Jane Rusbridge will be in conversation with writer and reviewer Isabel Costello when she returns to the Hampstead and Highgate Literary Festival this September. Authors at the 2011 festival included: Raymond Blanc, Esther Freud, Peter Snow, Edna O’Brien, Diana Athill, Martin Sixsmith, Nicholas Parsons, Andrew Morton, Peter Sissons, David Aaronovitch, Barbara Taylor Bradford and Daisy Waugh.

This year, Jane will be talking about her creative process and introduce the stories behind her mesmerising second novel,  Rook , one of 9 launch titles this year from exciting new imprint, Bloomsbury Circus .  Rook is a novel steeped in history and place, set in the ancient Sussex village of Bosham where Cnut is said to have proved even he could not turn back the tide.

Now established as an important addition to London’s literary calendar, the fourth Hampstead and Highgate Literary Festival will be taking place once again at Ivy House, former home of prima ballerina Anna Pavlova, from 9-11th September.

Bookings will open online on 1st July at www.hamhighlitfest.com

Jane Rusbridge is interviewed by K.J.Orr, shortlisted for the National Short Story Award in 2011.

Venue: University of Chichester     Details to be confirmed

Come along and join all the fun at the fete, where the Three Sussex Writers – Jane Rusbridge, Isabel Ashdown and Gabrielle Kimm -  will be setting up a stall with bunting and books. You can Throw a Wellie, bid on a Silent Auction, meet Mystic Meg or enjoy Mediterranean food cooked by Donna and Rami Kabbani at this traditional village fete held in the beautiful Downland village of Stoughton.

Community run, the fete has taken place in the gardens of Church Farm, Breakneck Lane for more than sixty years, to raise money for the upkeep of Stoughton’s ancient church, St Mary’s, which boasts Saxon herringbone brickwork and a chancel arch from the same period.  

If you’re a walker, Stoughton is a great place from which to explore Kingley Vale, and two of most beautiful areas of woodland in West Sussex, Wildhams Wood and Inholmes Wood, to the north of Stoughton. You can finish your day with a cream tea at Stoughton fete, as long as you get there before 4pm!

Jane, Isabel, and Gabrielle will sign and sell copies of their books, and donate a pound to the church fund for every book they sell. They’ll also be running a Lucky Book Dip. So come and say Hi, and have a chat with three local authors.

Read more about the Three Sussex Writers and their books here

stoughton west sussex – Google Maps

Jane Rusbridge will be speaking at a social networking seminar with PR expert Lucy Middleton, and novelist Annemarie Neary with Vicky Grut (chair) at a London Writing Workshop in October.

A new departure for London Writing Workshops, this half-day seminar led by PR expert Lucy Middleton is an opportunity for writers to look at the challenges and opportunities of the digital environment.

Writers are increasingly involved in promoting their work – whether they’re self-publishing, or working with a small or a mainstream publisher. The seminar will look at ways that traditional PR techniques can be reinvented, as well as exploring the online tools that allow writers to connect directly with their readers and build new audiences for their work.

Novelists Jane Rusbridge (The Devil’s Music, Bloomsbury 2010, and Rook, Bloomsbury Circus, summer 2012) and Annemarie Neary (A Parachute in the Lime Tree, the History Press, March 2012) will be on hand to talk about their experiences of promoting new books in 2012. (Click on the authors’ names to see their bios.) The seminar will be followed by drinks and networking for participants and speakers.

Lucy Middleton has been in PR, Marketing and Advertising for over 20 years, working with Blue Chip companies as well as small to medium-sized enterprises. She is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and has lectured in Marketing Theory at several academic institutions, including the MBA course at Cambridge University’s Judge Management Institute. She specializes in advising companies on their Social Networking Marketing Strategy as well as Strategic Branding Solutions and Crisis PR.

Cost: £46 includes a handout on Digital Marketing for Writers, tea/coffee break and a free drink at the end. Group limit: 30.

The seminar will be followed by networking/drinks.

