Tonight I'm on the same bill as V. G. Lee for my first novel reading session in Brighton.

After my incarceration at home with a lung infection, I'm wrapping up against the weather and getting a taxi to Brighton's Latest Music Bar for this evening's Have A Word, Brighton's rather smart literary review where I shall be reading from my new novel Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love, my Brighton-based novel set in 1967.










If you can get there, it would be great to see you. I'm also going to read some of my poetry but don't let that put you off. I shall have some copies of the novel with me if you would like a signed copy. My fellow Ward Wood writer, V.G. Lee is on the bill too so, even if you don't want to see me, she is a very good reason for coming along.

Novelist and comedian, V.G. Lee

On the road with Shauna Gilligan and The Writing Process Blog Tour

Shauna Gilligan

My fellow Ward Wood novelist, Shauna Gilligan has asked me to join The Writing Process Blog Tour where each writer answers four questions about the writing process and then passes the baton on to another set of writer-bloggers. Thanks Shauna, like any other relay race, the current runner is scared of dropping the baton and ruining the race. Anyway, here goes.

Firstly though, here's some information about Shauna whose novel, Happiness Comes From Nowhere, is simply terrific. Inventive and unconventionally structured, it's a gripping multi-dimensional tour de force.  

Shauna Gilligan was born in Dublin, Ireland and has worked and lived in Mexico, Spain, India and the UK. She currently lives in County Kildare, Ireland with her family. Her fiction has been published widely and she has read from her work and presented on writing at conferences in Europe and the USA. She holds a PhD (Writing) from the University of South Wales (formally University of Glamorgan). Happiness Comes from Nowhere (London: Ward Wood, 2012) is her first novel.

To read Shauna's answers to these questions go to:

http://shaunaswriting.com/wordpress/2014/02/my-writing-process-blog-tour/


Right, my turn:

What are you working on now?

Now that my first novel, Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love has been published (Ward Wood Publishing, 2013 - see below), I can put my mind to other things. I've just finished the third draft of my second novel, Blue Notes, Still Frames, like my first, it's based in Brighton but it's set in the 1990s with a completely new cast of characters. I am also writing a lot of new poetry and revising many of my older ones. This year, I hope, is going to be the time when I raise my game with poetry so I shall be concentrating on that and on a number of short stories that have been languishing on my desk looking for a little love. I'd like to clear my desk before settling on a number of ideas for the next novel but I'm already itching to get on with it.

Why is your work different from other work in the same genre?

This question scares me! I don't know if my work is different from others' work but I hope it is - otherwise, why bother. So much of writing is about finding confidence in your own voice so this question sends me scurrying away to my inner world of insecurity. I came to writing after a long career in the television industry, working for Granada Television, where serious and often complicated ideas had to be expressed in clear, direct and entertaining ways that were intelligible to every viewer. I believe that spirit of directness is important in my fiction too, as is humour, and I hope that I achieve at least some of this without sacrificing any of the passion and respect I feel for the great canon of Western literature. If my work is different from others', it might be that it is a mix of the old and the new expressed from what I'm told is a rather quirky worldview. God, I hated that question!

Why do you write like you do?

I love words whether it's in conversation or on the printed page. I was thrilled, as a child, by the impact and power of words. The years between childhood and my actually becoming a writer, were about honing down and refining what had always, I suspect, been my individual voice, an impulse that has been with me ever since I can remember. If it doesn't sound too weird, I think I have always listened to that observational voice in my head. It grew up much earlier than I did! I think I'm only just catching up with it now realizing that I don't really have any other choice but to write in the way the distinct voice dictates. Discovering this has also lead to my relatively new enthusiasm for writing poetry which often comes quickly in its first draft form.


How does your writing process work?

I always wanted to be a writer and always got a real kick out of the act of writing - The Joy Of Writing I suppose you could say,  like The Joy Of Sex. That feeling has never left me but has been fueled by great writers and artists from other genres, who have regularly turned me on throughout my life. I internalise what I love and let it mix with all those insubstantial and subconscious impulses and memories that rush around in the brain. I suppose my interest in the world around me and my fascination for our own oddly contradictory species is fed into that almost abstract thing, the mind. In some ways, I'm a passive witness to my own writing but when I start,  I write in a great flow of enthusiasm even if the subject matter is dark. The difficult bit is before that, sitting in an armchair quietly waiting while these thoughts are formed. It's a matter of opening portals in the brain. When it's a novel, this requires a lot of discipline, a daily ritual that begins meditating in a leather armchair and then moving on to some frantic typing at the computer. The real "work" comes with the second draft and beyond.  I'm always trying to improve and experiment with style and I anguish over these later drafts but, deep-down, I have to obey an internal force and, as humbly as I can, write down the words as they are formed in that place in my brain that is often quite dictatorial. It's an exhilarating ride whether it's a short poem or the extended writing of a novel even if I'm always left with the wish to have done it all better.

