On Reading Like a Writer – Claire Corbett

Claire Corbett has worked as a government policy adviser on water, genetically modified organisms and child and family health. She has had essays and stories broadcast on Radio National and published in Cinema Papers, Picador New Writing and The Sydney Morning Herald, among others. She completed the MA Writing (UTS) in 1997 and a Varuna Mentorship in 2000. When We Have Wings, her first novel, was published by Allen & Unwin in July 2011 to rave reviews. Today Claire is talking about reading like a writer.

Every writer, on being asked to give advice for emerging writers, will emphasise the importance of reading widely.

There is something to be said about the kind of reader you become once you start writing seriously, though, especially once you start to feel surer of your own style. At first it seems hard enough to write a decent sentence; then there are struggles with tense, point of view, and structuring a plot.

As I began to become more confident with some of the technical challenges of writing narrative fiction I noticed to my surprise that the way I read began to change. If a story impressed me, instead of just surrendering to it, I began to look more closely, to take it apart to see how it worked. Visual artists do this all the time, perhaps more consciously than many writers. An integral part of art training is (was?) to copy old masters until their tricks and techniques were known, understood and could be incorporated into the student artist’s repertoire.

I had already been through this process with film; I studied film-making during my Communications degree and went on to crew on feature films. I was fascinated by the technical difficulties of film-making, devouring issues of American Cinematographer and books written by directors. I learned deep respect for craft as I studied film stocks, lighting, processing, sound effects, mixing soundtracks and so on. I could watch a film, analysing the skills with which it was made while still enjoying the story and artistry.

Oddly, it took years before it occurred to me to do this with reading. I was so enthralled by writers I admired that I was swept away every time. I was aware that some writers I’d read and re-read obsessively had influenced my very sentence structures by osmosis, and I thought this was the only way to learn to write. I still think this is true of the way a writer’s deepest self is formed – through childhood reading. This is the way your ‘ear’ is trained for the sound and rhythm of the English language. Clearly that training can occur in other languages as some writers whose first language is not English, such as Conrad and Nabokov, are among our finest.

I remember the first time I wondered about the skill in a particular technique and considered whether I might teach myself how to do it. I was reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day and marvelling at how readers know only what Ishiguro’s narrator, the butler Stevens, tells us and yet we have a completely different view of events and of Stevens’ actions than he does. The writer never speaks to us directly, all we have are Stevens’ words, and yet we have at least two views of the events in the novel, the butler’s and our own (or possibly Ishiguro’s).

Most writers would probably try to give us a different view through the perspective of another character but somehow Ishiguro manages to give us at least two views through only the one lens. The subtlety of the technique is breathtaking and Stevens is proof you don’t have to find a character ‘likable’ to empathise with him. Stevens would refuse the reader’s sympathy. Yet still, you feel. No wonder that novel won a Booker prize.

Another writer whose technique I tried to unravel is possibly the world’s greatest short story writer, Alice Munro. Her stories end with a punch to the heart but she rarely relies on the ‘twist’ so beloved of short story writers. It took me many re-readings to pin down exactly how she does it and in the process I worked out why her style and her emotional power depends so heavily on the stories being shorter, why what she does would not work in novels. Ah, I hear you say. And how does she do it? I can do no better than point you in the direction of collections such as Runaway or The Love of A Good Woman or The Progress of Love.

A technique I had to consciously teach myself – painfully at first but I like to think I mastered it – was free indirect speech. Critic James Wood lays out how free indirect speech works brilliantly in his discussion of Jane Austen in his book of essays The Broken Estate. In When We Have Wings I have two narrators, the young flier Peri and the private investigator searching for her, Zeke. Zeke had to speak in first person because he is the reader’s guide through the new, strange world of the winged.

I felt I needed to write Peri’s part of the story in third person but in early drafts she was too remote, lacking in feeling, and the word choice was more mine than hers as the character. Using free indirect speech, where the third person can occasionally slip in and out of first person, brought Peri closer and allowed her to express her thoughts directly. This technique takes practice to make it supple but may have erased that distance so well that readers barely seem to notice that one strand of the book is in first person and one in third.

