Category: writing

Page 69, revisited

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Remember the Page 69 test? It’s where you:

Turn to page 69 of any book and read it. If you like that page, buy the book. It works.

Marshall McLuhan, quoted in ‘How To Read A Novel’ by John Sutherland

Last time round, I put both my existing books through the test, showed you what would have been page 69 had The Real World gone to print as it stood, and promised to be back ‘in a few months’ with the final page 69.

Well, just over a year later, here we are.

Page of a book. The text is transcribed below.

… make a great sermon illustration. You could demonstrate a miracle.’

Lydia sniggered. ‘And I noticed they weren’t using actual custard. Does actual custard not work? Or is it too expensive to make a whole paddling pool full?’

Colette thought about it. ‘Do you know, I’m not sure. The egg might do something weird…’ She frowned at her diagram: she’d missed a bond somewhere. When she next looked at the screen, an Asian woman was talking enthusiastically about the properties of wood. Barry did not appear again.

*

‘Are you up to anything interesting today?’ Colette asked the next morning.

‘Not at work. But I’m going to have lunch with Felicity, and bring her up to date with all the discernment stuff.’

‘Ah.’ Colette felt faintly put out. It wasn’t really fair, she knew: Felicity had as much right as anybody to know what was going on in Lydia’s life, and more than most. Felicity had been the one who had started all this, had been the one to say to Lydia, ‘So have you ever thought about ordination?’

‘Is that OK? I did mention it a few days ago.’

Colette remembered, and quashed an irrational surge of resentment. Why shouldn’t Lydia talk to Felicity? Why shouldn’t she let off steam? Why shouldn’t she complain to Felicity about the arcane processes of their Church, and the fact that she wouldn’t be getting married any time soon? ‘You did. It’s fine. Are you still going to want dinner when you get home?’

Lydia stretched up to kiss her cheek. ‘If you’re cooking.’

It was her turn. ‘I’ll sort something out.’

*

It was a grey day, and colder outside than it looked. Colette regretted walking up to campus, but told herself that waiting for the bus on Southview would be even colder. She buttoned her coat up to…

Well, other than the fact that this one also begins and ends mid-sentence, I think it works better than the previous page 69. It’s more representative. We get a hint of Colette’s academic trials (Barry, who has just pulled a disappearing act, is her PhD supervisor) and also see her being more absorbed than strictly necessary in an intriguing but unimportant question; we do get the Church of England and the discernment process this time. We lose James, but we gain Felicity. (They’re both new supporting characters, and I’m quite fond of both of them.) There’s also more of a sense of place, which is something I’ve been working on quite a bit lately.

If you preferred the previous page 69, well, it’s all still there. It’s just on page 76 now. And I’ve replaced [thing] with spike.

If you like it, buy the book, says Marshall McLuhan. Well, you’ll be able to do that in just under a month. If you want a reminder on the day, sign up for my newsletter.

Visibility, possibility: links for bi visibility day

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I put the finishing touches to The Real World a week ago, and since then I’ve been doing my best to do very little. Writing this book has taken an awful lot out of me, and I’m trying to make up for that by sitting in a deckchair on the lawn, reading other people’s books.

But I do also write things that aren’t 94,000 word novels, and I’m very pleased to have two pieces to share for Bi Visiblity Day. As I wrote in one of these,

my experience of being bisexual has been the ever-present consciousness of other possibilities. I’ve made a particular series of choices, my life has unfolded in a particular way – but I’m always aware that I could have made other choices, that my life might look very different today if… If I hadn’t grown up under Section 28. If I’d heard the word ‘bisexual’ before the age of 20. If, if, if.

I might have taken the road more travelled by, but that doesn’t mean all the other roads disappear from existence. (They closed the road through the woods…) Both of these pieces explore that sense of possibility, in fiction and in non-fiction (A merry road, a mazy road…).

The first one is perhaps more bi audibility than visibility, as it’s a podcast. This is the second story I’ve had featured at A Story Most Queer (the first was Prima Donna), but my first to be premiered there. I’ve added a PDF version too. It’s a fairy tale about a young woman who sets out to look for her friend who’s gone missing…

Daisy’s Yarn (podcast)

Daisy’s Yarn (PDF download)

The second piece is a guest post at Licence To Queer, where I wander all over the 007 canon, both book and film, looking for bisexual possibilities and revisiting my Eng Lit past. I even gave it a proper Eng Lit essay title with a colon in the middle. If that sounds a bit dry, I should also warn you that I fail to answer the question of what Felix Leiter was doing in Bond’s hotel room, and that I do pick up on a surprising allusion to the Book of Common Prayer. Fortunately David’s added some pictures.

