Natasha Mostert (Author)

CAREFUL, OR YOU'LL END UP IN MY NOVEL!

2011-01-17T12:43:00.002Z

Hi everyone,

A while back I was given a T-shirt that says CAREFUL, OR YOU'LL END UP IN MY NOVEL. I smile every time I look at it, but the truth is, I have not had the guts to wear it in public as I don't want to scare off my friends. I use it as a sleep shirt, along with another T-shirt that says GODDESS. I also don't want my friends to break out in uncontrollable laughter.

The question of whether authors should censor themselves and rule relatives and friends off-limits when they write their books, is an old one. How-to-books always advise beginning writers to write about "what they know" (not something I believe in but that's a topic for another discussion), so maybe it makes sense to write about "who you know?" After all, building a believable character is one of the most difficult tasks facing a novelist.

Truman Capote, the darling of New York Café Society, was ostracised by his friends after an early chapter of his novel Answered Prayers was published by Esquire magazine in 1975. The very people who celebrated his talent, his acerbic wit and charmingly malicious prose, found it intolerable that he exposed to the world their secrets shared with him over quiche and champagne. Capote professed himself baffled by their fury. "What did they expect?" he is quoted as saying. "I'm a writer. I use everything. Did all these people think I was just there to entertain them?

Answered Prayers was never finished and Capote did not continue as a writer. Whether this was due to his addiction or to the fact that he had been shut out of the society circles in which he loved to travel, isn't clear. But Answered Prayers does function as a cautionary tale to authors who decide to write into their manuscripts flesh-and-blood characters.

Of course, all writers will make use of tics, flaws and habits they observe in people they know. But most writers will combine these in such a way that a new character takes shape - a composite of several people - and then add some imaginary qualities as well. It is probably wise not to name a character after a relative or close friend unless they have a great sense of humour. I read somewhere (can't vouch for the accuracy of this anecdote) that Stephenie Meyer named Heidi, a character in one of her Twilight novels, after one of her sisters. From what I understand, Heidi is a vampire who dresses as a prostitute to attract humans for the Volturi to eat.

My own mother had a thoughtful cast to her brow when she read my second book, The Other Side of Silence. The mother figure in this novel, a woman called Klio, is a talented musician (my mother is a talented opera singer); she is charming (my mother is certainly charming) and she is gorgeous (my mother did modelling in her youth and is still beautiful). But Klio is also thoughtless and reckless and she hears noises in her head. Eventually these noises drive her to run screaming into the wilderness where she disappears and dies alone. At the end of the book there is a poignant scene where her bleached bones are discovered in the African veld. My mother -- slightly taken aback by all of this-- found the fact that I had dedicated this book to her sweet, but not exactly reassuring. In vain I pointed out that Klio has blond hair (my own mother is brunette) and that any resemblance must therefore be coincidental. My Mum remained dubious.

For my third novel, Windwalker, I created a doctor as a supporting character and I will state without being coy that he is, in fact, inspired by a real person. The doctor is based on a childhood friend of my husband's - a brilliant man who everyone thought was going to be South Africa's next Christiaan Barnard (a fact I mention in the novel as well). Instead he decided to leave South Africa and make neighbouring Namibia his home where he does wonderful work in a very, very tough part of the world. When we visit him, we have to take a prop plane from Walfish Bay and sputter our way across the inhospitable dunes of the Namib Desert. In my novel, he is portrayed extremely sympathetically - if not heroically. However, I did add an imaginary flaw. In the novel, he succumbs to alcoholic binge drinking once a month. I am happy to say the real life friend took this in his stride and gave me his (amused) blessing.

And then there are authors who like to build characters based on themselves. Tom Clancy has admitted in interviews that Jack Ryan - the intrepid, courageous, and handsome hero of Clear and Present Danger - is his literary alter ego. Stephen King is even less circumspect and appears as himself in one of The Dark Tower books, as does author Clive Cussler in his Dirk Pitt novels. I have never written a character based on myself although I confess to having great fun endowing my heroines with qualities I wish I possessed. On a purely physical level, many of my female characters have red hair as I would love to have Titian tresses myself. My heroines are brilliant, fearless, without inhibition and supernaturally talented: they are math geniuses, remote viewers, they pose in the nude, build memory palaces and do bungee jumping. Me? Not so much. While writing Witch, I did in fact turn up at a bungee jump but when I was second from the front of the row, decided that research is best conducted via the internet. Keeper of Light and Dust is about Martial Arts and kickboxing, which is something I do - but not very well. I certainly don't have Mia's moves and wouldn't last two seconds against a villain with Ninja skills like Ash. The interesting thing about this book is that the fighters I train with in real life, all expected to feature in the novel and told me they would feel hurt if excluded! I ended up having to create composite characters with clearly recognizable idiosyncrasies.

Right, enough about that. Hope you guys are all well and that so far, the new year is treating you kindly. I returned to London from South Africa two days ago after a bumpy eleven and a half hour flight (always a lot of turbulence when crossing the equator) to a cold house and mountains of unopened mail. The fact that most of these letters are Christmas cards delivered after I had already left, only makes me feel even more melancholy. As do the Christmas decorations gathering dust on my mantelpiece. But never mind -- onwards and upwards! Below is a picture I took of the view from the living room of my Mum's home in Stellenbosch. Is it not gorgeous?

DIGITAL MEDIA: AUTHORS, READERS AND A PAPERLESS WORLD. THE END OF THE LOVE AFFAIR?

2010-11-09T13:02:00.000Z

Hi everyone,

The relationship between writers and readers is a grand love affair. But hell hath no fury like a reader feeling cheated. Authors recently saw their star ratings decimated as readers, furious at the hike in e book prices, posted a slew of one star reviews on Amazon in protest. Authors were left wringing their hands but not able to do much else.

The fact is, writers have zero say in the pricing of their books. In fact, authors have zero say in pretty much anything to do with their profession. In addition, the paperless world is squeezing the life out of writers.

Allow me to start off by saying that readers are all-important to us needy scribes. Readers pay writers the ultimate compliment: you pay us attention. In a world where there are so many, many things clamouring to be heard, this is treasure indeed. On top of that you help us make a living by spending your hard earned dollars to read our work. No wonder we hate to disappoint you and want you to be happy. But slapping a one star review on an author's page for anything else than an evaluation of the book's artistic merit, is not fair.

This is what a writer's finances look like. Once you sign a contract with a publisher (usually after many years of rending your clothes and strewing ash on your head because of cruel rejection letters) you are paid an advance. Happy day!

You don't get all the lolly immediately, of course. The advance is normally paid out in two instalments: when you exchange contracts with the publisher and then when you deliver the final edited and rewritten manuscript, which can be a year later. Your agent takes about 15 percent of your all your earnings. In addition, the author needs to “earn out” the advance - in other words sell as many books as needed to match the upfront money - before she can start earning royalties. Sadly, even though the advance money is usually modest, many authors do not earn out. Studies on the income of authors show that the majority of writers - at least here in the UK - earn little more than minimum wage. And if you don't start earning out by the second book, chances are you will not get published again. An author's existence is precarious. Just because you managed to get published once, or twice, or five times does not mean you can count on getting your next book accepted. Even if you earn out, you also have to show increase in sales. Needless to say, one star reviews on Amazon is not a great way to up your sales.

There used to be one piece of good cheer to spur the author on his journey. The hardback! The royalty authors earn on hardbacks is higher than on paperbacks and publishers usually wait a year before bringing out a soft cover, which allowed writers to make a little money.

But then came Kindle. Cue ominous music and the clashing of cymbals. Will any-one still be willing to pay $28 for a new novel if they can download it for less than a tenner? Publishers tried to persuade Amazon to either hold off making the Kindle edition available until the print arrival of the paperback, or to keep to a higher sticker price. Amazon liked it not. A pitched battle ensued between some publishing houses refusing to budge and mighty Amazon, which retaliated by blacklisting the books published by these publishers. Imagine how an author feels waking up one morning to find all his books on Amazon displayed without a purchase button.

I grew up in South Africa where we used to receive new releases much later than the rest of the English-speaking world. Maybe this is why I find the idea that one is automatically entitled to get the latest releases now, immediately and at cut price, a little odd. I also grew up in a single parent family with two siblings where money was tight. I loved books but I was never able to afford the hardback edition and had to either borrow it from the library or muster my soul in patience for the twelve to eighteen months it would take for the paperback to release. I didn't feel hard done by and neither did my friends who faced the same reality. It certainly never occurred to us to photocopy the hardback edition on the sly, or to walk into a bookstore and slip an unpaid for book into our bags because the publisher dared to make us wait and the book was expensive.

True, those were more innocent times when the world wasn't ruled by binary code. But if the world has changed, surely the idea of fair play, should not. As is well-known, JK Rowling has been hesitant about releasing her books in ebook format because of piracy concerns. I recently read a highly eloquent blog post in which the author of the piece asked Ms Rowling to reconsider her position. With great charm the blogger explained to Ms. Rowling that he does not want to steal from her, but she would only have herself to blame if he does. He is perfectly willing to pay for an ebook edition but as there is no ebook edition available, he finds himself with no choice but to visit a torrent site and take her book for free.

Maybe it's just me, but there is something wrong with this logic. If I understand his argument correctly, the blogger is expecting Ms. Rowling to protect him against his own baser instincts. I'm not a bad person, I'm willing to pay but you have to make it easy for me. If you don't, tough cookies, and I'm going to rip you off.

My own personal view is that Ms. Rowling would be wise to go the ebook road but it is not for me - or anyone else -- to tell her how she should make her work available to the public. As for the blogger: my advice to him is to go buy his Harry Potters in print or wait for Ms Rowling to make up her mind on the issue (she's apparently thinking it over). Yes, printed books are big and clunky to carry and yes, the blogger probably feels he has paid a lot of money for his Kindle. And yes, the print edition is likely more expensive than an ebook edition would be. But access to novels in ebook format, at cut-to-the bone-prices, immediately upon their release, is not a human right.

Since Amazon's blackballing exercise against some writers, the balance of power has shifted again. Amazon has now backed down to accept the “agency-model”, which means publishers have the right to set prices. But Amazon has made readers used to those lovely cheap books and consumers don't want to go back to old times. Hence all the muddy one star reviews.

But wait, I hear you cry. Isn't it outrageous that publishers sometimes price the ebook edition at a higher price than the paperback edition? Isn't this typical greedy behaviour on the part of rich, bloated, fat cat publishing enterprises intent on parting the reader from his money?

Let me immediately make it clear that I am not an apologist for publishers. I have had many a run in with publishers over the years and I am not happy at all about the strategy of some publishing houses trying to make a grab for the digital rights of their authors' backlist - those novels published before the advent of new media. Publishers can indeed be greedy. But publishing houses are also in deep financial crisis. People tend to base their argument for lower ebook prices on the reasonable assumption that as there are no printing costs involved, that these savings should be reflected in a lower sticker price. I agree. They also want to be able to share - after all, if you buy a book in the real world, you are allowed to lend it to someone without turning yourself into a criminal. Again, I agree and I think the Nook, as well as Amazon's proposed lending feature, which will allow the lender to farm out books once for a 14-day period with the lender unable to read the book while it's loaned out, is a step in the right direction.

All in all, a lower price on ebooks is only fair. But note that I'm saying “lower” - not rock bottom. Publishing a book is not just about ink, paper and warehousing. A published book is something amazing: it is like a handmade Italian shoe - or a great opera performance - or a crafted Persian carpet. It is labour intensive and very expensive to produce. This is not like posting a manuscript on the internet and asking Facebook friends to purchase it on your website. A published book requires the skill and attention of many individuals. First, you have the author who spend months -- if not years -- writing his book. Second, an acquisitions editor has to pick this book from among thousands of submissions and then assist the author to hone that manuscript to get it into the best possible shape it can be: a process that can take up to eighteen months. While the editing process is underway, the art department is working on the jacket for the book and the marketing and publicity people are trying to position the book to allow it maximum exposure in a crowded marketplace. We're talking big bucks. Publicising a book is not cheap. It is wholly necessary, though, because an unpublicised book is a lost book.

In the world of bricks not clicks, the publisher also has to grapple with the bizarre tradition of book stores having the right to return unsold books. This is why an author doesn't really know for quite some time how many copies of her novel she has sold. A writer may ship 100,000 copies but after about six months half of that number of books could be returned to the publisher -- who has to eat the loss. This is why publishers are deeply dependent on their star authors who keep the boat afloat. And this is why they'll fight to keep the prices of their bestsellers as high as the market will allow. That expensive Stephen King ebook is probably subsidising the promotion costs of a new writer who has no following, just starting out.

How do I see the future?

The future will be determined by one question: How much does society value books -- and is it willing to pay for them? Or very simply put: what is the value of a book? The sorry demise of independent book stores, which find themselves unable to compete with the slashed prices offered by supermarkets, Amazon and super stores suggest that the answer is: not very much. And the push for even lower prices on books is relentless. The worst case scenario is that at some point, books are going to be so cheap and so easily pirated and shared that it will be impossible for your average writer to make any kind of profit. Writing a novel will become wholly a vanity affair and not a way towards making a living. Many writers will not write any more.

The losers in this brave new world will be writers, publishers and traditional booksellers. The winners will be Apple, Google and Amazon.

What would my wish list be?

Fair prices for my wonderful readers so they don't feel they are being cheated.
Fair prices allowing authors to continue making a living being creative.
A publishing model for internet sales, which will make it easy for readers to download their purchases and share these purchases selectively, but which will still protect authors from having their work stolen.
Studies show great aversion among consumers to DRM, but if not DRM then what? Please, if anyone out there knows how to protect creative work from being pirated without increasing the hassle factor for the consumer, do please share. The entire writing world will be in your debt. In fact, a gold-plated statue in your image is not out of the question.
Healthy, thriving publishing houses which are financially sound so that they are willing to take risks with interesting, off-beat books that do not conform to the standard.
Healthy, thriving book stores that are not teetering on the brink of collapse. Please, can we wave a wand to lift Borders out of bankruptcy and have them back in the UK.
The continuing welfare of hardbacks. My sense is that hardback copies will melt away, reserved only for brand name authors like Dan Brown, celebrity autobiographies, cook books and lavishly produced coffee table volumes on the reproductive cycle of the Congo Fire Ant. But it would be nice if this doesn't happen.

Not much to ask for, is it Santa?

Right, that's me done with the soapbox. Some of you wrote to me asking about my panel discussion at the Fortean Unconvention. It was such good fun. I got to meet three terrific guys - Nick Circovic, our fearless moderator; Adam Nevill, the author of the tremendously creepy Apartment 16 and Mark Chadbourn, a legend in the world of horror and fantasy fiction. The atmosphere was great and I was also pleasantly surprised by the turn-out for our discussion - especially considering that next door the topic was “Sex and Poltergeists”. Of course, maybe the people in our room were simply staking out their seats in anticipation of the presentation that followed ours: UFOLOGY. Did I mention I had fun?

And that's it! Take care, everyone. Hope you guys are having a productive and happy Autumm - such a wonderful season.

GALOSHES OF LUST AND GREEN MARSHMALLOWS: POWERFUL OPENING SENTENCES

2010-09-22T09:15:00.000+01:00

Hi everyone,

Hope you are all doing well and have started the Fall Season with a bang. Mine started with two crashes: first my lovely pink laptop went zing and then my desktop breathed its last only a day after. Two horrendously stressful weeks later, I am back in the saddle - mentally scarred and several hundred quid the poorer -- but relieved that I have been diligent in backing up my documents. In fact, I have now switched to parking my files not only on an external hard drive but also on a cloud (doesn't that sound poetic) in case of fire.

As a matter of interest, has any of you tried writing with a pen recently? Isn't it the strangest instrument? During my two weeks of enforced exile from technology I made the sobering discovery that my penmanship has deteriorated to the point of complete illegibility. And to think I won the school prize for neatest handwriting when I was ten years old.

Work wise, I've had a highly interesting summer and I'm burning to tell you guys all about it. Unfortunately, it will have to wait a while longer until all the paperwork is in place and there can be no more slips between cups and lips. Soon, I hope.

But I did want to share with you the most incredible opening sentence for a novel I've ever read.

"Cyberbot was coming back from the devastated war of the green marshmallows."

Is it not glorious? It is the opening sentence of the latest novel by my seven year old nephew, Carl. Despite his tender years, Carl has already authored several epics and is a writer of great depth and talent. My brother sent this sentence on to me with the message: "Eat your heart out". Ah, to have such untrammelled imagination and bold vision, not to mention finely-tuned ear for pathos. I can't wait to read what will next befall little Cyberbot.

First impression count and a powerful opening sentence is crucial in a novel. Many writers confess to compulsively rewriting their opening line even as the book is already wending its way to the printer. I too had slaved over the first sentence of my debut novel: The Midnight Side. After many, many rewrites, I settled on: "They had shaved her scalp." (referring to a woman in hospital.) When I gave the manuscript to a friend of mine to read, she misread this sentence as, "They had saved her scalp". My friend confessed to me afterwards that she was rather disappointed when she discovered her error, as "saving" conjures up so many more exciting possibilities for a story than "shaving."

Often an opening sentence becomes more well-known than the book itself. Even people who haven't read the actual work will probably know from which novels the following lines were taken:

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again"
"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times"
"Call me Ishmael."
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen"
"The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge."

Poor opening sentences can also pack punching power, of course, and become (in) famous in their own right. Every year San Jose State University sponsors the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest.Participants are invited to create the cheesiest, most overwritten and overwrought opening sentence of which they are capable. One of the organisers was quoted as saying that they are looking for "writers with a little talent but no taste."

The competition is held in honour of Edward Bulwer Lytton whose novel Paul Clifford, opens with the line: "It was a dark and stormy night." This sentence has become a byword for purple prose but I have to confess - at the risk of being struck by lightning -- that I've always found it rather atmospheric - or at least the entire opening sentence:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

Agreed, it needs a good lungful of air to read out loud, but I like that scanty flame quite a bit. I've always meant to read this novel in full as the premise seems promising as well: Paul Clifford is a criminal who leads a double life as a gentleman. Sounds good to me.

The contest itself has produced many amusing entries over the years and the following link will take you to this year's winning entries:

http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2010.htm

My own favourite, however, dates from a few years ago. (I did mention that poor taste is a requisite for the winning entry, right?)

She was like the driven snow beneath the galoshes of my lust.

So which opening sentences do you guys hold dear? Setting aside Cyberbot and his marshmallows, I think it will take a lot to top the opening sentence of Mary Stewart's Touch Not the Cat:

"My lover came to me on the last night in April, with a message and a warning that sent me home to him."

Now that's what I call irresistible...

