The Book Post

D Day - first draft delivery day - has finally arrived. Well, technically it was to be on Monday, but for quite possibly the first time in my career, I have delivered a few days early. I can report that I have lost a holiday and gained a wan complexion, two totally unnecessary kilos and most importantly, a workable first draft of the novel I began plotting and researching two years ago and began writing in August, after spending the past 9 weeks almost exclusively sitting in a darkened room in front of my laptop and consuming unhealthy quantities of coffee from sun up to sun down.

How does it feel? Ask me in the morning.

Oh look, Ewan McGregor with a manuscript and champagne. That gives me an idea...

I am heavily caffeinated in a darkened room, beset with something of a persistent headache (rubbing the temples helps, above) and almost unable to hold a conversation. And I am bloody excited about Assassin.

D minus 12 days. 10,000 words to go. Welcome to the world of a writer on deadline.

As promised, I am blogging about the writing of the sixth Mak Vanderwall novel to give one account of the writing process. Each author works differently, but equally, each book can be different to write, even for experienced novelists. Bestselling crime writer Val McDermid, for example, told me in our recent interview together that she had a process which worked well for her for a full 15 or 16 novels, and then, 'Without warning, it stopped working...I couldn't get a handle on the middle of [the book]. It was like trying to herd cats.'

My approach to writing this novel has differed in some key ways to that of my previous seven books. It hasn't been like herding cats, but there have been new logistical challenges. One obvious thing that has changed since the writing of the previous Mak novel, Siren, is that I have become a parent and accordingly, I haven't been able to write through the night as I did previously. One night of writing 9pm to 5am and waking at 7am to feed my daughter was enough to convince me that was a habit of the past. Additionally, with my new television and UNICEF commitments and the Pandora English series, I have never been busier. I've needed to be far more time efficient in every respect. As a result I took more time than usual plotting and researching this novel before putting fingertip to keyboard. Then, when the opportunity presented itself, I got stuck into long and continuous writing days. It's been a real marathon of writing since embarking on the first draft in August. For the past month, in particular, I have been staying with my understanding in-laws in Western Australia, locked away in a back bedroom writing from sun up until sun down, with enthusiastic child minding on tap in the next room - an ideal scenario for enthusiastic new grandparents and for a writer on hard deadline. It has been a very productive system, even if I felt like the bedraggled and pale antisocial teenager, hiding in my room and being called out for meals, mumbling to myself. A writer has got to do what a writer has got to do...

» Read more on 'D minus 12 days. 10,000 words to go.'

Those who follow my blog will know that there was very little that amounted to opinion in my post of October 11, 2011, Are our Sisters In Crime (still) fighting against a male-dominated literary world?, in which I wrote about Sisters In Crime, an organisation I have been a member of for 13 years and had attended a recent convention for. Despite this, my blog earned heated responses because it included some relevant and rather surprising statistics regarding gender bias in the literary world. Perhaps most memorably the blog post was labelled 'privileged whining', by a particular fiction reviewer and theatre critic for The Age whom I think we can safely say is not a fan.

There have been 90 responses so far. Things got a tad heated.

I later summed up the responses to the original blog and expanded on the issue in Literary Gender Bias, The After-Blog. In the months since I been asked about gender bias and the blog debate in a number of interviews that were ostensibly about other topics (my books or TV hosting, my UNICEF role, etc.) Specifically, I have been asked if I really think an unconscious literary bias exists. Well, yes. The bias is well established in statistics, some of which average a shocking 80/20 split between the representation of male and female writers in reviews and literary prizes despite about equal numbers of books written by men and women. Now don't get me wrong, I have a good career as a writer and I have tended to be well-represented and reviewed. I have no complaints whatsoever about my own career. To the contrary. But reading those statistics was a shock to me, as they would be to anyone else. To see what I mean, take a quick glance at these clear pie charts. The point is, the bias is unconscious, which means most of us are unaware of it. When we are made aware of it, it is surprising indeed. Like many book lovers and reviewers, it made me look at my own reading lists and reviews to see if I, too, was letting that unconscious bias creep in.

* Just 2 of 42 pie charts at VIDA, looking at publications as diverse as The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York Times Book Review, Poetry and so on:



Makes for interesting viewing.