So my message is: read widely, read at least some work that is difficult, not because it’s badly done but because it’s trying to do difficult things, and most importantly read beyond whatever genres you like and want to write in, including literary fiction. I can’t stress this enough. Just reading young adult won’t give you anything new to bring to young adult fiction, you might get an amazing idea for a fantasy tale from a business book (this seems to be the secret to much of Terry Pratchett’s comedy!) and if you read something you love, experiment with trying to make that technique your own. I don’t read much crime fiction and yet a crime novel gave me one of the most thorough master classes in style I’ve ever had. It’s a lesson I’ll never forget.

Thank you, Claire. I definitely need more practice in reading like a writer. 

Claire's website is here: http://www.clairecorbett.com/

• For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
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• My blog about the novels I write, and the writing life: http://ian-irvine.blogspot.com/

Reaching your Readers Part 3 – New Authors

In Part 2 of this series, http://ianirvine.blogspot.com/2011/11/reaching-your-readers-part-2.html, I asked my Facebook fans and readers how they found out about their favourite authors' next books.


I also asked my fans what factors led them to choose a new author. There were 66 replies. The most important factors in the decision to choose a new author's book were:

• The cover, back cover and blurb, and first few pages (by far the most important)
• Recommendations from people they know (a lot of people said this)
• Recommendations from people in bookshops (a few people said this)
• Online forums, blogs, Twitter or book sites (a few people said this)
• Print book reviews (one person said this)
• Book shows on radio (one person said this).

No one mentioned book advertising or other promotional materials. No one mentioned author websites, author newsletters, author blogs, author tweets or social media sites either, though that may have been due to the way I framed the question. 

Interestingly, though, people find out about new authors in a different way than they discover new books by their favourite authors. Presumably because fans actively seek out new books by their favourite authors, while discovering new authors by a more random process.

Here's the data (it sums to more than 100% because many people listed several factors, often in order of importance).

New Author Chosen From                                                % of Responses

Book Cover/title/blurb/first few pages                                        64%

Friend/family recommendations                                                  33%

Reviews/blog reviews/internet                                                    7.5%

NOT from reviews                                                                       7.5%

Bookshop recommendations                                                         6%

Author recommendations on cover of the book                             6%

Radio interviews                                                                        1.5%

Short stories by the author                                                         1.5%

Library                                                                                      1.5%

For two-thirds of responders, the book was chosen (or partly chosen) based on the book cover either physically or online (which induced them to read the back of the book), the title and blurb, and, for some people, after reading a few pages of the book. Recommendations from family and friends, including online friends, were also hugely important.

All other means were relatively minor.

Thanks very much to all those people who kindly gave detailed answers to the question. Part 1 can be found here: http://ianirvine.blogspot.com/2011/11/reaching-your-readers.html

• For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
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Reaching your Readers Part 2 – Reaching Your Fans

Following on from Part 1 of this post, http://ianirvine.blogspot.com/2011/11/reaching-your-readers.html, I asked this question on my Facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author.

How do you find out about your favourite author’s next book? Bookshops? Personal recommendations? Book reviews? Author's web site? Author's social media presence, on Facebook or blogs or Twitter or GoodReads? Author newsletters? Publisher's sites? Advertising?

There have been 50 responses so far (note, people usually gave more than one answer so the sum is more than 100%).

Author’s Website                                                                             44%

Physical bookshops (but often as a last resort)                                   26%

Wikipedia                                                                                       22%

Author’s social media/Facebook/blog/Twitter                                  22%
(mainly Facebook)

Search engines                                                                                16%

Online bookshops/Amazon                                                               14%

Email newsletters from authors/publishers                                       10%

Recommendations from friends and fans of other authors                   8%
(other authors they like)

‘Internet’                                                                                        8%

Publisher’s website                                                                          4%

GoodReads and similar sites                                                             4%

Authors’ recommendations (of other authors)                                    2%

Reviews (online or print)                                                                 2%

Facebook ads                                                                                  2%


There are some important lessons here:

