FROM NOW ON, PLEASE VISIT MY WEBSITE AT WWW.TRACYBUCHANAN.CO.UK FOR MY LATEST BLOG POSTS. FOR GERMAN VISITORS, CHECK OUT WWW.TRACYBUCHANAN.DE

I’m very excited to finally confirm my first ever novel will be published in Germany by Piper Verlag in 2011! Isn’t the cover just freakin’ fabulous?

And to coincide with this, I’ve launched a brand new website at www.tracybuchanan.co.uk (German version of the home page at www.tracybuchanan.de) and all blog posts will now transfer to the blog section on both sites so please bookmark for future updates. You can also read all about STERNENWANDLER in my new blog including English extracts under the Downloads section.

I’m absolutely delighted to be working with the fantastic team at Piper Verlag and can’t wait to see it in print next spring! It was exciting enough to see it on Amazon, so can’t imagine how it’s going to feel to see it right in front of my eyes! I’m even learning German. I particularly like the word ‘flughafen’ which means airport. I have no idea why, it just sounds so pretty and I keep shouting it out at the top of my lungs!

So, enjoy and keep your eyes peeled for more material on my new website and more blog posts there too…

It’s getting a fantastic response and I’ve really enjoyed working on it. It also got me thinking about connections and literary sets. I wrote about how important writer buddies are and it really is the case. I think people who write have this incredibly special connection, and by getting together, you kind of bounce creatively off each other and produce even better writing as a result.

One of my writer buddies is convinced we’re one day gonna be known as the MK Writing Crew… ha ha, who knows? Forget the Bloomsbury Set with all their scandals and dramas. You’ll find the MKWC down the local pub, supping on cider and downing huge ice cream sundaes while discussing who’s hotter: Edward or Jacob…

Anyway, to celebrate connections, I wanna give a shout out to my buddies and their blogs:

Knives: Hippy Punk Diaries

Bertie: Red Pen of Doom

Slinger: Robyn’s Nest

I also follow some wonderful writers on Twitter who I see as my extended writer buddy set.

So, enjoy the interactive and have a think about your connections with the writers around you.

Okay, so that’s obvious. ‘Girl writes Gothic book and draws on Gothic influences to inspire her. Der, of course!’. But the reason I mention it is that I read a blog post by one of my favourite writers, Maggie Stiefvater recently where she talked about a novel’s ‘core’. Check it out here. She said the core of her amaze-balls book Shiver was ‘the mood. It was to be a slow, slow build to a bittersweet end, no matter what else disappeared. I’d cut the werewolves before I cut that mood and pace.’

And that’s how I feel about the novel I’m working on now. It’s about the Gothic mood. And with every sentence I write, I’m always looking to ensure the essence of Gothic shimmers right through it.

Of course, Gothic can mean many things to many people. I guess I’m drawing on the old school stuff – Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. And yet my book won’t really be anything like those books apart from in mood. That impending sense of doom. Torment and wailings. darkness and rotting. Tortured souls and that feeling of being a caged animal. Terrible secrets and desperate love.

To really get my head in the right place, this is what I’ve been doing:

Listening

I love listening to music while writing. Some people can’t but I have to. So I always create a playlist which I’ll listen to while writing, while biking to work, while getting ready, while… yeah, you get the drift. I have a great playlist (which includes the Killers tune I posted in my original post about going  gothic). It includes a bit of Black by Tokio Hotel, a pinch of Breathe Into me by Red, a splash of My Love by Sia, and a dash of Slow Life by Grizzly Bear as well as the usual Evanescence and Within Temptation tunes. I know some of these aren’t traditionally ‘Gothic’ tunes but who cares, it gets me in the mood. One of the songs I listen to a LOT while writing this book is Fever Ray’s wonderful If I Had a Heart, check out the amazing video below… I love the line ‘dangling feet from window frame / Will I ever ever reach the floooooooor?’. Just gives me a little shiver as I imagine a little girl in a white dress sitting with her feet dangling over a window…