TO BLURB OR NOT TO BLURB

2010-07-14T10:25:00.002+01:00

Hi everyone,

Many years ago, when I was growing up in Johannesburg, a relative gave me a copy of Joyce Carol Oates's novel, Bellefleur. He had purchased the book while on a trip to the United States as at the time, her work was almost impossible to find in South Africa. I was immediately captivated and have remained an ardent reader of Oates's work ever since. Two years ago, I contacted her. Not only because she is a writer of genius, but because - like yours truly -- she is a fight fan. On my shelf of favourite reads is her book On Boxing, in which she gives eloquent expression to her fascination with the sweet science. Wouldn't it be wonderful, I thought, if I could persuade her to read Keeper of Light and Dust (which is set in the world of fighters and martial arts) and give me an endorsement?

Of course, this was never going to happen. I knew before I wrote to her that I didn't stand a chance and so it proved to be. Oates has a no-blurb policy and has had for years. As she explained to me in a charming email, she would not get any of her own writing done if she responded to the avalanche of requests that arrive on her desk every day.

I didn't really expect to have any more success with the other author I contacted. Robert Twigger, an Oxford educated poet, is an exceptional writer and won the Somerset Maugham Award for his book, Angry White Pyjamas. In it he tells of his adventures as he joined the Tokyo riot police in their excruciatingly tough training in martial arts. Sharp, side-splittingly funny and poignant all at once, Pyjamas is a marvellous piece of writing.

I managed to find Twigger through his publisher who promised to forward him a copy of my book and my cover letter. And oh, happy days - he got in touch, told me he loved the book and had read it in one sitting, the dear man. What's more, even though he now lives in Egypt, the planets aligned at exactly the right time and in the week of my book launch he happened to be in England on business. It was a great treat meeting him. There we were, drinking champagne and talking joint locks and Aikido. Perfect.

I should, however, make it clear that I am not a fan of the blurb. In my perfect book universe blurbology (nice word, huh?) would not exist. But this is not a perfect world and along with most other writers, I have no choice but to chase the blurb. Why? Well, because publishers insist on it. And the reason they are so insistent is because studies have shown time and again that the book buying public is vastly impressed by these endorsements. After all, if your favourite author gives a nod to the work of an unknown writer, wouldn't you be more likely to give it a try?

Before I became a published writer, my answer to the above question would have been "yes." I have since become more cynical. It is true that many authors do put in the hours and go through the time-consuming, frustrating and often humiliating process of tracking down a genuine blurb. When they are successful, as I was with Twigger, it feels like a true accomplishment. But blurbs regularly appear on jackets for reasons that are not literary. Often the blurb writer shares a publisher or agent with the seeker of the blurb, and has his arm twisted. Sometimes friendship is the motivating factor, which makes for a messy situation. Even if the writer really does like your book, your friendship means that people who know about the relationship will scoff at the effusive praise. On the other hand, if she doesn't like your book, she has to compromise her principles and lie.

Most writers detest being asked to give a blurb if for no other reason that writers have far too much to read already and a blurb request just adds to the load. Mo Hayder gave me a blurb for Season of the Witch and I know she would probably not have gone to the trouble of reading my novel if we hadn't shared the same editor. But it was also made very clear to me from the outset that if Ms. Hayder didn't like my book she would refuse to write it up. Unfortunately, there are many other writers - some very famous indeed -- who are not as scrupulous and whose names appear with depressing regularity on books of dubious merit. These are usually one word blurbs such as "stunning," "enthralling," "brilliant" and makes me wonder if these authors had even bothered to work through the pages. This is why I admire Stephen King who makes a point of championing books by writers with whom he has no connection and who didn't ask him for his endorsement in the first place.

And then there is, of course, the hyperbolic prose, which often makes blurbs appear so stupidly insincere. This practice was roundly ridiculed over the past week here in the UK by The Guardian newspaper that picked up on the novelist Nicole Krauss's over-the top praise of David Grossman's To the End of the Land.

By all accounts Mr. Grossman's novel truly is a great one. But Ms. Krauss's blurb (which appeared in reduced form on the advanced review copies of the book) is maybe a tad overwrought. Here is an extract:

"For twenty-six year he has been writing novels about what it means to defend this essence, this unique light, against a world designed to extinguish it. (This) is his most powerful, shattering and unflinching story of this defense. To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being."

The Guardian found this so amusing that it has set its readers the task to come up with a blurb, which outdoes the Kraus endorsement. However, instead of the Grossman book, they have asked readers to blurb Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. The results are hilarious and I urge you guys to take a look. Here is a link to the original article, followed by the readers' contributions:david-grossman-nicole-krauss-blurb

But let me know what you think? Do blurbs influence you? Remember - I am talking blurbs - not reviews. Sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish as some authors also work as critics (e.g I quote best-selling author Jon Land on the paperback jacket of Keeper but I had never contacted him for an endorsement and these words were taken from his review of my novel) but generally, when you see a line of praise followed by an author's name, that author was formally asked for a blurb.

Hope you are all well and are having a fantastic summer. We had a blow-out couple of weeks here in London - all blue skies, hot sun and heady temperatures. Yes!

WORTHY PROSE OR GUILTY PLEASURE: LITERARY FICTION versus COMMERCIAL FICTION

2010-06-10T16:13:00.001+01:00

Hi everyone,

Years ago, I read an interview with thriller writer, Richard North Patterson, in which he made the distinction between what he termed "New Yorker" fiction and commercial fiction. Patterson claimed that the kind of fiction that gets printed in The New Yorker Magazine, is the kind of story where a man gets up in the morning, contemplates whether he should leave his apartment to go outside and then, by the end of the story, decides not to.

The New Yorker Magazine is, of course, a highly esteemed publication and considered an arbiter of quality. It is also the kind of publication that curls its lip at hacks who toil away in genre land. Commercial fiction writers respond to this kind of snobbery by arguing that their writing brings pleasure to far more readers than their upmarket counterparts and that most people who buy literary fiction end up not reading the book, but leaving it on the coffee table to impress their friends.

There is something undeniably hip to reading literary fiction. Carry a copy of House of Leaves under your arm and your cool factor is infinitely higher than if you tote around a dog-eared copy of Twilight.. And whereas a large readership is usually something authors strive for, some literary authors are not interested in reaching the great unwashed. Who can forget Jonathan Franzen snubbing Oprah Winfrey on National Public Radio? He suggested that the Oprah logo on the cover of his book, The Corrections, would be to its disadvantage. For one thing, it might dissuade men from reading it. Oprah rescinded her invitation to Franzen to appear on her show and he did not get to have dinner with her. But The Corrections went on to become one of the biggest literary bestsellers of all time.

Literary authors are blessed with patient readers. Readers of commercial fiction, on the other hand, are in a hurry and if your book doesn't grab their attention within the first thirty pages, you will be pushed aside. Of course, one man's boredom can be another man's delight. I tend to glaze over when I read a Tom Clancy novel, whereas my husband makes these annoying little lip smacking noises when he gets to the bit where Clancy describes the intricacies of the trigger mechanism of an AK 47.

Popular wisdom has it that genre fiction is plot driven whereas literary fiction focuses on character development. And unlike the writer of literary fiction, the writer of genre fiction usually makes use of language that draws little attention to itself : after-all, self-conscious language can slow down the pace of the story, which in commercial fiction is the ultimate no no.

Keeping this in mind, I thought it might be interesting to try the following as an exercise. Which of these examples are from literary novels and which from commercial fiction?

"It was summer in New Orleans, when the streets steamed in the morning and the rain teemed in the evening, when the brown river flowed thick and muddy, and the bayous spread in an ooze of lily pads and crawfish. In the old St. Louis Cemeteries, where the raised crypts had cracked and sunk into the earth, water lapped at the rotting bones so that the sweet smell of decay rose into the air and took on the breath of resurrected life."

"Select any woman, slap a ring on her third finger and she becomes a wife. First she takes you into her warm soft body, which is pleasant, and then she takes you into her warm, soft mind, which is not so pleasant. She does not share, she possesses - she clings and she smothers. The relation of man to woman is uninteresting in that it confirms to an inescapable pattern, nature has made it so for the very good reason that it requires us to reproduce."

"You know how the earth feels before a thunderstorm, how everything gets still and colors seem to stand out with the brilliance of things seen during a high fever? My winter dreams... were like that, each leaving me with a feeling that was not quite sickness."

These examples are all taken from commercial novels. The first paragraph is from the book Mortal Sins by Penn Williamson who started her career as a romance writer. The second is by Wilbur Smith from his debut novel, When the Lion Feeds and the third is from Stephen King's Bag of Bones. To my mind, all three paragraphs are examples of superior writing.

Horror is not a genre known for its literary merit but Stephen King has an angel ear for language, which consistently sets the best of his work apart. Wilbur Smith is often called the master of the pot boiler but When the Lion Feeds is not only a fantastic action novel but gives a sweeping and insightful view of South African society in the nineteenth century. There is also a scene in this book, which is one of the most wrenching I have ever read. In it Smith describes the excruciating death of one of the characters who contracts rabies. It is stunningly well-written and memorable for both its physical and its emotional impact. You read it with your heart beating triple-time, even as you weep.

"Literary" is not automatically synonymous with "quality". There is nothing worse than making your way through a book whose author takes himself far too seriously and who submits his readers to pretentious prose and his own self-indulgent navel-gazing. However, I do think the best literary novels can be amazing in a way that is tough for a commercial novel to emulate. It is true that these masterpieces often unfold leisurely. The structure can also sometimes push the boundaries of the form -- but by doing so, these novels challenge the reader's perceptions and understanding of the world in a rather fabulous way. Consider Haruki Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicles - weird and wonderful. But then there is his Wild Sheep Chase, which is simply weird. It's a fine line.

The passing of time often seems to bestow literary status on books that were originally conceived as pure entertainment: the work of Alexander Dumas, Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters. Their stories still engage us powerfully. The archetypes resonate within us. The language, the atmosphere, the emotions continue to weave a spell even after we had long closed the pages. The characters are as dear to us as loved ones.

And this, I think, is what counts in the end. Does your book have staying power? A hundred years from now, will people still be reading Portnoy's Complaint? I don't know, but I bet they will still have Gone with the Wind on their shelves.

So let me know what you think! What is your definition of literary fiction? Do you have well-defined criteria or is it more a case of "I know it when I see it"? Or maybe you think there is no distinction and the boundaries are fluid?

Hope you guys are doing well. I've been very busy and I'm still waiting for Summer to arrive in London. Damp and chilly over here

Would You Name Your Child After a Literary Character?

2010-05-11T16:36:00.001+01:00

Hi guys,

Sorry for the radio silence. I've been busy, busy and also had to fit in another hasty trip to South Africa.

I thought I'd share with you this piece in The Guardian newspaper about Twilight loving parents naming their offspring after characters in Stephenie Meyers' books. I was wondering how many other authors can command this kind of loyalty of their readers.

Twilight Baby Names - Stephenie Meyer

My name too, was literary inspired. During her pregnancy my mother read War and Peace and loved it. I was named after Countess Natasha Rostova, a beautiful woman who is also a delightful dancer and singer. My mother was an opera singer herself and I'm guessing she was hoping I would be blessed with the same silver vocal chords as my namesake. Sadly, no. The fictional Natasha also has men driven to teeth-gnashing distraction by her beauty and falling in love with her left and right. No wonder my mother succumbed to wishful thinking.

When I was in my twenties I tackled Tolstoy's massive tome and was amazed on two accounts. First, I was greatly impressed by my mother's stamina. In the first volume of Tolstoy's massive tome, Natasha is only a thirteen year old girl but then goes through many -- and I mean many -- trials and tribulations before - gasp -- finally ending up happily married to the novel's main hero. I know this novel is considered a work of towering literary genius, but I have to be honest: if it weren't for the fact that I was reading the book that inspired my name, I doubt I would have made it past the Battle of Borodino.

Second: I realized my mother has a weird penchant for desperately tragic tales set in Russia. We're talking revolution. Societies imploding. Armies perishing in the snow. After finishing War and Peace my Mum moved on to Boris Pasternak's doomed Dr. Zhivago and it became a toss-up whether I would be named Lara or Natasha. In the end Natasha prevailed because it means "nativity" and as it turned out I was born on Christmas Day (six days late). It was obviously meant. Aaw.

One of the lovely things about being a writer is that you have the freedom to name your characters. Well, most of the time. In Keeper of Light and Dust I wanted to call my heroine Katrina and nickname her Cricket. My American editor approved but my British editor most emphatically did not. She complained that there were too many creepy crawlies in the book already: a) my villain's alter ego is "Dragonfly" and b) my heroine keeps a chameleon as a pet. I like Katrina and wanted to stick with this name, but in the end decided to opt for the name Mia instead. Katrina without Cricket would have turned into Kat and we'd still have a problem.

The greatest fun I had with names was in Season of the Witch. Minnaloushe and Morrighan Monk: don't you just love the alliteration? I've adored the name Minnaloushe ever since I read Yates's wonderful poem, "The Cat and the Moon" and had long waited for an opportunity to use it in one of my books. But I had a problem: "Black Minnaloushe" is a tom not a tabby. Minnaloushe is a man’s name.

I finally decided to simply ignore this awkward fact. To my mind Minnaloushe sounds utterly feminine, gorgeous and voluptuous. In fact, wouldn't it be a lovely name for a little red-haired baby girl somewhere? (Hint.) She'll hate you for it, of course, and will have to endure cruel taunting on the playground but it will be worth it once she's all grown. What guy won't fall for a woman with a delicious name like that?

So let me know if any of you has succumbed to the temptation of naming your little one after Harry (Potter), James (Bond) or Anita (Blake). BTW the other name my mother liked was Amber, after the busty, ambitious courtesan in Kathleen Winsor's Restoration novel Forever Amber who starts out as a village girl and becomes a Duchess. More wishful thinking.

The Oddest Book Title Award

2010-03-26T20:58:00.003Z

Hi everyone,

One of the more interesting literary awards is the annual prize for The Oddest Book Title. This year’s winner is Dr. Daina Taimina for her delightful, Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes. Doesn’t this title just want to make you rush to buy?

When I read about it, I rather thought the author must be a made-up person as well. I mean, Daina Taimina? But in fact, Dr. Taimina is a serious mathematician who teaches at Cornell University. A Hyperbolic plane is a connected Riemannian manifold with negative Gaussian curvature. (As if you didn’t know that.)

Dr. Taimina is obviously blessed with an editor who has a sense of wit and an ear for resonance. We should all be so lucky. You will recall that in one of my previous blogs Bad Moon Rising: The Vexed Question of the Title I have moaned to you about the fact that authors rarely get to keep the titles they choose for their books.

But back to The Oddest Title. Over the years there have been some great choices. 2002 saw Living with Crazy Buttocks carry the honours. How Green were the Nazis made the 2006 shortlist along with Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan. My own favourite is still The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History, and Its Role in the World Today (1984). I would love to meet the person who wrote this.

It used to be the prerogative of Horace Bent, the diarist for The Bookseller Magazine, and a panel of judges to choose the entries and the winner. In 2000, however, the contest was thrown open to the public. Mr. Bent, aghast, threatened to resign when told of this populist storming of the bastions. (He has since reconsidered.) So next year, if you feel like it, you can nominate a title as well if you go to the Bookseller’s Twitter account. Just keep in mind that it has to be a genuine title of an actually published book. It doesn’t matter if the content of the book isn’t odd -- only the title needs to be eccentric. I can’t help thinking, though, that the two must go hand in hand. Consider a previous winner such as Bombproof your Horse. Or how about -- Reusing Old Graves: A Report on Popular British Attitudes. What’s contained in those pages must surely be as rivetingly bonkers as the titles themselves are peculiar.

So have you guys come across titles weird and wonderful? If you have, let’s hear ‘em. And let me know what is more important to you – an interesting title or a lovely book jacket? Do you remember titles? Or do you remember the names of authors? I rue the day the I decided to use my married name as my nom de plume. It gets mangled constantly (Mustard, Messer and my personal favourite –Monster.) I’m sure I’m losing sales on Amazon because readers have problems remembering how to spell it and can’t find me.

And then, finally: On Tuesday, I will be doing a live online interview on the paranormal book site bittenbybooks.com. The idea is that anyone can post questions on the site for me in real time and I will be at my desk to respond almost immediately.

The event opens at 12pm Central (6pm London) and will continue until I fall asleep at my keyboard. I took a peek at a past interview with Justin Somper, another UK author and he was still up and answering questions at 2am in the morning. Methinks I do not quite have Mr. Somper’s amazing energy. But I’ll try to stay up as late as I can.

Here’s how to participate: Go to bittenbybooks.com.

On the day of the event (Tuesday 30 March), the event will be on the front page at the top of the site.

Click on the text where it says >Join Author Natasha Mostert Interview, Chat and Contest Today!

The link will take you to a page where you can read an interview with me by the Bitten by Books Editor. Scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will find a comments form where you can type in your question.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Natasha Mostert

Authors and Reviewers: Bullets and Valentines

2010-02-23T10:44:00.002Z

Hi everyone,

Like many other writers I was fascinated by the spat last year between writer Alice Hoffman and the literary critic, Roberta Silman, who reviews for The Boston Globe. After a rather unflattering review of her book The Story Sisters, Ms. Hoffman mobilised her fan base on Twitter to show her displeasure and among other things called Ms Silman a "moron". Hoffman also supplied the reviewer's email address and phone number. She later defended this action by saying both were in the public domain.

Oops. Few things get authors more worked up than a bad review. You're calling my baby ugly? You're saying it has a squint? Bandy legs? A low IQ?

I don't approve of Ms Hoffman's "moron" remark - making it personal certainly won't help -- and forwarding the reviewer's personal details is not on. I've also just read the review again after sending the link on to another MySpace friend and to be fair, the review seems fairly mild and considered. However, I know well how helpless one feels when you receive a review which is blatantly unfair or was clearly written with the goal of showing off the reviewer's own piercing wit.

I recently received a stinking radio review in South Africa by a big name reviewer. The lady in question is in her late seventies and the world of the dojo and sweaty, muscled men obviously did not appeal to her. She advised me to go back to selling shoes, which was a job I held in my youth (selling shoes - now that's an adventure - food for another blog entry.) She also obviously found the book so intolerable that she couldn't bear to read it properly. The review was riddled with factual inaccuracies: a Keeper, I was interested to hear, is someone who keeps other people from growing old. I was reaching for my voodoo doll and pins, when fortunately, Monsters and Critics posted their review of Keeper. Ah yes, forget about music -- a flattering review is what soothes the savage breast. The voodoo doll went back in its drawer.

