Celebs in Writing Distress: Megan Fox

by The Lone Ranger






Dear Lone Ranger

I'm writing my first novel in Microsoft word and have my font set to 12 - do you think it should be in size 10?

yours

Megan


Dear Megan

I would normally recommend matching your font to your shoe size. Good luck with the novel.

yours

The Lone Ranger

More letters from celebs soon!

8 Rooms, The Short Story Reinvented

by eight authors
Publisher: Legend Press 2009


by Jane





I’m fortunate that I’ve more than eight rooms in my house. However, I’ve found it’s impossible to keep them all in order without being slavishly devoted to housework. As a result each room has taken on a life of its own. It lives, it breathes. Indeed, if you look closely at any room it reveals much about the occupants. For example, in my kitchen the stacks of plates piled with crusts, bottles without tops and towers of leaning glasses betray the presence of three hungry boys. In contrast, the dining room is the tidy showpiece of two mature adults moving towards old age and then there’s my study where I slip away into peaceful but rather chaotic solitude.

8 Rooms, a collection of short stories from Legend Press and part of their Short Story Reinvented Series, is the result of a competition where the objective was to tell a story principally within the confines of a singular room. It’s an interesting scenario which poses many questions. What can we learn about a character from their room? Does a room define a character or does a character define a room? What is revealed about the protagonist when he/she is alone or interacting with others within their room or maybe even in someone else’s room? So many tantalizing ideas spring to mind it’s not surprising that the eight winning authors have produced an eclectic selection of stories which rather like the rooms in my house paint entirely different pictures of their occupants.

Of the stories I felt the opening one by C J Carver, which told the story of a prisoner confined to a rail truck and en route to his execution, was probably the most well rounded. It managed to pull sufficiently well at the heart strings, in what was quite a difficult and challenging subject, despite a rather cheesy ending where the narrative ended in mid sentence like an episode of a soap opera.

However, it wasn’t only C J Carver who suffered from this terminal illness. I was enjoying Mark Kotting’s colourful story of a disillusioned photographer only to discover that the resulting madness was all in his head. Yep, it was a Dallas scenario! In fact when the doorbell rang at end of this story I thought the surprise was going to be Bobby Ewing. (Unfortunately it wasn’t- which is a pity because I kinda have an attraction to rich oil men.)

The same sickness affected Emma Seaman’s story of the masseuse and the bachelor. Overall, this was a nicely written tale of two people’s mutual attraction but whose inhibitions prevent them from vocalizing their feelings. Unfortunately, after a 30 page build up I felt a little disappointed that there was no shock, sleaze or even a twist in the tail that might have set this story apart from so much of the sentimental fodder that appears in women’s magazines. Frankly, I would have been glad if one of the protagonists had been shot like JR in this story because, let’s face it, a real cliff-hanger is better than a wishy-washy “maybe they will, maybe they won’t” scenario.

Something entirely different and completely refreshing was my favourite story from newcomer Guy Mankowski. A trained psychologist, Guy used his knowledge to delve into the mind of a translator obsessed with the ownership of the space and people around him. With its explicit language this isn’t a story for those looking for a comfortable read but for a glimpse inside a mind descending into mental illness it's quite intriguing. Guy’s position gives him a unique insight into the oddities of human behaviour and I look forward to seeing what he delivers next.

Regrettably, I don’t feel the same about D E Rhylis whose story about the sudden death of a mother, seen through the eyes of her daughter, left me completely unmoved. As my own mother died suddenly and dramatically last autumn, I probably should have ended up weeping profusely but, sadly, the story didn’t fully explore the real issues of personal loss. Ironically, it actually skirted over them by featuring too many characters, events and details. By trying to achieve too much it actually achieved very little. In my opinion, to portray love and loss you don’t need to catalogue a series of events as evidence of your distress, you just need to strip away the detail and write from the heart.

I’m not sure that D E Rhylis’ story could even have been saved by some careful editing but like most of the stories it would have certainly benefited from the slash of a red pen. I suppose this raises the question of how much or little an editor should or would want to play in nurturing a writer. 8 Rooms was the result of a competition so I suspect the stories had minimal editorial input which is rather a pity because like actors on a stage, an author can sometimes benefit from good direction. And when there’s a price tag attached the ultimate objective must surely be to make any piece of work the best it can possibly be.

I felt this was particularly the case with A J Kirby’s story. It started out witty and entertaining with the premise of a geeky nerd living in a ground floor flat where strangers frequently call looking for directions. This was an exciting proposition dripping with potential for Kirby’s engaging humour so when the doorbell finally rang I was disheartened to find it was just his girlfriend’s dreary best friend and her baby. From then on the story got bogged down in trying to produce something obviously meaningful. I wanted Kirby to just let loose with mayhem perhaps with the arrival of someone as outlandish as a mass murderer, a rain soaked politician or even a transvestite door to door salesman. Humour is Kirby’s weapon and, I believe, used effectively could be just as successful as any “serious” attempt at writing. According to Legend Press Kirby is now currently writing a situation comedy. So good luck to him in his endeavours he has the wit, he just needs to go into freefall with the imagination.

