Scarecrow: Out Now

Back in February, I wrote that one of my stories had been accepted for World Weaver Press’ latest anthology, Scarecrow. Today, I am delighted to announce that this short story collection, edited by Fae’s Rhonda Parrish, has been released.

First of all, here’s a description of Scarecrow, from World Weaver Press’ website:

Hay-men, mommets, tattie bogles, kakashi, tao-tao—whether formed of straw or other materials, the tradition of scarecrows is pervasive in farming cultures around the world. The scarecrow serves as decoy, proxy, and effigy—human but not human. We create them in our image and ask them to protect our crops and by extension our very survival, but we refrain from giving them the things a creation might crave—souls, brains, free-will, love. In Scarecrow, fifteen authors of speculative fiction explore what such creatures might do to gain the things they need or, more dangerously, think they want.

Within these pages, ancient enemies join together to destroy a mad mommet, a scarecrow who is a crow protects solar fields and stores long-lost family secrets, a woman falls in love with a scarecrow, and another becomes one. Encounter scarecrows made of straw, imagination, memory, and robotics while being spirited to Oz, mythological Japan, other planets, and a neighbor’s back garden. After experiencing this book, you’ll never look at a hay-man the same.

My tale in this anthology is called Only the Land Remembers. It tells the story of Grace, a girl who volunteers to be the ‘Scarecrow’- a protector figure who must ward off the ghoulish ‘Crows’ that are haunting her town. Below is a short extract:

The Crows are gathering. 

Grace is curled up on the window seat upstairs, her arms around her knees, her fingers picking at the loose hem of her sleeve. This is the only spot in the house where she can watch them; it is just high enough to see over the town wall.  

They are smudged in the crisscross of panes, the glass distorting the almost-human shape of them, so that if Grace moves her head even a little, they seem to lurch from side to side. But even blurred those dark spirits are unmistakable, and she knows that, for now at least, they stand perfectly still beyond border.   

It calms her to sit here, taking stock of them: three by the gate, eight in the orchard, the rest away in the fields. Yesterday, there were two dozen; now she counts twenty-nine.  

After a while, her vision relaxes and she leans forward, a cold kiss lingering where her brow touches the window.  

‘Shoo,’ Grace whispers, her breath fogging the glass. ‘Get away. Shoo.’

I’d be lying if I said this had been an easy story to write. The plot changed significantly from my initial ideas, which is unusual for me, as I’m a compulsive planner. The number of drafts I struggled through, not to mention the endless hours I spent writing them, doesn’t really bear thinking about (a shout out goes to Joely Badger here, who unpicked the plot with me on multiple occasions, and never grew tired of my asking, ‘But what if…?’).

Needless to say, it was a huge relief to eventually wrestle my thoughts and ideas into a story I was pleased with, and when I received the postcard from Rhonda telling me I’d been accepted for Scarecrow it definitely felt as though all of the effort had been worth it. So today, as I look back on the whole experience - and I look forward to reading the rest of the anthology - I can't help but feel especially proud to finally see Only the Land Remembers published.

Scarecrow is available to buy as a trade paperback direct from the publisher, or as an ebook from the usual suspects. More information can be found here.

Newcastle Writing Conference 2015

Just over a week ago, I attended the Newcastle Writing Conference 2015. Organised by New Writing North and hosted by Northumbria University, it was a thoroughly informative and inspiring event - one I have thinking about ever since.

The day kicked off with a storming key notes address from YA author Meg Rosoff, which was a great ice-breaker for the conference, mainly because Meg is such an entertaining speaker. She brought a lot of laughter to the lecture hall as she told us exactly why she hated her former profession of advertising (it involved instant tea granules), her habit of getting fired from almost every job she’s ever had, and how her first novel – a pony book – was rejected for containing too much sex.

The talk concluded with Meg urging us to think of our brains as colanders: almost everything slips through, but once in a while something especially memorable or interesting gets stuck. When writing, she advised us to consider the contents of our own individual colanders: ‘None of it is the same as anyone else’s,’ she said, ‘and that is your strength and your weapon.’

After a panel event about social media, we split off into breakout sessions. I had chosen How to Pitch Your Work with Steve Chambers, mainly because the idea of talking about my novel-to-be terrifies me. In fact, what I really liked about Steve was that he didn’t deny that pitching was an unpleasant business, though as he reminded us, ‘You don’t really have a choice.’