There is no doubt that the relationship between author and reviewer is a skewed one. Reviewers have the whip hand. As her Tweets show, Ms Hoffman is of the opinion that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander:

Critics can say as they please, but no one else can? You open the door and it's open.
An email to a reviewer is hate mail? But a hateful review is a love letter?"
Interesting, reviewers can say what they want. But when writers speak up they're "going after" reviewers

These days authors have not only print reviewers to contend with, but also online critics. When my first novel, The Midnight Side, was published ten years ago, the only reviews I received were reviews in newspapers and magazines. Another four books later and my novels are reviewed by housewives, darkdeciders and bookiewookies. Today anyone can hang out a shingle and start reviewing. Newspapers are closing down their review pages as their stretched budgets can no longer carry the salary of a full-time literary editor or even an outside reviewer. The slack is being picked up online, and the entire landscape of book reviewing has become far more democratic - or anarchic - depending on your point of view.

How do writers feel about this? Well, from what I gather when I congregate with my fellow scribes at Society of Authors meetings (this is where we come to have a good moan and drink cheap wine) they have mixed feelings. On the one hand, they don't always relish being critiqued by eighteen year old college students or told off by women whose only credentials seem to be their fondness for reading and their astonishing ability to run through a gazillion books in a week. On the other hand, there is no getting away from the fact that some of the old school print reviewers were unashamed snobs. Certain kinds of books were simply not reviewed. Online reviews have given exposure to many authors who otherwise would never have received a look-in.

Before the online revolution, not just anyone could call himself a literary reviewer, of course -- it was a title to be coveted, but bestowed on only a few. These erudite gentlemen and ladies of the press would often have degrees in English or Comparative Literature and not only was their knowledge vast, but their own prose was superior. With a few deft words, the author's aspirations would either be skewered, or confirmed. Reviewers were posh. Here in the UK they were usually men and to this day, their names have resonance: Anthony Powell of Punch, Martin Amis of New Statesman, Terence Kilmartin of The Observer, Mark Amory of The Spectator. When my debut novel, Midnight Side, was picked for discussion by The Literary Review, I was awed to think that my novel was being critiqued in a publication that had Auberon Waugh at its head.

Whereas a newspaper review is kitted out in a black tie, an online review can wear tattoos, nose rings or frilly aprons. I have to admit to rather liking the egalitarian vibe of online reviews. And make no mistake: some of these reviewers are very, very good. Despite their deliberately weird, "shocking" or cutesy monikers, they are highly talented readers and skilful interpreters of text. When I receive a good review from one of them, I feel as chuffed as if I've received a good review in the Daily Mail.

However, it is also true that many online reviews can be deeply amateurish and nothing is more amateurish than giving away the ending of the book. I'll never forget how sad I was to read the following about my book Windwalker:

How this book ever got called a romance book I will never know. Half way through the book the boy and girl still had not met much less kissed! And when they do meet Adam stay around for a few days and then poof he's dead. Now tell me what kind of romance is that!? If I had not been stuck on a plane I never would have finished reading this book.

In my own defense, my hero did not exactly go "poof": it was a far more elegant demise. But I agree with the reviewer - Windwalker is my darkest novel and should never have been marketed as a romance. And it should be noted that one of the reasons why Ms Hoffman was so incensed, was that Ms Stilman also gave away the ending. Very gauche of The Boston Globe. My South African reviewer went even further. She decided to read out loud the very last sentence of my novel and rather effectively destroyed the punch line of the book.

A review like the following, on the other hand, is fair:

(Mostert) built everything up about these two people destined to be together and they didn't end up together. It was probably supposed to be romantic and show how these characters grew and blah, blah, blah. All i got out of it was a loss of $7 and a headache.

Apart from the spoiler, I cannot really fault this comment, which was written by a reader who posted on Amazon. She paid good money for my book, it disappointed her and she has every right to say so, even if her analysis of my work is written in a rather free-wheeling style.

Reviews are, of course, always subjective. But some reviewers will give a bad review simply because they don't like the subject matter of the book. This is like a food critic who doesn't like chocolate giving a bad write-up to every single chocolate dessert he is served regardless of whether the dish succeeds in the chocolate department. This is unacceptable. Judge the book for what it is trying to accomplish. Is the writing superior? Is the plot tight? Even if you don't like ballet dancing transvestites, does the ballet dancing transvestite hero of the book convince as a character?

Then there is the question of skimming. If you are a reader, then it is your right to skim if the book doesn't hold your attention. But if you pin on a reviewer's badge and are sent free books by publishers, then there is no excuse for such laziness. One reviewer found herself unwilling to finish my book - (an indictment of the book itself, of course) -- but still posted her review and added kindly that she felt sure the story would pick up later on. This kind of thing would never be tolerated in a print review. Neither would mangled titles (Keeper of Light and Lust - not kidding here), and wild inaccuracies. Or comments that blatantly reflect the reviewer's own personal prejudices. If someone critiques my exposition or prose, this is something I can work with . But I am at a loss when I receive reviews criticising me for writing books that do not reflect "Christian values".

I should, however, stress that I am grateful for any reviewer taking the time to read my work. There are many authors out there looking for attention and if your work is picked for review, that is a compliment in itself.

Right, that was quite cathartic ! But let me know what you guys think? Do you pay attention to reviews? Do they influence what you buy? Do you make a distinction between online and print reviews?

And finally: I now have a newsletter. Yes, indeed - this is me getting organised. If you are interested in subscribing , here is the link:

www.natashamostert.com/newsletter/

I am also now on Facebook - please join me there:

www.facebook.com/pages/Natasha-Mostert/209751266089

Thanks guys. Hope you are all well and keeping warm. We have such grim weather here in London - the coldest in thirty years they tell us...

Cheetahs and Smoking Dutchmen

2010-01-08T17:56:00.003Z

Hi everyone,

Hope you guys are all doing well and not suffering too badly from holiday withdrawal symptoms. I am still in South Africa but I have started work myself this week -- not easy with a blue sky, beautiful mountains and lush vineyards outside my window.

Close to my home in Stellenbosch

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, this had been a special Christmas for me. It was the first time in seven years that I had both my brothers in the same room when we opened our Christmas presents. It was also the first time my adorable six year old nephew, Carl, visited South Africa. When my brother and sister-in-law first told me they were thinking about braving the marathon flight from the United States to Cape Town I was delighted, but dubious. After all, nineteen hours in coach with a six year old is enough to make gladiators weep. But my family is made of stern stuff! They arrived -- if not exactly sprightly -- emphatically ready for adventure.

This being Africa, Carl wanted to see animals. The big five! Not easy to arrange as most of the game reserves are in the north of the country, but we managed to do something pretty cool for the little guy, anyway. Close to Stellenbosch is the Cheetah Outreach Program, which is helping to ensure the survival of free-ranging cheetahs. Sadly, cheetahs are endangered. They are not only the target of poachers but because they do not roam in prides like lions do, they are at a natural disadvantage in the wild.

A female cheetah is like Greta Garbo - she vants to be alone. She raises her cubs on her own, without the help of a male protector. (Male cheetahs are party animals and stay with their male siblings for the duration of their lives.) Because of its magnificent speed, a cheetah is usually able to outrun its prey but then often cannot defend its catch against the much bigger lions who wait around for it to do the work before moving in and taking the kill for themselves. Some lionesses also have the horrible habit of waiting until the cheetah female starts to hunt, before deliberately searching for the unattended cubs and biting them to death. Nature at its least pretty.

When we arrived at the Outreach Program we were required to disinfect our hands and the soles of our shoes. (Inbreeding has given the animals vulnerable immune systems.) We then walked around watching cheetahs do cheetah things - yawning, strutting, butting heads, looking beautiful and aloof - but surprisingly little running despite there being ample space for them to roam. I was surprised to learn from the wardens that cheetahs don't really like to run. If I were the fastest land animal on earth, I think I would have found it tough to keep myself from constantly showing off, but apparently cheetahs will only reluctantly break into a sprint.

The first part of our visit took place behind the safety of a chainlink fence, but then we were taken inside an enclosure with one of the animals. This is a picture of my brother and Carl making friends with Joseph. Isn't he gorgeous? He is seven years old and has such presence. This is a guy who knows he is the most fabulous thing around.

Carl with Cheetah

The gentleman holding Joseph's head is his handler and it is his task to keep Joseph happy and, I would hope, well-fed. Most cheetahs will not take kindly to being petted and do not wish to interact with their human admirers. However, every now and then you will find a cheetah who gets along well with humans and who adores being stroked. Joseph is one of them but he always has the option of getting up and leaving if he feels bored. He will also never be forced to submit to being handled if he doesn't feel like it. Most of the time, it seems, he does feel like it. When you stroke him, his purr sounds like distant thunder. Before we were allowed to approach him, we were given instructions on how to touch. Strong, firm movements are required as Joseph finds hesitant strokes irritating (and may mistake them for flies) and could just swat at you in annoyance if you don't get on with it.

Carl had a fantastic time and the rest of his visit was equally successful. The only disappointment was that we were not able to take him to the top of Table Mountain. This was high on his wish list and we had scheduled the visit for the day before he was due to fly back to the States. Sadly, on the day itself, we woke up to find Table Mountain shrouded in cascading clouds and the cable car lift closed. We had to explain to Carl that the devil and his opponent, the scowling Dutch sea captain, Van Hunk, had once again lit their pipes and were trying to outsmoke each other in a weird macho contest that has been going on for three hundred years. And even though wemay not have made it to the top, we did spend time on the Eastern slopes of the mountain at Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens.

Kirstenbosch

Carl in Kirstenbosch

Home to only indigenous South African plants, Kirstenbosch is arguably the oldest botanical garden in the world. To my mind, it is the most beautiful place on earth. When I die, this is where I would like to have my ashes scattered.

And on this rather pensive note, let me hasten to wish you all a wonderful 2010! May the next decade bring a world that is peaceful, creative and tolerant. And let's have some serious fun while we're about it!

Unpublished Writers: To Pay or Not To Pay?

2009-12-07T07:26:00.000Z

Hi guys,

I read with interest that The Board of Mystery Writers of America voted unanimously last week to remove Harlequin and all of its imprints from their list of Approved Publishers. MWA states that it did not "take this action lightly." The decision was made because "Harlequin violates MWA's rules regarding the relationship between a traditional publisher and its for-pay services." This means Harlequin authors will no longer be considered for The Edgars Award and new writers signing with Harlequin will not be able to use this as proof that they are published authors, which is a prerequisite for acquiring Active Member Status.

The row has been brewing for a while. At the heart of the matter lies Harlequin's policy of directing prospective authors whose manuscripts they had rejected, to resubmit those manuscripts to Harlequin's self-publishing imprint, DellArte (formerly known as Harlequin Horizons.) DellArte charges writers a fee to read their manuscripts in preparation for self-publication. In a letter to MWA, Harlequin's Publisher and CEO, Donna Hayes, confirmed that this is Harlequin's standard practice and that they make rejected writers aware that Harlequin editors are monitoring DellArte titles for possible acquisition. To put it very bluntly: pay us (or at least our imprint) and we may consider your manuscript afresh.

Pay-for editorial services abound. My previous editor at Penguin is now a freelance editor and for a fee, will help you whip your manuscript into shape. There is nothing wrong with this: she is a professional with a track record of editing successful authors. She will not make you any false promises that your manuscript will get published, but she will offer you the opportunity to have your work reviewed by someone with experience in the field and you will receive from her a serious commitment to help you raise the standard of your work.

What Harlequin is doing, is different. I can not comment on the standard of editing that writers receive at DellArte as I have no knowledge of this. But I am concerned that the carrot that is dangled in front of people who are desperate to see their work in print, may be fake. Writers who have not made the cut at Harlequin, flock to DellArte not because of the editing service, but because they think they will be given a second chance. This second chance is not guaranteed, of course, and the author may part with a substantial sum of money and still not have the manuscript taken on inhouse.

The fact of the matter is that we writers are easy targets. We all yearn to be published. I remember well that incredible hunger that gnawed at me as I sent out The Midnight Side to twenty-seven agents over a two year period who all turned it down on the spot. Once I managed to find an agent, my ego received yet another round of battering from editors who sent me charmless rejection letters in which they bothered not at all to pull their punches. One memorable response stated: "Oh, please. This is all too woo woo confusing for me." Another editor reprimanded my agent for submitting a novel, which "although startling in its conception, is nevertheless far from ready for publication." By that point I would have been willing to take out another mortgage on my house if it would have helped me get my novel accepted.

Of course, if you're simply looking for feedback of your work without any strings attached, and if you're willing to write a cheque for this kind of service, that's fine. The need for feedback is a very basic one for unpublished writers. Published writers want feedback too, but we have editors who slap us around the head and tell us exactly what's wrong with our prose. And once the book is on the shelf, we receive reviews - sometimes brutal, sometimes nice. Published writers have it covered. Unpublished writers, on the other hand, are constantly looking for the attention of a sympathetic but knowledgeable reader. And this is tough to find because it is a big commitment to read someone's work and to give a considered opinion.

I receive on average around twenty-five such requests a week. I am contacted through social networking sites, through my discussion board and increasingly by letters sent either to my agent or my publisher. I feel dreadful every single time I don't respond but it is now my policy not to respond to any such request -- regardless. Whether it is a poem or a novel - it takes time and creative energy to formulate a response. It would be easy to shoot off a few stock platitudes to someone who asks for my feedback but I have too much respect for anyone who writes and I am far too aware of the emotional investment that goes into writing, to do so. A few years ago I listened to Sandra Brown at The Edgars Awards saying that she no longer reads any-one - published or unpublished. I remember how shocked I was, and how disapproving. How on earth can you call yourself a writer and not read? These days I am not quite as judgmental. After writing eight to nine hours every day, I am drained. All I feel like doing is kicking a bag or punching my long-suffering kickboxing instructor, which is why most evenings you'll find me in the dojo doing just that.

My advice to unpublished authors who are searching for feedback is to do what I did and to build a circle of first readers --one precious friend at a time. Don't just rely on friends who are bound to be uncritically supportive - that is not going to help you. Find friends who are avid readers and who are able to articulate both likes and dislikes. Beware of toxic readers. Sometimes friends who may be wonderful friends in all other circumstances - looking after your dog when you're going out of town, making you chicken soup when you're feeling poorly, sending you funny e-cards when you have a crisis in your love life - will devastate you with their unrelenting criticism of your work. Often these people harbour a deep seated - even unconscious -- envy of your ability to express yourself creatively. However, it is also true that you need to build up a tolerance to unkind comments. Once you get published and those reviews start coming in, you will need the hide of rhinoceros, trust me.

And finally, when you ask someone to read your work, don't ask for a blanket opinion. Send your reader questions: Which character was most convincing? Why? Any characters that you found irritating? Was there a particular chapter where the narrative tension slackened and you were tempted to leave the story and go bake a cake instead? Did the ending move you? Leave you stuck in neutral? Disappointed? Did you lose the plot at any point? Were any of the transitions between chapters fuzzy?

Right, on to other things! Hope you guys are enjoying the holiday season and are making merry. I am getting ready to lift anchors in a few short days. As always I will be spending Christmas in South Africa and this year is going to be memorable. My youngest brother lives in the States and he, my American sister-in-law and my adorable six year old nephew, Carl, will be joining us. (They will be flying for nineteen hours - yikes!) This will be Carl's first visit to South Africa. We plan on doing all the touristy things such as taking a cable ride to the top of Table Mountain and attending an ostrich race. We may even introduce this little Yank to the glory that is rugby. I have another brother who lives in South Africa and the two brothers have not seen each other in seven years. My mother is quite overwhelmed to think she will be waking up to find all three her children under the same Christmas tree. Aah...

Thanks everyone! Wishing you all happy holidays. May 2010 be the best year yet!

Richmond Literature Festival Feedback

2009-11-14T10:06:00.000Z

Hi everyone,

Just a quick report back on my talk last night at the Richmond Literature Festival. Thanks to all of you who sent me messages of support and good wishes ahead of time. They cheered me considerably!

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I was nervous about this one. The Richmond Literature Festival draws some big names and I was wondering how I was going to entice people to come to my event when authors of the calibre of AS Byatt and Fay Weldon are also on the programme. Not to mention Martin Amis who will be wowing an audience at his event tomorrow. Amis made headlines here in London only recently after criticising British readers for spending their credit crunch pounds on Jordan's book instead of supporting authors more worthy. Jordan, for those of you on the other side of the Atlantic, is a British celebrity known for her impressive -- but fake -- assets (she even named the dynamic duo). How on earth, I thought, was I going to get people to come to my gig if Amis beckons only a day later?

On top of this, the weather turned apocalyptic. We're talking floods. 70mph winds. Torrential rain. I believe an ark was seen floating on the Thames. I fully expected to face a room filled with empty chairs. I even worried my loyal band of friends who always turn up for these events may balk at braving the elements.

But it was a lovely evening! People came and one wonderful MySpace friend even drove for seven hours through horrendous traffic and billowing winds to support me. Good karma is his in the next life. The organisers of the event contacted me a few days ago asking if I would please bring props to reinforce the "cooky, crazy, creepy tenor of the night's proceedings." (Their words.) I have a wonderful Bride of Frankenstein Halloween outfit and was getting all excited about this idea, but sadly, my husband vetoed it. In the end, though, props were unnecessary. Located in Twickenham, the Octagon Room at the Orleans House Gallery, is set in preserved natural woodland and driving from the entrance to the house itself is quite spooky – all dark, looming trees and wet leaves on the mossy ground. The room itself is baroque and was built in 1721. It is gorgeous and was the perfect venue for an evening of fantasy, supernatural and gothic. The vibe was good and the audience friendly although I did have one gentleman in the front row who asked deeply erudite questions and who told me afterwards that this was his first literary event and he only came because his wife made him :happy

I've attached two pictures for you – not great pictures, in fact rather terrible – they were taken by my husband on his iphone. I don't know if it is the photographer or the phone that is at fault but I hope it will at least give you an idea of how very pretty the room itself is.

Thanks again for your good wishes. Stay warm and dry!

Of Bloody Toes and Other Gruesome Things...

2009-10-19T08:55:00.000+01:00

Hi everyone,

Some of you have sent me messages asking about my status line in which I congratulate my friend Carlos on finishing the Jungle Marathon. For those of you unfamiliar with this torture fest, the Jungle Marathon takes place over five days and covers 200 km of hostile terrain in the Amazon. We're talking jaguars! Snakes as thick as a man's thigh! Piranhas! Apart from jungle trails, the competitors also have to wade through swamps, climb steep elevations and do river crossings. The second to last stage have them running 87 km for two days non-stop. Carlos is my kickboxing trainer and a former European champion. Believe me, he is no sissy and I once saw him fight with two broken ribs. But this was something else altogether. He was one of 55 out of 120 competitors who managed to finish the entire 200km, but he is shattered. His feet look like something out of a George Romero movie. He wasn't just doing all of this for the T-shirt, though, he was also running for charity. Sponsorship money will go towards helping AIDS orphans in Kenya. www.justgiving.com/jungle-marathon/

From bloody toes to another blood sport. The Frankfurt Book Fair took place last week. FBF is Europe's biggest book fair and every autumn publishers and agents from all over the world gather to sell and buy foreign rights to books. Editors meet with agents over Bratwurst and kegs of beer and engage other editors in bitter battle to try and secure the best titles for their respective houses.