» Read more on 'The Debate Continues. (Literary Gender Bias, The After-After-Blog)'

Today is the centenary birthday of that great luminary of macabre humour, cartoonist Charles Addams (Jan 7 1912 - Sept 29, 1988). He attended the Grand Central School of Art in New York in 1931 and sold his first 'spot' sketch to The New Yorker the following year, aged 20. In 1942 he published his first anthology of drawings, appropriately titled, Drawn and Quartered. The Addams Family television series first aired on ABC in 1964.

Addams died after a heart attack suffered whilst parking his car in front of his apartment at West 54th Street, NYC. He was buried in his pet cemetery, 'The Swamp', on his estate, though as readers of my Pandora English series are aware, he lives on in Spektor, NY, where Addams Avenue is named in his honour and he is regularly spotted taking walks in the moonlight and ordering publications from Harold, the viridescent proprietor of Harold's Grocer. He feels the cartoons in The New Yorker are not what they used to be.

We can be sure Spektor will really go off tonight.

Around this time, every novel deadline, I think of Jack Torrance.

Back in August I set about putting fingertips to keyboard for Assassin, the 6th Mak Vanderwall crime novel, vowing to update this blog with my progress to give one example of the novel writing process. I soldiered on with updates until it all went off the rails two months ago with extra commitments, some dream interviews, a surprising (and weirdly heated) diversion on literary gender bias, and finally, a book tour. The keeping track, at least, went off the rails, though the writing came in fits and starts (excruciating 30 word days, exhilarating 1100 word days), on planes and in hotel rooms, in moving cars (in passenger seat, with resultant headache) and once on the edge of a chair in emergency. Now, after a couple of years of planning and several months of intense writing, chatting with ballistic and forensic computing experts and hassling a morgue, I have 39,000 words of Assassin to lay down between now and the end of January.

These are my 39,000 (word) days of Christmas, if you will.

Wishing you and yours a wonderful holiday season full of love, adventure, delightful reads and one of these trees (above). And if you too are on deadline, may the Word-Santa visit with a truly satisfying, on-schedule manuscript. (One the mischievous typo elves haven't messed with.)

x

Image via Toni Blake on FB.

Yours in merriment,

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Valerie Khoo at the Sydney Writers' Centre about the writing process, my writing tips, Mak Vanderwall, Pandora English and my latest novel The Spider Goddess. Here is the interview:

A couple of years ago when launching my crime novels in Spain, El Mundo referred to me as 'Agatha Christie con tacones'. This quote was later translated into English by one of my publishers and printed on some promotional material for Siren as 'Agatha Christie with balls'. Someone had mixed up tacones, the Spanish word for heels, with cojones, the expletive for testicles. An easy, and brilliant error.

But as we well know, we don't need language barriers to misunderstand each other. This year I was misquoted as saying my daughter is 'an inevitable joy'. That should have read ineffable joy, a joy that can't be expressed in words. 'Inevitable' does put rather a different spin on the joys of procreation. I blame my accent.

A beautiful error came up today in a piece by the excellent Blanche Clark, books editor for The Herald Sun. We had a lovely and rather long phone interview (I can be pretty verbose with enough tea), resulting in the profile piece, 'Moss a Rolling Stone at Home'. But when I noticed the line, 'She has studied topics as diverse as psychology and sarcophagy and earned her PI licence', it gave me pause.

That should read psychology and psychopathy , the study of psychopaths, not sarcophagy - flesh eating. Though it must be said, I am fond of zombies.

Interestingly, sarcophagy comes from the Greek σαρξ sarx meaning 'flesh', and φαγειν phagein, 'to eat'. The related word, sarcophagus (a funeral receptacle for a corpse, usually carved or cut from stone) translates loosely as 'flesh eating stone', a reference to limestone coffins which were thought to decompose the flesh of corpses. 'Sarcophagy' and 'psychopathy' sound quite similar, especially down a phone line, and let's face it, it's just the sort of grim practice I might study for a novel. To clarify, though, I haven't yet studied sarcophagy, but as it happens I recently purchased a book on the subject by anthropologist Dr. Beth Conklin. I haven't pulled the wrapping off it yet. Perhaps I should take this as a sign to get reading.

There once was a gifted weaver...

Here is the first look at the book trailer for The Spider Goddess, the second Pandora English novel, due in bookstores from November 22nd, published by PanMacmillan.

What do you think?

Oh yes. I forgot to warn you. It has spiders in it. Lots of spiders.

'Like' Pandora English on Facebook to read the full first chapter and to get updates from Celia's haunted mansion, and click on the icons at the Pandora English Official Website to learn more about Pandora's world in the supernatural suburb of Spektor, New York.