1. Fans get the vast majority of their info via the net (no surprise there).
2. The author's website is by far the most important source of information about their books, yet  many author websites are either out of date, or all show and no substance, or don't provide the information and detail readers and fans are looking for. 
3. Wikipedia is one of the top three sources of information, yet many authors haven't corrected their Wikipedia entries or supplemented them with the right level of detail about their books, particularly new books.
4. Social media (particularly Facebook) are as important as Wikipedia, yet few authors have a fan page on Facebook, and of those that do, many don't use it effectively. Most personal Facebook pages are useless for communicating with fans. For info on using Facebook effectively, http://ripping-ozzie-reads.com/2011/07/30/ian-irvines-adventures-using-facebook/
5. Search engines and online bookshops are important sources of information and places to buy immediately. Authors should make sure their information is easily found by search engines, and that the details on online bookshops and other places on the net are correct – they often aren't!
6. Email newsletters to people who have subscribed are a simple but effective way to market your books to your existing readers.  

Thanks very much to all those people who kindly gave detailed answers to the question. Part 3 of this post, which deals with reaching new readers, can be found here: http://ianirvine.blogspot.com/2011/11/reaching-your-readers-part-3.html

• For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
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• My blog about the novels I write, and the writing life: http://ian-irvine.blogspot.com/

My Tortuous Path to Publication

I’m not sure exactly when I had the idea of writing a fantasy novel, though it must have been sometime after July 1977, because that’s when I bought and read Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara.

It wasn’t the story that inspired me, though. I’d read a huge amount of fantasy by then and found the plot to be too close to The Lord of the Rings. My inspiration was the map – but not in a good way.

The map in The Sword of Shannara so irritated me (because it seemed so clichéd, and so wrong) that I sat down on the spot and began to create my own, based on what I believed a real fantasy world should look like. Here’s a small, early version, done in 1978.

This soon became an obsession. At a time when I was supposed to be writing my thesis, I redrew the maps in greater and greater detail, until they were the size of house doors, then began to work out 10,000 years of history (as one does), the politics and economies of some of the countries therein, the peoples and ecosystems.

And then, snatches of characters, many of whom would appear in The View from the Mirror a decade later – Mendark, Shuthdar and the Golden Flute, Yggur, Faelamor, Kandor (who became Rulke), Kyllian the bard, who became Llian the master chronicler, Karan, my favourite character, and Yfanna, who became Maigraith.

Finally, on June 25, 1979, on a train in Finland, I wrote the first snatch of the story – Kyllian leaving Chanthed for the mountain inn at Tullin. Not very good, is it? But at the time it wasn't intended as part of a novel. It was just a moment that occurred to me.

What with finishing my thesis, taking a demanding consulting job, looking after little children and renovating a lovely but decrepit Victorian house in Sydney, 8 years went by before I had the time to formally begin writing – in longhand. It was September 1987 and I figured if I wrote 3 pages a day, I’d have a first draft done by Christmas.

By the time I was halfway through the story, then called The Mirror of Aachan, I knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life writing stories. I finished the first draft 5 days early but, to my astonishment, the story ended on a cliff-hanger with possibilities exploding out in all directions.

A month later I’d worked out that there would be four books to the story, now called The View from the Mirror, their titles and, in some detail, what would happen in each book. I did several more drafts of the first book then, in 1989, looked around for a publisher.

At the time, no Australian publishers were publishing science fiction or fantasy for the adult market – see my post on the Golden Age of Aussie Publishing, http://ianirvine.blogspot.com/2011/10/golden-age-of-publishing.html.

But I probably wouldn’t have sent it there anyway – I’d decided to try Unwin Hyman, in London, publishers of The Lord of the Rings and a number of other great fantasy novels. They knocked it back, but very kindly, saying that they’d be happy to see a revised version, or anything else I cared to send them. However when I sent a much revised version, months later, they had just been taken over by Harper Collins, who had closed their list.

Various other disappointments followed from the UK and US, sometimes after agonisingly long times – one NY publisher took 13 months to respond. I never sent the same manuscript out twice – I always revised it several more times, and kept working on the other three volumes of the story.

In the early 90s, Australian publishers, particularly Pan Macmillan, began publishing speculative fiction. By this time my story was complete – I’d done about 18 tough drafts of A Shadow on the Glass and even 4 or 5 of the final book, The Way Between the Worlds.