By all accounts the 2009 FBF was a rather subdued occasion with both sales and attendance down on previous years. American publishers sent fewer editors across the ocean and there were fewer mega book sales. The hottest fiction title of the Fair was The Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. Viking US reports that they've sold well over seven figures in worldwide rights sales so far. Harkness's book is her debut novel and in it she describes a world in which four species - vampires, witches, demons and humans -- live side-by-side. The heroine falls in love with a vampire although inter-species sex is prohibited. Not exactly a novel premise, maybe, but by all accounts the writing is excellent. On the non-fiction front, the book of the Fair was The Mandela Diaries, sold by my own agent, Jonny Geller.

It has been a very tough year for scribes in general. Whereas Dan Brown still sells up a storm, for the rest of us, the picture is far from rosy. I belong to the UK Society of Authors, which recently commissioned a survey and found that authors' advances have been cut by as much as 70%. The majority of authors expressed fears that their contracts will simply not be renewed.

But even those with contracts are not safe. It used to be that once a publisher has signed a contract with an author, the writer was assured that he will be paid the full advance and that his book will go into print. Yes, there is something called an "acceptance" clause, which means that if the publisher deems the manuscript to be of too poor a quality to publish, that it has the right of refusal. But the only author I know of who fell foul of this clause is Joan Collins. You may remember the case? It happened in 1996 when Ms. Collins took Random House to court after they claimed her manuscript was "unreadable." During the trial Random House tried to prove its point by reading out loud sections of Ms. Collins's manuscript:

"The eye signals between Paul and Venetia precluded any necessity for small talk. They each knew what they wanted. She saw him quiver as she gave him a languorous look from beneath her heavy-lidded innocent eyes as she danced lasciviously close to him at the club and they made a date to meet."

This could not have been very pleasant for the plaintiff, but she did win her case. Random House had to pay her 1 million dollars. For that kind of money, I suppose putting up with a little public ridicule might seem like an excellent deal.

The only other clause a publisher can use to revoke a contract, is the one which states that an author has to make her deadline. In practice, an agent can usually manage to get his author another 3 to 6 months wiggle room if necessary. It does irritate your publisher somewhat as promotion and editing schedules get messed up, but publishers realise that writing a novel is not like baking a cake and the creative process is not always on tap. But now, the waters are bloody. Publishers are using this clause to get rid of authors in whom they no longer have faith and agents have sent out letters to their clients urging them to meet their deadlines. There have been reports of authors getting axed even after they've already worked for more than two years on a manuscript.

Anyway, enough of the gloom! In this economy everyone is suffering so why should writers insist on being pampered. However, industry insiders are predicting a revolution - not in the sense that authors will storm publishing houses and drag editors to the tumbril - but in the sense that book publishing may evolve into a hybrid form. Check out this link in which Anthony Zuiker's new "digi-book" is being discussed. The idea is that readers will buy a book and then combine the reading experience with video material and interactive online surfing.

Anthony Zuiker's Digi-Novel

How do you guys feel about this? Would you like to have this kind of multi-media experience when you read? Or is this a bridge too far?

And then finally: a reminder that yours truly will be talking about suspense, fantasy and gothic in the 21st century at the Richmond Literature Festival on the evening of 13 November. Those of you who don't have to take a plane to get here-- it will be great to see you in the audience. I am nervous! As I mentioned before, some of the other authors participating in the Festival are pretty amazing writers -- AS Byatt, Martin Amis, Tibor Fischer. I've been trying to think of innovative ways to tempt people to attend my presentation instead but all I can think of is to offer them free alcohol. I have no shame and I can attest to the success of this strategy. Many years ago, on an icy winter's evening, I took part in a book reading event at Borders Bookstore in Oxford Street. There was a massive poster outside mentioning that free South African wine was on offer. It was a gratifying sight: every seat was filled. Of course, it took me a while to realise why the entire back row was asleep. These poor people were homeless and had obviously decided the offer of booze and warmth made the boredom worthwhile.

If you're interested in attending, here is a link to my events page: www.natashamostert.com/events/

Hope to see you there and to raise a glass together!

The Most Popular Book on the Planet

2009-09-20T09:48:00.000+01:00

Hi everyone,

Lost Symbol mania is upon us and a good deal of chatter has been about the incredible discounted prices at which Dan Brown's book is selling. I don't know what the situation is in the US, but over here you can pick up the book at your supermarket for £4.99. My agent, Jonny Geller, was interviewed by The Bookseller and was quoted as saying: "If the most popular book on earth is a fiver, what does it tell the punter? Books are worthless. Retailers are just throwing away their industry."

Deep discounts are a fact of life for authors these days. If you want to be sold next to tinned cans of spaghetti and frozen TV dinners - and we all beg for the opportunity, believe me - you and your publisher have to settle for a diminished retail price in the hope of big sales and upping your name recognition. But it is rather amazing to think that the UK book industry has so far given away approximately £6.3 million in margin on a guaranteed bestseller.

The Lost Symbol was five years in the making and I found Brown's admission that he was paralysed by fear when he started writing the novel rather touching. He admitted to becoming very "self-aware" and said, "Instead of writing 'This is what the character does' you say, 'Wait, millions of people are going to read this. It's like a tennis player who thinks too hard about a stroke - you're temporarily crippled.' Well, the crutches certainly went flying. Lost Symbol is predicted to be the biggest selling hardback in the UK this year - possibly, if it can overtake Harry Potter, this decade.

The whole Lost Symbol adventure has been good fun, of course. Brown's novel is sold in the UK by Transworld, my own publisher, and there was much intrigue in the run-up to its publication. Before its release only four people inhouse had the privilege of reading the manuscript and in order to keep the content secret, passwords and encryptions were used on internal and external communications. (I tried my best to winkle some info from one of those in the know, but without success ) The title, "Lost Symbol" was chosen for its blandness so that imitators and parasites wouldn't be able to launch comparable books beforehand. The booksellers also fed the frenzy with odd opening hours and speed readers racing through the text so the stores could get their reviews out first. One independent bookseller - probably in desperation at not being able to match the deep discounts of the chains - offered customers a slice of cake in the shape of the White House. This is an innovative bookstore - when Thomas Harris published Hannibal, they served their customers fava beans and Chianti .

And then there is all that delicious sneering and mud-throwing from other authors with Philip Pullman leading the pack and calling Brown's writing "flat, stunted and ugly". Professional reviewers here in the UK have generally not been kind either. The New York Times, on the other hand, has been quite positive even as it castigates the author for using "so many italics that even brilliant experts wind up sounding like teenaged girls." But in the end, of course, it is the readers that matter, not the reviewers. As long as his fans are not disappointed, Mr. Brown will have done his job.

But why is this book the most popular book on the planet? Why is Dan Brown the number one bestselling author in modern hisory, with the exception of J.K Rowling?

There have always been books that manage to spark our imagination, or that touch something deep inside of us. Usually we fall in love with a book because we find the characters irresistible. Gone with the Wind is often described as pulp fiction but if it is, it is amazing pulp fiction and the characters will survive long after more intellectually challenging novels, written in more elegant language have been forgotten. Brown's characters are not usually singled out for praise and though I find Robert Langdon - Brown's hero - pleasant enough and rather dig his Harris Tweed jacket -- the professor does not rock my boat in the same way Rhett Butler does. So if it isn't his characters that hook the readers, is it the controversy that surrounds Mr. Brown's books? Many readers were scandalised by his premise of Mary Magdalene being the mother of Christ's child. But Philip Pullman's theological theories are equally as controversial or more so: his next book will be titled "The Good Man, Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ". Pullman's novels have sold 15,000 000 copies - pretty fantastic numbers to be sure - but The Da Vinci Code alone sold more than 80 000 000. Of course, Brown's books are usually praised for the relentless momentum of the narrative and the way in which he laces his story with historical details and puzzles. I too, admire him for his page-turning abilities - getting the reader to ask 'What's next' is one of the toughest things to pull off in thriller writing. But there are many other fine writers out there who can spin a pretty breathless yarn, but their books don't break the record for total lifetime sales for adult hardback fiction in the first thirty-six hours of publication.

So what is it then? Do tell. You guys are the experts - the readers buying the book --so let me in on the secret, please? What is it you love about his work? How many of you have ordered his book in advance? How many of you would be happy to buy Lost Symbol at full retail price? Or are you one of the disillusioned who refer to 15 September as "Brown Out Day" and "Beigeocalypse"?

Onto something else! On 13 November I will be speaking at The Richmond Literature Festival and I am shaking in my boots! I do quite a bit of public speaking but this event is a decided step up for me. People who attend the Richmond Festival are usually interested in serious literature, not commercial fiction and some of the other writers who have agreed to speak that week will be Martin Amis, Tibor Fischer, Steven Berkoff and A.S. Byatt. Very intimidating. So any of you who can make it, please do come to my talk and support me! I'd love to see you there. Here are the details: http://www.natashamostert.com/events/

Thanks! Hope you are all having fun and not suffering too much from the post Summer blues...

We Love Vampires! Of Blood and Fangs...

2009-08-16T09:56:00.002+01:00

Hi everyone,

I was amused to read in The Independent newspaper last week an article about "The secret blood sucking world of Mr. Darcy." It seems a writer called Amanda Grange will soon be publishing a book titled Mr. Darcy, Vampyre, in which she reveals the dark private world of Jane Austen's dashing romantic hero. Regency with a bite.

At some primal level, most of us are attracted to the idea of vampires. Women in particular, adore dark, intense guys with good teeth. I've been trying to analyze my own attraction to the breed. Vampires are either cruel and careless (sort of cool) or tortured and agonised (cool and ever so romantic.) No wonder so many of us mortals aspire to undead status. In fact, there doesn't seem to be much of a downside to not having a heartbeat. True, vampires only walk at night and they're always hungry. But they never grow fat and night time allows them to opportunity to indulge their adventurous dress sense. Think Wesley Snipes in Blade. However, it did occur to me that if you're going to be a vampire then you'd better make sure to get bitten when you're young. I can't think of anything more dreadful than to become a member of the living dead at an advanced age. While every other vampire around you slinks around in leather looking sexy, you have to suffer wrinkles and sagging flesh. Imagine having a double chin and flabby underarms for all eternity.

Vampires, of course, have no soul and that is bad. Still, in vampire universe a soul doesn't seem to be necessary to fall in love, wrestle with ethical dilemmas or engage in fits of self-loathing. The only other rather uncomfortable aspect of being a vampire I can think of - and here I'm referring to male vampires - is their dodgy attraction to very young teenaged girls who are either of the kick-ass kind (Buffy) or the tremulous, fall-over-their-feet clumsy kind (Twilight). These guys are invariably beautiful, strong, keen- sensed and brilliant but they can't find better use of their time than to hang around school buildings? But maybe that's just me and I have no imagination. A friend of mine says she finds Twilight's seventy year old Edward sexy in part because of his "self-discipline." At first I thought she was referring to the whole "will he kiss her, or will he eat her" angle but it turned out she meant the fact that he regularly attends high school and delivers his science projects on time :)

And then there is the True Blood TV series based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris. After reading a glowing review, I decided to watch. As I haven't read any of the books, I didn't quite know what to expect except "wild sex," which the reviewer mentioned several times in her write-up. The opening sequence with the credits is great - I love it -- and the Louisiana setting is nicely sultry. However, I wasn't as blown away by the rest as I had hoped. (Mind, I'm only on the third episode so far, so who knows.) Certainly the main premise - vampires living openly among humans - is an imaginative twist and there are cute touches such as the newspaper headline proclaiming "Angelina adopts vampire baby!" The sex is certainly wild, but - dare I say -- a little unappetising? But my main problem is with the characters. I find them startling, but not appealing :( And I don't particularly care what happens to them. I can't help feeling that the producers are trying way too hard to be edgy and to differentiate this series from the rest of the pack. Take this scene in True Blood where vampire hero, Bill, cleans up the blood from an injured Sookie by swishing his tongue across her forehead. I still can't make up my mind whether this is gross in a romantic way (he is caring for her the only way he knows how) or simply gross. Nah. It's just gross.

Lest I am giving the wrong impression, let me state unequivocally that I am a huge vampire fan myself. Josh Whedon is a genius and Buffy his finest creation. The scene where Buffy kills Angel - "close your eyes" is heart-stoppingly poignant. But to my mind Ann Rice's Interview with a Vampire is still the best of its kind. She manages to convey in her characters an authentic emptiness of the soul while raising all kinds of interesting questions about our relationship with our Maker. And Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula is one of my favourite movies. It was shredded by the critics, but I very much admire it for its magnificent, operatic scale: a truly tortured, black-as-blood love story.

Will I ever write a vampire novel myself? In a way, I already have. Keeper of Light and Dust was my attempt to create a vampire for the twenty-first century. My guy gets turned on by light, not blood. He is, of course, also brilliant, beautiful and keen-sensed but instead of hanging around school playgrounds he keeps himself busy with quantum physics and Zen philosophy. Ah, yes. Classy, classy. Edward, eat your heart out.

So let me know if vampires are your thing? Do you wear vials of blood around your neck. Will you read anything vampire and if so, why?

Onto something else! For those of you who live in London, I will be at Ealing Library on 8 September talking about my books and taking questions from the audience. If you have nothing better to do, I'd love to see you there. On 13 November I'll be at the Richmond-on-Thames Literary Festival addressing the following topic: "From Bram Stoker, to Andrew Davidson, to Stephenie Meyer: the increasing use of fantasy in suspense fiction." Vampires again... Here is a link to the page on my website that gives details of both events: http://www.natashamostert.com/events/

Hope you guys are doing well. Sadly, summer in England has turned into a wash-out. We had such a good start - first Wimbledon in years not to rain out - but then things became drizzly...:sad

The Keeper Game Results

2009-07-01T16:10:00.001+01:00

Hi everyone,

First -- to all of you who played The Keeper Game – the game has now concluded and I am waiting to hear from the winner (whose name is posted on the game page www.thekeepergame.com) whether she would prefer a Kindle or a pair of pink boxing gloves. It will be interesting to see if the lady is a reader or a fighter. She could be both, of course!

I found the stats fascinating: 37.4% of players were Warriors. 31.6% scored the profile of Thief and 31% were Healers. Probably a good thing that the pragmatic, feet-on-the ground types are in the majority rather than the obsessives or the touchy-feelies BTW even though there are no more prizes to be won, the game is still active. So if you haven't tried it yet, give it a spin!

Here are the two banner ads I ran on MySpace to advertise the game. As I said before, I'm all for subtlety in my books but when it comes to promotion I have no shame. One was intended for a more general public and one was targeted at martial arts and fighting sites. I'll leave it to you to figure out which is which

It was an interesting experience running the ad. One has to conform to strict rules concerning size and layout but it is fair to say that MySpace is not nearly as strict as Facebook. Facebook commercials are very uniform-looking (pretty much like Facebook itself) and do not allow for great artistic freedom. Furthermore, you get slapped down for sloppy spelling, poor grammar and for misleading the consumer: Play the game. Live forever. Obviously a misleading promise. Bad girl.

And then, thanks again to all of you who responded with ideas to my previous blog. I will be making very good use of your feedback next week when I head to New York to attend the annual Thrillerfest convention. I'm very excited – this will be my first attendance and I'm looking forward to the panel discussion. I just hope we draw a good audience. Unfortunately, our discussion goes head to head with two other panel discussions that are scheduled for the same time slot. One of them has the catchy title of "Will you sign my bra?" I'm actually not quite sure what this debate will be about but I rather think it may draw more interest than ‘How international is the modern thriller market."

Anyway, wish me luck! I also have a forty minute taped radio interview scheduled with a very impressive interviewer by the name of Pia Lindstrom. Ms Lindstrom is the sister of Isabella Rossellini but she is known in her own right for her skilled interviewing technique. To say that I am slightly apprehensive is putting it mildly. Ms Lindstrom obviously believes in thorough preparation and has asked me to send her copies of all my books in advance of the interview. My problem is that I can hardly remember my early books. My memory is feeble and I have difficulty remembering the twists and turns of the plot lines. Furthermore, as I am a fickle woman, I tend to forget my heroes as soon as I move on to the next man in my life. Fingers crossed...

Thanks again, everyone! My panel discussion takes place on 11 July and I'll report back to you guys soon after. Have fun and I hope the weather where you are, is as spectacular as it is over here.

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not: Authors and Reviewers

2009-06-27T15:51:00.001+01:00

Hi everyone,

Like many other writers I was fascinated by the recent spat between writer Alice Hoffman and the literary critic, Roberta Silman who reviews for The Boston Globe. After a rather unflattering review of her book The Story Sisters, Ms. Hoffman mobilised her fan base on Twitter to show her displeasure and among other things called Ms Silman a "moron.' Hoffman also supplied the reviewer's email address and phone number. She later defended this action by saying both were in the public domain.

Ah, yes. Few things get authors more worked up than a bad review. You're saying my baby has a squint? Bandy legs? A low IQ?

The truth is that apart from reaching for the voodoo doll at the back of the closet and writing "Critics are scum pond" on the bathroom mirror, there isn't much an author can do. There is no reply button to a vicious review.

I don't approve of Ms Hoffman's "moron" remark - making it personal won't help -- or forwarding the reviewer's personal details. However, I know well how helpless one feels when you receive a review which is blatantly unfair or was clearly written with the goal of showing off the reviewer's own piercing wit. There is no doubt that the relationship between author and reviewer is a skewed one. Reviewers have the whip hand. As her Tweets show, Ms Hoffman obviously feels that what goes for the goose should also go for the gander:

Critics can say as they please, but no one else can? You open the door and it's open.
An email to a reviewer is hate mail? But a hateful review is a love letter?
Interesting, reviewers can say what they want. But when writers speak up they're "going after" reviewers

These days authors don't only have to contend with print reviewers but also online critics.

When my first novel, The Midnight Side, was published nine years ago, the only reviews I received were reviews in newspapers and magazines. Another four books later and my books are reviewed by housewives, bookwhores, darkdeciders and bookiewookies. Today anyone can hang out a shingle and start reviewing. Newspapers are closing down their review pages as their stretched budgets can no longer carry the salary of a full-time literary editor or even an outside reviewer. The slack is being picked up online, and the entire landscape of book reviewing has become far more democratic - or anarchic - depending on your point of view.

