Go get a critique group, I couldn't live without mine!

Tobey Forney, Mimi Vance, Chris Cander, me, Penny Linsenmayer and Andrea White 

I am so lucky to be part of a writers' critique group with five fantastic and inspiring women writers. 

My great author friend, Andrea White, suggested a couple of years ago that I might like to meet another friend of hers, Chris Cander. "Chris has one book out already and another heading towards publication," said Andrea, "and I know you'll get on." .

Talk about an understatement! We could have talked for hours, and by the time we met for the second time we were up to five writers, with a sixth added soon after. And although at first we did swap manuscripts around and comment on each other's work, it became apparent that we are all so swamped with our own work, as well as family life etc, that this wasn't really working for us all.  So we decided instead to meet for lunch every couple of months to share our stories, our ideas, our hopes and our panics. I now wonder how I ever wrote anything without them.

When we meet, we go round the table to catch up on what everyone is working on - writing, researching, selling or promoting.  It is wonderful to have friends who are proud to be your cheerleading team, who love to celebrate the triumphs and talk through the disappointments. We build each other up  so we will be better able withstand the next stomach-lurching loop of the roller-coaster career we have chosen for ourselves, and we cheer the loudest when one of us succeeds. We all write such different things, but we all share the joy of telling stories and reaching new people. 

Over the next few months, I would love to introduce you to my critique group friends one by one, but today I wanted simply to share a photo, taken at our lunch today, showing six women writers, some published, some almost-but-not-quite-published, looking happy, relaxed and, if you look deep in their eyes, inspired by each other.

Andrea White, Chris Cander, Tobey Forney, Penny Linsenmayer and Mimi Vance - thank you, thank you, thank you.

And to you, dear reader, if you also like to write (even if you don't yet have the bottle to call yourself a writer - yes, we've all been there), go find yourself a critique group (or one friend who has a friend, who has a friend, etc., so you can form your own group), and even if you never critique each other's work, it's a great excuse for some lunch and some laughs.

Smelling the seaweed on Google Earth

The RSPB reserve at Aberlady Bay

In case you didn't know it already, Google Earth is a fabulous thing.

What an amazing gift Google has given to writers everywhere. We can cruise down the Champs Elysées, The Strand or Broadway. We can study doorways of burger joints and pizza parlors in Melbourne or Naples, look at statues on courthouses in Buenos Aires, posters on theaters in Rome and read neon signs in shopping malls in Flagstaff AZ if we want to. We can check the color of the central bulb-roof on the Kremlin, check the height of the royal balcony on the front of Buckingham Palace and even (I’ve just been astonished to discover) find out how many steps, slopes and passages you have to negotiate to walk the Great Wall of China.

Cromarty Harbor

My Google wanderings have been rather smaller in scale though. Over the last few years, I have spent hours wandering around two small Scottish seaside towns – Cromarty, up in the north on the Black Isle, and Aberlady in East Lothian, near Edinburgh – to get vital information about life in those towns for the two novels I have been writing. In the past, writers could only pore over maps to see how far their character’s house was from the police station or the school in a distant town. I had the indulgence of being able to do that walk myself, all while sitting in a café in Houston, Texas.

When I began to write my first novel, With Cowries at her Throat, I had never been to Cromarty. I had driven up the A9 through Inverness en route to the north coast, but had never taken the right turn just past the Kessock Bridge which would have taken me across the Black Isle. I had visited Aberlady a few times as a child as it was much closer to home, but once I decided to set my second novel there, I realized I could remember very little of the village. Hence the hours I spent wandering (or is it scrolling) around the villages, stopped by Google Earth only when I wanted to trespass onto private land.

So it was a strange experience a week or so ago, when I was back in Scotland on a family vacation, to drive through Aberlady for the first time in perhaps thirty years and feel like I had been there only last month. The streets were so familiar that it was almost like I was in my own book. I knew where the church was, the school, the grocery store and the hotel. I could point out to my kids the wide green where I had set my VE Day picnic, and which of the white-washed cottages on Sea Wynd belonged to Mrs Murray, the teacher.