Unfortunately, by the time my manuscript of A Shadow on the Glass arrived, Pan had been burned by a number of failures and were pulling back. They wrote me a nice but painful rejection letter, to the effect that, ‘We agonised about whether to publish your book, but decided not to.’

However they also did me a favour by suggesting I commission Dr Van Ikin, the long-time speculative fiction reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald, to assess the manuscript and provide suggestions for improvement. I did so, followed Van’s many suggestions to the letter and when he looked at the revised version he said, 'You've got it! Send it out.'

By this time (January 1996) Harper Collins had had a big success with Sara Douglass’s Battleaxe, so I sent the mss to them, along with a copy of Van Ikin’s effusive letter. They rejected it, saying they’d be willing to consider a revised version. They also included comments from an unnamed external reviewer who thoroughly disagreed with Van’s assessment, and made a series of what I considered to be ill-informed critical comments about the book.

I didn’t bother to send them a revised version; instead I looked for another publisher. My father-in-law, John Rummery, a former English lecturer who had enjoyed the story, contacted a friend and colleague, John Cohen. John Cohen has an encyclopaedic knowledge of fantasy and for many years had been the editor of Reading Time, the book review journal of the Children’s Book Council of Australia (and he still is).

John loved the book and contacted Nancy Mortimer, then the education publisher at Penguin Australia, who asked to see it. In May 1996 I sent her the huge manuscripts of the first two books – a cardboard box full of paper. After looking the manuscripts over, Nancy agreed and gave them to Kay Ronai, a vastly experienced editor who had also edited some fantasy authors, asking for a book report. Kay loved the story and recommended that Penguin publish it. However she didn’t think they would, because Penguin hadn’t published fantasy for the adult market before, and they would have to commit to 4 very large books.

Kay’s report went to Erica Irving, then the publisher for the Children and Young Adults Department at Penguin. Erica wasn’t sure, and asked Isobelle Carmody, one of their star authors who wrote fantasy for younger readers, to take a look. Isobelle read the first book and said, ‘If you don’t publish this, someone else will.’

That’s how I came to be published.

I signed a contract with Penguin in October 1996 and the four books were published between February 1998 and September 1999. Only 11 years after I started writing, and 9 years after I began sending manuscripts.

The View from the Mirror is still in print in Australia 13 years later, incidentally. And in the UK.

• For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
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Reaching your Readers Part 1

How does one reach one's readers and fans to tell them about a new book? I've been a full-time novelist for 12 years now, and this is one of the questions that most vexes me.

It's easy for readers to contact me. My email address is in all my books and on my website, and can be googled in an instant. I also have a huge, frequently updated website, two blogs, a very active Facebook fan page, a Twitter account, and presences in various other places on the net. But not many people do contact me.

How many?

Some years ago, when email was still king, I divided the number of books I'd sold (a million) by the number of different people who had emailed me about them (a little over 3,000). I was being contacted by roughly 1 individual for every 300 books sold. But many of my readers had bought lots of my books, so the real question was, what proportion of my readers were communicating with me?

For that matter, how many readers do I have? To work that out, I've used actual sales data from my royalty statements, plus some educated guesses, thus:

• My biggest selling book, A Shadow on the Glass, has been published in 11 countries and has net sales of around 190,000 copies. But I've written a lot of other books, some of which appeal to different audiences where there's little crossover – my eco-thrillers, for instance, and my kids' books. 
• Adding a proportion of these in, my best guess is that around 250,000 different people in the world have bought at least one of my books. 
• To estimate the number of unique readers, I multiplied the above number by 2. I think that's probably conservative, since many people share books, some end up in second-hand bookshops, and I've a lot of books in libraries – more than 25,000 copies in Australia alone. 
• That calculation gives me half a million readers, most of whom are in Australia, the UK, US, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland and South Africa.

Dividing my email numbers into half a million readers, one reader out of every 170 has contacted me – 0.6%. But readers don't use email much any more – most contact comes via social media, for those writers who have a presence there.

I currently have 3,370 members of my Facebook fan page, http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author. That is, one in 150 of my readers has joined my page – 0.67%. Actually it would be less than that, since many people have fanned my page due to advertising targeted at fantasy readers. Using the Facebook ad creator and published data for various big-name authors' sales, I discovered that their figures are similar to mine – less than 1% of their estimated readers have expressed interest in them on Facebook.