A few pieces of advice from that session that really stood out for me:

• Build your pitch around the main character – people are interested in people.
• Pitch it like you’re talking to a mate at the pub.
•  It isn’t about the novel’s themes or issues - or why you’re writing it - it’s about telling the story.
• Focus on what is unique about your story. 
•  Not everyone will like your ideas, and that’s okay.
•  Don’t lose confidence, and keep pitching – you will improve.

I also found that Steve, who is the Programme Leader of the Creative Writing MA at Northumbria University, had a lot of writing wisdom to share, not all of it related to pitching. In fact, my notes are full of his offhand little gems, one of my favourites being, ‘You can’t help the kind of writer you are, because who you are keeps coming out of your work, in your voice.’

In the afternoon, I opted to attend Meet the Agent with Jo Unwin. Much like my attitude to pitching, I find the prospect of one day attempting to find an agent rather intimidating - they are, after all, the gatekeepers of the publishing world. Fortunately, Jo turned out to be very friendly, eager to explain what her job entailed, and full of advice on how to approach an agent. Of course, a lot of information about submitting work can be found online – and it varies from agent to agent – but I thought I’d record just a few of Jo’s many wonderful tips below:

• The biggest agents in the business might not have space for new authors, but it’s a good idea to approach their assistants, who will be looking to expand their client list.
• Mention a personal connection to the agent if you have one. This might be meeting them in person, but could just as easily be watching them talk at events on YouTube etc.
•  Have a good sense of the book you’ve written. Pitch the nugget of your story in your covering letter – and be specific, so it’s memorable. ‘Don’t tell me it’s about innocence and loss,’ Jo advised. ‘Tell me it’s about a mother whose daughter was lost at sea.’
•  Your covering letter should be serious, demonstrating that you’re a ‘career writer’ – i.e. someone who has been writing for a long time and is committed to a future in the profession. 

The conference concluded with a fantastic panel event called What’s Hot and What’s Not with Jo Unwin, Francesca Main (Picador), Rachael Kerr (Unbound) and Anna James (The Bookseller). It was great to hear about these women’s respective roles in the publishing industry and their current projects, not to mention the many, many book recommendations they had (my bank balance is about to take a serious hit).

As for the question posed by the name of the panel, although the speakers could identify current themes in publishing (nature writing is ‘having a moment’, women’s voices are popular) they cautioned us against chasing trends, because tastes inevitably will have changed by the time a book has been written and published. Instead, we were simply urged to write the best, most important book we could.

I found this point - which had been repeated one way or another throughout the conference - oddly reassuring. Obviously, writing a high-quality novel is no easy task, but given that the rapidly-evolving publishing industry can sometimes seem like a confusing sort of place, it’s a clear objective – something to get on with. 

In fact, Meg Rosoff summed it up nicely right at the beginning of the day, when she related what her agent had once said to her: ‘Forget about being a good girl and doing it the right way, and [write a book] as fiercely as you can.’

Fae: The Interview

This summer saw the release of World Weaver Press' Fae, which features one of my short stories, 'Antlers'. Around that time, the anthology's editor, Rhonda Parrish, asked us authors a few fae-related questions, and I'm pleased to reveal that my interview has now been published:

Fae Contributor Interview: Amanda Block

So head on over to Rhonda's blog at the above link if you're interested in reading my fairy-centric chat (and first interview!) about the inspiration for the story, reworking old tales, and my favourite magical character. Plus there's an extract from Antlers to be found there too, featuring a birth, a death, and some serious sibling rivalry...

Australia: Melbourne, City of Literature

'What's this about books?'

Continuing with my travels, I left New Zealand at the beginning of March this year, and flew into Queensland, Australia. Over the course of the next week, I then had a series of strange and fairly dangerous adventures, which included sailing out to the Great Barrier Reef during a tornado warning, night diving with sharks, and getting trapped in the middle of ‘Cape Tribulation’ (the name’s a clue, by the way) during a tropical storm, unable to leave a flooded, spider-plagued hostel because all the nearby crocodile-infested rivers had burst their banks. In short, Australia was enormous fun from the get-go.