Of course, imagination is a principle factor in developing any story but I didn’t feel either Miranda Winram’s tale of a burns victim or Rebecca Strong’s one of an unborn child were particularly creative. In fact they imbued me with the image of an angst ridden female’s writers group. (Ugh.) While the sentiments of both stories are praiseworthy and no doubt will find many female admirers they didn’t appeal to me. Perhaps it also didn’t help that the real action in these stories took place, or had taken place, outside the “rooms.” (The foetus reacts to what’s going on outside the womb and the burns victim is already injured when we encounter her in her hospital bed.) In the more successful stories the action/conflict was more obviously centred within the room although in C J Carvers story the action cleverly took place using a moving room (the railway truck) which enabled her to tap into all sorts of memories and emotions without it appearing overly contrived.

So 8 Rooms is very much a mixed bag and like the rooms in my house, some stories were neat and orderly, some were messy and some looked good on first impression but on closer inspection didn’t live up to expectations. Maybe with a little bit more handiwork, some décor and a few finishing touches this book might have been a collection of truly memorable rooms rather than one where some of the rooms needed a little more love and attention.

Pride or Prejudice?

By Lorraine Jenkin



The great thing about being a published author is that at least some people have read the work that you have spent months, weeks, days and hours toiling over. Hopefully they will have enjoyed it. One of the less favourable aspects about it is that they might believe that they now know everything about you – about your dreams, your hopes and your fears. And sometimes they will and sometimes they won’t.

As an author who has recently grappled with a (very) long list of editor’s notes for my second novel, Eating Blackbirds, I am coming to terms with the fact that I am finally seeing my own likes and prejudices paraded in front of me.

It struck me recently as I read a book and was jolted by a statement completely unrelated to the story. A woman was sat, contemplating, on a bus and listened into another conversation in which a younger woman was saying what a wonderful husband and father he really was, despite being sat there with a black eye from him. The author obviously had feelings about women who stick with their aggressors and had wanted it to get inside her novel. Fair enough, it’s her novel, but it made me think: what are the things that I’ve put in mine that make me read like an open-book?

The process of editing is very revealing. My editor, Caroline Oakley of Honno, is fantastic: sharp, objective, blunt and, despite a few mumblings, I realise that she is usually right. Her editing process is therefore rigorous and exposes all my foibles and (as I prefer to call them) my eccentricities.

The first cull is usually my foul language. Expletives are removed and it makes me cringe as I realise (as she has done) that most were gratuitous and, therefore, pretty childish. The second cull is my lewdness. Less is usually more, I am told. Therefore references to wind, burping and cat-sick are removed. These culls make me question my own spoken language and I am ashamed to sometimes find it crass and lacking in sophistication.

The other jolt has been my ingrained stereotyping of people at certain ages. I recently wrote about two forty-five-year-olds who really shouldn’t be having any kind of intimacy, rolling around like hippos, squelching and slobbering with a lack of sexual prowess and a large pair of beige pants. It came as a shock to me when it dawned that, at thirty-nine, they were only six years older than me! These scenes were views of people that I had had when I was fifteen and they hadn’t matured, as I should have done. Am I, therefore, a slobbering, squelching hippo? Quite probably.

As I am battling with novel number three, I am debating the dilemma: if I remove my own feelings and prejudices, will I make it better or will it become bland and impersonal? Should I analyse what my thoughts actually are and review them to make sure that I am still happy that they are current? Or should I just move the ages of my characters forward ten years and worry about it another day?


Author Profile Lorraine Jenkin quit her job and went off round the world to write her novel, Chocolate Mousse and Two Spoons. She has written a variety of pieces for newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian and The Times. Her second novel, Eating Blackbirds, is released this July by Honno. Catch up with Lorraine on her blog, http://lorrainejenkin.blogspot.com/

Picture of hippo: Jennifer Jordan

Issue 13 of TVFH

The View From Here issue 13

Issue now on sale for $5.49 plus P&P.

Interviews with ...
Katie Fforde
Yasutaka Tsutsui

Original Fiction at thefrontview by:
Todd Heldz
Suvi Mahonen
George Polley

Guest Writers:
Paolo Giordano
Mike Murphy
Sophia Bennett

A Creative Exercise by Stella Carter
Original Short Fiction by Kathleen Maher
Rabbit Writer monthly cartoon from Naomi Gill

Book Reviews of
Love Letters by Katie Fforde
Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

with original art by Fossfor.
ISSN 1758-2903

To purchase the magazine click here.