Reading

I’ve also been reading some YA books that are considered ‘Gothic – ish’. This includes Immortal by Gillian Shields. It certainly succeeds in getting across that old school Gothic vibe delivered in the likes of Wuthering Heights but it really didn’t do much for me, but that’s just my personal opinion. The Summoning by Kelly Armstrong was recommended too, which I reallllly enjoyed, great ‘voice’ and good fun but it didn’t feel very Gothic. Next on the list is The Splendour Falls by Rosemary Clement-Moore which I’m really looking forward to. I’m then going to re-visit one of my favourite authors, Angela Carter, queen of post-modern Gothic, and read her amazing and often ignored Heroes and Villains again, considered a Gothic fantasy (and very dystopian too). The male character, Jewel, oozes the kind of stuff I’m looking for in my main male character. Got any other recommendations?

Watching

TV-wise, I’m actually really enjoying The Vampire Diaries and find the setting – the old school town and forest – really inspiring.  I found The Crow quite inspiring too (if a little cheesy) and the latest Batman films are really quite Gothic. But what else? I need recommendations friends!

So… this is all how I keep to the ‘core’ of my book and I really hope that shows in the final product.

How do you keep to the core of your book?

x

It’s not often I talk about the day job, or indeed, anything other then writing! But I thought I’d show you something I’ve been working on lately while also telling you something you might not know about me: I’m a bit of a sports fan! Especially football so yep, am enjoying all the World Cup stuff at the moment.

It’s funny ‘cos my mum is a complete football nut whereas my dad and bro aren’t. So while my dad would be gardening or doing the DIY in our house on Saturdays, my mum’d be watching the footie.

Anyway, I helped come up with the idea of and commissioned a strategic shoot out for The Open University which launched last week. It’s basically a fun game that uses academic research into what it takes to score a penalty. Check it out by clicking here.

So as you can see, I’m pretty lucky really, being able to work on things I have a passion for (my next project is a literature interactive!). Before this, I spent years working as an editor and journalist but over the past few months, I’ve been learning the ropes in web production for the OU and BBC and it’s good fun… and also means I get a bit of a break from writing during the day so I can focus on it in the evenings and weekends without losing my mind.

I also get the chance to pick up a lot of interesting research for inspiration here at the OU, and have access to some proper boffins to help me with any questions about any of my books.

How does your work help your novel-writing?

My friend and I were talking about how life can sometimes turn into a monotony of nine to fives and utility bills. And she wrote this really beautiful poem that totally struck a chord with me. So am sharing with you all (with her permission).

It lives

What is there to do in this world that is worth doing?
Reconnecting to the voice of my soul I hear echoes of broken, paint-peeled rooms with nubbed windows casting light from the dull sky.
I want to sit there and be something I’ve forgotten in the nine to five anti-depressant.
Reading something written with soul and understanding of what lays beneath the clinical, clean world of Radio One in the morning, I remember it.
The spark.
That thing that drove me from my bed day after day in my old room overlooking the sea.
Searching for something to turn into words.
The coldness and yet the warmth of reality, with the sheen and mundanity washed away. It stares me in the face.
This is must be my future, though it seems passed,
Scrunched up with those final poems and chucked into the darkness.
It’s a wonder it still exists, this tiny soul, beating silently beneath the anxiety and mania that rules a life.
The routine and boredom and career development.
It sits, waiting for me to come home.
To listen and take off to find my paint-peeled nubbed window by the sea.
And to look inside and live with joy.

By Angela Cranfield

It wasn’t until I let my friends read my novels that I realised I used certain words allllll the time. For example, ‘crazy’ was a real favourite of mine. ‘My heart beat like crazy’, I used to write. ‘It was crazy how he ignored me’… you get the drift. There’s nothing wrong with crazy, I just used it too many crazy times!

