Ghostwoods: Open Call for Short Stories

Having just waxed lyrical about Ghostwoods Books yesterday, they have an open call for submission at the moment. Information here. Stories between 5-8,000 words. Deadline 7th June 2020.

Rosy Hours for #IndieApril

Next up on my #IndieApril book tour is the big one, Those Rosy Hours at Mazandaran.

I call it 'the big one' because it was by far the best publisher I've ever had and the widest-reviewed book to date. Therefore it's going to be a bit of a long post.

I recently reviewed Les Miserable by Victor Hugo, and mentioned that I've always enjoyed musicals. I grew up listening to Phantom of the Opera on my mum's old vinyl player. So, I suppose you could say I've always been a phan, as fans of Phantom are known. I was also a drama schooler, where musicals were unavoidable. We had an entire musical theatre department whose students would occasionally appear out of nowhere and burst into flash dance, legwarmers and all.

I'm not sure when I first became aware that there was another story within Phantom - the untold story. Perhaps it was an older version I saw on telly. I remember always being fascinated by how Erik became so disfigured, and I'm sure there was one version that tried to explain it as his mother having drank poison in a failed abortion bid or something. I can't entirely remember. But anything Phantom, I was a little bit hooked.

Naturally, I eventually went to the source, the original novel written by Gaston Leroux. Like Dumas's Musketeers, it began life as a serialisation in a newspaper. That was a big thing back then. But it was really within the pages of that novel that it struck me how much was never fully explained, and how tantalising that story could be. I'd always wondered why a Persian was hanging around Paris with Erik, and  why he got turned into a musical box so no one actually had to go into that question.

So many fascinating loose ends, like how he got the name Erik, which was apparently 'an accident' and not his given name. Where he'd been before Paris, how he'd survived. And the more I read, the more fascinated I became with the Little Sultana, who was the daughter of the Shah of Iran and a playfellow in Erik's bloodiest games.

The other thing that struck me is that Erik is a stone-cold killer. Webber's musical gives him a redeemable edge, but really, he's cruel.

Which got me thinking, what kind of a girl would be a match for him. Who could he possibly respect enough to consider, if not an equal, than at least equally dark, and what might have made her that way?

And that's where the research began.

During the blog tour we did for the book launch, I wrote quite a few articles about that research. Went into detail about the food, music and costumes. You can also see more on the Rosy Hours at Mazandaran Facebook page.

We know that Erik was involved in building the Paris Opera House because he put in is trapdoors and secret corridors. From that, I could place a rough age on him meeting Christine and work backwards to figure out when he would have been in Iran - around the mid-1800s. That gave me a historical starting point.

The Little Sultana would have been a shazadi, and likely the daughter of Nasser al-Din Shah. Looking him up, I found an entry for Princess Afsar od-Dowleh, who has nothing really written about her, including her date of birth or death. So, I took that name and began the novel: Though my name has since been removed from the annals of history, it was Afsar. You remember that, and tell any who deign to ask. For I was she, and no other. That name belongs to me.

So, this is the shazadi's story, told from her perspective. You don't need to know anything about Phantom of the Opera to enjoy it, but those who do will get an extra kick out of it.

One of the toughest things for me was working out what pre-revolutionary Iran looked like. I had two images in my head. That of the modern media where women were cloaked in yashmaks and forbidden to interact with men, and that of the stories of Aladin I knew from my childhood, where women wore practically nothing.

It was a really fascinating exploration to learn that the truth was somewhere in between. There's a lot of fascinating photos on the Facebook page, but this one certainly inspired Afsar. A thoroughly independent lady, unveiled and reading a book. But, also trapped within the confines of a harem. Which adds a certain level of frustration for ambitious women.

I feel this is the best novel I have written to date, and might be the best I ever write.

I was just in this incredible creative zone at the time. I'd always had this story so strongly in my mind, but didn't start writing until I got a definitive knock-back from someone I really liked. I'm very rarely lost for words, but around them I couldn't find any. Just a brilliant human being - bright, sparky, funny. Anyway. I felt rotten at the time and this was my way out of that. One word after the other, it just fell onto the page. It's by far the most complicated novel I've ever written, but also the easiest. It felt effortless.