“What makes you think this is the first time?”: assumption, possibility, and bisexuality in Bond

If you’re at all interested in James Bond and queer themes I recommend the whole Licence To Queer site heartily: it’s a joyful deep dive into the world of 007 – with some intriguing cocktail recipes too.

Interestingly, while The Real World has turned out to be an extremely bi novel in other ways, the sense of possibility isn’t nearly so present. Except, perhaps, as a sense of something missing, something distorted… Ah, you’ll see.

Annoying pricing news

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Corner bookshelf stacked with books

I’m sorry to say that the prices of Lulu’s paperback books have gone up quite a lot. I’d intended to price The Real World at £8.99, the same as the other two, but I find upon uploading the file that it won’t let me put it on at anything under £13.06. Which is a silly price, liable to change with exchange rates. And it’s a bit demoralising for me not to be paid anything at all, so I’m afraid that when it appears it’ll be £13.99.

Worse news: the other two books will also have to go up, because the current cover price isn’t covering the printing and distributor costs. (This might explain why I don’t seem to have been paid for any Amazon sales recently.) Oh, well: I suppose I was making new covers anyway (a complete redesign for Speak Its Name, and adding an award badge to A Spoke In The Wheel) – so I might as well add the updated prices.

I do understand that there’s a pandemic on, and no doubt printers’ costs have gone up the same as everything else, but I feel that fourteen quid is a bit steep for a paperback myself. So I’m going to knock another quid off the price of the ebook. I also understand that ebooks don’t work for everybody, and fourteen quid is still a bit steep for a paperback. If you’re not in a hurry, it’s worth waiting for Lulu to do a 10% or 15% off promotion, which happens quite frequently (though you may still get dinged on the postage). If you’re really not in a hurry, Amazon occasionally makes substantial reductions on POD paperbacks (I note for the benefit of fellow Clorinda Cathcart fans that A Man of Independent Mind is currently down to £3.37, for example) but I can discern no rhyme or reason to this, and it may never happen to any given book.

I’ve no desire to set myself up as a bookshop, but in exceptional circumstances I’ll consider supplying the paperback at [cost price] + [postage and packing]. If, when the time comes, you’re someone for whom the difference between £8.99 and £13.99 is really quite a big one, drop me an email and I’ll see what I can do.

In the meantime, you can find a number of free reads (and listens!) linked from the menu at the top of this site, and there are a couple of exclusive ones available if you sign up to my newsletter. Which I really must get round to sending, as I have a couple of things to announce…

The Real World: cover reveal (and one for luck!)

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Speak Its Name wasn’t meant to have a sequel. I thought I’d made all the points I’d wanted to make, answered all the questions I’d raised in it, had taken the characters as far as they needed to go.

Ninety-four thousand words say otherwise. I was wrong. Stancester was a city I hadn’t finished with – and perhaps still haven’t finished with. The Real World, which picks up the action three years later, works as a standalone, but adds something to Speak Its Name, makes it something more than it was before. And so it seemed appropriate to create not one but two covers.

Here’s The Real World:

Book cover: 'The Real World' by Kathleen Jowitt, featuring a red stained glass flower with green leaves on a red, floral patterned, background.

Colette is trying to finish her PhD and trying not to think about what happens next. Her girlfriend wants to get married – but she also wants to become a vicar, and she can’t do both. Her ex-girlfriend never wanted to get married, but apparently she does now. Her supervisor is more interested in his TV career than in what she’s up to, and, of her two best friends, one’s two hundred miles away, and the other one’s dead.

Welcome to…

The Real World.

And here’s Speak Its Name:

Book cover: 'Speak Its Name' by Kathleen Jowitt, featuring a stained glass passion flower on a magenta background with a floral print

A new year at the University of Stancester, and Lydia Hawkins is trying to balance the demands of her studies with her responsibilities as an officer for the Christian Fellowship. Her mission: to make sure all the Christians in her hall stay on the straight and narrow, and to convert the remaining residents if possible. To pass her second year. And to ensure a certain secret stays very secret indeed.

When she encounters the eccentric, ecumenical student household at 27 Alma Road, Lydia is forced to expand her assumptions about who’s a Christian to include radical Quaker activist Becky, bells-and-smells bus-spotter Peter, and out (bisexual) and proud (Methodist) Colette. As the year unfolds, Lydia discovers that there are more ways to be Christian – and more ways to be herself – than she had ever imagined.

Then a disgruntled member of the Catholic Society starts asking whether the Christian Fellowship is really as Christian as it claims to be, and Lydia finds herself at the centre of a row that will reach far beyond the campus. Speak Its Name explores what happens when faith, love and politics mix and explode.

I’ll be uploading the new cover for Speak Its Name at the same time as sending The Real World live (give or take – I may need a bit of a lie down in between), meaning that they should both be available on 2 November.