Or read it free in our on-line magazine style format at Issuu:

Open publication - Free publishing - More writers

Help spread the word - put the magazine on your blog - copy and paste the code below (width190)

We Are All Made of Glue

by Charlie



Here’s the thing. If I was reviewing an Ian Rankin ‘Rebus’ I wouldn’t be giving much away if I told you it was a gritty account of one man’s struggle to bring justice to a world in which alienation battles with hope. I would add it was a cracking whodunit to boot, written with a sure hand and a dark wit and I wouldn’t be spoiling it for anyone. You know what you have when you hold a ‘Rebus’ in your hand. The problem here is that to define Marina Lewycka’s latest book as a whole would weaken one of its greatest strengths – that although her tone is light, I felt that calamity might take the whole book to unexpectedly dark places. And that’s all I’m going to say on that; if you pick up a copy, and you should, you’ll have to find out for yourselves the path Marina’s characters led her down. I know and I was not disappointed.

The book finds Georgie our narrator and central character, having come ‘unstuck’ from her husband, meeting the remarkable Mrs Shapiro who lives with a population of cats in a large crumbling house. Rather to her surprise Georgie is befriended by Mrs Shapiro and becomes her reluctant champion when Mrs Shapiro is beset by social workers, scheming estate agents and matters of a DIY nature. Alongside this Georgie is trying to figure out if she wants her self absorbed husband back or a new and salacious love life, puzzling over her teenage son’s newfound religious leanings and cleaning up quite a lot of cat poop. Oh and Georgie also writes articles for an adhesives magazine when not struggling with her novel of romance and revenge, The Splattered Heart.

Marina sets this stall out with a deft touch, lining up her characters without fuss. She has the gift, through dialogue and description, of fleshing them out in ways many other authors might only dream of. Georgie as narrator is a pleasure to journey with and her deeds, thoughts and opinions are both warm and comfortingly domestic. Some of the people she meets are equally charming, others less so, yet all are intriguing although some seem oddly disconcerting, if not somewhat sinister.

The first time I met Wonder Boy, he pissed on me. I suppose he was trying to warn me off, which was quite prescient when you consider how things turned out.

What befalls Georgie and Mrs Shapiro is both touching and comical; and sometimes laugh out loud funny, particularly in moments that involve bargain shopping or cats. This is at heart a story of almost everyday events and almost ordinary people but as we, like Georgie, are drawn in we are also taught more than one lesson. Snippets of the history of Israel and Palestine after WWII, how fundamentalism may take root in unexpected places when the internet is in every bedroom, the treatment of Jews in Denmark during the Second World War and how the Miners strike in the 1980s touched adults and children in those communities. Not to mention we discover quite a lot about glue.

That’s a lot of targets to aim at and whilst Marina may not hit the bull’s-eye every time, her aim is more than sure enough to make us think, and more importantly, feel how the past shapes lives in the present. Some might accuse her of cherry picking events to make her points and they might have an arguable case if the book is seen as a history per se rather than a human drama. Some might also accuse her of bringing her subtexts to the surface a little too often but I was not unhappy to see them. Like Georgie, a northern lass by birth, Marina also calls a spade a spade.

Let me be blunt as well. Go buy this book. It isn’t War and Peace; it isn’t The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. What it is is a simple pleasure to read. If I were you I’d take it on holiday; if the sun doesn’t warm you, this book will – although as I said at the beginning, you might find yourself checking for rainclouds on the horizon from time to time.

Finally I cannot help but include a personal aside. In another life I was an industrial chemist, making adhesives for a living. I never thought I would want to hear about the stuff again. Thanks to Marina I can once again think about cohesive strength and cure rate without wanting to do someone harm!

Read our interview with Marina ...

Part 1

Part 2

Interview with Marina Lewycka - Part 2 of 2

by Jen




The View From Here Interview - Part Two: Marina Lewycka




Part one of this interview can be found here.

****

Your latest book is just out this week, on July 2nd - We Are All Made of Glue - a mystery which moves from Highbury to wartime Europe to the Middle East. Can you tell us something about writing your third novel?

The new book is called We Are All Made of Glue, and it’s about bonding. (Though bondage comes into it too.) On one level it’s about an old lady who lives in a crumbling house in London with seven smelly cats, and a secret. As the narrator gets to know the old lady, she realizes that she is not who she says she is. But as we find out about the old lady’s past, we also discover things in the present which relate to her story.


One of the strands is also about the situation in the Middle East, and the dispute between Palestine and Israel. I wrote it partly because I was so troubled about the state of the world, I wanted to learn for myself what was happening over there – it seems to be one of the central problems of our time. I was trying to understand the current situation in the Middle East and find out whether there is a solution to the problems.

When I tell people my book is about the conflict in the Middle East, and it’s a comedy, they look at me as though I’ve gone mad.