I knew it was good but I didn't know what to do with it, so I tentatively tried a couple of small press. I got an almost instant response from Ghostwoods. Their editor had pretty much read it in one sitting.

I have to admit, given my previous experiences of publishing, I wasn't really expecting much. For me, it was enough the book was written. I didn't really mind what happened next. I was proud of it.

Ghostwoods exceeded all expectations. A fair trade publisher who offered me 50% of all profit (the best I'd done before was about 12%), who absolutely smashed the cover (here's how they made it), and then, to top it all off, got the Nebula award-winning Emma Newman to do an audiobook. So many amazing things happened with Ghostwoods, but I think one of the most touching included the Iranian lullaby.

So, authors often nick foreign words they like the idea of but don't always know how to pronounce. I can assure you, this is a fucking nightmare when it comes to giving book readings. One of the things I included, was an Iranian lullaby that goes like this: la la la la, gole poneh, bekhab bach’che, delam khune, apparently meaning something to the effect of, Sleep my child, my heart is broken. Obviously, not knowing Farsi, I had no idea how this was actually supposed to sound. For the audiobook, Ghostwoods rustled up a Farsi consultant, Nadia Tariqi, to make sure Emma was pronouncing the words correctly - and then Emma sang it.

The first time I ever heard those words out loud was when I listened to the audio proofs for the book - and I cried. It was like a theatre production, where the sum of everyone's efforts turn out to be something greater than the original idea. And that people had cared enough about the story to achieve that level of authenticity was just truly incredible. I could not have achieved that by myself.

Other things that were really amazing to me include Stephanie Piro, who is a cartoonist. She was inspired by the book and did a couple of sketches, sending me the originals. That just blew me away. I don't think there's any higher praise, or anything more validating, than your art going on to inspire other artists. Seeing spin-offs, fan art, extensions of your work in whatever form is just phenomenal.

She also created a Phantom-themed bracelet with a miniature scroll inside that contains a passage from the book.

The other one that really touched me was a book review site called Kahakai Kitchen, who created a dish specifically for Rosy Hours. The reason this was such a big deal to me is because I love Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's book Sister of My Heart and someone turned that into a dish. I thought that was the coolest homage to a book ever, so having it done for mine meant a lot.

So, there were a lot of really lovely experiences with Ghostwoods and they absolutely did the book justice. It's extremely sad to me that they had to cut back on publishing new titles due to personal circumstances and the constant financial struggle that small press face. I hope things pick up again in the future because any author would be lucky to be published by them.

For my part, I look back on this as the book that really convinced me I could write. The three before that were me testing my wings, and there was a fourth bottom-drawer novel between Georg[i]e and this that will never see the light of day. That's why it took until 2015 for Rosy Hours to hit the shelves. I was spending time learning the craft. I wish every book I wrote could be this caliber, but I'm lucky to have written one. One novel I am completely and utterly satisfied with. I think that's rare for authors. There's usually a lot of things we feel we didn't get quite right. 

PURCHASE

Musical Interlude: April Skies

Splintered Door for #IndieApril

Just before I dive into another novel on my Indie April tour, I thought I'd mention this. It's a collection of short stories and not published by anybody, but I put them online free a while back.

They were written somewhere around 2012. I was going through quite a stint of block and finding it really hard to get inspired. Although grateful to the publishers who took on my work back then, I think I was just feeling a bit deflated. I wasn't sure whether my writing would improve or whether I should just give up on it. 

One day, I stumbled across the Random Title Generator. I'm not sure if the original is still up. It's just this website where you hit a button and it throws out some title suggestions.

I decided to stop taking myself so seriously and just hit the button. The program would throw up five title suggestions. I made myself pick one - no cheating by pressing it again - and then I had to write a story on that theme.

So, that's how Splintered Door came into being. Quite literally, not just the stories but the title of the book itself. There's seven stories, each quite different from each other, some very poetic, other's not so. A couple have a recurrent theme just for kicks, so I suppose if you read them in order it might be more interesting, but not compulsory. 

The first one was particularly interesting for me. I was going through a bit of a DBC Pierre fascination. What I was drawn to was that he's an Australian guy writing all American. I know he grew up in Mexico and lived in America later, but still, we're used to seeing British and Australian actors playing Americans in movies, but not so used to seeing them writing in an accent. I wanted to know if I could do it, so I had a go. I asked an American friend to check it over after, to see whether I'd got the lingo right.

