See - It Can Happen!

If there's a lesson to all this, it's that there are as many paths to publication as there are published writers. Everyone who has managed to reach the summit all writers aspire to can tell a different story of how they made the ascent. For me, it started with the encouragement of a friend when I was ready to give up, and ended with a chance encounter on a crime fiction website. And that's the final lesson for anyone who writes: don't give up. Life can turn on a pinhead, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, but you never know when that twist is coming.

After all the depressing publishing news of the last few weeks, here's a story to warm the cockles of your heart and provide the wannabes among you with the inspiration necessary to keep going.

Stuart Neville, a writer from Northern Ireland, describes on his website how he got discovered by a new York literary agent, and signed up for a major book deal. [via Reading Copy].

His first novel, The Twelve, a crime thriller set in Belfast, will be published in the UK and the USA and translated into Japanese, French and Spanish. It has won praise from best-selling Irish author, John Connolly who calls it :

... not only one of the finest thriller debuts of the last ten years, but also one of the best Irish novels, in any genre, of recent times.

Let's wish the author all the best.

Rumblings of the Pyschic Bowel and Other Writerly Ruminations

Some rather telling quotes from authors who have been featured in the book pages this week:

To look Asian but to speak with a British accent completely threw people. I liked that; it felt as if I was just under the radar. You couldn't place me through accent or class or ethnic things.

Peter Ho Davies on living between cultures in an interview with Liz Hoggard in today's Observer. His mother is Malaysian Chinese, his father Welsh, and he grew up in Coventry in the British Midlands. His excellent debut collection of short fiction The Ugliest House in the World won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize and the Macmillan Silver Pen award, and two of the stories were set in Malaysia. (Though Thor wasn't impressed with his factual accuracy, remember?) Now his long-awaited first novel The Welsh Girl is out.

What do I think about linking the Virginia Tech killer to violent fiction? Actually, my reaction might surprise you. You think I'm going to instantly lay down a distinction between real-life psychopaths and those of us who write about them for a living?... But I do actually think there's something rather strange regarding those (like me) who write about such things - or, for that matter, those who want to read about them. After all, to write repeatedly about people dying horrifically is an odd way to make a living... but then I'm in a queasy collusion with my readers. So I'm prepared to spread the blame about a little.

Yes, you guys must take some of the blame for Dublin born author John Connolly's warped imagination. Connolly's new novel The Unquiet, is in the bookshops now. Read the whole interview in the Independent.

It seems to me that any kind of creativity, whether it be writing a novel or inventing something, is a slow accretion of knowledge, working through mistakes, failures, of figuring out what is right for you, what doesn't work ... Every single one of my short stories was a way of finding my more natural voice, which I think is the voice of Careless.

Deborah Robertson who tells Deborah Hope in the Australian how she made the transition from writer of short stories to first-time novelist. Robertson won the Aus$20,000 Nita B. Kibble prize for women writers against a field of more experienced writers, including Gail Jones. Her novel, Careless, has also been entered for a whole slew of other awards including the Miles Franklin and the Orange.

I think it's like a lot of the creative talents; the talent does have to be there, but it also needs to be cultivated in the right way. Part of this is steely determination, a lot of it is a willingness to hunker down deep inside yourself and listen to the sound of your own, psychic bowel - no matter how unpleasant it may be.

Author Will Self talks to Sarah Kinson in the Guardian about why he writes and dispenses some good advice for writers. He is currently working on a novel called The Butt which is an allegory of the way that liberals in the US and Britain responded to the invasion of Iraq.

Mistaken Identity

Kumar sent me this story which he'd picked up from crime writer John Connolly's website.

I just have to put myself in the shoes of the poor interviewer!

The interview began reasonably well. I was promoting my third book, The Killing Kind, in the Far East and the journalist conducting the interview seemed unusually excited at the prospect of speaking to me. (Actually, any degree of excitement at meeting me is pretty unusual. Even vague disinterest sets my pulse racing a little.)

Niceties exchanged, she began asking her questions, and the interview immediately took a turn down a conversational dark alley.

Journalist: 'You've lived a very interesting life.'

Me (wondering just how boring someone's life would have to be to find mine even remotely interesting): 'Well, I'm not sure about that . . .

Journalist: 'You're being too modest.'

Me (with 99 per cent certainty): 'Er, no I don't think so.'

Journalist: 'I mean, you've saved lives. People would be dead if it wasn't for you.'

Me (wondering if, when I'm napping, I somehow sleepwalk and rescue women from burning buildings, like a kind of somnambulist Superman): 'Look, I - '

Journalist: 'And now Martin Scorsese is making a film of your life.'

Me (briefly entering a fantasy world in which Martin Scorsese does make a film of my life, and it's even duller than his Tibetan movie 'Kundun'): 'I'm not sure that he is, and - '

Journalist: 'Tell me, you must miss driving an ambulance in New York.'

Me (as the light dawns): 'Um, I think you're confusing me with Joe Connelly, the guy who wrote Bringing Out the Dead. I've never even been in an ambulance.'

Journalist (unable to conceal her disappointment): 'Oh. So what do you write...?' "