After those slightly mad seven days, I headed south, to Melbourne, which was an even more exciting prospect than Queensland. First and foremost, it used to be the home of my creative co-conspirator, Joely Badger, who was my trusted guide for the remainder of my Australia trip. And secondly, Melbourne is a UNESCO City of Literature.

Coming from Edinburgh, and having written about its City of Literature status before, I was keen to find out more about this aspect of Melbourne during my stay there. I was only visiting for three weeks, but it turns out you can discover quite a lot about a place in that time, and so below are just a few of my book-related adventures in Australia’s first literary city.

Detail from the Joyce and Court Oldmeadow Memorial Sculpture

1) Visiting the State Library

Melbourne has some beautiful buildings, and the State Library of Victoria is one of them. Handily situated in the centre of the city, its pillared façade and elegant lawn easily make it the grandest building in sight – exactly as a library should be. 

Inside too, it’s an impressive space, especially the domed La Trobe Reading Room. Although perhaps my favourite part of the library was the Joyce and Court Oldmeadow Memorial Sculpture (above), cast in bronze by Tessa Wallis. It features multiple characters from Australian children’s literature, many of which are native critters, including a koala, a wombat and a platypus.

View of Melbourne over the Yarra

2) Seeing John Marsden at the Children's Book Festival

As luck would have it, the Children's Book Festival was taking place while I was in Melbourne and Joely suggested we go and see the author John Marsden, who she explained was something of an Australian national treasure. His most famous work is the Young Adult series that starts with Tomorrow, When the War Began, which seems to have been required reading for Australia’s schoolchildren over the past couple of decades. Tomorrow kicks off the story of seven teenagers who go camping deep in the Australian bush and return to find their town has been invaded, and life as they know it has changed forever... 

Happily for Joely and me, much of Marsden’s talk focused on writing. As a neat little story-building exercise, he had the audience match some random adjectives and nouns, creating strange pairings such as ‘blue spaghetti’ and ‘glass parrot’, and then he demonstrated how to construct a tale around them, by asking three questions: 

- What led to this?

- What are the consequences of this?

- What is the resolution?

Marsden told us that ‘stories interrupt routine’, which I like as a definition, and then pressed upon us the importance of language, urging aspiring writers to learn the rules of English in order to later enjoy breaking them. Plus he dispelled the myth that authors receive some kind of divine story inspiration: the Tomorrow series developed over time, he told us - the result of combining subjects in which he was interested, such as farming and Second World War history, with a wish to write about a group of resourceful teenage protagonists.

Joely at work in The Moat - with cocktail, naturally

3) Writing in Melbourne’s cafés

Melbourne is famous for its ‘café culture’, which I’m pretty sure is just a hipster way of saying it has lots of nice places to drink coffee. But it does, and obviously there is a natural attraction between writers and caffeine (/alcohol) so in Melbourne’s many cafés Joely and I had a great old time chatting stories, plotting stories, writing stories, coming up with a story-related business idea (maybe more on that one day…) and even meeting up with her Melbourne-based writers’ group.

Our favourite haunt, it should be noted, was The Moat, downstairs from Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre for writers. Not only does it have very cool, book-focused décor, they also have literary-themed cocktails. I sampled ‘The Bard (Ode to William Shakespeare)’, and it was glorious.

4) Picnicking at Hanging Rock

All right, this wasn’t exactly in Melbourne, but just outside of the city is the infamous spot featured in Peter Weir’s cult 1975 film, Picnic at Hanging Rock. Although the story of the turn-of-the-century schoolgirls who disappear on a Valentine’s Day picnic at the rock - some of them never to be seen again - was actually originally a novel, written in 1967 by Australian author Joan Lindsay.

I never saw any of these people again

Naturally, staying so close to Hanging Rock, Joely and I decided to visit this notorious place with a couple of friends, and of course we had a picnic there, and obviously we dressed up in frilly white tops and re-enacted parts of the film (shouting ‘Miranda!’ at one another from between the rocks, and so on). And, maybe I’m imagining it, but the Rock does have a weird atmosphere, perhaps not helped by the fact that we visited on a particularly hot, bright day not unlike the one featured in the well-known film. 