The collection was just a bit of fun for me, but it was also liberating as it allowed me to play. I could try out styles and stories without really caring whether they were much good. 

Surprisingly, I'm still pretty happy with them. They came out better than I expected.

My lovely friend Jessica Clark provided the cover. I mentioned her in my TEDx talk. She runs Raven Feather Photography and used to do some really kooky stuff. I really liked the image so asked if I could use it. There are several of her pictures I would love to put on book covers - just need to write the stories.

Really Kooky Stuff
Raven Feather Photography

There isn't masses to say about this book, although people keep asking me if it's available in paperback because they also love the cover. I haven't done that and probably won't. It was just a bit of escapism.

I don't think you can ever underestimate how important it is for artists to play. Just mess about with whatever form of art you enjoy without expecting it to become anything. Just for the pleasure of it. I think writers, in particular, do this less and less as the years go by, simply because writing a book takes so long and often you don't know whether it'll be any good until the end. So, we constantly feel like there isn't enough time and that in itself is self-defeating, because it saps creativity. We start to feel like everything we write needs to be serious - needs to be something important. Our books are rarely that good, so if we haven't enjoyed the process either, that's a double downer. 

Still, as much as I enjoy them, I don't write short stories very often anymore. 

Mind you, I don't write novels very often either. 

Free Online

dusabe_king

My friend Gerard told me about his brother's art recently. Dusabe King Christian is a really tallented ball-point artist and you can find his work on Instagram. To commission him, you can WhatsApp +250780 813 764. Some more of his work below, including a man wearing the traditional Rwandan amasunzu hairstyle. Also check out my friend Dady for more Rwanda art.

Georg[i]e for #IndieApril

 

Continuing the Indie April book tour, this was the third novel I wrote and either the second or third to be published. It came out the same year as Lucid, around the same time. I think maybe just before. Valentine's Day rings a bell. 

It was the second published with Green Sunset Books, who originally took me up with Angorichina. It's not what they usually publish, but they liked it so decided to go ahead. 

At the time, I was still pretty new to writing and therefore I was exploring genres. Someone once described this as 'chick lit with balls.' It's a romance between a straight girl and a trans FtM guy called George. Originally Georgiana. 

The inspiration for this one was sudden. I was walking across Gloucester Park one day from my dad's house to town, to do some shopping. Suddenly, Georgie was walking beside me. It was just an out-of-the-blue moment, where a character arrives so clearly you can't ignore it. Like the four characters in Angorichina that night in Kigali. 

The logo for Georgie (up top) was designed by my lovely friend Daniel Matthews, who did the children's story about the cloud and the mountain. We were at performing arts school together a long time back, along with Mathew of Baron Magazine.

Perhaps it's not so surprising I went for a sharp-dressed lead character. I've always had a fairly strong hat and tie fetish and regularly wear them on a night out. I have a collection of hats sitting on top of my piano and a collection of ties hanging over my closet door. Though I only tend to go with red, black or that humbug tie on the right.

 

In contrast, I very rarely wear dresses and don't feel particularly comfortable when I do. 

My friend got me drunk and suggested I
try on her dress.

I love the way that clothes can change how you behave, and the clothes you're most comfortable in give you confidence. I remember at drama school doing that exercise where you try on different shoes to help get into character, and how it changes your posture, the way you walk and even the way you talk. If I'm going out somewhere I don't know or feel not so confident about, I'll often put on a tie. Here, it gets some funny looks, but it also throws people off a bit. Strangers aren't always sure how to react, and that gives you a certain advantage, because now you're both a little uncertain of the situation, rather than just one of you. Sometimes women laugh, sometimes men frown, but I feel more confident than I would in a dress or a skirt. 

I think Georgie ended up dressed like he was simply because he's a confident character, and those clothes make me feel confident. So, perhaps a little projection there in wardrobe choice if nothing else. 