These kinds of words are known as ‘crutch’ words – words we lean on; that we rely on. Recently, I came across the most brilliant online tool for discovering your crutch words. It’s called Wordle and you can literally paste your ENTIRE – yes ENTIRE – novel into it to find out which words you use the most. I did this for SHIMMER and it churned this out:

What does this say about SHIMMER? That Cam plays a huge role in it, as do Ashton, Tori, Laura and someone’s dad. But it also says a lot about my writing style. There’s a bunch of ‘eyes’, ‘looked’ and ‘face’ which doesn’t surprise me, I have a tendency to write ‘she looked at him’ and ‘her eyes flickered’. ‘Turned’, ‘back’, ‘towards’ and ‘away’ also crop up a lot which means I like writing actions such as ‘she turned to him’, ‘he turned away’ and ‘she walked towards him’. I also put in the book I just wrote, and this was the result:

And oh look, the same old crutch words come up: ‘looked’, and ‘eyes’, ‘turned’ and ‘away’! I’m not going to stop using these words all together but I am going to be more aware of them and not rely on them so much.

I even did it for this blog, see below:

Try it out yourself by going to www.wordle.net/create and let me know what your crutch words are!

Let me start with a disclaimer. I’m actually cool with self-publishing. It’s an admirable endeavour when other routes to publication haven’t worked. The issue I have is with people who advise aspiring fiction writers to start down the self-publishing route and bypass agents and / or traditional publishers. I feel this is doing these aspiring writers a great disservice. Self-publishing should be what happens after you’ve tried the traditional route. Why? Remember that old saying by W. Clement Stone? “Aim for the moon. If you miss, you may hit a star.” Well, starting with self-publishing when you’re a fiction writer (and sometimes, a non-fiction writer) is like aiming for a tree branch. It rarely gets you anywhere near the moon and the stars, and in my view, if you love writing, why the hell not give the moon and the stars a go?

Let’s start by figuring out what the moon and the stars are for writers. For some, it’s being able to tell their story to as many people as possible. For others, it’s the pure joy of putting pen to paper. Then there’s being able to tell people you’re a published author or simply making millions, like JK Rowling For many, it’s all four.

Let’s start with getting your story out there. So you self-publish your book but then what? Just because you’ve built it, they won’t come. High street bookstores are unlikely to pick it up, and Amazon will take it for a few bucks but won’t highlight it unless it miraculously becomes a best seller. Most good journalists won’t review it (trust me, journalists don’t take self-published books seriously) and unless you’re a marketing or PR guru, it’ll be very difficult to promote it well. But say you do manage to bring attention to it.

The next hurdle is trust. Sadly, self-published books have a bit of a grim rep. Whether it’s because people associate them with their Aunt Bettie’s History of Littlehampton book with its funny photoshopped front cover, or because they’ve read a self-pubbed book chock-a-block full of mistakes (which, sadly, most self-pubbed books have due to the lack of a decent editor and proof-reader), there’s not a great deal of respect for self-published books despite there being some decent ones out there.

Why? The fact is, anyone with a few bucks can self-publish. Anyone. But not anyone can get through the publishing gatekeepers. So Joe and Joanne Public would rather part with their money for a book that a traditional publisher has liked enough to publish, not the book your old boss or good friend has liked enough to provide a blurb for. This is why self-published books on average sell dozens (if you’re lucky hundreds) whereas traditional publishers tend to sell in the thousands.

Now if you’re one of those writers who doesn’t care about book sales and it’s all about the love of writing, then self-publishing is worth a shot. But consider this: you’ve spent a year or so writing your book, maybe more, maybe less. So why not try to get paid for your hard work, rather then pay, as you would with self-publishing. Just give it a try, you know? For a start, most reputable traditional publishers will pay an advance (usually in the thousands if through a larger publisher). Then you’ll get royalties for every book you sell (once you make back your advance). Sure, you’re not getting the whole sehbang in your pocket as you would with self-published sales but your self-published sales will strain to reach the hundred mark whereas a traditionally-published book can reach into the thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, hell millions (plus you have an advance, remember). Even Kevin Weiss, CEO of a huge self-publishing company in the US (Author Solutions), admits 80 per cent of their authors fail to break even whereas traditionally published authors always do as they never had to fork out in the first place.

