Flying with Magpies book tour: Eco-Libris

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.

And can I take this opportunity to remind you that via Eco-Libris you can also plant a tree for every book you read, which is a wonderful way of offsetting the environmental cost of printing books.

Magpies

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.

And if you want to take part in a discussion about it, don't forget the Salt Reading Group which kicks off on Twitter tomorrow with Too Many Magpies as the book for discussion. As I say, you can read about how to join in here. Tomorrow, too, the virtual tour for the book will come to rest finally in the tree-filled world of Eco-Libris, with whom I'm having a tree planted for every copy of the book - and I get asked some pretty tough questions about the environment, and how it relates to my writing!

Flying with Magpies book tour: Debi Alper

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.

Flying with Magpies Book Tour: Tania Writes

The virtual tour for Too Many Magpies comes to roost today on the blog of Tania Hershman, fellow Salt author whose wonderful story collection The White Road and Other Stories was commended by last year's judges for the Orange New Writing Prize.


Tania is an excitingly imaginative writer whose stories often take off-the-wall ideas and run with them in an exhilarating way while yet illuminating the subtlest aspects of human nature, and in lyrical prose. It's no surprise then that she hosts my blog tour in an imaginative way, too: instead of the usual interview, she conducted a word association game with me - so be warned: my subconscious is on show!

The writing or the life

This is what I feel a cross-section of my brain must have looked like while I was beginning work on the present novel. On my current visit to Nuala ni Chonchuir's blog for my virtual book tour, I explain how hard I find it to concentrate on anything else if I'm involved in a piece of work, and vice versa: once my attention is scattered by external things the spell of the novel/story/play is broken. My novel was increasingly gripping me (which of course I needed it to do), and it was a stage requiring especial concentration because I was working out a new structure and grappling with a new voice. I needed to sit and listen to that voice and watch the new structure taking place, but there were other calls on my attention. Flying with Magpies, the virtual tour for Too Many Magpies, was beginning, and I had to turn my mind to its organisation, and to think about that novel instead. It's not as if I don't enjoy these virtual tours - I do; I really love the interaction with the blog hosts and their readers - but that's part of the trouble: it's so very distracting! And then I had to take time off to design leaflets and a poster for my Chorlton Arts Festival event, which takes place tomorrow evening, and to spend a morning delivering them. Here's the poster I designed: I have to say that with my attention at such a premium I didn't put as much care and time as I usually do into the design, but I guess it does its job.


It really felt as though the novel was being sucked out of my brain by these things. Anyway, they all got done, and the virtual tour seems to have settled into a routine now, and the novel seems to have taken good root in my head in spite of it all. In order to ensure that, I had been working really long hours on it, and my back was aching and I felt exhausted, and I must say pretty frazzled at the end of each day when I looked around at the mess in the house and turned to all the other things I had to do. I made the decision, having cracked it, that I need to pace myself and do fewer hours on it each day, and I felt secure enough in it to take the weekend off and take stock of it while clearing up some other things. Turns out it was a really good move: with the distance, I was able to think about an unformed worry that had been growing at the back of mind and see what it was: I needed to go back to the beginning and adjust the frame I had set up for the novel. Must say, though, that by the time I had spent yesterday afternoon planning the reading on Tuesday and doing an application for another arts festival, and with domestic stuff still to do, I just didn't get round to writing this blog yesterday evening as I meant to do...

Flying with Magpies: Stop 2

This week's stop on the virtual book tour for Too Many Magpies is at the blog of the thoughtful and erudite John Baker, whose own tour for his impressive Winged With Death came here a year ago. John is very insightful about the themes of Magpies, and, I'm thrilled to say, gives it a lovely review, which ends thus:

Baines has a unique voice and it will, undoubtedly, be worth following up on anything she writes. This book is only 123 pages long, but bursting with ideas and surprises and humanity. It is touching and the emotional life of the narrator lingers in the memory long after the final sentences have faded. Highly recommended.

John also asked me some searching questions about my aims in writing novels and, since this is a theme of Magpies, our present-day sense of ourselves in the world - I had to think very hard about the latter! You can find his questions and my answers in the comments section of his post.