My website, http://www.ian-irvine.com/, gets more traffic than my Facebook page – so far this year it's had over 10,000 unique visitors. My blogs, Twitter and other sites on the net add more contacts. Even so, the total number of people who have visited one or more of my sites can't possibly be more than 15,000, ie 3% of my readers.

Even assuming that half of those 500,000 readers are no longer interested, it still leaves 250,000 – yet only 6% are seeking me or my sites out in a year. How do I contact the remaining 94% of my readers to tell them about my new book?

As far as I can tell, the only way for me to get through to them is:

• By writing an absolute cracker of a book, one so good that they'll hear about it by word of mouth. 
• Making sure that the first few pages grab them by the throat and don't let go.
• Then, crafting a fantastic, engaging blurb.

But I'd be doing all that anyway, wouldn't I?


Thanks very much to all the people who answered my question on Facebook.

Part 2 of this post, which deals with reaching your fans, can be found here: http://ianirvine.blogspot.com/2011/11/reaching-your-readers-part-2.html.

And Part 3, Reaching New Readers, here: http://ianirvine.blogspot.com/2011/11/reaching-your-readers-part-3.html.

• For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
• To say Hi or talk to me about books and writing:http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author
• To follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/ianirvineauthor
• My blog about the novels I write, and the writing life: http://ian-irvine.blogspot.com/

The Truth About Publishing – 15

Lesson 14: Putting your money where your manuscript is

Despite what the hucksters say, it’s better for a publisher to publish your novel than for you to do it yourself. Why? Because publishers have a vast knowledge of the market and what it takes to succeed in it. You don’t, and this knowledge of book editing, cover design, placement and marketing for any particular niche of the fiction market isn’t easily or cheaply acquired. Yes, you can buy these services, but how do you know you’re getting something worthwhile. More critically, how do you know it’s going to be right for your particular book?

Several new authors have achieved fame and fortune in recent years by publishing their own novels and promoting them relentlessly. Now it’s widely believed that this is the best option for all authors – a 70% royalty on Amazon and iBookstore is far better than the 10% royalty on a printed book, or 25% on a publisher’s eBook, isn’t it?

That depends on how many books you can sell by your own efforts. The authors who have succeeded spend a lot more time promoting their books than they do writing them – they’re professional promoters who write books rather than professional authors who are good at promoting. If you’re a professional promoter, maybe you can succeed too. But if you just want to write great books, and looking on promoting as a painful chore, you’re better off with a publisher.

One exception – if you’re a published writer with a backlist and a strong writer’s platform (e.g. popular blog, website, Facebook page, identity as an expert or public speaker, etc). If you can no longer get your books published with a traditional publisher, publish them yourself and you might do well. But it’s getting harder.

Explosion of EBooks

The barriers to self-publishing both print books and eBooks have fallen dramatically over the past decade. Has this made it easier to succeed? Not on your life. It’s made it much, much more difficult. Why?

Because the size of the book market (the number of books sold a year) hasn’t changed significantly, but the number of new titles published has exploded – in the US from 215,000 in 2002 to 2.7 million in 2010. http://www.bkconnection.com/static/10%20Awful%20Truths%20About%20Book%20Publishing%206-20-11.pdf

Average Sales Falling Every Year

Most of those titles are self-published eBooks, and probably only sell a handful of copies, but since there’s millions of them, they’re taking a sizeable slice of the pie. Every year it becomes harder to make your book stand out.

And it gets worse. Books used to go out of print when they stopped selling, but many eBooks stay in print forever. Every year it gets harder for you to sell the number of books you sold last year, and since the price of books isn’t going up, but your cost of living is, if you can’t sell more you’re going to be worse off.

Of course, most of those titles aren't fiction. Matt Wilkens estimates that there were about 100,000 unique, novel-length fiction titles published worldwide in English in 2007. http://mattwilkens.com/2009/10/14/how-many-novels-are-published-each-year/. With the ease of self-publishing eBooks that number has probably risen greatly in the past few years, though currently no one seems to know what the true number of fiction titles is.

