Body art inspiration for my current story

India Knight’s Comfort and Joy

Comfort and Joy: buy from Amazon

I really wanted to like this book. I love India’s columns in The Times, and find her tweets often hilarious – especially when she and Caitlin Moran are watching Downton Abbey at the same time. I think she usually has a lot of interesting things to say and a sarcastic, yet honest, way of writing. It doesn’t feel, in her columns, as though she’s going for a cheap laugh or a moment’s entertainment at the expense of the point she’s trying to make. But I didn’t feel the same warmth from her novel.

Set over three conscutive Christmas Days, 2009-11, Comfort and Joy follows Clara and her complicated extended family as they negotiate what I suppose is a very modern way of trying to make Christmas traditional. The family changes over the three years, with Clara trying to manage her mother, half-sisters, ex-husbands, children and friends around the dinner table while trying to keep her sanity – so far, so I Don’t Know How She Does It.

There are a few warm, funny moments – for example, the youngest daughter complaining sadly that her body isn’t private, in response to her cousin’s clear training when preparing for bathtime, because her brothers always tease her, is a moment anyone with a large family will recognise I think. But there were few so that when they came along it was noticeable.

Christmas Ghost Stories

Ghost stories always seem to have a particular resonance at Christmas. Perhaps it’s the atmospheric frost, fog and snow that almost inevitably occurs. Perhaps it’s the late-night images of telling them around the fire, or the thought that somehow there is something about Christmas, the way that people are so open with one another and more forgiving, which thins the boundaries of this world and another. The Victorian Christmas annuals became a tradition of ghost stories, with famour authors vying to have their contributions accepted – particularly in those published by the likes of Dickens. The Turn of the Screw and A Christmas Carol were too long though they’re freely availavle at project gutenberg. So, on Christmas Eve, here is a short ghost story……

The Signalman (Charles Dickens)

“Halloa! Below there!”

When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the door of his box, with a flag in his hand, furled round its short pole. One would have thought, considering the nature of the ground, that he could not have doubted from what quarter the voice came; but instead of looking up to where I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself about, and looked down the Line. There was something remarkable in his manner of doing so, though I could not have said for my life what. But I know it was remarkable enough to attract my notice, even though his figure was foreshortened and shadowed, down in the deep trench, and mine was high above him, so steeped in the glow of an angry sunset, that I had shaded my eyes with my hand before I saw him at all.

“Halloa! Below!”

E-Publishing stories

In this post, I’m going to look at the three main e-publishing options available for short stories – amazon, lulu and my own website.

Having decided to experiment with e-publishing I chose a story I’d written while at university and think is pretty good. As much as anything, I want to see what the process is like and whether it’s viable. Obviously, when trying to sell writing, marketing is crucial, and that’s something to look into once I’ve got my head around making it available. There is clearly an option to post writing online for free on various websites like East of the Web or enter competitions etc but, as I said yesterday, I’d like to try this as well. Submitting stories for free is something I’d class as marketing with the hope that it’d lead to something more later on.

Money

As I go through this post I’m going to suggest some of the pros and cons that I think are the major issues, as well as be really upfront about the costs involved – because, after all, that’s partly the point of this. Of course if I just wanted people to read my work, I could distribute it in all sorts of ways but I do want to explore the possibility of making this a more realistic lifestyle eventually. The balancing act required – in all types of publishing – between income (and how that’s divided!) and the price someone is willing to pay – is always going to be a delicate one, and is one that has been squeezed in recent yeras with the development of online purchasing, both digital and hard-copy. Undervaluing fiction is also a negative thing; I strongly believe that to make something sustainable it needs to pay for itself (a discussion I recently also had involving subsidies to the film industry) and I think that when people expect to get a novel for free it makes them less willing to pay for other novels.

Publishing options

First steps into e-publishing

In September, I took the (scary!) step of entering my name for the Ilkley Literature Festival open mike competition that ends the festival. October, then, found me reading a short story in front of around 40 people. It was an experience that had me literally shaking – despite standing on my feet all day talking in front of people, nothing scares me like seeing people read my own creative work…except reading it to them. Despite my nerves, however, I was pleased to be Highly Commended by the judges – who said that it as brave to atempt a short story in three minutes!

So, the next phase of my attempt to turn this writing love into something more than a private hobby is to experiment with the world of e-publishing.

There’s a few reasons I’ve decided to give this a go. I have several short stories on my hard-drive that I feel are well-written and powerful. I could try to submit them to a series of competitions or to a publisher as a collection. Short story collections are, though, difficult to place and sell when you don’t have a track record of novels behind you. Competitions are often more focused and I do intend to do something more with that – but what about those stories that are entered and don’t win? It doesn’t necessarily mean that they aren’t valuable or worthwhile – although it can mean that! – it means they didn’t suit what the judges wanted on that occasion. I also think that e-publishing’s an exciting avenue to try and experimenting with it via short stories will be an interesting thing to do – and part of what I want to do with this is to try new things, new ways of writing and having people read what I write.

So, my next post will be a detailed look at how I’ve gone about exploring this!