Now, with my thanks, I'll introduce the authors who will be continuing the writing process blog tour a week from now.  Their answers to these questions will be on their websites next Monday, 17th. February:

Adele Ward

Adele Ward is a publisher, Ward Wood Publishing, a novelist, Everything is Free (2011) and a poet, Never-Never Land (2009). She lives in North London with her sons Stefano and Danny. She worked as a journalist and author of nonfiction before spending four years in Italy where her children were born. She was one of the first students on Andrew Motion's postgraduate creative writing programme at the Royal Holloway, University of London. Her poetry has been anthologised and broadcast on national and local radio, and other publications include a selection in the first Bedford Square anthology published by John Murray. In summer 2010 she set up Ward Wood Publishing with Mike Fortune-Wood, and in 2011 she started the regular Friday Night Writers event in London.

http://adeleward.blogspot.co.uk/

Peter Daniels

Peter Daniels published his first full collection Counting Eggs with Mulfran Press in 2012, following pamphlets including three from Smith/Doorstop, Mr Luczinski Makes a Move (HappenStance, 2011) and the historically obscene Ballad of Captain Rigby (Pronoun, 2013) based on court records at London Metropolitan Archives. He has won first prize in a number of competitions including the Ledbury (2002), Arvon (2008) and TLS (2010), and twice been a winner of the Poetry Business pamphlet competition. His book of translations from the Russian of Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939), published by Angel Classics, was the Poetry Book Society’s recommended translation for Autumn 2013.

http://eggcounter.wordpress.com/

http://www.peterdaniels.org.uk/index.html

An interview with Sue Guiney about her new Cambodian novel, Out Of The Ruins

My friend and fellow Ward Wood writer, the American but London-based Sue Guiney has just published a new novel, Out Of The Ruins. We meet pretty regularly these days at either Ward Wood events or at the monthly poetry readings held in London by Camden-Lumen Poetry. There's a real sense of family between all of us writers published by Ward Wood Publishing and, delightfully, whenever we meet we also manage to laugh a lot as well as discuss the wonderful world of writing so it was great meeting up with Sue again in London on Friday for the launch of the new novel.

Sue Guiney

We are fellow bloggers too. Sue writes regularly about her writing and her work in Cambodia where her previous novel, and now this new one, is based one her website:

http://sueguiney.com/

She was kind enough to suggest doing a blog interview with me when my novel, Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love was published last year and now I'm returning the favour.

Out of the Ruins begins with one Cambodian doctor’s frustration over how the poor women in his country are dying needlessly. He reaches out to friends to help him create a new clinic for the local villages around Siem Reap’s world famous temples, and they answer his call. Tradition collides with science as East meets West, and though the doctors are all too eager to help, they have much to learn about their own personal demons in this desperate and seductive society.

Me: I loved your first Cambodian novel, A Clash Of Innocence and I’m really looking forward to reading the new one, Out Of The Ruins. I’m happy to see that at least one of the characters, Srey, from the first book has made into the second and I’m wondering if this is a sequel or maybe part of a planned sequence of related Cambodian novels with shared themes.

Sue: Thanks so much, Colin! I must admit, I’m really excited about this new book’s arrival, too. Your question about sequels is interesting. This has all happened organically. When I wrote A Clash of Innocents I assumed it would be a one off. But people responded well to it, and I realized I had much more to say about Cambodia, so I decided to write a second novel. Actually, I was trying to work out the plot of a completely different book at the time,, set in Ireland actually, but the plot just wasn’t happening. I mentioned that to our editor, Adele Ward, and she suggested writing another book set in Cambodia. And once she did, its plot popped right into my head. But it was a story set in a different part of the country, and so I knew it had to have different characters as well as some from the first. All this is a long way of saying that Out of the Ruins became a “companion” piece, a book that can stand on its own, but which shares some characters with the previous novel. So if you happen to have read that one as well, then the experience is even richer, I suppose. And now that Ruins is complete, I realize that there is at least one more in the series that needs to be written. I’ve already started planning that, but I won’t talk about it now. First things first.

Me: I know that you are a regular visitor to Cambodia. When you first went there did you imagine that you would become so involved with that country or even that you would write so extensively about it? How much do your novels reflect not just your experience of living and working in Cambodia but also your life as an American living in London and spending so much of your time between three continents?

Sue: My connection with Cambodia is one of the great surprises of my life. I first went there on a family volunteering holiday, with the notion that this “would be good for the teenage son.” It was, of course, good for him. But it actually changed my life. I was writing my first novel, Tangled Roots, at the time, and that one is actually set in Moscow and Boston, so I wasn’t thinking about writing anything else but that. But being in Cambodia opened my eyes and heart to so much, and then the story of A Clash of Innocents just came to me, complete with characters and themes. It is clear to me, though, that my own expat experience underlies much of what I write. I seem to be endlessly fascinated by why some people choose to live their lives outside their native country, and why others don’t. How does that decision change you? Are we running away from something or towards something? These questions are still there in the new book, and probably always will be. Growing up in suburban New York, I lived a rather sheltered and protected life. I never knew that it was even possible for someone to decide to live outside their own country. Me spending my adult life in London? Impossible. And yet, here I am, both an outsider and an insider on both sides of the Atlantic, and now also in a country on the other side of the planet.

Me: I’m intrigued that you and I both write fiction and poetry and have a background in classical music. Do all these elements come together in your writing and do they influence each other or do you manage to keep them separate?

Sue: Excellent question. The more I write, the more I realize the way my musical background influences my writing. It is certainly key to my ear for cadence and rhythm, which is important to me not only in poetry, as would be expected, but also in prose. Being a violinist who has spent her life playing in orchestras, I have also been intrigued by the fact that so many physicians play musical instruments, and especially string instruments. What is that all about? I’m still noodling that one, but you’ll see it is addressed to a certain extent in the new novel, which is the first time I’ve really written about the experience of playing music. I loved doing that, and I’m sure I’ll write about it more. A funny thing, though, is that the more I write, the more important playing my violin is to me – it’s the only time when I don’t have words in my head, and believe me, the constant words can be exhausting.

Thanks so much for asking me onto your blog, Colin. I do hope you enjoy this book, as much as you did the last!
I'm sure I will Sue, I have it on order and can't wait to read it.

Sue Guiney's Out Of The Ruins can be ordered online from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing, from bookshops and from Amazon and The Book Depository:

If you'd like to read Sue's interview with me then here's the link:

http://sueguiney.com/2013/11/767/

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