The same had happened to me when we visited Cromarty a couple of years ago. I knew the town so well that I could walk from the harbor straight to Fergus’s house, and when we got there, I really had to control myself not to ring the doorbell so I could say hello to him and his Grandma. Gladly, sense prevailed and we walked away. I doubt the people living in that particularly beautiful house would have taken kindly to me knocking.

The Hundred Steps in Cromarty

However, there was one huge difference between my virtual Cromarty and Aberlady wanderings and my real ones, and that was the sensory overload I got from being in the real place.  My virtual towns looked just like they do in real life, but all I could smell was coffee and cheese paninis, and feel a chill from an overactive air-conditioning system. The real Cromarty smelled of fishing boats, seaweed and fresh baking bread . And as I walked the Hundred Steps up the South Sutor, the scents changed to those of the wild garlic, the rich loam of decaying logs and of the dank moisture trapped under bowing branches.

In the real Aberlady, I could feel the pale warmth of the early sun on my face, all the while fighting to keep my chilled fingers moving so I could adjust the settings on my camera and binoculars (and yes, it was that cold in mid-July). By the time we had walked through the churchyard, the Sea Green, the RSPB bird reserve and over the golf courses at Craigielaw and Kilspindie (which sit on the piece of land I have purloined for Jock Anderson’s farm), the movement in the air had grown from a breeze to a positive bluster, making me pull my hair out of my eyes and back into a ponytail in order to see anything at all, not something I have had to do sitting in Barnes & Noble café very often.

The grass around the golf courses was luscious and soft under my feet, but Coffin Lane was stony and narrow. I also learned that when you walk, as my characters Lorna and Iris do, at low tide alongside the Peffer Burn as it threads its shimmering way across Aberlady Bay and out into the Firth of Forth, you are not walking on sandy gravel with pebbles strewn around, but on sucking mud flats, dotted with worm casts and shells. Good to know. Better go and change that bit right now.

The Peffer Burn early one morning

As we walked, I could suddenly taste the salt on the air in a way that I never could in my virtual Aberlady, though I must say, the millionaire’s shortbread and tablet from the Gosford Bothy Farm Shop tasted every bit as sweet and delicious as my drooling mouth told me it would be when I saw the shop’s sign as I cruised down Google's version of the A198 out of Aberlady.

So while I cannot recommend Google Earth enough to you other writers who need to research fine details of distant places for their books, I would also remind you that discovering a place by sight is only part of your research. Discovering it by smell, touch, taste and sound is a whole different matter entirely.

Want to read Margaret Atwood’s new book? You’ll have to wait… for 100 years

If you want to read Margaret Atwood’s latest piece of writing, Scribbler Moon, you will have to wait a while, say, for about ninety nine years.

Artist Katie Paterson accepts the first Future Library

manuscript from Margaret Atwood

Photo (c) Kristin Von Hirsch 2016

Atwood is the first contributing author to the Future Library project, for which Scottish artist Katie Paterson and The City of Oslo have planted a thousand trees in a forest just outside the city. As I said in my blog post last October when the project was launched, the trees will be looked after for one hundred years, until 2114.  In each of those hundred years, one author will be commissioned to write a manuscript of some sort and that piece of writing will be placed, unpublished, in a secure and specially designed room in the new public library being built in Oslo. They will all remain unread until the collection of one hundred manuscripts is complete. Then in 2114, the trees will be cut down and the wood will be used to supply paper for a special anthology of books in which 100 years of writing will be published.

The Canadian author delivered her manuscript to Katie Paterson this week, deep in the heart of the Future Library itself, in the Nordmarka forest just outside the Oslo, but it remains a secret as to whether it is a poem, short story, novel or memoir. No one else will know until 2114.

"There’s something magical about it," Atwood said as she handed over her work. "It’s like Sleeping Beauty. The texts are going to slumber for 100 years and then they’ll wake up, come to life again. It’s a fairytale length of time. She slept for 100 years.