The book also took a lot of inspiration from the Cardiff LGBT scene, even though it was set in Reading. I did my undergrad in Reading and a master's in Cardiff, so they were both cities I knew well. I was with someone from the last year of my first degree until a few years after moving to Cardiff. When that relationship ended I became a regular on Charles Street, which used to be (I'm not sure how active it still is?) an entire street that was wall-to-wall gay bars. It was a happy place. But it was quite a collection of politics and personalities, some of which made it into the book. Whereas there's a lot of love, light and 80s music on the scene, there's also a slightly sharp side to it - a little underlying snydeness, which I personified in Sebastian. As well as some real vulnerability, which came across strongest in Eddie, and later in George himself, who, like many people, appeared far more confident and self-assured than he was beneath the surface.

It also covered the issue I encountered trying to juggle two groups of friends. I wrote my main character, Phoebe, as very straight, but as the story unfolds she faces a few of the challenges bi people like myself face. It wasn't always that easy to integrate friends, so you found yourself going out to different places with different friends on different nights. For me, there was never any homophobia involved and I've always refused to hang around anything that remotely whiffs of that, but it was more that my straight friends had no problem going out for a night on the scene - because the music is always fantastic - but that my gay friends didn't usually feel particularly comfortable, or look quite at home, sitting in a very heterosexual public house drinking a pint, where there was absolutely no music and definitely no glitter. It still makes me smile thinking about it. 

Anyway. By the time I was writing Georg[i]e, I don't think I was really going out much anymore, but I thought it was quite interesting to look at the scene from both sides, or at least somewhere in the middle. It can feel like bridging two cultures, not dissimilar to going overseas - there's a language to learn, things you do and don't do, and do and don't ask, ways to behave, both in the LGBT community and the heterosexual world. I was interested to explore where those boundaries lie, but also, I just wanted to write a love story. It's not a complicated book. There's no social message.  

When I look back on it now, I feel the same twinge I do with Angorichina. The grammar is pretty bad. If I could tear it apart and put some of those sentences back together without semi-colons, exclamations or ellipses, I certainly would.

The launch coincided with bookQfest, the first book festival I'd ever appeared at. It was held in November back in 2012 and was the country's first dedicated LGBTQ book festival. Even Alan Moore turned up and blew everyone away with a poetry reading from The Mirror of Love. I made some lovely friends there who I have stayed in contact with ever since, such as Jane Lovering, who is an award-winning romance writer, Paul Magrs, who is heavily involved in Doctor Who, crime writer Adrian Magson and former Betty Trask Award-winner and celebrated aerialist Will Davis. It was a real experience for me, though my reading didn't go so well. I was reading a funny part and one of the audience members laughed, which made me laugh, and I completely lost my place. Mortifying.

Photograph by Suzanna Raymond

I was a bit disappointed when the cover first came through. I wanted it to be very simplistic - just a black title against a white background, which it was, but there was a miscommunication and the title was left-justified, when it would have looked a lot better centred. I'm hoping to revamp it one day. Obviously, the font is Georgia.

The dedication is to my good friend Harri. She and I grew up in the same small country village, but not together. I'm a bit older and we were introduced when my mum's partner started giving her driving lessons. 'There's someone you'd really get on with,' he told me. We met down the pub and the rest is history. She's written a lot for Women's Views on News.

 

In recent years I've been questioning a bit again. I've always said 'bi' because that's what I am, but it's a lot more complicated nowadays. It seems to have become quite technical. So, I'm cisgender female bisexual (she/her/ze), I guess, despite the tie fetish.

But I've also stepped out with a trans guy after he blew me away at a conference on human rights by demolishing the speaker at the podium with an argument over sexual health services. Nothing sexier than intellect. So, sapiosexuality is definitely an element there.

The argument goes 'bisexual is basic because there's more than two genders,' yeah... but, it's easy. It takes a lot less explaining at parties, which gets you to the bar quicker. Plus, even if pansexual is the correct definition, whenever I hear that word all I think of is a goat playing the pipes. I think that's my Pagan heritage. Terminology is so personal.

And that, dear readers, segues nicely into a wonderful little ditty I'll leave you with by the magical being that is Clare Summerskill.

UK / US

The Annals of Caledonia Pace

The lovely Matthew J Elliott and friends have just released a short, entertaining, murder mystery: The Culpeper Culprits. It's the first in a series that's free to listen to online and very cheap to download if you want to support the artists. So, come join in the fun with Caledonia Pace and her 'folios of felony'.