It seems to be a popular misconception that Picnic at Hanging Rock is based on true events - even the author herself grew vaguer over time as to the inspiration for her novel. So, for me, perhaps stranger than the Rock itself was its visitor’s centre, which shows a kind of documentary film on a loop about the girls’ disappearance, despite the fact that - as far as anyone knows - it never happened. I thought this piece of marketing quite interesting: although we’re so used to fictionalising facts in books and films and TV shows, it’s rare to experience the factualising of fiction, which appears to be what is happening around the story of Hanging Rock. 

5) Having tea at Miss Marple’s

Finally, one of the things I liked best about Australia was that even when I thought I was getting used to a country that, in many ways, is very similar to my own, it would take me by surprise. I was shocked, for example, by the high quality of hot chocolate there, the high prices of books, and the high probability of being subjected to violence when attempting to feed cockatoos. 

Another such surprise occurred in the middle of the Dandenongs rainforest (again, just out of Melbourne), when we came across the memorabilia-packed Miss Marple’s Tea Room and stopped inside for scones and cake. Why, one might ask, was it there? Did the Dandenongs have some link to the Miss Marple stories? Had Agatha Christie once visited? Or were the owners just very enthusiastic fans? I have absolutely no idea, for I never solved this particular Marple mystery. But then, why shouldn’t one find a café dedicated to a fictional English geriatric sleuth in the middle of an Australian rainforest? Why on earth not? 

Miss Marple's Tea Room, complete with suspicious-looking man on roof

For more bookish bits and bobs from my 2014 travels, see New Zealand: Literary Landscapes.

New Zealand: Literary Landscapes

Mount Ngauruhoe, also known as Mount Doom

Back in February, between leaving Geneva and starting freelance work in Edinburgh, I set off on a three-month trip around Australasia and Southeast Asia. My first stop was the mighty New Zealand, a country of which I had a very favourable impression, despite the fact I had never been there and actually knew very little about it. Well, I knew the obvious, clichéd stuff: New Zealand was the home of the haka, the bungee jump, and far more sheep than people; it had landscapes many claim are ‘like Scotland, but better!’ (seriously, a lot of people say this); and, thanks to Peter Jackson, it was a place inextricably linked in my mind with The Lord of the Rings.

Like so many, I grew up with Tolkien’s world: as a child, I was read The Hobbit at bedtime; as a young teenager, I tackled The Lord of the Rings books on my own; as a sixth former, my friends and I obsessed over the films. Although there are aspects of the saga on which I’m not so keen (the endless songs, the [lack of] female characters, The Hobbit films…), I have always found Tolkien’s world irresistible, its originality and scale marking it out from the rest.

To return to 2001, when we were devouring advanced publicity for The Fellowship of the Ring in the sixth form common room, I remember all the media focus was concerned with the same thing: New Zealand. I didn’t get it at the time - as far as I was concerned, Middle Earth was a fantasy version of olde worlde Britain - but then I watched the film and, of course, I understood. And now I've been there, I understand even more: New Zealand is a magical place.

Hobbiton: view from the party field up to Bag End

The most genuinely 'Middle Earth' experience I had on my trip was undoubtedly my visit to Hobbiton, also known as Alexander Farm on the North Island. Used as a filming location for The Lord of the Rings trilogy and recently rebuilt for The Hobbit films, the site has since been preserved as a tourist attraction. There, you can wander past the iconic round doors of the hobbit houses, all the way up to Bag End at the top of the hill, before finishing up in the Green Dragon pub for a drink and perhaps some second breakfast.

What particularly struck me about Hobbiton was that it didn’t feel like a film set. There are no lighting rigs or tyre tracks or wires spoiling the view. Almost everything is authentic, from the vegetables in the gardens, oversized in comparison to the little trowels and rakes, to the shirts and trousers hanging over the gates, which look as though they've been shrunk in the wash. Walking around that place was not just like walking into a story, it was like walking into that story - the one bound up with my childhood - and so was somehow completely joyful and hauntingly nostalgic at the same time.

Anyone for second breakfast?

But to talk about New Zealand only in terms of The Lord of the Rings would do the country, and my time there, a great injustice. For starters, it has a rich literary history of its own, from the folktales of its indigenous people to its current contributions to the bestseller charts. While in the country, I was fortunate to connect with stories from both ends of this scale. In Rotorua, I visited the Tamaki Maori Village where, aside from watching the famous – and frankly terrifying – haka, I was enthralled by our hosts' storytelling, their tales having been passed down in the oral tradition over countless generations. Then conversely, during much of February, I was absorbed in The Luminaries, a historical novel set in New Zealand that, among its other accolades, won last year’s Man Booker Prize (its Kiwi author, Eleanor Catton, is the youngest writer ever to win the award). Speaking, once more, of walking into stories, it was great fun to spend long bus journeys lost in Catton’s fictional chronicle of New Zealand’s gold rush era, only to look up and find we were driving through the very places mentioned in the book.