"I am sending a manuscript into time. Will any human beings be waiting there to receive it? Will there be a ‘Norway’? Will there be a ‘forest’? Will there be a ‘library’? How strange it is to think of my own voice – silent by then for a long time – suddenly being awakened, after 100 years."

David Mitchell

The next contributor to Future Library will be David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks. 

He said, "Imagine if the Future Library had been conceived in 1914 and 100 authors from all over the world had written 100 volumes between then and today, unseen until now. What a human highway through time to be a part of. Contributing and belonging to a narrative arc longer than your own lifespan is good for your soul."

Katie Paterson created the image below to symbolize the Future Library. A tree trunk with a tiny blue "2014" at its center, 100 growth rings expand until, at the top right outside edge, there is another tiny blue date, 2114.

Katie Paterson's Future Library icon

As the hundred years pass, future contributors will be announced year by year. Some will be familiar to us now, though it is startling to realize that many will not even have been born yet.

For more information, visit Future Library here.

I've joined the Inprint blogging team with a celebration of young writers

One of Houston's most important literary resources is Inprint, the fabulous literary non-profit organization that supports and engages Houston's readers and writers. I am delighted to have just joined the team contributing to the Inprint blog - An Open Book. 

My first contribution was posted today and is a celebration of the first graduating class of Creative Writers at the High School for the Visual and Performing Arts and you can read my article on An Open Book.

The HSPVA Creative Writing Class of 2015

The Writer’s Voice – Never Met, Never Parted

I am thrilled to have won a place in The Writer’s Voice. Thanks to Brenda Drake, Mónica Bustamante Wagner, Elizabeth Briggs, and Krista Van Dolzer for hosting the competition and for giving so many of us the chance to take another step towards literary representation and publication.

My Query

In the spring of 1945, a severely burned German prisoner-of-war is delivered to a Scottish farm to work. Lorna, the farmer’s teenage daughter, soon discovers that in wartime, your family and your allies might not actually be your friends, and your enemy might turn out to be the love of your life. Lorna’s friendship with Paul, and their developing love for each other, is challenged by Lorna’s own prejudices and by the intolerance of her soldier brother and her friends in the village. Ultimately, the events which bring peace to Europe will tear Lorna and Paul apart.

Never Met, Never Parted is a YA Historical novel of 107,000 words. The first book in a pair, it ends as Paul is taken away with the other POWs from Lorna’s village. The second book will follow Lorna across war-ravaged Europe as she tries to find him again.

I am a Scottish writer now living in Houston, Texas. I am an active member of SCBWI, and in 2014 won the SCBWI Joan Lowery Nixon Award for this story. As my prize, I have had the honor of a year's mentoring from Newbery Winner, Kathi Appelt. I am the mother of three teenage readers and writers.

Never Met, Never Parted - First 250 words

Lorna was ankle-deep in cow-shit and milk when she first saw the boy with the steel-gray eyes and only half a face.

Only dimly aware of the rumble of a truck lurching up the lane, Lorna tried to push Caddy and Canny away from the reeking, steaming mess with the broom. The dogs, however, dodged around her and continued to lick up the milk from where it had puddled in the deep crevices between the cobbles, a rare treat for them. Like the dogs, Lorna kept her head down. Her father was raging at Nellie, which made a nice change since it meant that, for once, Jock Anderson’s ire wasn’t directed at Lorna.

“What in the Devil’s name did you think you were doing, you glaikit girl? Can you not even carry a bucket without dropping the damn thing?”

The great farmer’s bulk cast a threatening shadow over Nellie who looked so petite, even in her Land Army uniform of baggy fawn breeches and thick green sweater. Lorna felt a little guilty about not sticking up for her, but Lorna knew Nellie was made of stronger stuff, so she carried on sweeping.

“But Mr. Anderson,” Nellie began, “it was an accident, I—”

“If you’d been concentrating on the matter in hand, lassie, you wouldn’t have all these accidents. Particularly when the matter in your hand is a big bucket of my cows’ milk. This is not an accident, let me tell you, it’s a tragic waste.”

