I wanted to show you the view from my writing desk in Wales, as it's a view which this week has been central to my psyche, apart of course from the scenarios of the novel. However, the mobile broadband signal isn't good enough for pics this morning (I think it must the wind, and not the clouds, as I've thought previously: there's no cloud down on the mountain), so I'll describe it instead: there are ash trees, and beyond them the blue-and-purple of Nantlle Ridge. I've been working really hard - not steadily as I intended, because it's really taken me over, and I need to take advantage of that. I've been writing in the mornings, typing up and editing the morning's writing in the afternoons, sometimes until six or seven o'clock in the evenings, by which time I have been exhausted and badly in need of just
getting up from the chair. As a result, I've been out of touch with blogging and the internet generally, although every day I have (unrealistically) intended not to be...
The new typing chair has been great, though: I would never have managed such long hours without a lot more stiffness and RSI with the old Victorian chair...
Yesterday evening I finally got to the end of the first section of the book, and this morning, for the first time since I got here last Sunday, I am able to sit back and take stock and turn my attention for a moment to other things.
The days have been hot, apparently (though not nearly as hot up here on the mountain as I understand it is in England), but it's cool inside the house where I'm working. On one of the warmer days the swallows were teaching their young to fly right past the window, and one baby almost flew into the glass just as I looked up, only to realise its mistake just in time, which felt like some of the moves I was making with my narrative. Often when I look up I see goldfinch and yellowhammers and linnets flitting in the nearest tree. For the whole time a cuckoo has been calling, which puts paid to my long-term idea that cuckoos only call for the month of May, and for some reason I have found that really heartening: I love the idea of having one's longtime assumptions overturned, and I think the sense of that has been especially good for the novel. By the time I have emerged in the evenings it's become fairly nippy, one evening so cold that I wore three tops including a woolly jumper without getting too warm and could have done with gloves, even though John and I had a strenuous walk up the side of a mountain. This is a wonderful time of the year for writing, because it means that you can work for such long hours yet still have long light evenings for walking, which you really need to do, I think, when you've been static all day - and of course, it stays lighter longer here than in Manchester, being further west.
In the evenings too I have been reading Nuala Ni Chonchuir's really lovely novel,
You, which she will be touring around the blogosphere from 7th July, stopping by here on the 14th. Usually when I'm writing so hard I find it very difficult to read - it's the disruptive wrench into another psyche and another language - but Nuala's book is so engaging and moving I'm having no trouble at all, and I'm really looking forward to talking to her about it on the tour.
We'll be here until Monday, and on the way back we'll be stopping off in Chester for the launch of Clare Dudman's new novel,
A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees, which I'm also really looking forward to reading - and speaking of launches, I'm especially sorry to miss Charles Lambert's London launch next weekend for his new book from Picador,
Any Human Face.
And by the time we leave I hope to be well into the second section of my novel...
The last stop of the tour for Too Many Magpies is up at Eco-Libris, with whom I'm planting a tree for every copy of the book printed, and I'm asked some fairly deep but very interesting questions about my take on the environment, which of course relates to the theme of the book.
I'm thrilled to discover that Too Many Magpies is 4th in Salt's current Top Ten Bestseller list. Thank you so much to those who have bought it, and I do hope you enjoyed it - I'm very interested in people's response to the book (one is always wanting to learn for the next book!) so if you want to let me know, I'll be glad to hear, whatever you have to say.
Latest post for the virtual tour is up at the blog of Debi Alper, author of the feisty contemporary thrillers, Nirvana Bites and Trading Tatiana, where she generously provides a collection of resources about Too Many Mapgies, including an extract from the book and a short film in which I talk about it.
Today the virtual tour for Too Many Magpies stops at the blog of Words from a Glass Bubble author, Vanessa Gebbie. Vanessa was staying with me in the last couple of days, so, unusually for a virtual tour, we were able to conduct an interview in person. The night before Vanessa arrived I fell down a flight of stairs, and Vanessa uses this as a thematic springboard for a pretty wide-ranging discussion about not only Magpies but about my writing in general.
Here's another image from the time, a couple of weeks ago, when I was getting going on the WIP, and which will now always be associated with it for me. It's a whitebeam tree with clematis growing all over it, and as usual I can't help finding a parallel with the novel: the new draft is taking over from the old one, but the old one is still sturdy and flowering away underneath, so (I hope) I'm getting the best of two worlds!
I'm thrilled that Too Many Magpies is to be the first in a new Twitter Reading Group for Salt books, beginning right now. You can read about it here on the Salt blog, where you can also listen to a podcast of me reading from the novel. Next week there will be an interview with me, and at the end of the month there will be an open Twitter discussion about the book, so anyone on Twitter will be able to have their say (eek!). (Just search on Twitter for #SaltReadingGroup.) If you'd like to take part and haven't read the book yet there's still time to do so (it's not a long book!). (And you know where you can buy it, eh?)
Winging back to Ireland today, and poet Barbara Smith's blog, for the tour for Too Many Magpies, where she gets me talking about the crucial issue of voice. She seems to have liked the novel, too, I'm thrilled to say: she calls it 'amazing' and says she read it in one sitting!
I am failing in my reading now that I'm so engrossed in the novel. Here are three books which arrived weeks ago now, all by writers I know via the internet. Jenn Ashworth and I swapped our own novels via Twitter: I sent her Too Many Magpies and I got in return A Kind of Intimacy, which I have been interested to read for some time now - a novel with an unreliable narrator, one of my favourite novelistic modes - a woman with a secret in the past, I think. I sent off for Sarah Salway's Getting the Picture as soon as it was available (it's only just officially published), and it looks every bit as inventive yet readable as all her other work. Neither have I yet managed to read. Roast Books asked me if I'd like a copy of Nik Perring's flash fiction collection, Not So Perfect, and I couldn't resist, but I have only just got around to reading it, and Nik's launch has already been and gone. This book is striking for the concepts of the stories - a woman fills her house with post-it notes to remind herself of a lost lover, another woman vomits up animals, another actually spits fire, a man literally grows invisible as he fails to be acknowledged - and for the contrast in the determinedly deadpan prose in which they are told. Striking too is the format: fittingly for a book of flash fiction, the book is compact, indeed the size and shape of a CD, and quite lovingly produced, with illustrations - although, ex-typesetter as I am, I thought the number of 'widows' (a last line, the punchline, appearing all on its own over the page) was a shame, especially in a book of stories so very short, where the last line is often so important. Clearly, though, Roast Books have put a lot of thought and effort into the production and marketing of this book, and I'd say they are a new publisher to watch.
I've been up the mountain in Wales since Tuesday. The weather's been great but I have to say I've spent most of the time indoors - with the window wide open, I hasten to say - as I'm working really, really hard on the novel. I was very frustrated with it when I got here: I had been stuck for about four days on a particular section, which I must say I had thought pretty perfect in the last version of the book! I had decided that I needed to dramatize the scenes in it much more, but as soon as I began doing so, a different slant to the story began emerging, and I began to see possibilities and connections I hadn't seen before - I guess this is what people mean when they say that their characters take over from them. It wasn't gelling, though, and I was getting pretty fed up with it.
Today my virtual tour for Too Many Magpies swoops down (do you think I'm stretching this metaphor too far, hee hee?) on the blog of Tom Vowler, How to Write a Novel, and in keeping with the thrust of his blog, Tom asks me chiefly about my writing methods.