Self-Publishing

If you can’t get a traditional publisher, and you’re really sure you’ve written a good book, you can publish it yourself.

Print Self-Publishing

This isn’t easy, and it definitely isn’t cheap, but if you’ve got months to spare and $10,000 lying around with nothing to spend it on, you could consider self-publishing a printed book. Several of Australia’s best selling novelists began that way, and many other writers have in other countries. There are many options, Lulu being one of the biggest. http://www.lulu.com/publish/index.php?cid=en_tab_publish.

But the vast majority of self-publishers do their dough, so if you are going to do it, do it right, and get the right advice. Otherwise, you might as well tear your money up and flush it down the toilet. You must employ a professional editor, a professional cover designer and have the book typeset. This will cost you several thousand dollars, or more if your book is long and requires a lot of editing. Printing will cost you several thousand more dollars, or even more if it’s long or you have a lot of copies printed. For instance, 500 copies of a 400 page paperback at Lulu will cost $US 4,375, i.e. $8.75 each. Shipping will be extra. But paperbacks sell on Amazon for less than that price, so you’re already uncompetitive.

Don’t print more than 500. The biggest problem of all is distribution, which is why publishers have invested millions in it. It takes the most monumental effort for an individual to sell more than 300 - 400 copies, even if you get some good publicity and a few bookshops stock your books. Print too many and they’ll still be rotting in your garage in a decade.

Print On Demand
Margaret has pointed out, in the comments, that it may be cheaper to use a print on demand publisher. Here are some recent articles: http://smartwrite.com.au/2011/11/03/print-on-demand-publishing-is-it-for-you/, http://www.insearchofdesign.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=908:self-publishprint-on-demand-what-they-dont-tell-you&catid=291:printers&Itemid=121.

EBook Self-Publishing

Publishing an eBook solves both the printing and distribution problems, but you still have to spend the money on editing and cover design. The following article tells you how to do it, and what you get.

http://reviews.cnet.com/how-to-self-publish-an-e-book

And you still have to promote it, but that’s another article – or ten. To get you started, you can download this free marketing eBook from Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/305. You’ll also find lots of useful advice and guides here: http://bookmarketingmaven.typepad.com/.

Being a published writer is a great and perilous adventure. Good luck!

Next, in PART 2 of this series, I'll be talking about Surviving Publication.

Disagree with what I've said? Or would like more information? Please post a comment.

• For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
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• My blog about the novels I write, and the writing life: http://ian-irvine.blogspot.com/

Karen Brooks on Giving Birth to a Book

Is there anything Karen Brooks hasn't done? An academic known internationally for her work on popular culture, an award-winning teacher who's also written eight novels and an acclaimed non-fiction book, Consuming Innocence – Popular Culture and Our Children, Karen is also a social commentator who appears regularly in print media, radio and TV. Oh, and among many other things she's been a checkout chick, an actress and an army officer. Whatever Karen has to say is worth listening to and today she's talking about giving birth to a book – and a bit on the side.

Many authors liken the process of writing a book, never mind finishing one, to giving birth. Having just completed my ninth one, I’ve had cause to examine this analogy and, for the most part, wholeheartedly agree. Just like childbirth, books or word-babies are brought into the world amidst great joy, pain, struggle, exhaustion and with the aid of assorted medicinals – usually, the liquid kind. The latter self-administered and in varying quantities. For a lucky few, some books make their entry more easily and with less hangovers.

Whichever way the work arrives and no matter how many you’ve written, the end result is fundamentally the same: you’re the mother or father of a beautiful lexical child. At least, that’s how you consider it until someone tells you otherwise. The one guarantee about being a writer and birthing a book, as opposed to a human, is that there’s always someone out there prepared to tell you that’s one ugly baby you delivered.

Now that I’ve reached the end of The Curse of the Bond Riders trilogy, having recently handed to my publisher my 220,00 word-child, titled Illumination, replete with structural flaws, grammatical foibles and syntactical problems (that like a good midwife/paediatrician, she’ll help me smooth over so people don’t scream when they peep in the crib), I’ve decided that completing Book Three wasn’t so much like giving birth as ending a long-term but deliciously complex and demanding relationship.