In the meantime, you can add The Real World to Goodreads, or join my mailing list, or, of course, both.

Getting ready for The Real World

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Over the last few weeks I’ve been going back through old journals. A little over two years ago, at the end of July 2018, I wrote:

I am feeling ready to start the new books. They are both feeling pretty huge and intimidating, as if the end of them is a long way off, but that’s to be expected.

Yes, that’s books, plural. One of them was ‘the Ruritanian thing’. The end of that is still a long way off: it’s sitting at 12,500 words, and I haven’t done nearly as much work on it as I’d expected.

But the other one was what is now The Real World. And it’s done.

I’m always surprised by the way I suddenly know that a book’s finished. It’s a pleasant surprise, because it’s characterised by the departure of worry. I stop worrying about whether it’s any good or not. I stop worrying about who I might have offended and what I might have got wrong. I stop worrying about what people might make of it. It’s not that I stop caring – I still care, very much, about making this book good – but I stop worrying. It’s a painless separation, and it happens when the book is ready and not before.

When I say it’s done, I mean that I’ve got the text as good as I, personally, can make it. I may still change things. I have the usual cohort of beta readers and editors and nitpickers looking at it at the moment, and I may draft more in.

And I still have all the typesetting and design work, all the fiddly stuff that comes before pressing the ‘publish’ button, to be done. The cover is, I think, nearly there (of course assuming that I don’t look back at it in a month and decide that actually it’s irredeemably naff), but there are a lot of other things to be done.

But I’m confident enough that I’ve got something decent that I’ve committed to a publication date.

2 November 2020.

Mark your calendar, sign up for my newsletter, add it to Goodreads, whatever. Or just pop back closer to the time. It’s going to happen.

Three quick links

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13-2014 August 039

Firstly, I’ve finally sorted myself out with a mailing list. This is solely for the purpose of letting people know when I’ve got new stories available – my between-times burblings will remain here on the blog. If you want to receive a very occasional email letting you know that I’ve got a new book out, or a piece in someone else’s podcast or anthology, and also to read subscriber-only short stories, sign up to my mailing list

Secondly, Ezvid Wiki think I’m generating a lot of buzz.

Thirdly, this is the last week in which Speak Its Name and A Spoke In The Wheel are free.

Meanwhile, in the real world…

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Do you remember how, back at the beginning of lockdown, various obnoxious productivity types were telling us all that if we didn’t come out of it with a new skill or a novel then we were all pathetic failures? I haven’t heard so much from them recently. That may have something to do with my spending less time on Twitter. Or the obnoxious types may have discovered that in fact it’s not so easy to get things done with a global crisis going on outside, and have shut up.

As it happens, I’ve learned a few new skills – painting walls, making curtains, changing taps – but they’ve had more to do with having just moved house than with enforced leisure. I’ve continued to work full time, so, apart from the commute (which I’ve gleefully replaced with an additional daily hour in bed) I haven’t had much in the way of enforced leisure. Anyway, I went into lockdown with a novel, or, at least, 93,000 words of one, so it would be a bit of a cheat to claim that it had anything to do with coronavirus. If anything, I was hoping to make it shorter. As it is, I’ve now got 94,661 words. They’re better, though. They’re quite a lot better.

They’re good enough for me to say, tentatively, that this book’s going to come out this year.

I’m aiming for a release date in November. Of course, this means that I need to have everything done in September, which means that I’ve only got a couple of months to get things done. But that feels achievable, now, in a way that it didn’t at the beginning of the year.

Meanwhile, my existing books will remain free to download from Lulu until the end of this month. After that they’ll go back to full price. Consider this fair warning, and, if you haven’t grabbed them already, you can find them here:

Things I know people won’t like about The Real World

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Well, the clue’s in the name, really, isn’t it? Granted, The Real World is set in 2017, which was not quite so spectacularly apocalyptic as 2020’s turning out to be.

That’s one of the reasons why I’ve been quiet around here recently: there’s plenty that’s wrong with the real world, and quite often I feel that the best way for me to contribute to righting it is to show up for my job, to be part of a collective campaigning against racism and transphobia rather than pontificating in my own tiny corner of the internet.

The other reason is that by half past five I tend to feel that my eyeballs will start dribbling out of their sockets if I look at my screen for a moment longer. I turn my computer back on in the evenings, and convert some thoughts into pixels, but it’s slower going than it used to be. I’m not missing my commute, exactly, but it did make a lovely chunk of time that was for writing and nothing else.

So the first thing that people won’t like about The Real World is:

  • I don’t know when it will be published. The last time I had a date in mind, I was thinking of this September, to coincide with the beginning of the academic year. I’m pretty sure I won’t make that now, and, while I’m feeling more optimistic that I will, you know, get this wretched thing finished, I couldn’t tell you when that will be.