Find out about more London Writing Workshops

Jane Rusbridge will be appearing at the Arundel Festival 2012 with Isabel Ashdown and Gabrielle Kimm.

The three authors are known as the ‘Three Sussex Writers’, and regularly appear together at festivals, libraries, schools, universities,charity events and book groups across Sussex. At Arundel Festvial, they will read from their books, chat about the writing process, and answer questions.  Come along and join the conversation!

At the end of the session, for anyone who wants to try their hand at writing, or spark up their creative energy, there’ll be a chance to participate in some quick-fire and fun writing exercises.

Details for this event to be confirmed

Find out more about the THREE SUSSEX WRITERS and their novels

here

This is the ‘uncorrected proof’ of Rook, sent out a month or so ago by the team at Bloomsbury. Now I’m walking a knife-edge – there’s the hope people will love Rook and maybe respond with a word or two, and then there’s the fear no one will. Book cover ‘blurb’ from a well-known author will give a huge boost to a beginner like me. But imagine Rook on the bedside table of an author whose work I’ve read and admired for years? No. Best not to. Pretend it’s not happening. As Claire King has recently blogged, you can only hope people will be kind.

So far, I have found they are.

Page edits and last minute typos are still to be done before Rook is published in August; much ‘correcting’ – major and minor editing work, countless redrafts of scenes and sentences – has already been done, way too much to recount in detail here.  

However, to follow on from Gerald Hornsby’s insightful post on editing a self-published novel , I’m going to outline the way the editing process proceeded for me, as an author published with Bloomsbury.

The beginning:

Late 2008: I’m a ‘myopic’ editor of my own work, changing a sentence as it emerges, fiddling endlessly with detail. As I wrote the first random scenes, I felt my way, word by word. In January 2009, I joined Kathy Page’s Workout for the Novel , an online course which gave me a kick-start, and more idea where the novel might be going. The course involved valuable input sessions as well as weekly online workshops. Feedback from Kathy and other writers raised questions and led to changes. And more editing.

Throughout 2009 there were monthly meetings, with an exchange of feedback with my long-term writing group of four, plus emails flying, in moments of crisis, to other writing friends, like Jackie Buxton. The novel progressed haphazardly. I’d imagined the final scene, but not how the characters would get there. Some of the characters were  bit ‘muddy’. In March 2010, I joined Vicky Grut’s Novelists’ Club , travelling up to London once a month for productive day-long workshops on various aspects of novel writing such as dialogue, plot and structure. With Vicky’s editorial help I worked on a chapter outline. Joined up a few dots. Finally, in August 2010, the very first draft of Rook was sent to my editor at Bloomsbury.

The middle:

I had no confidence in that first draft. It was all over the place. There’d been no  ‘perfect storm’ moment which Aminatta Forna so accurately describes. I’ve done plenty of line-by-line work, but there’s another aspect to editing a novel – a different skill – which involves being able to take an overview of the sprawling mass of words, to see how best to shape them. An experienced professional editor brings this invaluable skill into the mix. Having previously worked with Helen Garnons Williams on The Devil’s Music, I knew already how much creative energy can be sparked through the  insight gained from working with a talented editor.

That first wobbly, raw-egg draft of Rook was read by two editors at Bloomsbury, Helen and Erica Jarnes. The feedback began: ‘this has the makings of a wonderful novel and your descriptive prose is glorious….’ .  The praise. Then, that word: ‘But…’  – and there followed by 7 pages of notes which revealed Helen and Erica had seen straight through my chaos of stray plotlines to the story’s pulse. It’s such a relief to find that your editor ‘gets it’. Helen and Erica ‘got’ Rook before I did, or so it seemed at the time. After a week or two to mull things over, and with some suggestions of my own, I met Helen to bounce ideas around. Afterwards, throughout the autumn of 2010, I wrote with clearer vision and renewed energy. Some peripheral drama was cut; one central character was dumped. (I’d never liked him, which should have told me something.) This wasn’t tweaking, but a major rewrite, one which revealed to me the core of the emotional journey I wanted the reader to travel.

