a friend’s hippyish dad who was visiting the UK from Australia.
Obviously, I was relieved to find the Indian guy was wrong as I made it through to 36 unscathed and happily alive, but not so thrilled to annually suffer the car issues without the longed for publishing deal.
Most years there have been promising signs that this could be “the” June – a shortlisting for a writing competition, inclusion in a literary magazine or website, or a book out on submission via my agent, but so far each June has drawn to a close with a hint of melancholy (which quickly dissipates with the arrival of my birthday).
Anyway, it’s a truth universally known that the road to publication is circuitous for most writers. Unless you’re Martin Amis, a footballer or celebrity, your average writer has to fight for his or her right to be published. I mean, I even thought about writing a novel about twitching and sending it to Jonathan Franzen so he could champion me, but someone beat me to it, so what else?
I’ve always sought publication via the traditional route. I have a charming agent who talks to the right people but still it’s not easy, and recently it hit home just how hard it is for writers to secure a deal. At the London Book Fair I attended a talk about the market for crime and thrillers. Sarah Hodgson, deputy publishing director at HarperCollins, revealed that they take on about three new writers a year. Three. And that’s in a hugely popular and commercial genre. And who are they taking on? Often it’s writers who are already doing it for themselves. They have self-published novels that are selling, or perhaps they are YouTube stars with millions of followers.
Anyway, whatever, YouTube is not for me, but I’m all for putting work out there, so that’s why this June is different. Yes, there’s been car trouble – tyres that needed attention, new car tax and a parking permit – yawn yawn – but then that is what the Australian fortune teller predicted -.
London Tsunami & Other Stories is available here for the UK, and here for the US. Also available for Kobo, Nook, iBooks etc.
JAQ HAZELL 