Apart from that:

  • Church politics. Church processes. The small but important faultlines between different churches and different Churches. My first beta reader pointed out, tactfully, that there didn’t seem to be anything else. I’ve added some other things since, but there’s still quite a lot of Church stuff in there.  (Depending on your point of view this may, of course, be a feature rather than a bug.)
  • Not everybody gets what they want. In fact, hardly anybody gets what they want. I don’t think this is a pessimistic book, but it’s set in, well, the real world, and at least one of the characters wants two things that are, in the real world, mutually exclusive. And, while an author can of course wave a magic wand and make everything better, that doesn’t feel honest to me; it doesn’t feel respectful to those real people who are having to make those impossible decisions.
  • I’ve managed to develop Unpopular Opinions about a concept that’s a major theme in this book. I’m hoping that my opinions haven’t hijacked everything else, but that’s for the reader to decide. I had an epiphany some time last year when I realised that, just because a character happened to agree with me, it didn’t mean that they were right, but it’s undeniable that they do have their say.
  • Portraying depression from inside the head of someone who has it is probably a risky move. I’m gloomily resigned to the probability of someone mistaking depiction for endorsement, but I’m not looking forward to that.

The thing that I don’t like about it at the moment (apart from the fact that it still needs a lot of work) is the fact that it’s stubbornly refusing to go below 93,000 words, and at the moment I can’t see whether that’s because 93,000 words is, in fact, the length it needs to be, or because there’s something that needs to come out.

I’ll keep you posted. Probably. In the meantime, I hope the real real world is being kind to you.

I have worked out what is wrong with this book

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It’s been three months since my last major wobble with this book. When I put it away before moving, I wrote myself a note:

It’s not going to be as bad as you think. I promise.

And you will see what you need to do. You’re coming to this after a break of time and a change of space. This will give you room to see what needs changing…

You might not work on it at all in March: that’s fine. But you must pick it up again in April. Start with a read through; look for the gaps, in the first instance – not the physical omissions, but the thin parts, the bits you’ve been telling yourself you’ll get away with… your focus for the moment should be on adding substance, adding depth, making your characters and your setting more solid.

I spent the last couple of weeks doing that. And I worked out what is wrong with this book.

It is the reason why I always have trouble with writing books in this series (based on a sample of one, so far): it’s about people quietly trying to get on with their own lives while drama happens around them.

And writing it from Colette’s point of view accentuates the problem, because she’s always taken minding her own business to a fine art, and has always had to be dragged into plot by main force (in the first book, by Peter and then by Lydia). Consequently, I’ve got at least four other characters’ plots going on which are, at the moment, very boring, because she’s either giving people space to deal with their own stuff or just doesn’t care. And then she tends to suffer in silence rather than do anything about it. In this book I’m going to get her to the point where she does do something about it, but I need to keep the interim suffering in silence from being too tedious.

The problem is, of course, not so much that she doesn’t care, as that I don’t. Because I am the one who is writing this thing, and I do need to tie them up a little better than I have at present. I’ve worked out how to inject some suspense into one of the four subordinate plots, and another two are things that she really ought to care about because they have a major influence on her life, and actually one needs some work and the other is better than I think it is. The fourth can and should fade into the background, I think.

I also wrote:

We’ll talk later about the deadline for this. I’ll tell you this: it isn’t September. This one is too important to rush. Take your time; get it good.

And I still have no publication date. What’s different now is the fact that this doesn’t seem to be worrying me at all. I think I’ve adapted to this weird timelessness in the air. This book will come out when it’s ready, and that’s the only logical way to schedule it.

I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, my existing two books are still free.

A brief update (and free books)

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Hello friends! I hope you’re keeping well. It’s a funny old time – though I think perhaps it feels less strange for me as we moved house two weeks ago, so the general chaos of curtain rails and cardboard boxes has drowned out the background, global, disquiet. And we still don’t have broadband at the new place so I haven’t been online much.

However, I have seen that many institutions, artists, musicians and writers, have put their work online for free, to go at least a little way towards brightening the gloom or passing a few dull hours. And I thought I’d do likewise. The ebook versions of both of my novels can now be downloaded for free from Lulu. The price reduction should eventually filter through to the other online bookshops.

If you’re trying to come to terms with the sudden absence of sport from your life, try A Spoke In The Wheel. If your church, university, or both, has moved online and you’re missing the politics (erm…) you might prefer Speak Its Name. Feel free to download both if you like! I’m in the fortunate position of being in salaried work that I can do from home, so I won’t be disadvantaged by people reading my books for free. And, once I’ve got fed up with putting up picture hooks and painting walls, I’ll finish the next book, and you’ll be able to buy that one.