During the spring of 2011, plagued by insomnia, I wrestled with interwoven narratives, secrets and memories, three feisty women characters, warriors and battle scenes from 1066. I was, more often than not, at my desk by 4.30 a.m., prodded awake my ‘wild mind’, as Natalie Goldberg calls it. Finally, the narrative came together with the exhilarating synchronicity many writers speak of as essential to the creative process – it’s certainly part of the magic. I was buzzing with excitement when I sent off the second full draft, in June 2011.

Editorial feedback was positive. All that was needed in terms of structure was some adjustment to the penultimate chapter where fresh preoccupations of mine had crowded in at the last moment – actually the beginnings of novel 3 stirring in the compost of my mind. Out that came!

The final stages happen quite quickly:

October 2011: The draft of Rook was sent to one of Bloomsbury’s copy editors, Audrey, whose meticulous mind had helped sort out stray inaccuracies in TDM. Emails flurried to and fro between us for a few days, ranging over a variety of issues such as tying historical dates in with characters’ ages, whether to use ‘Cnut’ or ‘Canute’, and whether rooks eat carrion. In November 2011, a fat envelope arrived containing Audrey’s copyedit manuscript for my approval, with fortnight deadline for any changes to be marked on the pages or listed by email. Just before Christmas, page proofs landed on my doorstep, with another deadline the middle of January 2012. While I read these page edits, another editor at Bloomsbury was checking them too. Whoever it was found an error I’d never have noticed: I’d used ‘Robinson’s’ instead of ‘Robertson’s’ when talking about jam!

Fiction editors are important. They play a key creative role in the growth of a novel, or so I have found. At Bloomsbury, over a period of 18 months, Rook-in-progress passed through the hands of four different editors, all of whom helped shape the novel that will hit the shelves in August. Editing is an art.

The View From Here literary magazine has interviewed Helen Garnons Williams, fiction editorial director at Bloomsbury

Part one: Introduction

Part two: Insights into working with authors and Helen’s advice and top three tips for debut authors.

Part Three: Helen discusses the ever changing publishing industry, working at Bloomsbury, and hopes for the future.

Do come and join fellow Sussex Writers Gabrielle Kimm, Isabel Ashdown and I at a public event to celebrate the launch of a new Art Room at Augusta Court in Chichester. We will be talking about what inspires our writing, reading from our work and answering questions. We will also be signing copies of our books, for sale at the special event price of £5.

Details below. All welcome!

Thursday 10th May at 11.00 a.m.

My father-in-law grew up in Selsey, on the West Sussex coast, and lived in the same area all his life. He knew many interesting stories about local people. In one memory from his childhood, he told me of his parents and other adults discussing, with some disapproval, a local woman who had taken to swimming every day off the beach at Selsey, alone. In 1912 it simply wasn’t the  ‘done’ thing for a woman to swim unchaperoned. He recalled that his own feeling, as a boy overhearing the adults talk, was surprise at their lack of sympathy. It was perfectly clear to him that it would be essential for her to swim, every single day, because she had lost her husband at sea, on the Titanic.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this woman and my father-in-law’s intuitive interpretation of her actions, so I began to read about the sinking of the Titanic. My reaction to the devastating detail in contemporary newspaper reports, and the language used to describe the disaster, was so strong I knew I had to write about it myself.

Here is my story, inspired by a bereaved woman in Selsey – whoever she was – who swam everyday, alone.

