Revisiting Faber

I spent Wednesday evening at the Faber offices in Bloomsbury. I had been invited along to speak to the students on the Faber Academy 'Writing a Novel' course - which is the programme that I completed last year.

It was a wonderful experience, and one I thoroughly enjoyed. I felt a little embarrassed to be talking about myself quite so much, but I suppose (or hope, at least!) that is what the students were interested in hearing. And I was asked some interesting and perceptive questions, which, reassuringly, were about how I wrote Before I Go to Sleep, and what I did to get the most possible out of the course, rather than whether there was any money to be made from writing novels or what the secret is to getting a publishing deal. I don't know the answers to those questions (and rather suspect they don't have answers more helpful than 'yes and no' and 'writing a good book') whereas I could tell them where I got the idea for Before I Go to Sleep, whether I knew the ending before I started writing it and what time of the day I like to write ('an obituary', 'no', and 'any time, but mostly in the morning'). In any case, I think and hope it was a good time for the students to be hearing from someone who is still new to all this, who is still learning the business of publishing, and who was sat where they are just a few months ago. They are at the beginning of their course, and have a wonderful journey ahead of them, a wonderful opportunity to develop and grow as writers.

And hopefully to make some new friends too. In some ways it was a bittersweet experience for me, too (though more sweet than bitter, by far). I still miss my time on the course. I miss the routine of attending every Wednesday and one Saturday a month, I miss the excitement of wondering what I'll learn, and who I'll meet. But most of all I miss my gang, the other students , as well as Richard, our tutor. We bonded incredibly quickly and became (and remain) very very close. We all cared hugely about each other, and each other's work. We wanted the best for each other, and wanted to bring the best out of each other. It was lovely, in the pub after my session, to see that that kind of camaraderie is already developing in the current crop of students, but it made me miss my lot. Now we're scattered across the globe our friendship is no less strong, but it's an inescapable fact that the occasions when we are all together are going to be rare and much cherished.

At the Bloomsbury Festival

So this is me, at a Faber Academy open day, as part of the Bloomsbury Festival. I was chatting about my experience of going from writing by myself, wondering if anything I was committing to paper was even any good, let alone whether it would ever be published, to where I am now (i.e. a little less insecure, though sometimes still riddled with doubt, but at least knowing that my book will be on the shelves next year). I tried to explain how I think the course I did at the Faber Academy had helped me to make that journey, without sounding like I was selling it, or recommending it (or a course like it) as the only way to ever get a publishing deal. I may well type up my notes and put a version of my talk up here, but for now I can just say that the gist is 'Perseverance and hard work will get you where you want to be, and the idea that the publishing world is full of people trying to keep you out is both prevalent and wrong.'

The event was in a very grand location - the Foundling Museum - and I think was well received. It was certainly nice for me to meet my fellow speakers, all of whom were very entertaining and interesting. Anthony McGowan framed his talk about writing for children with a rather gruesome tale that I won't go into here, Andrea Stuart spoke about the pleasures and pitfalls of writing one's own family history and Gillian Slovo discussed ideas, and where they come from, and how sometimes an idea that seems to have come from nowhere has in fact spent a long time gestating. That's certainly true of Before I Go to Sleep - while the basic premise came to me very quickly, it's only now that I can see that a lot of the ideas and preoccupations of the book are things I've been thinking about for years.

So, all round, I got loads out of the day - and I hope that the people that attended it did, too.

Preparing for a talk or two, and writing Nine Lives

All has been relatively quiet on the book front this week. I've been asked to do a quick talk to a few prospective Faber Academy students tomorrow (when I say 'a few' I mean ninety - I'm not that nervous, but only because I've decided not to think about how many there'll be and instead try to convince myself it's just to a couple of people in a living room) so I've been preparing for that. It's quite handy really - good practice for next week when I'll be guest tutor at the Faber course proper. It's the same course that I did, and when I was there we had Andrew Motion filling equivalent slot. I'm trying not to let that intimidate me - after all I have no hope of reaching the giddy heights of his talk. I'm just focussing on being intelligent and articulate enough that not too many of the students demand their money back.

Partly by way of preparation for my talk next week (and partly just so we could catch up and have a bit of a gossip) I met up for a quick drink with Richard Skinner and Louise Doughty - the two tutors on the course I did - the other day. It was so lovely to see them - Louise especially as she only taught me a couple of sessions (we were split into two groups and Richard taught mine) and so I didn't know her as well socially. Both are wonderful writers (I'd recommend Richard's brilliant 'The Red Dancer' and Louise's 'Whatever You Love' is absolutely stunning) and though I still feel very humble in their presence it was nice to just go for a good old chin-wag with them.