Happiness for Beginners - and having tea and cake with the author is a good start

Katherine Center
Photo credit: Karen Walrond

 What more could a writer and book-lover like me ask for on a sunny Saturday afternoon but the chance to spend a couple of hours sitting at a table covered in sandwiches, cakes and tea, listening to an author tell us about her new book? Not much more, I can tell you.

I was delighted to be included this weekend in what, I suppose, might have once been called a literary salon. Houston author, Katherine Center, gave a group of book-loving women the chance to hear about her new book, Happiness for Beginners, and about her approach to her work

She told us about how she had written her first novel when she was in 6^th grade – a blockbuster about how all the members of Duran Duran had fallen in love with her when their car had suffered a flat tire right outside her home. Though it occurred to me that some of the younger women at the table might never even have heard of Duran Duran, there were certainly several more like me who nodded vigorously, no doubt having shared similar fantasies themselves round about 1983 or ’84.

Katherine also admitted to becoming a closet Romance novel fan in recent years, and she talked about the profound effect that had on her own writing in general and on her approach to Happiness is for Beginners in particular. 

“I like the feeling of being happy when I read a book,” she told us, “and that is something I got from reading Romance novels. I started thinking about it with regard to my own writing. Though I don’t write actual “Romance” novels, I do always have a nice juicy, highly delicious love story in anything I write, because frankly I like that stuff. I’m interested that magical connection than can happen between people, because there’s something very special about those moments, so I started trying to harness that goodness in my own books.”

“I realized that in a lot of the books that I’ve read in my life, the thing that has pulled me through the book is worry. Writing teachers will actually tell you to do that, to make your character worry or make your readers worry about the character. But when I became a mom, I discovered that I don’t like to worry. I do a ton of worrying now that I have kids, living with that constant churning in my stomach, and I don’t like it.  What I like about those Romance novels is that what pulls you through them is not worry, but a delicious sense of anticipation, and the knowledge that you are moving towards something good. Even if the hero and heroine have been thrown into a dungeon by pirates, you know it’s going to be okay in the end. Bad things might happen, but you do have this overwhelming feeling that you are moving towards something good.  Though I suppose it’s the bad stuff that gives the good stuff its meaning.”

But how did this epiphany made a difference to Katherine’s approach to her new novel?

“Happiness for Beginners is the first book I have created as a writer since having that realization as a reader. Writing a story is really something you do to a reader. You are making them have feelings so that they invest in your characters, and you lead them through a simulated experience. You are in charge of what you want your readers to feel. I want my readers to feel hope and happiness, and perhaps get a little misty-eyed, but I want them to come out of it feeling grateful and inspired.”

“I try to give people hope, to make them happy, and to make them laugh. And perhaps I can offer them a way to look at the worst situations and see the best way through them.  When I was reading as a kid, it was all about trying to have something to look forward to, and that’s what I’m now trying to give to the world now. If I’m doing it right, I am putting out the kind of books that a reader just can’t stop reading once they’ve started, but also ones that will offer them a new perspective on their own life too.”

Katherine Center’s new novel, Happiness for Beginners, is published by St. Martin’s Press and is her fifth book. Her previous novels are The Bright Side of Disaster, Get Lucky, Everyone is Beautiful and her 2013 novel, The Lost Husband, which is recently been optioned by a movie production company.

For more information about Katherine and all her novels, please visit her website at www.katherinecenter.com

Inspiring Houston Women - Dorothy Gibbons of The Rose

I am delighted to have posted another interview on my other blog, Inspiring Houston Women.

Dorothy Gibbons is co-founder of The Rose, a non-profit that provides high quality breast healthcare to women regardless of their ability to pay.  

“For every three insured women who come through our doors for a mammogram we can take care of one uninsured woman. We could do more free screenings, if one diagnostic exam was all that was needed, but by the time they come to us, many of these uninsured women are also certain to need ultrasound and biopsy too. I always tell my staff that until we don't see women with late stage cancer anymore, our job isn't done.”

To read my interview with Dorothy, visit the Inspiring Houston Women blog