Ship of Dreams

Note: ‘Ship of Dreams’ was first published in Riptide Journal 4, ed. Jane Feaver (2010)

‘Lucky 7’ is something of a displacement activity … but, hey, it’s also fun!  Trish Nicholson tagged me. She’s a writer who lives in New Zealand and blogs from a treehouse. I met Trish on twitter, where you can find her @TrishNicholson

The instructions for Lucky 7 are:

• · Go to page 7 or 77 in your current manuscript
• · Go to line 7
• · Post on your blog the next 7 lines, or sentences, as they are – no cheating
• · Tag 7 other authors to do the same

My 7 lines come from page 77 of Rook, currently in uncorrected proof form and out visiting other authors. It’s also being passed around various members of my family for the first time. ‘Uncorrected’ indicates, of course, that it’s still a work-in-progress – and it is. Only last week my OH found one or two ‘blips’ to add to my own list of page edits required before the novel is published later this summer, on August 2.

Rook is my second novel and is one of nine launch titles in Bloomsbury’s new literary imprint, Bloomsbury Circus. Set in the ancient Sussex village of Bosham  -  said to be the place where Cnut proved he could not turn back the tide -  Rook explores the mystery surrounding Harold II’s burial place, the hidden histories of the Bayeux Tapestry, and the connections forged through three women’s secret stories, past and present.

The 7 lines focus on the bird itself, named ‘Rook’ by Nora, who finds him in a ditch. Harry has just suggested that they should try to help the baby bird but in such a way that it does not become a pet. They must allow Rook ‘to be wild’.

‘Nora nods, although part of her resists the idea. Harry makes it sound as though it’s just a matter of giving permission. What if, after the plummet from  a high nest and the suffocating rush of air, Rook can’t be wild?  His beak flips open readily enough for food but so far he has not let out any sound louder than a wheeze or putter. Perhaps the baby bird fell from his nest and squawked or cried or peeped for his parents until the muscles of his parched tongue and the throb of his scarlet throat were strained beyond the ability to produce any more sound. A silent rook would not survive.’

The Next Seven:

The 7 writers I have chosen represent a range of genres, some published, some about to be published and others soon to be discovered! They are:

• Jackie Buxton                     @Jaxbees
• Voula Grand                       @VoulaGrand
• Isabel Ashdown                 @Isabel Ashdown
• Sanjida O’Connell              @SanjidaOConnell
• Isabel Costello                    @IsabelCostello
• Alison Wells                        @AlisonWells
• Susan Elliot Wright           @Sewelliot

Hope you enjoy reading their 7 lines from new works …

‘Lucky 7′ series and rook photo all by Natalie Miller @natflink

They say prejudice is born of ignorance, so thinking it was time to search out some information, I turned to Gerald Hornsby. I met Gerald at Frinton Litfest in 2010. He has been writing since he could hold a pencil, but his short stories and flash fiction were languishing on various hard drives until, excited by the new opportunities in self-publishing, he gathered them into two collections of dark fiction, and published them on Amazon and Smashwords. His debut full-length novel, entitled Buried Threat, will be published in summer 2012, and he has a series of crime stories in the pipeline.

Gerald’s Bleak Midwinter story collections one and two are available at Smashwords (for non-Kindles) or you can buy both in one print edition. Kindle editions are available on Amazon

Here’s what Gerald has to say about editing:

There’s no doubt that publishing has been changing over the past few years, and with the advent of cheaper electronic readers, the market for ebooks has increased dramatically. One of the most beneficial effects of this is that many more authors can now have their work published.

In one way, this is a very good thing. No longer do authors need to persuade a so-called ‘gatekeeper’ – a publishing editor – that their novel is worthy of the huge investment to make it available in print. We all know stories of famous authors being rejected – twelve publishing houses rejected J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Stephanie Meyer, author of the hugely successful Twilight Saga series, sent out fifteen query letters for her first book. Of those fifteen, she got nine straight rejections, five no responses, and one person that wanted to see her. So, in the new publishing paradigm, the book-consuming market is available to every author.

But there is a downside. The ebook market has become flooded with works from unknown writers, and the quality of some of those ebooks is questionable. Bad spelling and punctuation, loose formatting and poor design can be fixed – sometimes – automatically with software and online support. But what about bad writing? Poor storytelling? Characters that are gossamer-thin, plots that meander meaninglessly, pacing that lurches from turgid to express?