Other than that I've just been trying to press on with writing Nine Lives. So far I've not done that much onscreen (it's far too early to start talking about word counts, but let's just say when I told Louise how far I'd progressed she first thought I was talking about pages, not words) but the scraps of paper with spidery scribbles are gradually accumulating. (And not all of them are pointless doodles...) Oh, and I've got into a bit of a pointless argument about NaNoWriMo on a message board I occasionally frequent (I think I'm classed as a 'lurker' there) - my thoughts on which I won't go into, for fear of getting into the same argument here...

Finally, I thought I'd provide a link to the Facebook page for my book here. I rather suspect some of the people reading this have come from there, in which case I apologise, but for the rest, please consider taking a look, pressing "like", or even dropping a quick comment. It makes me feel popular, and I promise not post too often, and only with things at least moderately interesting and relevant...

Oh, and I've also started going to the gym, but no one's even remotely interested in that, surely....?

The latest incarnation

I thought I'd just share the latest incarnation of Before I Go to Sleep. This is bound, but not copy edited, ready for me to give to a very famous author indeed to see if they'll do me the very great honour of reading it. Fingers crossed!

Meetings and more press

It's been a pretty busy week, though for once not all of it has been book related. After an unexpected trip abroad we flew home on Saturday, and then on Sunday went to dinner with Clare and Michael, who is my Australian publisher. It was wonderful to meet him, despite the excesses of the Frankfurt book fair that he was in the middle of returning home from he was funny, fun and charming, and his enthusiasm for my book was wonderful to witness. He advised me to think carefully about my decision to write Nine Lives in the third person ('Because I want to see if I can...') and when I said I intended to start the actual writing the next morning asked me if I was sure I was ready to put pen to paper ('I think so...'). I think he's going to be a wonderful ally...

I spent Monday working on the plot of Nine Lives (it turns out I wasn't ready to put pen to paper after all) and then yesterday plunged back into the world of Before I Go to Sleep. I had a meeting to discuss the jacket design, one that I went to with no small amount of anxiety. What if I didn't like it? Would I be able to sit there, next to the designer who had worked so hard, and say 'No! I hate it!' (or even, 'Well...er... it's sort of kind of... ok... I suppose... maybe?'). No, of course I wouldn't. But in the end I needn't have worried. Though it's still in its early stages (far too early for me to post a picture here) I can report that the cover design is going to be stunning and I'm very happy indeed.

And now, today, I find that the local newspaper in the town where I grew up, is running with the 'Midlands Medic/Hollywood' story. You can read it here. It's weird, seeing these newspapers run with what is essentially the same story, all with slightly different quotes and emphases. The Express and Star has me as coming from Amblecote (not strictly true, and certainly not something I said to Dalya when she interviewed me a couple of weeks ago) and it seems I'm now a definitely a medic, which to me implies a doctor, which I'm not. (In fact I'm a Clinical Scientist - a profession which includes microbiologists, biochemists, toxicologists and so on - people who are often sitting in a laboratory with petri dishes and samples, though in my case (Audiology) I spent my time working directly with patients in a sound proofed room). I won't get upset, though. As errors go, these things are reassuringly trivial....

More press

More press! This time in The Birmingham Mail. You can read it here.

The press, and my leaving party, and a thankyou

So, last week was bizarre. Clare sent me a message out of the blue late on Monday night - would I be happy to talk to a journalist the following day? Now, Tuesday happened to be the first of three consecutive days back in my 'old' job, and so I would be spending it locked in a room in central London analysing questionnaires (part of my job is as a sort of Ofsted type inspector, but for health services), and so I said I would be happy but not available. No problem, she said. I could do an interview over the phone in my lunch break.

So I did. It was a very odd experience. The journalist, Dalya, was very lovely, and asked me lots of interesting questions about me, and the book, and how I came to write it. You wouldn't think it would be too hard - after all I'm sort of in love with the book again (now it's finished and in someone else's hands) - and this blog is probably testament to the fact that I don't have any problem talking about me. But still it was weird. Trying to answer questions in an articulate yet unambiguous way, constantly aware that every sentence might end up between quotation marks in a newspaper - it was harder than you might think, particularly when coupled with the need to be vaguely entertaining or interesting or, ideally I suppose, both.