It often seems publishers want more of the same after an author is initially successful, but authors and readers may need something new. How do you manage this?

When Tractors was published, I was all set to write a sequel. But my publishers said, don’t do that. Sequels are always compared unfavourably with the original. Why don’t you do something completely different? I thought that was good advice, so I started working on something completely different. But as Tractors became more and more successful, they started to get nervous – ‘well, actually, we’d like it to be the same’, they said. So there you are – Two Caravans, is the same but different.

After Tractors came out, Rose Tremain’s novel The Road Home also explored Eastern European immigration, working conditions and aging in the UK and after Two Caravans Patrick Ness featured a talking dog in The Knife of Never Letting Go. How difficult is it to be original and what do you think writers can do to be distinctive?

I think that may be more of a problem for readers than writers. I haven’t read either of those books yet, and I’m sure they haven’t read mine. But I do think there’s a Zeitgeist – ideas and themes which are current, and which grab everyone’s imagination.


The covers of your novels are distinctive. Were you involved in the artwork selection, and why the US / UK title difference for your second book?

They’re by a very talented designer called John Gray. Our only brief was that because the title was rather ‘male’ the cover should have feminine appeal – definitely no tractors on the cover, we said. But when his design came back, we just loved it. He gave the books a rather utilitarian look, to make them seem like authentic books from the former Soviet Union. There’s a name for that style – it’s called Ostalgia. It’s even done deliberately off-the-straight.


You know there’s a funny story - when I was in Holland I looked at the cover and noticed they had straightened up the edges But they said, “Well, we Dutch, we like things to be orderly.”

The Americans, however, couldn’t relate to that ‘Ostalgia’ style at all – it means nothing in their culture. They wanted something prettier. Actually, I think the US and Canadian covers are very attractive, but they don’t have the same whacky appeal as the John Gray covers.

(Two Caravans was published as Strawberry Field in America, as caravans didn't translate well.)

Do you favour a PC or longhand - what tools do you feel are must-haves for writers?

I work on a lap-top on a little bean-bag tray I bought in Oxfam – the sort of thing they used to have for TV dinners. My preferred place to write is in bed propped up with lots of cushions, and a nice pot of tea on a tray – but it can be hard on the back.


What’s your writing process? Do you write in order, or in parts?

I’m not a very orderly writer, I don’t plan nearly enough. But for Two Caravans, I used a different colour for each character, so I could follow through the individual threads, and make sure they all ran smoothly. The story is a bit like a game of rugby. Each has the story for a little bit, and runs with it, then passes it to someone else. (I’m married to a New Zealander, maybe that’s where that idea comes from).

Because there are nine characters, the voice of each character must be different. Only Irina has a first person voice. And Dog, of course. The others are in the third person, some in the present tense, some in the past.

I’m a huge fan of Chaucer, he has the most wonderful characters, and I drew on him a lot for Two Caravans.


Do you read other writers’ work for pleasure, for study of the competition or to improve your own writing?

I find it quite hard to read for pleasure now – being able to lose myself in another writer’s world is a thing of the past. I enjoy reading non-fiction nowadays – I feel that with so much out-put I need to keep on topping up my in-put. And I do study other fiction writers for ideas about technique and how to solve particular problems.


What's coming up for you now in terms of events with the launch this week?

The new book is just out and I’m sure there’ll be lots of trekking around to book festivals, though the only one I know for sure at this stage (at time of writing in March) is the Edinburgh Festival.


Assuming you were on Desert Island Discs, which book and which luxury object would you like to take with you and why?

The book would be The Culture of The Europeans by Donald Sassoon – it’s a big fat book with lots of fascinating information, but written in a very accessible and amusing style. It would keep me going for ages. My luxury object would be a solar-powered laptop. I’m afraid I’d need my glasses, too. Would that be allowed?

***

ABOUT MARINA LEWYCKA
Marina Lewycka is of Ukrainian origin and was born in a British-run refugee camp in northern Germany, after the end of World War II. She grew up in England and studied at Keele University. She has written a number of books of practical advice for carers of the elderly, published by Age Concern England . She lectures in the department of media studies (journalism & PR) at Sheffield Hallam University.

Her first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005), tells of the exploits of two feuding sisters trying to save their elderly father from a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee, Valentina. This book won the 2005 Saga Award for Wit, the 2005 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her second novel Two Caravans was published in hardback in March 2007 by Fig Tree (Penguin Books) for the United Kingdom market, and was shortlisted for the 2008 Orwell Prize for political writing. In the United States and Canada it is published under the title Strawberry Fields.

Rabbit Writer-- Too much attention

Poor bunny. They really aren't designed to take that kind of attention from preschooler, never mind a room full of them.

Let's just hope that he doesn't relieve himself, or that the floor is non-porous.

by Naomi 'Brigid' Gill