Rainforest near Franz Josef glacier

Incidentally, the bus I’m referring to here is the big green Kiwi Experience bus, a ‘hop-on, hop-off’ mode of travel that allows tourists to cover a surprising amount of land. And what land it is. New Zealand’s topography is unbelievably diverse; on the Kiwi Bus we would set off from a surfers’ paradise in the morning and end up in a rainforest next to a glacier just a few hours later. The country has it all: picturesque, snow-topped mountains; lakes so flat they perfectly mirror the scenery around them; tangled, fairy tale forests; gorges that disappear into menacing mist; craggy coastlines packed with chubby seals… and so much more. While the Scottish half of me is reluctant to confirm that it is truly ‘like Scotland, but better!’* there must be few places in the world where you can find such a variety of scenery without crossing a border.

I’ve written before how, as an outdoorsy sort of person, I find the natural world very inspiring, so strangely enough one of the aspects of the trip that I enjoyed the most was the long journeys. During my time on the Kiwi Bus (and when I wasn’t tackling The Luminaries) I would gaze out of the window at whatever spectacular scenery we were driving through that day and allow my mind to wander off where it liked. I reflected on what I had written, I thought about stories I wanted to tell, and I even began to sort out the plot of my novel-to-be. Because of this, New Zealand was probably the most creatively productive time of the whole trip.

As I said at the start, I had had high expectations for my Kiwi experience, all of which were totally surpassed by the country itself and the wonderful people I met there. But what I hadn’t anticipated were the moments that didn’t feature on any bucket lists, or that I couldn’t capture on camera: the feeling of stepping into Hobbiton, for example, or a eureka moment while mulling over something make-believe on a bus. In this way, New Zealand gave me even more than the adventures I had sought out there, and in terms of stories it was - like that of Bilbo Baggins – an unexpected journey.

Mirror Lake reflecting Mount Cook

*The English half of me has no such qualms

‘Well, I’m back.’

Sam and Rosie's house, Hobbiton (New Zealand)

Since mid-February, I've picnicked at Hanging Rock and second-breakfasted in Hobbiton; I've partied with Maoris and hiked with Vietnamese villagers; I've fed kangaroos and wallabies by hand, and been feasted upon by more mosquitoes, sand flies and leeches than I can count; I've climbed to the top of an Angkor temple to experience a sunset, and I've crawled through a Viet Cong tunnel to experience a mild panic attack. Then there was the diving (scuba and sky), the jungle trekking, the missed flight in Sydney, the lost tooth in Melbourne... and a thousand other barmy, totally exhausting and utterly wonderful adventures in Australasia and Asia. In fact, during the last three months, it seems like one of the only activities I haven't managed to cram in (outside of a travel journal) is writing.

Which was exactly the plan. Part of the reason I went travelling after leaving Geneva was I felt overworked and in need of a break (sometimes not an easy thing to take, when half your job is in your head). So while I'm hoping that the time away will be good for my fiction, first and foremost it's been good for me.

Besides, I didn't give up stories entirely - I don't think I could. Whether you want them to or not, new places and new people bombard you with stories, some you might anticipate and some that are completely unexpected. While I won't be writing an account of my travels, exactly, I have some literary bits and bobs from the trip I'm hoping to share with Writer's Block over the next few weeks.

Picnic time? Hanging Rock (Australia)

Plus there's plenty to look forward to, right here, right now. I'm back in Edinburgh and about to start writing and ghostwriting full-time, which is very exciting/terrifying. Fae, the anthology featuring my short story 'Antlers' is to be published by World Weaver Press in July (a post to follow on that one shortly). Then there's the fact that, without setting pen to paper, I've been having a good old think about The Novel and some other writing projects during all the long bus/boat/tuk tuk journeys of late, which may have given me some much-needed perspective. And I suppose, at the end of the day, gaining a little perspective is what travelling's all about.