Then there were the photos. It hadn't crossed my mind they'd need a picture. 'You're a scientist,' said Dalya. 'Do you wear a white coat?' I told her I didn't and the disappointment was audible. It would have made a good picture, I suppose, but in the end we arranged to get a real, proper, professional photographer to take some pictures, and so I arranged to meet him outside the hospital in which I work at 8am the next day.

That was another first. Standing, posing, in the street while someone with very professional looking kit takes shot after shot. I sort of enjoyed it, after a while (even though I'm not keen on having my photo taken at the best of times, plus I was dreading my colleagues turning up for work and seeing me - I'd never live it down), my favourite thing being seeing busloads of people looking disappointed when they craned their necks to see who I was, only to find I was nobody important, interesting or famous.

And then, yesterday the story ran. It was in the Evening Standard (you can read it here). Another weird experience. I went out for a lovely lunch with Liza, the woman who is producing the film of Before I Go to Sleep, and on the way home was suddenly aware that I was on a tube train filled with people reading the Standard, which carried the story of my book next to a photograph. Suddenly paranoid that I might be recognised, I wondered briefly if this is how famous people feel all the time (of course the answer is no - they feel much worse because a) they really are recognisable and b) people really would hassle them if they were recognised. I mean, what was going to happen to me? Probably the worst thing was that someone might nudge their companion and say, 'Isn't that the bloke from the paper?'). Then of course I found that I needn't have worried - unlike the online version, the printed copy carried a HUGE photo of Kate Winslet (AN ACTRESS WHO MIGHT BE IN THE FILM!) and a tiny photo of me (some bloke who wrote a book). I have NO idea what made the people at the Standard think that people would rather look at a photograph of a glamorous star than one of a bald, bespectacled and ever-so-slightly overweight (the BMI is creeping up - writing a novel is not good for the waistline) author, but there you go.

Seeing the story in print was very odd, though. It made it all feel very real, somehow, yet in a weird way made it seem as if it had nothing to do with me. And then, last night, I had my leaving 'do' (I'm taking a bit of time off to write another novel). I arrived to find all my colleagues brandishing copies of the Standard, demanding I sign them (I think they were joking, but they made me do it nevertheless), after which they ribbed me mercilessly (shift work?! A lab??!) and demanded that I name some of the characters in Nine Lives after them ('Be careful what you wish for!' I replied...) But it was a lovely night, and I feel very fortunate that these colleagues and friends are so supportive of my writing and enthusiastic about my book.

If any of them are reading this - thank you.

NEWSPAPERS!

I seem to be in the news! Enormously exciting, and I shall write more soon. But for now, the story is here...

Copy edits...

My copy edits are back. Both the US (who got them to me first, but gave me a longer deadline) and the UK versions. So I'm currently in the middle of going through them with a fine-tooth comb, making sure that I'm happy with the changes that have been made.

I've been doing it for a couple of days, and I'm in awe of copy editors. I must have read Before I Go to Sleep countless times now, either in chunks or as a whole, and all four of my English language editors have also read it so many times that really they deserve a medal. Yet still the copy editors have spotted so many mistakes I've made.

And I've made them all. Words repeating in in the same sentence? Check. Sentences in which order the word is messed up reason totally for some? Check. Missing question marks. Check. Forgetting to close quotation marks? "Check...

I've slipped into the past tense in the middle of a present tense section, forgotten to edit out the dreaded pluperfect (dreaded to me at least - I had no idea how addicted I was to the pluperfect until someone pointed it out to me). I already knew I had a tendency for characters to nod so vigorously and for such a long time that they ought to be seeking medical help for whiplash (and that's when they're not enduring pauses that are longer and more frequent than a particularly tense Pinter play), and I was aware that in the first draft one character puts his knife and fork down seventeen times during one meal without picking them up once, but I am particularly grateful to the copy editor who pointed out that one character describes something that had already happened as occurring 'soon' and to another who spotted that when my main character says, 'So you told me that ......' the person to whom she is speaking has said no such thing. Copy editors have to know when an author (i.e. me) has confused a scientific instrument (a Van de Graaff generator) with a prog rock band (Van der Graaf Generator) as well as when an author (still me I'm afraid) has a character remarking on the aroma of a flower that doesn't have a smell. They google guest houses to make sure that the dingy, run down establishment that the author has named doesn't actually exist (oops!) and check that the motorway the characters travel down is actually a sensible route from where they live to where they're going (yippee! I actually got that one right!). Like I said, I am in awe.

And I'm only two thirds of the way through...