How do writers feel about this? Well, from what I can gather when I congregate with my fellow scribes at Society of Authors meetings (this is where we come to have a good moan and drink cheap wine) they have mixed feelings. On the one hand, they don't always relish being critiqued by nineteen year old college students or told off by women whose only credentials seem to be their fondness for reading and their astonishing ability to run through a gazillion books in a week. On the other hand, there is no getting away from the fact that some of the old school print reviewers were unashamed snobs. Certain kinds of books were simply not reviewed. Online reviews have given exposure to many authors who otherwise would never have received a look-in.

Before the online revolution, not just anyone could call himself a literary reviewer, of course -- it was a title to be coveted and bestowed on only a few. These erudite gentlemen and ladies of the press would often have degrees in English or Comparative Literature and not only was their knowledge vast, but their own prose was superior. With a few deft, elegant words, the author's aspirations would either be skewered, or confirmed. Reviewers were posh. Here in the UK they were usually men and to this day, their names have resonance: Anthony Powell of Punch, Martin Amis of New Statesman, Terence Kilmartin of The Observer, Mark Amory of The Spectator. When Midnight Side was picked for review by The Literary Review, I was awed to think that my novel was being discussed in a publication that had Auberon Waugh at its head.

"How this book ever got called a romance book I will never know. Half way through the book the boy and girl still had not met much less kissed! And when they do meet Adam stay around for a few days and then poof he's dead. Now tell me what kind of romance is that!? If I had not been stuck on a plane I never would have finished reading this book."

In my own defense, it wasn't exactly "poof", it was a subtle, dare I say - poetic - demise. But I agree with the reviewer - Windwalker should never have been marketed as a romance. It is my darkest, edgiest novel by far. And it should be noted that one of the reasons why Ms Hoffman was so incensed was that Ms Stilman also gave away the ending. Even The New York Times can be gauche...

On the other hand, I have no problem with the following review:

"(Mostert) built everything up about these two people destined to be together and they didn't end up together. It was probably supposed to be romantic and show how these characters grew and blah, blah, blah. All i got out of it was a loss of $7 and a headache."

I cannot fault this comment. It was not written by someone who has formally donned the reviewer's mantle, but by a reader who posted on Amazon. She paid good money for my book, it disappointed her and she has every right to say so, even if her analysis of my work is perhaps, shall we say, not as eloquent as it could be.

Then there is the question of skimming. If you are a reader, then by all means skim if the book doesn't hold your attention. But if you pin on a reviewer's badge and get sent free books by publishers, then there is no excuse for such laziness. Online reviewers often speed-read the pages: for some reason it has become a badge of honour for them to read as many books as they can in the shortest possible time. Your average print reviewer would blanch at the number of books chugged through by their online counterparts. I read two hundred books a week! Therefore I know of what I speak! H'mm...maybe not. If you read this many books per week you cannot possibly pay full attention to the language, the story and its nuances. One reviewer who recently did a piece on Keeper of Light and Dust found herself unwilling to finish my book - (an indictment of my book itself, of course) -- but still posted her review and added kindly that she felt sure the story would pick up later on. This kind of thing would never be tolerated in a print review. Neither would mangled titles, poor spelling and other inaccuracies.

Right, that was rather cathartic:raspberry Thanks again to all of you who responded with ideas to my previous blog. I will be making very good use of your advice next week when I will be heading across the ocean to attend the Thrillerfest convention in New York. My panel discussion takes place on Saturday July 11 and I will be reporting back to you guys!

The Keeper Launch Party

2009-04-28T16:14:00.002+01:00

The Keeper Launch Party

Hi everyone,

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, the launch party for The Keeper was last week. The event took place at Bourdon House in Mayfair, which is a lovely venue. Bourdon House was the residence of the second Duke of Westminster until his death in 1953 and it is currently the flagship store of Alfred Dunhill, which is why this photograph has my books flanked by good-looking men's leather luggage!

It was a gorgeous spring evening and it was so good to be surrounded by friends and by the many people who toil behind the scenes at my publisher and who work very hard indeed to make my book a success. We had champagne and we had chocolates -- all provided by another very generous and talented man, my friend Bill McCarrick: the owner of the Sir Hans Sloane Chocolate and Champagne House. He is the guy in the white chef's uniform on my right in the picture below. And no, I'm not singing The Hills are Alive in the other picture, I'm actually making a speech and getting just a little carried away :)

It was a fun evening but I woke up the next day with my voice all but gone. I still sound like Darth Vader, which is freaking me out as I have a few radio interviews lined up this week....Fingers crossed I'll start sounding like Marlene Dietrich soon.

Have a good week everyone!

Goodbye to South Africa

2009-01-23T10:38:00.001Z

Hi everyone,

I tuned in to BBC News this morning and was informed that London is still in the grip of a “winter vomiting virus” (try saying that one really fast). As I’ll be returning to the UK on Sunday, you can imagine how much this news cheered me.

Truth to be told, it is time for me to go back. I urgently need to start work and furthermore, my liver will probably not be able to keep up much longer with the reckless eating and drinking to which I’ve subjected it. The food here in the Cape is good. As my birthday was on Christmas day (which means I get ignored and no-one makes a fuss of me), I was treated by my husband to a belated birthday dinner last night at my favourite restaurant. We had ostrich carpaccio to start with, followed by Cape Crayfish and finally ended the meal with “koeksisters” – a spectacular South African dessert. You make it by twisting three pieces of special pastry dough into a thick plait and then dipping it into boiling ginger syrup before allowing it to cool. And a mere ten thousand calories per bite!

Of course, last night we also had several glasses of very good South African wine. Ah, the wine. This is where it gets dangerous. My Mum lives in Stellenbosch and people here have wine with breakfast. Stellenbosch and the neighbouring town of Franschoek (literally translated “French corner”) form the heart of South African wine country. Most of the vineyards here were started by the French Huguenots in 1685 and many of the wine estates still carry French names.

I’ve been to Napa – lovely and you guys make great wines – and I’ve been to Australia – ditto. But truthfully, there is nothing that can compare to the beauty of the Cape winelands. Do me a favour and click on the following link, which will take you to the website of the L’Ormarins wine estate. Take a look at those pictures – aren’t they breathtaking?

L'Ormarins Wine Estate

Here’s another one. Note the manor house, which is built in typical Cape Dutch style with its flowing white gables.

Boschendal Manor House

OK, this is pathetic. I’m supposed to write a literary blog and here I’m drooling all over the page. Apologies Let me quickly move on to something more fitting. You may remember that Season of the Witch made the longlist of 50 books nominated for the Books to Talk About Award and that I’ve asked for your support to see if we can’t manage to move my witches onto the shortlist of 10 titles. I still don’t know if we were successful – I’ll have the answer for you on 1 February – but I do know that the comments you left on my page were wonderful and have drawn attention. My editor actually called me on the phone to congratulate me on having such “delightful” readers. Thank you so much, you guys! Fingers crossed...

Right, I have to go pack my bags but in conclusion, I’d like to finish with a lovely quote from Karen Dinesen’s Out of Africa. It feels appropriate, somehow:

If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back…does Africa know a song of me?
Will the air over the plain quiver with a colour that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?

Next stop, London...

Greetings From South Africa

2009-01-08T10:28:00.000Z

Hi everyone,

I hope you all had a wonderful festive season and have started the New Year on a high note!

I'm still in South Africa and will be until the end of the month. It is hot here in the Cape! The ocean is sparkling, the vineyards are green and I'm eating and drinking way too much. I must admit to feeling very guilty whenever I turn on the news and watch people digging themselves out of the snow in Britain and the US while outside my window the sky is the most divine blue you can imagine...

Before you start hating me too much, I should say that Christmas in South Africa is often a rather surreal experience. Imagine Santas keeling over from heat exhaustion. Watching your relatives dripping sweat into their brandied pudding while Bing Crosby dreams of a white Christmas in the background. Tinsel does not look good in sunlight and fake frost looks even tackier. Many South Africans still insist on having a full turkey Christmas lunch even though the temperature is in the nineties and a cold meal would be far more appropriate. Of course, we also insist on sending each other Christmas cards featuring snow scenes or red breasted robins, even though the majority of South Africans have never seen either in their lives.

New Year's celebrations are good, though. Even at midnight the air is blood warm, and there is nothing like ringing in the new year while looking up into an African sky and seeing the Southern Cross above your head. Usually we spend New Year's eve with our families but this time my husband and I attended the most wonderfully cheesy "Jungle" party where we were served potent drinks in hollowed-out pineapples and most of the women were dressed like Lara Croft. Yours truly had found herself a pair of rather gorgeous tropical butterfly wings on the internet and had ideas of my husband accompanying me as my butterfly catcher. (Cute, yes?) Sadly, the idea of tripping around in a pith helmet and butterfly net did not appeal to my man and he decided to go the macho route (gorilla).

I haven't just been partying – I've also been catching up on my South African reading. If you go into a book store in South Africa, there is always a big shelf right at the front door that displays the latest offerings from South African authors. South Africa has eleven official languages (twenty-five are spoken) but English is the lingua franca and many South African authors write in English regardless of their native tongue. My native language is Afrikaans, which is based on seventeenth century Dutch but which has changed greatly over the past three hundred years. I love my language – my first job involved teaching it – and it has a fantastic literature, especially in poetry. Like most commercial writers, however, my aim is to reach as many readers as possible. As there are only about 8 million native Afrikaans speakers worldwide, I have decided English is probably the best way to go. My friend, Deon Meyer, who writes crime novels, does it differently. He writes in Afrikaans and then has his prose translated. (You'll find a picture of the two us together at a book signing if you go to the pics on my MySpace page).

And speaking of book signings! In another three months, Keeper of Light and Dust will be in the stores. If you guys would like to read a synopsis of the novel and the first chapter, please go to my website www.natashamostert.com for some background on the book if you're interested. You'll also be able to see what the UK cover will look like. BTW, my British publisher has suddenly decided to change the title to The Keeper. It is not that I dislike the shortened version, but I'm not best pleased at having two different titles on either side of the ocean. It makes it very difficult when you're doing promotion on the internet. You'll see what I mean if you go to my website: lot of asterisks and footnotes.

Right, that's it from me. I'm leaving you with a picture that I took yesterday when I was at The Vineyard Hotel in Cape Town: one of my favourite spots to have a proper tea with all the trimmings. The hotel is situated at the foot of Table Mountain (but from the back and to the side) and as you can tell, the gardens are beautiful. The hotel itself has an interesting history. It was originally built in February 1800 as a country house for lovely blonde, blue-eyed Lady Anne Barnard. Lady Barnard, the daughter of the Earl of Balcarres, had been the toast of London until she shocked polite society by marrying a man 12 years her junior and leaving Britain for South Africa. At the time, the British had been in power for five years at the Cape of Good Hope, George III was on the throne in England, Napoleon was reaching for glory and Beethoven had completed his first symphony!

Until next time, you guys, have fun and stay warm

A Career Tip for Authors

2008-12-05T09:10:00.000Z

Hi everyone,

Before I get on to the above topic, I want to share something with you that gave me a good chuckle. You will recall that a few weeks ago my American copy editor had her way with my manuscript and tweaked it with regard to spelling and punctuation. Last week it was the turn of my British copy editor. Copy editors on this side of the Atlantic are always much stricter than their American counterparts and are relentless in their quest to purge manuscripts of "Americanisms". This can have unintentionally comical consequences, especially when it comes to dialogue. Below is one such example, which cracked me up. In my original version I have my heroine say the following words (she's talking about an attractive guy):

Mia: "Ah, how is the cutie?"

My copy-editor's rewrite: "Ah, how is the dishy bloke?"

After her rewrite two of my characters (who are boxers) are now referring to each other as "chap" or "fellow" ("guy" being too American). I hang out with fighters a lot and believe me, the day I hear one of them address the other as "old chap" is the day I get struck by lightning. My copy editor also decided to jazz up the dialogue of one of my other characters and has inserted "Aye!" and "Och, well" to emphasize his Scottish roots. He now sounds as though he had stepped out of Treasure Island. She also thought it might be a good idea to keep it truly British and replace a reference to Woody Allen with Hugh Grant. (?) On the other hand, she did a great job catching a few sloppy bits, which her American counterpart had allowed to slip through and I'm grateful.

Anyway, enough of that. Someone recently asked me what is the best tip I can think of to give to a commercial author who wishes to build up a loyal readership. I suppose there are many valid tips, but the tried and trusty route to commercial success is to come up with a character who manages to gain the affection of a vast number of readers and then to place that character in an environment the reader would like to visit again. This is the smart route.

Sadly, I am not smart. You might even say I'm self-indulgent. Instead of taking my own advice, I go completely the other way. After Season of the Witch, the obvious move would have been to write a book called Season of the Witch II - Gabriel's Revenge. Or, Daughter of Minnaloushe. It would have gladdened my editor's heart and satisfied readers who liked the first book.

But not me. I make sure to build a new world that has absolutely nothing to do with the old. Instead of highly educated characters living in a swish neighbourhood in South London, the characters in my new book are not particularly cerebral (except my villain who is an absolute genius – yes, I know that's a cliché but it works well ), and even though my hero and heroine are South Londoners just like the Monk sisters, they live many grimy streets away from fashionable Chelsea. Oh, yes and they sweat a lot. Suffice it to say, I believe in ploughing new furrows with every novel. My publisher would be very happy for me to make hay in familiar pastures.

It is understandable that publishers want continuity. Readers become emotionally attached to their favourite characters and that's why they keep looking for the new Reacher or Rain adventure; the new Dalgleish, Rebus or Brennan crime puzzle. There is a certain predictability in follow-on books, which is comforting. Readers know the world the author has created and because they enjoyed their stay the first time around, want more of the same. They become friends with the characters and know their quirks. Picking up a sequel is like saying hi to an old friend. So to all you aspiring writers, this really is the easier way to success.

Unfortunately, I grow bored with my characters very quickly. Call me a fickle woman, but once I'm finished with a book, the hero is toast in my eyes. Of course, up till that moment I am a woman in love – fantasising -- even mooning -- over the man who takes over my life for eighteen months. (My husband, by the way, knows all about this and has long since made peace with finding doodles of another guy's name on the telephone pad.) Furthermore, my books are heavily researched. After eighteen months of wading knee-deep through the minutiae of pretty esoteric subjects, the brain is mush and needs a break. And that is why – when I finished Season of the Witch – I closed and locked the door to my memory palace. It was fascinating crawling around its labyrinthine halls for two years and I had fun, but now there was another topic – another obsession – that had taken me by the throat and was demanding my full attention. Not to mention the new guy who is really rather cute.

There are, of course, certain common denominators, which become an author's trademarks. I may not have recurring characters but like most other authors, my style – that elusive thing called "voice" – is pretty much constant. The worlds I create in my books are always highly-charged, lush and textured. In every book I flirt with melodrama. This is a risky thing to do because it can easily topple over into the ridiculous, not to mention purple prose. But I do so like my characters to be larger than life. Still, they do not have inexplicable superhero abilities. They don't fly or shape shift or become invisible, unless I can work out a relatively rational or pseudo-scientific explanation for why my villain is suddenly able to sprout wings, fly out the window and suck the blood from my heroine's neck. I like those kind of books by the way (as a teenager I had a huge crush on Dracula – still have) but I don't write them. It is probably the most consistent aspect of my work – the fusion of reality and mysticism. I want to show magic lurking in the shadow of the mundane; luminosity hiding behind the dusty curtain of everyday living. You're probably scratching your heads by this time, wondering how fighters, quantum physics and mystical ideas can co-exist side by side in one novel. Easily. Stay tuned.

Some of you have become fond of the characters in Season of the Witch and have told me you would like to hang out with Minnaloushe and Morrighan for another round. All I can say is thank you – I am very pleased you enjoyed their company – but I do hope you'll follow me into the next world where another heroine is waiting: a blonde, this time. Even though she is not as classically beautiful as either of the Monk sisters, she has some pretty cool moves of her own. She has a chameleon as a pet, which is called Sweetpea and she has two men in her life who find her utterly captivating...

Until next time, you dishy blokes and ladies -- have a great festive season! When I write to you again, I'll be in South Africa and I'll be sitting in the sunshine sipping a glass of very good Cape wine. Last year I was unable to go home because I broke my ankle and it has been two years since I visited. I can't wait!

And the Cover for "Keeper of Light and Dust" Looks Like This...

2008-11-15T10:39:00.000Z

Hi everyone,

Well, here it is. This is the cover, which Dutton has chosen for Keeper of Light and Dust and which will appear in a book store near you come April:

Thank you all very much for your feedback. It was an interesting experiment! I received comments from MySpacers, the members of the discussion board on my website www.natashamostert.com, and I also asked for feedback from people offline.

As I expected there was a split along gender lines, but not as sharp as I had imagined there would be. The great majority of men chose the cover above, although there were some guys who professed to being rather smitten by the pink girl in the cover below:

My publishers always tell me men don't read (??) and that writers have to target - and please - the female readership.

They should therefore be happy when I tell them that the black cover seemed to have met with approval from the majority of the women in my mini poll, as well. However, many women didn't like it at all and the pink cover received almost as many votes as the black. This was my publisher's first attempt at a jacket concept and at the time I liked it. However, I didn't think it was edgy enough and suggested the designer go for a little flash and ring the girl's eye with a kind of phosphorescent glow! Cool, yes? Maybe not. This suggestion did not fly and I got the distinct impression my publisher thought the idea cheesy. I then wanted them to move the tattoo from her shoulder to her cheek but that received an even frostier reception.

My publisher's second attempt was the tattooed girl and the cityscape background:

What surprised me was how few of you voted for this cover. I had thought all women wanted to be Angelina Jolie in The Wanted - and all men wanted Angelina Jolie in The Wanted. Here on MySpace there were a few takers but overall this cover scored really poorly and received some actively hostile comments from some of the guys. (We had a rather spirited discussion about this on my discussion board.)

Thanks again for participating, everyone. I am really grateful to you for taking the time. And speaking of time, I was wondering if I might impose on you again. Season of the Witch has been nominated, along with 49 other titles for the "Spread the Word: Books to Talk About" Award. The titles on the list are British but voting is open world wide as part of the World Book Day 2009 campaign. I need votes! So if you have a minute to spare, may I ask you to please go to the Spread the Word website (see details below) and vote for yours truly? Thanks to all of you who have already voted for me. Very much appreciated indeed. I would also be in your debt if you could spread the word to other people who may be interested. The organisers are encouraging people to place links to their blog pages and websites and to leave a comment along with their vote. However, a vote alone will do nicely.

Spread-the-Word!

www.spread-the-word.org.uk

Until next time! Take care.

Creative Energy

2008-11-06T15:20:00.004Z

I hope you guys had a good summer! I had two weeks of being lazy and watching my husband fly fish -- great fun -- no, really, but I received some unsettling news just before my break. My US editor decided to embark on a new adventure and has left Penguin Dutton. It is an uncomfortable experience for an author to suddenly find herself orphaned. I will, of course, be appointed a new editor but it is still rather sad losing the support and enthusiasm of the person who had worked with you right from the start. Ah, well. Things change.