It’s not that I’m going through a divorce so much as a separation – one I’ve initiated – but that doesn’t make it any easier.

I’m heartbroken. I find myself turning to Shakespeare and quoting Romeo and Juliet to describe how I feel: “parting is such sweet sorrow” seems to almost capture it. I feel the wrench of disconnection, the void of absence.

But, there’s another emotion alongside all these roiling ones and it’s threatening to dominate. To be utterly frank, I’m also experiencing relief – relief that after all this time, it’s finally over.

And that makes me feel guilty.

For the last six years, I’ve devoted most of my waking hours and spare time, some of it very intimate, to Bond Riders, and its rich and decadent world. I’ve neglected my partner, children and friends and been immersed in a different time and space and come to know all these wonderful and diverse characters who leapt from my imagination and onto the page. I’ve seen them and they’ve seen me, on our finest and very worst days. I’d even reached the stage of dreaming about them. I think it’s understandable then that I have a sense of ambivalence about our time together drawing to a close. On the one hand, I’m despondent about saying farewell to my beloved, but on the other, there’s also a tiny bit of me that feels liberated. Well, actually, a big part. You see, I have a confession to make…

For a short time, I’ve not been true to this relationship.

I’ve been having a bit on the side.

There, I admit it. Like an unfaithful lover, when I should have been focussed on Bond Riders, my thoughts wandered into a different tale. I started to fantasise about spending time with these new people and ideas. It’s not that Bond Riders lost its appeal; on the contrary, I loved it more than ever. But I also knew that just as my relationship with it must end, so a fresh one had to begin. It’s part of the deal of being a writer: that as one book cover closes, another opens. That this process started before I’d broken up with my last novel wasn’t intended. Really. I didn’t go looking for this. I didn’t ask for it to happen. It just did. Despite setting my trilogy in Renaissance Venice, I am no Casanova.

Call me a scarlet writer, a fallen novelist, I really don’t care. I am so thankful. You see, by moving on before my last writing affair is over, I’ve avoided something many authors, me included, fear: that when one piece of work is finished, there will be no inspiration or ideas for another one. That somehow, the old Writer’s Block will erect itself, the muse will take a holiday or resign in disgust, or the well of imagination will dry. I know some authors who wait months if not years before finding their next tale. So to discover mine when I did is beyond a reprieve: it’s a gift and I will take it with gratitude.

Now, I straddle an imaginary crossroads, where one book ends and another commences. I know the paths in both directions are beset with challenges even though they disappear into a mist-bound distance. It’s both a comfortable and awkward position to be in. I am Janus-faced: looking forwards to a virgin story and backwards to my old flame and its publication and reception simultaneously. Second-guessing my familiar work on the one hand, wondering what changes I’ll have to make, where I’ll spit and polish the manuscript, while on the other, creating afresh the triumphs and tragedies of a new world.

With Illumination off being edited and farewells almost complete, I’m just about free to consummate this new literary relationship. Currently, we’re still flirting, with ideas, characters and plotlines. At present, my tentative, rather shy steps have taken me into Fourteenth Century Britain and Flanders, the Hanseatic League, trade in various commodities, and into the lives of a strict merchant family with a dark and wonderful secret.

I am all a-tingle over this. One would think I should behave with more decorum, act my age and in a manner more appropriate to my writing experience. Truth is, I can’t help myself. Maybe it’s too strong a comparison to suggest I relate to the poet John Keats when he first read Chapman’s Homer and likened the encounter to being “some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken…”, or the explorer Cortez who shared with this men the vista of the Pacific and was stunned into silence. There’s no doubt, I’m dazzled; I feel like I’m voyaging through untrammelled frontiers and the excitement is visceral and acute. It’s hard not to shout for joy from a mountain peak and become lost in the journey.

Even so, I won’t forget what brought me to this point, the relationship I laboured over with love and impatience for so many years.

Like all my books past, present and future, no matter whether it’s regarded by others as beautiful, ugly or with indifference, The Curse of the Bond Riders will always hold a special place in my writing life and heart.

Thank you for those lovely insights, Karen. It's left me with much to think about, and I welcome readers' comments.

Karen's website is http://www.karenrbrooks.com/books.html.

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