Maybe you’re one of those deep souls who really doesn’t care about money. Unless you’re lucky enough not to have to work, if you love writing, surely you want to write for a living? If money allows you to do that, suddenly money is pretty cool huh? Okay, the chances of making a living from writing novels is minimal but you sure have a better shot of it via traditional publishing then self-publishing. So why not aim for the stars?

And then there’s being able to tell people you’re a published author. Most savvy people will not accept you are one if you’ve paid to have your book published because, as I’ve said before, anyone anyone anyone can self-publish.

As for the idea that your amazingly successful self-pubbed book will garner the attention of traditional publishers, this does happen but not often. Your chances of getting an agent and then publisher are higher.

So what I’m saying is, give traditional publishing a chance first. Don’t let people tell you traditional publishing is a pipe dream; that getting an agent is impossible; that self-publishing is the first and best option. It isn’t. The fact is, if you write a damn good book, someone will take notice and maybe you’ll get published and maybe you’ll make money. I never thought it was possible a year ago and now here I am, making money, not dishing out money.

I’m sure many people will disagree with me on this and am happy to read people’s views. But I want to stress: my issue isn’t with self-publishing, it’s with people who advise you to self-publish before trying the traditional route, and are therefore putting you out of pocket.

So to get you in the gothic groove, check out this amazzzzzzing video from The Horrors!

I know it’s been a while but been choking under an Icelandic dust cloud while waist-deep in my latest work in progress. It’s a strange one because it started out YA but on second read, it’s clearly MG but will see what my agent thinks.

In other news, attended my second London Book Fair ‘How to get published’ masterclass to meet one of my favourite writers, Meg Rosoff, and get some sound advice off the likes of agent Carole Blake whose Twitter stream is fab fab fab. I managed to grab Meg Rosoff after the talk (Carole was too busy being accosted by aspiring writers wanting to pitch her books about the history of Portsmouth) and she’s as friendly, feisty and fabulous as I hoped. And listen up! She had one piece of amazing advice for aspiring writers out there…

Just write a f?*&ing good book!

And you know what? That’s it, really. That’s the key. No matter how much pondering and research you do on ‘how to get published’, the simple fact is… it means jack if you don’t write a good book.

What made me laugh is the ‘positive psychologist’ a few seats from me who a) grunted when she heard Meg’s advice then b) asked why the panel was being so negative and couldn’t they do a positive ‘rap’ on the industry and c) stormed out when everyone looked at her in a bemused way. God, if she hasn’t started querying yet, God help her! This business is HARD work, it’s not all shiny unicorns with rainbows streaming from their behinds and pixies. It’s exhausting, demoralising, difficult… but when it all comes together, it’s worth it!

On the subject of advice, I read a great article recently from The Guardian, offering top writers’ top 10 tips for writing. And also check out Meg Rosoff’s top tips too (as well as the one above )

My top 10 tips? It’s Saturday night and there’s books to be read (Meg Rosoff’s The Bride’s Farewell) and films to be watched (New Moon, told hubby it’s a great action film, didn’t bother mentioning the shirtless werewolves and smoochy smooching, ha ha!), so how about I offer my top tip in ten words:

Just write a f?*&ing good book while eating yummy chocolate.

Pic credit

When writing scenes that require a lot of nail-biting action and tension, there’s always the risk of going ‘too Scooby Doo’.

What the hell are you going on about? you might ask.

I first heard this phrase from my agent after she read one scene of mine (now scrapped, thank the Lord). It involved a lot of ‘skidding’ across the floor, ‘grabbing’ at things, ‘eyes wide with alarm’… you get the drift. There was also a cheesy and entirely convenient ‘reveal’. Like, ‘OMG, she did it?!’ The fact I’d had an epic late night the night before writing it might have had something to do with it!

Now when I write, I’m super aware of this. Especially now, as I write a crucial scene for Book 3 (which we’ll call MCC – it’s the one that’s gonna help me hit the big time ) I’m hyper aware of this.

So… do you find yourselves writing Scooby Doo stuff? Any examples of Scooby Doo scenes in books, even film, that spring to mind?