Anyway, on to another topic: Shortly before leaving on vacation, I had cause to visit one of my favourite places in London, the theatre at the Royal Geographical Society. The RGC has been home to adventurists since 1830 and whenever I visit, I am convinced I can sense the ghosts of Livingstone, Shackleton and Hillary lurking in the corners. A few years ago, I attended a lecture there by Sir Ranulph Fiennes after his attempt to walk solo and unsupported to the North Pole. During this expedition he sustained frostbite on one hand. Despite his doctor urging him to postpone surgery to see if they can't coax some healthy tissue back into the hand, Sir Ran decided to chop off his dying fingertips with a fretsaw in his garden shed. Somehow this seemed to me to be a rather splendid gesture and quite magnificently British. As a colonial myself, I do quite think that only someone with a name such as Sir Ranulph Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, 3rd Baronet OBE would be capable of such an act. These British explorers have always done things their own way. Think of Scott listening to Caruso on a gramophone in the heart of the Antarctic and jettisoning food in favour of fossil rocks to carry with him on his sled during his doomed excursion. Eccentrics? Yes. Gentlemen? Always.

But I digress. My visit to the RGC this time around, was to attend a seminar that was jointly hosted by PEN and The Medical Research Council. The topic was 'Creative Energy: What drives writers and scientists?' I am rather interested in this subject as I have a brother who is trained as a physicist and sometimes when I talk to him it feels to me as though we hail from two different galaxies. While I would quite readily agree that his work is every bit as creative as mine, I enjoy telling him that aesthetics relate to writing in a way it can never do to science. He would always hotly contest this assertion by maintaining that great math is not only 'workable' but also 'elegant.'

On this evening, the audience was made up of writers and scientists and the panel consisted of luminaries in both fields. I was awed to be in the presence of a genuine Nobel Prize winner, Sir Aaron Klug, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982. However, if I had hoped to find clues to what it is that fuels his imagination, I was disappointed. Sadly, his array of diagrams and experiment details were so dense and complex that they defied my understanding. I was left only with an impression that this is a person to whom intense curiosity is the driving force in his creative work.

The rest of the panel included Ian McEwan, author of Atonement, and possibly the most celebrated author in Britain at the moment, Dr. Sheena McCormack, a HIV researcher and Ruth Padel, a prize-winning poet and Chair of the UK Poetry Society (and interestingly, the great, great granddaughter of Charles Darwin.) McEwan asserted that creativity is an ongoing process – not a fleeting spark – and that in order to create, creativity has 'to become a habit' for writers and scientists alike. He also listed 'persistence, tolerance of drudgery, luck, playfulness, ambition and ruthlessness' as other characteristics shared by both groups. I concur, although my brother's idea of playfulness does not always agree with mine. For those of you who have seen WALL-E, think of the scene where Eve dances inside WALL-E's home. (By the way, wasn't that a great movie? I thought the first 40 minutes were genius.)

And it seems I was wrong about the aesthetics bit. McEwan made the point that scientists have long adhered to Keats's assertion that 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' and quoted James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, who wrote that the double helix of DNA was 'too pretty not to be true.' Einstein too, apparently believed beauty to be the prime requirement of any theory that is worth serious consideration.

Padel, in her presentation, quoted a review of The Good Soldier in which the critic stated that he considered Ford Maddox Ford to be 'a brilliant writer but not a great one,' giving as his reason that Ford never gave himself over to 'determined stupor.' Whether you agree with him or not, you have to love that phrase. It is true that writers are obsessives and are often both dogged and dazed when they create. I believe it is when you write in a blind fury with a complete disregard for whether it is going to sell, whether it is going to please your editor, even, whether it is going to please the reader, that you start to soar. Or bomb. Both hold true. By quieting those outside voices and only listening to your own, you can either produce a work of profound imagination that speaks true, or a piece of writing that is so self-indulgent no reader should be asked to suffer through it.

However, it did become very clear to me during the evening that where scientists and writers part company is when it comes to metaphor and ambiguity. Writers love subtlety, nuance and layers of meaning. Scientists practice associative thinking as well, but scientists abhor ambiguity. Listening to Dr. McCormack speak about her HIV research it was obvious that in her world data is king. The collection of data is painstaking and above all, rigorous. The interpretation of blips and anomalies is highly disciplined and wild assertions are simply not allowed.

It was also fascinating to hear her describe her office. She admitted that she couldn't bear working in a study where everything isn't neat, filed and pigeonholed. On a good day my office looks whimsical (I hope), on a bad day it looks like the playground of someone who needs serious help: stacks of paper and printouts, photographs, boxing paraphernalia, sagging pin boards with too many newspaper and magazine clippings, objets d'art made by my godchildren, CDs, many, many little bottles of hand sanitizer (neurotic, don't tell me, I know) and books, books, books. I am sure there are writers who have offices where all is serenity and order, but I am relieved to know that my friends who are also writers, are like me and work in an environment of cheerful anarchy.

But probably the most significant difference between writers and scientists was highlighted by Ian McEwan. One could read sixty years' worth of copies of Nature and discover little about 'human passions, cruelty, kindness and love', he said, whereas it is exactly these emotions, which form the creative well from which writers draw their inspiration. I did wonder, but didn't have the guts to ask, whether creative genius and self-destruction go hand in hand in the world of science in the same way it so often appears to do in the literary world. Are the ranks of scientists also filled with alcoholics and depressives or does the white coat shield you from these demons?

In the end, though, I believe the creative urge – whether it manifests itself in the laboratory or in a haphazard corner of a suburban house – takes place because the person who experiences it, has no choice. You simply have to give in to it: it is your second heart beat. Whether the creative urge always equals excellence is another matter, of course. Even those people who are endlessly productive (and this includes successful writers and artists) often find that their ability lags behind their compulsion. It is that old conundrum of your reach exceeding your grasp. But it matters not: when the desire to create and give expression to your inner life is hardwired into your genes, it cannot be denied.

Wow. That sounds rather ponderous! Enough of that. Hope you guys are well and raring to go! I'm getting ready to receive the copy edited manuscript back from my publishers (this will be my last chance to make any changes before it is sent through to the printer) and I'm also waiting for the finalised jacket image. My US publisher has come up with a draft image, which they've used for their Spring 2009 catalogue, but I'm told they're not quite happy with it and it may change. As soon as I have the final version, I'll post it and you can tell me what you think.

Take care! Here's wishing you all a very creative and happy Autumn...

AT LAST: We have a jacket for Keeper of Light and Dust!

2008-11-01T16:06:00.001Z

AT LAST: We have a jacket for Keeper of Light and Dust!

Like most cliches, there is some truth to the saying that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. In reality, of course, we almost always do. Nothing can sabotage the chances of a book more than a cover that is blah and unimaginative. This especially holds true if you are not a name author. JK Rowling could package her books in fish-and-chips paper and they would still fly off the shelves. Lesser scribes like yours truly, need a little help.

As with the title, your contract states that the publisher has the final say. The author is to be consulted, but in the end it comes down to liking it, or lumping it. A good publisher will try to meet the author's concerns but the process can only be repeated so many times. Every revision costs money. At some point, a decision has to be made and the publisher is the commander-in-chief.

Generally, the process starts off with the editor pitching the book to the designer. Sometimes the designer will actually read the manuscript himself, but most of the times he has so many books in his care, he does not have the time to do so. So it's up to your editor to punch the key buttons and try to tell not just the story, but also convey atmosphere and texture.

Once the designer comes up with a design, it is sent to the author and her agent. The jacket is also presented to the marketing team who can either clap their hands enthusiastically or boo it into immediate oblivion. If the marketing team does not think this is a cover that can be sold to book store managers or to the supermarkets, the cover is killed on the spot. Even if the author thinks it is the best thing since Haagen Dasz Belgian Chocolate ice cream, the designer will go back to the drawing board and start from scratch. Sometimes there is ambivalence in the air. No-one is wowed, but no-one is completely disenchanted either. In practical terms, this will have the designer rethink certain aspects such as font or colour wash.

We've had a tough time with Keeper of Light and Dust. The jacket has seen three incarnations and has been surrounded by many arguments. I'm happy to say I think the final version is wonderful and that it does what it is supposed to do. I thought it might be fun if I show you all three versions... but don't tell you which one is the winner until next time around! I'm really interested in your feedback: please let me know which cover you prefer and why. Of course, it is going to be pretty terrible if no one likes the cover we'll be going with, but I'm brave. Let's hear it.

I know you guys are going to say to me that I need to tell you what the book is about before you can make your choice, but I'm not going to. When we're in a book store we reach for a book not because we already know what the story is about. We pick it up because the image is irresistible, or because we recognise the author's name, in which case we don't care if the jacket looks like mud. Pretend you have never heard of an author with the weird name of Mostert. Will this jacket entice you? Will it make you stop as you stroll past it? I'm rather interested to see if the vote will be split along gender lines. I rather think it might.

By the way, all three cover versions have leaked onto the internet already – don't ask me how that happened – so keep in mind that just because you may have seen one of these jackets on someone's blog site does not mean it is the ONE.

And then, as you may remember, Season of the Witch was nominated for the International Horror Guild Award. I lusted after that tombstone but sadly, my witches were not victorious. They tried their best but lost out to Dan Simmons's monstrous ice creature in The Terror. From everything I've heard, it is a spectacular read, and a very worthy winner. Peter Straub received the lifetime achievement award.

Right. Send me your thoughts on that jacket! This, by the way, will be the jacket for the American edition. My British publisher is still struggling...

The Copy-Edited Manuscript

2008-10-13T09:15:00.000+01:00

After two weeks of severe eye strain, I have finished work on my copy-edited manuscript and fedexed it back across the ocean to my publisher. Big relief.

A book passes through many hands as it makes the journey from messy manuscript to polished volume. Of all the people who will end up working on my story, the copy editor is the most meticulous. This person, who is always nameless, and who I never get to meet or speak to, checks every comma and hyphen, ensures my use of "which" and "that" is correct, checks my spelling, weeds out typos and massages my grammar. Whereas my editor gets to make the grand, operatic gestures, the copy editor's work is more discreet. My editor may decide to kill off a character, my copy editor may decide to kill off a comma. Not that this does not sometimes have profound ramifications:

My wife Jill. In heaven is she, not in hell -- I know that well.
My wife Jill. In heaven is she not, in hell -- I know that well.

The first time I received a copy-edited manuscript, I was surprised to find that the copy editor uses a green – not a red pencil. She also sometimes pastes yellow stickies onto the pages that flutter from the manuscript almost festively, but which always make my heart sink. These flags usually point to woozy sentences and poorly articulated ideas. Most copy editors are fanatical Strunk and White followers. This means they frown on my fondness to use nouns as verbs – an activity branded "suspect" by the great style fathers – and don't like it when I write in the acknowledgment page of my book that "I am so blessed to have him (my husband) in my life." (So used as an intensifier is strictly verboten by Messrs. Strunk and White but I tend to think there's a time and place for everything – even overkill.) Sentence fragments are not always enthusiastically received either and over the years this has led to some serious arm-wrestling between me and my copy editors. It is true that nothing is more irritating than this kind of thing:

Their eyes met. A languid gaze. The soft questioning of minds melding. Fugitive thoughts, passionate desires...

However, when I write action scenes, I often indulge in frags as I try to create a kind of 'choppy' urgency to the scene. And if you go back to the first paragraph of this blog entry, you'll notice that I decline to "heave" sighs of relief.

When the copy-edited manuscript arrives at my door I also know that this will be my last chance to make any additional changes. Some authors are so panicked by the idea that they will never again have the opportunity to tweak their story that they rewrite chapter after chapter, manically introducing new characters and plotlines along the way. This makes your publisher very, very unhappy. In my case, the knowledge that when the manuscript leaves my desk this time around it will be forever, concentrates my mind wonderfully. I know it is my last chance to wrestle with those awkward paragraphs and clunky transitions, which no matter how many times I've chiselled away at them, still don't feel right. I know this is my last chance to rid my hero of irritating mannerisms and I know I'd better make sure I have my facts and figures straight. I therefore revisit every book, every photocopy and every internet article I referenced over the last eighteen months, and I recheck all the facts that ended up in my story. As my books are research intensive, this is an immensely time-consuming exercise and massively boring. But I have to do it otherwise some sharp-eyed reader, or worse – reviewer – will take great pleasure in pointing out that Mount Kilimanjaro is in fact not 5,859 metres high but 5,895 metres.

How meticulous does one have to be? Well, I am not as obsessive as Umberto Eco, who even personally counts the number of steps between landmarks mentioned in his books but I try to be as rigorous as I possibly can. My characters are larger than life and get to do some interesting things. Walking through memory palaces, dreaming lucidly (in tandem with other dreamers), discovering the key to the building blocks of the universe and so forth are all in a day's work for them. This requires my readers to be generous and sign up to the contract that was memorably articulated in 1817 by Samuel Coleridge: in exchange for the promise of entertainment, the reader agrees to "a willing suspension of disbelief" when he turns the first page. This is a great contract and like all writers I rely on the goodwill of my readers to park their scepticism at the door when they enter the world I've created. However, I know full well that I have to make the transition as seamless as possible and that it is my duty to reduce the "huh?" moments to a minimum. The best way to do this is to hide the magic in the shadow of the mundane. If this means obsessively checking facts about mountain ranges, then I am willing to do so.

Not all my research is text driven, of course, and in a future blog entry I will tell you how I've been hanging out in tattoo parlours (the heroine in my new book is a body artist.) It has been freaking out my husband big-time as he keeps expecting me to turn up with a massive coiled python on my spine. I think he knows that if I do decide to take the plunge, I won't go for the butterflies or the cute hearts.

I still don't have a book jacket to show you guys! I'm getting pretty desperate to have a look myself. I saw the first effort many months ago but by this time the cover image may have changed completely. Here's hoping I will have something to share with you soon.

Right -- now that the manuscript is out of my life, it is time to get my anarchic house into some kind of shape. Over the last two weeks I've done only what was absolutely necessary and I now have to catch up on bills, many, many emails, laundry, shopping – my husband has been eating omelettes for fourteen days – water my plants and catch my breath...

And the New Title Is...

2008-07-15T17:11:00.003+01:00

I am happy to say that the search for a title for my new book is over. As I discussed in my previous blog entry, my first choice – Thief of Light – was unavailable and my second choice, Dragonfly, was deemed not worthy by my editors. As I also mentioned, when it comes to the title and book jacket, the hapless author is very much sidelined. While the bun fight between the editorial and marketing teams takes place, authors try to find solace in Zen thoughts, self-help tapes and comfort food.

My great fear was that I would end up with a different title on each side of the ocean, and for a while it looked as though this dire scenario was inevitable. This is bad news for an author and you really want to avoid it happening to you if at all possible. Reviews don't carry over, there is confusion in chat rooms and on discussion boards and readers become very irritable when they order books online and find out they have paid twice for the same story. Barry Eisler is one author whose novels are published under different titles and I watched him at a signing event trying to explain that this was not some devious ploy on his part to sell more books. Even celebrated authors sometimes seem to have given way on this issue. Philip Pullman's first instalment of His Dark Materials trilogy was published as Northern Lights in Britain and as The Golden Compass in the States. The marketing people will tell you this is necessary because the two markets are different and I don't doubt they are. However, I still believe if you want a buzz to start around a book – especially in borderless cyberspace – it is best to have a single, unified focus.

But enough of the throat clearing. Here, without further ado, is the title under which my next book will be published. Drum roll...

Keeper of Light and Dust

Intriguing? Evocative? Or does this make you say, huh?

I know some of you are going to tell me that it is impossible to say if Keeper of Light and Dust is a successful title if you don't know what the book is about. But the title should be so powerful, that even if you have no clue as to the story, it will still engage your imagination. I am quite happy with this title myself, although I do worry that it might be a mouthful. I was pushing for the shorter version --The Keepertt -- but my editor vetoed it on the grounds that it would conjure up images of sturdy men dressed in corduroy pants and Burberry coats striding the moors and scanning the horizon for game. For a while it looked as though the novel would be known as Book of Light and Dust but that idea bit the dust because of possible confusion with Book of Air and Shadows.

There is one area where Keeper of Light and Dust scores high. Books are usually not referred to by their full titles inhouse and both the marketing and editorial departments delight in using acronyms. My titles have always fared poorly. Midnight Side became MS, Other Side of Silence, OSOS and Windwalker, WIWA. Season of the Witch's acronym was particularly unfortunate: SOW. But KOLD has that coolness factor to it.

On to other news: Season of the Witch has made the shortlist of The International Horror Guild Awards. The Award was created thirteen years ago and recognizes achievements in the field of Horror and Dark Fantasy. I am deeply thrilled, of course, and let me confess immediately that I covet that funky statuette that is presented to the winner. It used to be an even more inspired design – an actual gargoyle, which looked as though it had stepped straight off a spire on top of Notre Dame Cathedral – but I think you'll agree that the present one, which is in the form of a tombstone, pretty much rocks as well. You can find it on the website of the IHG. Take a peek: www.horroraward.org/award.html

For a full list of the nominees, click on the home link on the page above. You'll notice I'm in good company: one of the other nominees is Elisabeth Hand, a highly accomplished writer who is a New York Times notable and multi-award-winning author. She was nominated for her book Generation Loss. I can recommend it: it is highly disturbing tale, written in beautiful language. Smashing.

And that's it. Hope you guys are having a great summer!

Bad Moon Rising: The Vexed Question of the Title

2008-06-21T08:49:00.001+01:00

Before I get to matters literary, thanks to all of you who have been inquiring about the state of the ankle I broke six months ago when I was kickboxing. I am happy to say that my surgeon has finally allowed me to return to the dojo! YES! He did, however, warn me that for a considerable time to come, the ankle will "hurt like the dickens" when I work out.

I've never been sure what exactly "the dickens" are - but he wasn't kidding about it hurting. At the moment my training sessions sound like this: Punch, punch, kick, OW! Punch, kick, kick, YO-O-W! Fortunately, there is something in martial arts called a "spirit shout." This is the noise a martial artist makes when he gathers his chi --vital energy-- in his hara --abdomen. ( Think Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon.) It is also a sound you make to intimidate your opponent. My instructor isn't fooled but I am hoping my fellow students are interpreting my howls of anguish as battle cries. It is fair to say that a number of them already seem quite cowed by the sheer raw intensity with which I let rip.

From howls of anguish, to whimpers of distress. I have finished the first round of edits - which means the manuscript is back with my two editors and I now await any further comments they may have. And if there is one thing for certain, it is that these two ladies will have additional comments. Before the manuscript is finally sent on to the printers, I can expect to go through two or three such editing rounds.