The traditional publishing house employs editors to work with the author, to develop their novel, iron out inconsistencies, and firm up on elements that might make the novel better. But what about the self-publisher? What are they to do? One route is to use friends, relatives and acquaintances. But readers with a social or familial link to the author are notoriously lenient. As an author, I meet people all the time who say things like “I’ve written a few things, and everyone I’ve shown it to really loves it.” It’s hard to find someone close to you who can remain objective. However, there is an option available to self- or independent (sometimes called “indie”) publishers – which is to use a third-party editing service.

Before we discuss options, any independent publisher should know that there are two stages of editing your novel. The first is a copy edit, sometimes called proofreading – the manuscript will be scanned for spelling, punctuation, grammar and obvious typographical errors. No matter how carefully you check, re-read, lay aside, pick up, re-check – something will get past you. The more you read the manuscript, the more you get ‘blinded’ by the words, you get to know them so well, and simple, obvious mistakes can slip through. I know. I’ve been embarrassed to see errors in my published work.

The second type of editing is the story edit. Items under the spotlight would be plot development, characterisation, continuity, pacing, and the like. For this, you will need someone who has experience of editing, and can understand what makes a well-paced novel.

Where to find an editor?

This is a difficult question. Many people and organisations offer editing, but who to choose?

One of the best ways is through personal recommendation. If you don’t know anyone in publishing, try joining an online forum or writing group. One of the busiest is the Absolute Write Water Cooler. Search for it online, or follow http://www.absolutewrite.com forums There is a huge amount of advice on there, on writing, editing and publishing for the independent author. Also, and specifically for Kindle, there is Kindleboards at http://www.kindleboards.com and specifically, the Writers’ Cafe. There you will find feedback from writers who have successfully self-published, and in some cases have sold many hundreds of thousands of their novels. Always be sure to check on an author’s recommendations – find their books online, and check the reviews, to see if the editing process was successful.

How much will it cost?

For proofreading, expect to pay between $0.001 (a tenth of a cent) and $0.0025 (a quarter of a cent) per word. This works out to between $100 and $250 (around £64 – £160) for a 100,000-word novel.

For editing, the price will be higher. Expect to pay between $0.003 (three-tenths of a cent) and $0.005 (half a cent) per word. This works out to between $300 and $500 (around £200 – £320) for a 100,000-word novel.

These prices will be flexible, and many editors, if they don’t know you, will request a chapter or a thousand words, so they can judge how much work will be involved.

Incidentally, the self-publishing industry is more advanced, chronologically, in the US than it is in the UK, and there are a wider variety of publishing services available there, which is why the prices quoted above are in US dollars.

Warning

Publishing is changing, and there has been a huge upsurge in new writers becoming published. Unfortunately, this upsurge has brought an increase in companies and individuals looking to prey on new authors, impatient to see their work in e-print. Make sure that you retain control of your work, and only pay for the service you actually need. There are a number of companies who will offer to proofread, edit and publish your work, including marketing, for a fee. These fees can extend into thousands of dollars, for a service which you possible do not need, and may not benefit in increased visibility and ebook sales. Vanity publishing is alive and well, albeit in a slightly different form. Preditors and Editors are invaluable for checking companies, as is Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware

Finally

The most important piece of advice is: don’t rush the editing process. As an author, you will have probably spent hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of hours creating your novel. Doesn’t it deserve the best chance to succeed?

Thank you, Gerald, for sharing your ‘inside information’. I’d never have thought of looking to the US for selfpublishing services. And I’m glad you added the words of warning!

So, is this any different to editing with a traditional publisher? Take a look at Ed Hogan’s post about working on The Hunger Trace (Simon and Schuster) with editor Francesca Main over on bookhugger’s blog and see what you think.

Gerald Hornsby’s Bleak Midwinter story collections one and two are available at Smashwords (for non-Kindles) or you can buy both in one print edition. Kindle editions are available on Amazon