In the meantime, we have moved on to a sensitive area: the title. The title and the jacket cover are probably the most contentious issues between writer and publisher. My contract states that I need to be consulted on these two all-important points. It also states that the final decision rests with the publisher. In practice, this means that the title I choose has about a 99% chance of getting ditched. Of the five books I've written so far, only two of my titles were accepted: Windwalker and Season of the Witch. The others got booted straight away… including the title I had chosen for my new book.

So what does a good title do? Ideally a good title has to be a hook: it has to deliver enough of an emotional punch that it will catch the eye and engage the mind of the jaded book buyer. If you are given a terrible cover ( a topic for a future blog entry) a good title can still rescue you. And it has to be "sticky" - a title cannot afford to be forgettable.

Does it have to tell you what happens inside the pages of the book? I don't think so. But it helps if it reflects the mood of the story and the texture of the writing. Here are some of my favourite titles, which I think are all exceptionally evocative and resonant: The Church of Dead Girls, Neuromancer, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, Deja Dead, The Time Traveller's Wife, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Blood Meridian. This last title was unintelligible to me when I first saw it -- and before reading the inside subtitle -- but I didn't care. Even if I hadn't known that the book was written by Cormac McCarthy (I'd pick up one of his novels even if it was titled The Egg Price in China) I would still have been fascinated by that title.

Non-fiction is different, of course, and should probably be a little more topic specific, which still doesn't mean it has to be blah. One of my favourite titles of all time is Robert Twigger's Angry White Pyjamas. For those of you who haven't read this book, I can recommend it wholeheartedly -- even if martial arts is not your thing, I guarantee you, you'll love it. Twigger, a poet educated at Oxford, joined the Tokyo Riot police on their brutal one year course in Aikido and this is a brilliant and hilarious account of his experiences. (The book won him the Somerset Maugham award so that tells you something about the quality of the writing.) As for the title, I think it does everything. It conveys information -- the white pyjamas refer to the gi worn by Aikido practitioners; it tells you this is going to be a witty read and it is sufficiently original that it piques your curiosity. Another non-fiction title I love is Women who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. This book says: I am Woman, hear me Roar!

My first book has the title The Midnight Side, which is not the title I had in mind when I wrote it. I wanted it to be called Precious Dust. It is a quote from the Thomas Carew poem "Elegy on Maria Wentworth" and as you can probably tell, it is a poem about a corpse. I thought it was erudite, classy, chilling, altogether terrific. My editor dismissed it immediately on the grounds that readers would think I'm writing a National Geographics study on precious metals. She was probably right. However, Midnight Side now gets mixed up with Sidney Sheldon's The Other Side of Midnight. What's more, people seem to think I did it on purpose to poach his readership. Actually come to think of it, my editor was one smart woman.

An interesting fact about titles: there is no copyright in titles. This means I can call my book The Da Vinci Code if I want to. (Unless Brown had trademarked his title and then I can not.) I desperately wanted to call my new story Thief of Light and both my editors liked this title as well but it was already on the cover of another book. If it had been an obscure, not very well-known novel, we might just have decided to go ahead anyway, as legally we wouldn't have had anything to fear. Sadly, however, Thief of Light, published in 1995 drew a lot of publicity. Why? Because the author was paid a million dollar advance. My editors therefore decided that a) it is not fair to confuse readers (they have more scruples than my Midnight editor) and b) I need to establish my own identity as an author and the confusion could be to my disadvantage.

So what will my new book be called? That is the question. Dragonfly, my choice, is not to be. Some of the titles my editors want to be, I find unacceptable. In the end, they are going to overrule me, but for what it is worth, I'm still kicking up a fuss.

I chose Dragonfly because that is what my villain, a brilliant but deeply insane and dangerous man, calls himself. Dragonflies are lethal predators. Their legs are studded with sharp spines, which allow them to scoop their prey out of the sky and consume it while in flight. They are incredibly acrobatic and can change direction so rapidly, their prey has little chance of escape. They can even fly backwards. Dragonflies are also the ultimate survivors - there are dragonfly fossils that are 350 million years old - and the tag line of my book is: To live. To live for ever. (Makes sense?) And finally, the dragonfly is the totem of the god Hiro - the god of thieves -- which is highly relevant for my story.

But my dragonfly was swotted to the ground with two swift blows. Neither one of my editors liked it. We still haven't found common ground and I hope to inform you of the new title in my next blog entry.

In closing: an anecdote. Going back to Midnight Side, this title was chosen by committee - more specifically by the marketing team. None of them had actually read my book, they relied on the blurb written by my editor. One of the titles they were keen on, was The Midnight Lair. When a perky publicity person called me to tell me about it, I muttered sullenly, "Kill me, kill me now." This was my way of trying to convey to her how utterly underwhelmed I was by this idea. Two days later I received an email from her with the new short list:

The Midnight Lair

The Midnight Side

Kill me, Kill me Now

Can't win.

So let me know some of your favourite titles -- and why!

Double Pleasure, Double Pain

2008-05-19T15:46:00.001+01:00

DOUBLE PLEASURE, DOUBLE PAIN

In my last blog entry, I mentioned that I was waiting to hear from my editors and that this was a nervous time. Well, I've received their first notes and the nervousness has been replaced by bruxism, obsessive snacking and failed attempts at Zen meditation.

First, let me state that I firmly believe a writer without an editor to be a writer at a loss. Yes, it is true that you can strike it unlucky and get saddled with an editor who is a frustrated writer and who brandishes her editing pen like a Katana, lopping off chunks of perfectly serviceable prose and even beheading characters of which she disapproves. These kind of heavy-handed assassination attempts are extreme, but they can happen. On the discussion board of my website www.natashamostert.com, a member recently mentioned that another writer shared with him his despair at having one of his characters eliminated by his editor, which made his work read "disjointed". I can well believe this. It would be rather like dropped phone signals, I would think. Or those outlines left by cartoon characters smashing through walls.

On the other hand, if you're lucky, you have an editor who prunes your prose with a firm but generous hand, reigns in your narcissistic tendencies (those pages where you are getting just a little too happy with yourself), picks up inconsistencies in the story and champions the book in-house with so much enthusiasm that the jaded marketing staff can't wait to rush out and peddle your book to the booksellers. Booksellers don't automatically stock every book that is published; they have to be seduced by the reps and it can be a bumpy courtship. A rep who is psyched about your book will move like Mata Hari but a rep who feels blah about your book, will not dance the dance of the seven veils. Some authors go to extraordinary lengths to get the reps in their corner. Here in the UK, one famous author who obviously doesn't trust her editor to do the job, is known to bake brownies for the reps and deliver them in cute little gingham baskets.

It is also worth keeping in mind that books published within the same publishing house are not part of one happy family. Books – even if they are published under the same umbrella – are in cut-throat competition with each other: think Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso. The star authors -- the Rowlings, the Meyers, Clancys and Kings -- are allocated the biggest chunk of the marketing budget. For envious, mean-spirited midlisters like myself, this doesn't make any sense as these books are practically guaranteed print coverage – not to mention huge sales -- and those marketing dollars can be put to so much better use. What's left of the publisher's budget is doled out to the likes of moi and this is where your editor has to be a gladiator and fight to get your novel noticed in-house. If you have a senior editor with substantial clout, your book stands a much better chance of getting some lolly and this is important: any posters you see in the book store, any cardboard cut-outs or dump displays (those lovely pyramids of books carefully arranged on the front table) are paid for by the publisher and they cost many, many thousands of dollars. It is up to your editor to persuade the publisher that your book--- among all the others on the list -- is the one to push.

I have worked with some demanding editors in the past but at present I am blessed in that I have two lovely editors – one in the UK and one in the US: women of great sagacity, skill and stamina (my UK editor would probably frown on this last showy alliterative sequence but you get my drift: they're pretty good at what they do.) So why the teeth grinding and the attempts at Buddhist Zazen I mention in the first paragraph? Well, precisely because I have two. Double pleasure; double pain. My editors work for different publishing houses, which means they do not have to defer to each other and are free to edit the manuscript independently and according to their own vision. For an author, this presents a challenge. At the moment I have two sets of notes and I am trying to find common ground. The last thing I want is to have two widely differing novels appear under the same title on either side of the ocean. But I know that even if I try my hardest, the two editions will turn out to be different in small but sometimes quite significant aspects. This holds true for Season of the Witch – my previous book – as well. If you buy the book in the States, you will have a slightly different reading experience than if you buy it in England. As for translations: my UK publisher is considered my primary publisher so therefore translators will always follow the British edition.

British editors tend to be more gloomy and American editors more chirpy. American editors like characters who pull themselves up by their bootstraps, whereas British editors enjoy watching those bootstraps severed. Nowhere is this more clear than when it comes to the ending. In Season of the Witch, my American editor was desperately unhappy with the ending and found it far too melancholy. My British editor was all for making my hero suffer even more. I trod a careful path.

Of course, I count myself fortunate that my new book will be published in both markets. There is a common misconception that all books published in Britain are automatically printed and distributed in the US and vice versa. Not so. A relatively small proportion of authors are cross-over authors and the best-seller lists in the two countries often do not correspond. My second book, Other Side of Silence, was never published in the States. My agent at the time was of the opinion that the book – set in South Africa – would not appeal to American readers because the milieu was too "foreign." Brits, on the other hand, are used to playing rugby and cricket against the South Africans (who usually trounce them with gusto – not that this has anything to do with literature but I thought I should mention it, anyway ) and are open to books set in former colonies.

So who has the final say? Can I simply refuse to take on board my editors' suggestions? Technically, yes. But there is a standard clause in my boiler-plate contract, which states that if the publisher doesn't feel the manuscript to be up to scratch, then the publisher has the right to refuse publication. You get to keep your advance, but no book on the shelf for you. This is a pretty big stick, or big carrot, depending on your perspective. Do I follow all the instructions my editors throw at me? Not at all, but I pick my battles. Furthermore, it is probably fair to say that if you keep sending your editor hate mail, "Your woeful misreading of the underlying subtext in chapter seven is inexplicable if not downright laughable" or voodoo dolls covered in pins, chances are she will not look kindly on your next offering and will refuse to buy it.

In the end, compromise but not selling-out is probably the name of the game. And T.S. Eliot may have nailed it on the head when he said: "Some editors are failed writers, but then so are most writers..."

Pole Dancing

2008-04-19T17:45:00.001+01:00

A friend recently directed me to the following link, http://www.robinhobb.com/rant.html which opens into a humorous piece written by author Robin Hobb on the perils of blogging. Mr. Hobb is not a fan of blogging and compares it to pole dancing – something that can be done by anyone who wishes to "stand naked in the window of the public's eye...and twitch and writhe and emote" in stark contrast to skilled story tellers who dance "the dance of a thousand veils". "Blogging," he sighs, "condemns us to live everyone else's tedious day as well as our own."

Right, then. Let me sashay straight into my tedious day(s) and tell you exactly what I've been up to since that joyous moment when I opened a bottle of wine and emoted sloppily over my finished manuscript all of a five weeks ago.

For the first two weeks I slept in, read until two in the morning and had lunch with friends I haven't seen in eighteen months. They are used to my emerging from my cave only infrequently and they always speak to me in soft tones and give me gentle glances because they believe that after finishing a book I'm in a fragile state. I play along and ham it up: exhausted author who is slowly making her way back into the sunlight of every day living.

What else? Well, I've been immersing myself in housewifely things! I've baked! I've shopped! I've done creative things with socks. Usually after doing the laundry I simply chuck all my husband's socks into the anarchic sock drawer and leave it to him to try and bring the partners together. I firmly believe this to be a character-building exercise and that I'm doing him a favour. But over these past few weeks, I've found myself rolling the socks into those cute little balls. Challenging.

About three weeks ago my first readers started giving me their feedback on the new manuscript. As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, these are friends whose judgment I trust and even though they tend to couch their criticism in diplomatic terms, they do not hesitate to tell me what they think is wrong with the book. Their feedback was gratifying – everyone seemed to have had a good time reading my story – but there were one or two... or maybe three little things, which had escaped my attention and needed to be fixed. One of my characters had inexplicably turned brunette after being a blond for most of the book. One character had simply disappeared never to be heard of again and a few of my readers, not unreasonably I suppose, wanted to know what had happened to him.

I also received feedback from my brother who lives in the States. Deep breath here. My brother is my mother's clever child – doctoral degrees from Carnegie Mellon in physics and electrical engineering – and my mother swears his first word as a baby was "quark". ( Actually, I have two talented brothers – the other one lives in South Africa and looks after my website www.natashamostert.com and also designed my MySpace page but he and I move to the same mellow vibe and we have boundless tolerance for each other's eccentricities.) My mathematically gifted brother, on the other hand, despairs of his sister's fuzzy thinking. In my new book, I had dipped a toe into the realm of quantum physics – courageously I thought – but my brother used a different word. I took his comments on the chin and rewrote those passages, which were causing him such distress. I won't say he is one hundred percent happy with the finished product but at least he is no longer talking to me through clenched teeth. For some reason he took it personally that I had criticized Einstein.

I also heard from my agent and oh happy day, he liked the book as well and decided to send it through to my editors immediately. And now I'm waiting for my editors to send me their notes. This is a nervous time.

This is also the time I should be thinking of a plot for the next book and the characters whose company I will be keeping over the next eighteen months. Usually by this stage I have a pretty good idea where I'll be heading but this time around I am coming up empty. One or two anaemic ideas are rattling hollowly and forlornly through the caverns of my skull. No dance of a thousand veils, for me yet. Did I mention this is a nervous time?

Oh, yes, I also had a gig two weeks ago at the Brompton Library in South Kensington in London. After the reading, I removed the blog entry in which I alerted friends to this event and I've been receiving messages from some of you curious to know if the evening went well. It turned out quite fun although at first I thought: tough crowd. For the first ten minutes no-one smiled when I made eye-contact, no-one except my good friends in the first row laughed at my jokes and I felt as though I was slowly settling to the bottom of the ocean. But then things started to improve -- whether because of my fantastic presentation or whether because of all the free wine and very little solid food that was on offer, I'm not sure -- but by the end of the evening we were rocking!

This is probably enough pole dancing for now -- thanks so much for emoting with me. And now, I spy an errant sock...

The New Book is Finished!

2008-03-08T17:08:00.000Z

Before I get to my news, let me share with you the following. I recently came across a quotation by someone called Edmund Bergler: "Every writer without exception is a masochist, a sadist, a peeping Tom, an exhibitionist, a narcissist, an injustice collector and a depressed person constantly haunted by fears of unproductivity."

I have no idea who Mr. Bergler is, but he has, sad to say, captured the essence of what it is to be a writer. However, I don't think Mr. Bergler is a writer himself. I rather think he may be the spouse of one. There surely is a special place in heaven for the husbands and wives of writers. Not only do they have to put up with our mood swings, but they also have to fend off our terrible neediness. And believe me, there is no-one more needy than an author with an unfinished book. The relief on my husband's face when I told him I had finally wrapped up the final pages of Dragonfly, said it all.

I am finished! YES! After eighteen months of talking to myself in the mirror, swallowing tubs of ice cream and gobs of melted cheese, I have a finished manuscript. Tonight I will get maudlin over a bottle of wine and read choice passages out loud (my poor husband) and convince myself that no other writer has ever produced anything remotely as good. It is the best moment.

It is a fleeting moment. Tomorrow…well, tomorrow the realization will sink in that the time has arrived for me to share with my agent and first readers. No-one – not even my nearest and dearest – has read the book.

My husband has no choice: he has to say nice things about it -- that is if he wants a quiet life. My mother is tough and doesn't pull any punches. She lives thousands of miles away so she feels safe. My agent – well, the word "forensic" comes to mind. Let's just say I need him more than he needs me, so he feels safe too.

Then there are my first readers : these are friends whose judgment I trust. Two of them are writers themselves and three are what I call "talented" readers. Although they usually try to couch their criticism in diplomatic terms, they know it is not in my best interest for them to lie. So they dish it out and I am grateful -- they have kept me from making a complete fool of myself more than once. I'll never forget a passage I wrote in one of my previous books, Windwalker. My hero, a cave diver, is walking across the beach in full diving gear. Now, when divers enter the water, they do so backward – and I got that fact right, thanks to a real-life cave diver who was advising me while I was writing the book. But instead of just saying, "Adam walked backward into the water" I wanted to make it poetic. So I wrote: "Fins splaying his feet in a bizarre approximation of a balletic plie, Adam inched carefully backward until he reached the water's edge."

So what's wrong with this sentence?

First, it shows that the author was trying to be too cute and second, that she knows nothing of ballet. I thought a plie was the posture ballet dancers take when at rest. You know, fully upright, feet turned sideways. I felt rather proud of coming up with this inspired analogy. Thankfully, one of my first readers does know about ballet and gently pointed out that yes, a plie requires your feet to go to the sides, but it also requires you to bend at the knees. So imagine the image I would have conjured up in the minds of knowledgeable readers by having my hero shuffle backwards knees bent. In the end I changed the sentence to "a bizarre approximation of a balletic movement" but I think I should simply have deleted the sentence altogether. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

First readers are essential, and once I receive their feedback – probably within the next two weeks – I will return to the book. I don't take all their suggestions on board, but if more than one reader complains about the same thing, I take notice. On 31 March I'll hand over a bunch of sweaty pages to my editor – and then...Sigh. But let's not go there yet.

Before I forget: the paperback edition of Season of the Witch came out in the US this week. It has a different cover from the hardback and I'd love to hear what you think of it. For readers in the UK, the British soft cover won't hit the shelves until 14 July but Australia and South Africa – you guys get the UK edition this month already. I thought it might be fun to line up all the covers and ask you all to tell me which one you prefer. I'd be especially interested to see if there's a split along gender lines and according to nationality. My publishers keep telling me that UK and US audiences have widely differing tastes.

Oh, and I should mention that both paperback editions have a little bonus. They include the first chapter of Dragonfly, or rather the Prologue. My editor thought it might be interesting to add it to the back of Witch to provide readers with a taster of what's to come. Of course, it does mean that I'm not allowed to change the beginning of the book ever again. For a writer like me, who can't keep her hands off the manuscript until the day it is actually sent off to the printers, this is a tough restriction.

But for now, that bottle of wine is waiting...

The Not So Secret Lives of Authors

2008-02-23T17:26:00.000Z

In my previous blog entry I wrote about what authors get up to in private: hanging around the house in sweats, eating too much cheese, talking to themselves in the mirror. This blog entry will be about the public life of a writer: the interviews, the book signings, the literary festivals. Oh, yes. We are talking GLAMOUR.

My first book signing took place in Borders, Oxford Street in London, on a desperately cold and rainy Halloween. The event was billed as an evening of South African writing and two other South African writers – Deon Meyer and Gillian Slovo -- shared the gig with me. The idea was that we would not only sign books but do a reading and talk about our novels as well.

I was excited. I was really excited. It took me two hours to decide what to wear. Should I go for the bohemian writer look – ankle-length skirt, unstructured jacket, beads – or should I go for the sexy look – short skirt and well, short skirt? I chose sexy. The chairs they gave us to sit on were these low slung monstrosities where your seat almost touches the ground and your knees are pushed up to chin level. Ms Slovo, an old hand at these events, wore slacks and looked unruffled.

We had nine people in the audience: one agent, three long-suffering editors, my husband, the store manager, two people who were browsing the shelves (before deciding that the free South African wine on offer looked good) and one homeless guy. As the rookie, I was on last and when it came to my turn, we were down to six people. By the time I had finished my reading, we were down to five. The homeless guy had decided the rain outside was preferable to the boredom inside.

Book signings can be depressing affairs but if you mess up or don't sell any books, relatively few people are witness to your humiliation. Interviews? Now that's where it gets tricky. You can end up with the incestuously friendly interviewer who does not give you a chance to get a word in edgewise; the hostile interviewer whose goal it is to make you look stupid or my personal favourite: the interviewer who hadn't read your book -- this is when you know you are in for an adventurous time. My first novel, The Midnight Side, is a ghost story about two cousins. In one memorable radio interview – at least I will never forget it – the interviewer who had obviously read only the blurb, fixated on the word "cousins". Her first question to me was, "Could you please give us your views on family relationships in the twenty-first century?" Her second question was, "China's one child policy means children grow up without cousins. How do you feel about that?" As I was expecting questions on the topics of lucid dreaming and telephone calls from the dead, I found this line of questioning rather challenging.

Visiting book clubs are the promotional events I like best. They feed you and give you glasses of wine and everyone tells you how wonderful you are and how fascinating your book is. Most of the time, that is. At my last book club event one member complained that the characters in Season of the Witch were unrealistic. For those of you who haven't read the book, my characters are two sisters who live in Chelsea, do bungee jumping, practise witchcraft and pose in the nude. So I was rather baffled by this comment. When I told her that I bump into women like these every day on the King's Road and whenever I step into Peter Jones (department store on Sloane Square), she was not amused. When I added that I had not set out to write a kitchen sink drama, she became aggressive. (It later transpired that her favourite read was Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting.) Another member told me that the book "dipped" for her at one point. When I asked -- rather feebly -- where exactly, she snapped back: 'Well, you can't change it now, can you?' True, very true.

And then there are the literature festivals. How wonderful: a chance to exchange ideas with fellow writers and interact with eager fans. Admittedly, I have never been invited to Cheltenham or Hay-on-Wye; the kind of affair I get to go to is altogether more modest. But even high-profile authors cannot escape the low profile festival. If you look through the photographs in the revolving carousel on my page, you will find a pic, which shows me in the presence of two very well-known and successful authors: John Connolly and Paul Johnston. On this particular occasion (the venue was glamorous Clacton-on-Sea) the attendees were bussed in and their average age was around 80. But make no mistake, these ladies – and the odd gentleman – were avid readers and critical. They had all read our books before the event and were asked to fill in cards with their comments. One reader wrote the following about The Midnight Side: "Interesting story. Obviously written by a woman with a past." I took this as a huge compliment and ever since the card has been tacked up on the message board in my office.

My most cringe-worthy moment did not happen during a promotional event for one of my own books, however, but at a book signing by another author: none other than Ruth Rendell. As was expected, I bought a copy of her new book but also pulled from my handbag an older novel, which I had brought along specially for the occasion. Placing the book reverentially in front of her, I asked if she would please sign this copy for me, as it is one of my very favourite suspense novels. She opened the book on its title page and smiled gently. Yes, she agreed, PD James is one of her favourite authors as well.

How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors

2007-09-02T10:10:00.002+01:00

Years ago, I read an interview with Dame Barbara Cartland. As I have never read any of Ms. Cartland's novels, I cannot comment on her work, but two things about the interview struck me forcibly: the lady's work ethic, and her pale blue velvet sofa. Ms. Cartland wrote more than 700 novels. I manage to finish a novel every two years. Ms. Cartland dictated her books to an assistant, while lounging in a silk gown on a pale blue velvet sofa. I have no assistant and no silk gown but these things matter not. It is the sofa I covet.

I mean, think about it. Who has a pale blue velvet sofa in their living room? It is demurely decadent. More than a little unpractical. Frivolous and glamorous. And at some deep level it confirmed my suspicion that other writers lead far more interesting lives than I do.

I sometimes receive emails from readers asking me what my day looks like. Let's just say, it is a walk on the tame side. My working day begins shortly after I have made my husband a cup of tea in the morning (around 5.30) and it ends when I make him dinner. In between these two highpoints are squeezed in roughly nine hours of writing and research. I write creatively every day except weekends although this is now starting to change and my Saturdays are becoming writing days as well. What exactly do I do in those nine hours? Well, I type. I stare at the screen in quiet desperation. I wrestle with the hero of my book, who is often disappointingly lazy and inarticulate. I eat Haagen Dazs Belgian chocolate ice cream from the tub and I melt Marks and Spencers shredded Mozzarella cheese in a microwave and eat it straight up. I know, disgusting. I'm sure Ms Cartland insisted on Earl Grey and cucumber sandwiches. When I can't stand it any longer, I go to the dojo and kick a bag or punch my trainer, Carlos. Before you give him the sympathy vote, he is a former WKA European light-heavyweight kickboxing champion and can take care of himself.

Surely it must be different for other authors? Think of Bruce Chatwin exploring far horizons; Hemingway wrestling bulls and doing manly things; Ann Rice ferried in a hearse through the streets of New Orleans; Bret Easton Ellis, OK...let's not go there. But the point is, these authors obviously required more than ice cream, a punch bag and a room of their own to write. They needed adventure, bull runs and designer clothing to keep the creative juices flowing!

It was therefore with trepidation that I accepted an invitation by Dan Crowe, former editor of the literary magazine, Zembla, to contribute to a book called How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors. I was also thrilled, of course - how could I not be? I would be rubbing shoulders with A.S. Byatt, Jonathan Franzen and Joyce Carol Oates. Am I cool, or what. But my apprehension was acute. Sixty-four of us were asked to contribute an essay on something we consider to be essential to our writing lives: something we simply cannot do without. It could be anything - an object, a memento, a ritual - anything, which helps us arrange words on a page. I was convinced my fellow authors would be writing about Cristal champagne, yoga in the desert, smoky jazz bars, balloon rides at sunrise. Not Haagen Dazs and stringy cheese.

So what does inspire my illustrious colleagues? Hot showers (Jane Smiley), chocolate (Douglas Coupland), post-it notes (Will Self), cigarettes (Anthony Bourdain), a large desk (Alain de Botton). Good grief, their lives are as boring as mine. Seriously, all the contributions in this book are wonderful and written with imagination and flair – Nicholson Baker, e.g. manages to make ear plugs seem almost unbearably sexy – but they do bring home one inescapable truth: to be a writer, you have to be able to sit in a chair.

My contribution? I decided not to go for the mozzarella cheese, but I did choose my trusty boxing aid. No, not Carlos, but a speedball, which is attached to the wall in my office. It has a potent, plum-like shape and it beckons me several times a day. When my brain is sagging and slumping, I tap out a triplet beat and then no more sagging and slumping but swaying and spinning...

Is not the brain shaped like a pair of boxing gloves?

How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors is published by Rizzoli and is now available (see below). Edited by Dan Crowe.

In my study:

How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors:

The Day Stephen King Kissed My Cheek...

2007-04-27T17:59:00.000+01:00

I recently read Stephen King's The Shining for the second time. The first time was many years ago when I was a young girl living in Johannesburg, South Africa. I had never seen snow. I had, in fact, never stayed in a hotel. King's description of snowbound Overlook seemed alien and monstrously wonderful. When I picked up the book after all these years, I wondered if the novel would still pack a punch as powerful. It did. It scared the stuffing out of me all over again. This is a great book: it takes you into the heart of darkness the way a good horror story should.

I know Mr. King is not fond of having this label slapped onto his work and I understand why. The horror genre does not get much respect and frankly, it doesn't often deserve any. Too often "horror" means clumsy over-the-top plots and prose as purple as a the festering boil on the forehead of a flesh-eating zombie. The kind of book that makes you go, Ooh!, then yuck, followed by yawn. And like badly written sex scenes, horror can easily tip over into the ridiculous.

But place a story of subtle evil in the hands of a masterful writer who uses elegant language and he'll mess with your mind like no-one else can. Good horror writing takes skill. It requires a clammy hand but a light touch to convince the reader that something ephemeral is lurking at the periphery of his vision and if he moves his head quickly enough, he will come face to face with something so devastating...

I'm not happy either when my own books are classed as horror and it happens all the time. Borders, for example, insisted on buying Season of the Witch on the understanding that it will be shelved in the horror/fantasy section. So when I walked into the Borders store in the Time Warner Building in New York City three weeks ago, it was with mixed feelings that I finally tracked down my witches. There it was: my book with its beautiful cover of a woman with wanton red hair and long, sexy white neck squeezed in next to a book with a vomit-hued jacket featuring a female with no teeth and breasts like rotting apples. But to the left of my witch, was perched a fluorescent crow. Another Stephen King classic: The Stand. If my witches were going to hang with someone, who better than Mother Abigail or Randall Flagg.

Two days after I had searched out my book in Borders, I attended the Edgar Allan Poe Awards ceremony. Each year the members of The Mystery Writers of America get together for a day of seminars and discussion, followed by an awards banquet. This was the first time I attended and I was as star struck as a groupie. There was Lee Child! He has sold a gazillion copies of his books about loner drifter Jack Reacher! There was Barry Eisler! He has sold a gazillion copies of his books about loner assassin (but what a sexy assassin) John Rain! There was Harlan Coben who has sold more than a gazillion copies and had won more than a gazillion awards. Actually, as Mr. Coben and I share the same publisher, I was seated at his table the night of the banquet and I was able to introduce myself to him as his MySpace friend number 2034. I'm happy to say it created an immediate bond between us. And there was Stephen King. Oh, wow.

At the banquet Mr. King was crowned Grand Master: a life-time achievement award. Earlier in the day, he had signed books. When I approached with my copy of Lisey's Story for him to autograph, he started talking to me about my own novel. Not that he had read it, but he could hardly fail to notice the T-shirt I was wearing. I was shamelessly self-promoting Season of the Witch and emblazoned across my chest were the words "Prepare to be seduced." (I'm all for subtlety in my stories but when it comes to publicity...) We also talked about Bag of Bones, one of my favourite King novels and I managed to quote a sentence from the book, which I have always found magical."I can smell pine – a smell which is both sour and clean at the same time – and the faint but somehow tremendous smell of the lake." The tremendous smell of water. Is that not beautiful? Well, my memory – for once flawless – got me a once-in-a-lifetime. The King leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. Just like that.

An aside: Later that day, I left the Edgars to attend a panel discussion arranged by Pen World Voices. One of the participants was Neil Gaiman, another author I admire greatly and one whose sense of horror is rather nicely developed as well. I think I may have had visions of a second kiss, but sadly, Mr. Gaiman left before the end of the evening and I had no chance to quote at him a line from American Gods.

What is scary? My own books feature almost no graphic scenes of violence because I am the first to admit that I am very poor at writing gore. Still,reviewers often use the words "chilling", "disturbing" and "creepy" to characterise my work and book stores like to stick me into the weirdo section located at the back of the store behind the stairs. But for me, it is all about the mind. Jung once said there is nothing more fascinating than watching your own mind self-destruct. I agree. Which is why the Jack Nicholson character in the movie version of The Shining cannot compare to Jack Torrance of the novel. You look into Nicholson's eyes and you are reminded of what Samuel Beckett said: "We are all born mad. Some of us remain so." Nicholson was crazy right off the bat. But in the book Jack is losing his mind one tiny slippery step at a time...

So here is my question to you: What do readers find frightening? What do you guys find suspenseful and deeply disturbing? I'd love your feedback on this topic. Do you require blood spattered sheets, eyeballs impaled on toothpicks, psychopaths supping on people's brains while they are still alive? What gets the goose bumps going for you? Do you find it more frightening when horror is tinged with the supernatural, or is it the stone cold serial killer lurking inside the pages who makes you check the doors and windows?

War Stories

2007-04-27T10:00:00.001+01:00

Last week my physiotherapist allowed me to jettison both Brad and Johnny (crutches) and walk unassisted. Yes! I am Crutches Tiger, Hidden Dragon no more. The sad news is that I will not be allowed back in the dojo until May. No kicking of bags or instructors until then. Still, I shouldn't complain. At least I can now sit on a bike and pedal with both legs. Up till now I've been pedalling with one leg only, which is very hard to do and does not look cool.

Instead of the dojo, I've been hanging out at the fracture clinic. Be assured, this is a highly competitive environment. My fellow fractees (?) are either young guys who broke their bones snow- or skateboarding, or more elderly victims who suffered quite horrendous injuries falling in the bathtub or down the stairs. What we all have in common is a fervent desire to outdo each other in the war story department. I had rather thought I would scoop the prize for best "injured-in-action" tale – puny woman felling 190 pound kickboxing champion with one blow -- but not so. There is a very good-looking gentleman in our group who tells of breaking his ankle on some remote island off Argentina, dragging himself through miles of swampland, then taking a rickety ferry to the mainland, then flying on a prop plane (at first I mistakenly thought he had piloted it himself, as well) before making his way back to the UK -- all with his broken bones unset. Top that one. As for the injuries themselves – seventy-one year old Stella who suffered 'spiral' breaks has bragging rights here. Her spiky X-ray makes the hardware they've drilled into my leg look like chopsticks.

The line at the fracture clinic is often long, which is why many people bring their own reading material with them. Looking around the room I was sad to see not even one Season of the Witch and rather predictable choices: J.K Rowling; Tess Gerritsen, Dan Brown but also The Executioner's Song – aha - in the hands of a kid who couldn't have been more than sixteen. Doesn't that just give you hope.

Personally, I like browsing through those old dog-eared magazines that are always on offer. They're an adventure. What, Posh and Becks are having marital problems? This is also the only time I ever get to read my horoscope. I was immensely cheered to learn that my financial prospects were about to 'move to the next level' although rather sad to discover that this particular copy was three years old. Seriously though, magazines in waiting rooms have been good to me in the past. When I was thirteen years old and waiting for my appointment with the dentist, I read an article about Thomas Edison. This article ended up providing me with the plot for my first novel many years later. Edison, whose parents were Spiritualists, tried to design a telephone that he hoped might connect the living with relatives who had "crossed over". When I sat down to write Midnight Side, I decided to make use of the concept of phone calls from the dead. After all, what could be more creepy? A ghost wouldn't scare me that much, I don't think – but picking up a ringing phone and recognising the voice on the other end as someone I know to be no longer alive? See Jane run.

Anyway, thanks very much to all of you who have been sending me good wishes and speedy recovery, and who still do. You warm my heart!

BTW This blog entry was originally posted 26 January 2008 but because I wanted to move it to the back of the list I had to play around with the dates...

Broken Bones

2007-04-22T09:01:00.000+01:00

I have been receiving messages of condolences from MySpace friends about my fractured ankle and I am very touched by your concern. I did have trouble at first figuring out how you guys knew about it! But it seems my brother had posted a notice on the discussion board of my website. www.natashamostert.com. Having a brother as a webmaster has definite perks but it also means it is impossible to be a woman of mystery.

Just to put the record straight: I wasn't being incredibly clumsy when it happened just incredibly brave. OK, and stupid. I have been trying to sweep my kickboxing instructor off his his feet for many years now, but in vain. On Friday, much to my -- and his -- surprise, I managed to do so. We were in a clinch, sparring and I swept his ankle. This was an aggressive move on my part but usually my feeble attempts do not even register with him. He is a champion after all and there is about a 40 kilo weight difference between us: www.myspace.com/carloslionheartandrade. But on this occasion my technique must have been devastating because he went down like a sack of bricks. Unfortunately, he collapsed on me. My ankle was still entangled with his and when we both hit the floor, it broke. The man needs to go on a diet.

I'm also sad to say my long-suffering husband has finally lost his sense of humour about the situation. I can't blame him. In a previous kickboxing mishap I cracked my nose. The effect was quite spectacular as the one half of my face turned black and blood pooled underneath my eye. The other half showed no sign of trauma. When I looked into the mirror it was like looking at a rather grisly rendition of the two theatre masks: happy and sad. My husband was sympathetic until the day the greengrocer's wife gave me a piece of paper with a telephone number, explaining that it was the helpline for battered women. When I tried to tell her what had happened she told me I needed to work through my "denial". We now buy our vegetables some place else.

I had surgery on Friday evening and I'll be on crutches until end of December. However,as I have a book to finish by February, I need to be desk bound anyway. And after pushing myself around on crutches for eight weeks my upper body strength is going to be fearsome. This doesn't mean that I do not feel incredibly sorry for myself, of course. So what I need is lots of sympathy and not messages (this is for you, John) that I have only myself to blame for taking part in such ridiculous pursuits.

Thanks for the good wishes everybody and stay safe...

BTW This blog entry was first posted in November 2007 but because I wanted to push it to the back of the list, I had to play around with the dates!

Where Would I Rather Be, Right This Minute?

2007-04-01T09:46:00.001+01:00

Season of the Witch, my fourth novel, is to be published in April this year. It was a challenging book to write and I only finished the proofs in early December 2006. So I am feeling rather drained and at the back of my head I have the sense that I should now be allowed to take it easy - shoes off, tacky drinks with floating umbrellas, bubble baths, marshmallows, B-grade movies on TV.

Sadly, there is no rest for the wicked. My next book has a December 2007 deadline. So I need to work the keyboard!

It is always difficult to get started on a new book: you're not yet comfortable with your characters, the world you're building for them has gaps and the plot is wobbly. Most of the time I find myself thinking I'd rather be some place else than behind my desk facing my laptop. When I told this to a friend of mine who is also a writer, she and I ended up trading emails of where we'd rather be. This was my list.

I'd rather be:

in a Cirque de Soleil performance
in the dojo
in the reading room of the British Museum - but with no specific goal in mind and no pressing research to do.
having a meal in Rubens restaurant in Franschoek in the Cape Province
having a glass of champagne with the TWACUs in the salon upstairs from the Cheyne Walk Restaurant in Chelsea
in Namibia. It is my favourite place in the world and I try to visit as often as I can. Too bad it has now been discovered by every-one and his brother since Brad and Angelina's adventure.

More about Namibia: Long before it became fashionable, the hero in my third book, Windwalker, made his home in a deserted mining town in the Namibian desert. As a fugitive on the run, it was the perfect hide-out: a place where the ghosts walk even during the day...

Heart Burn: Why Do They Love/Hate Windwalker So?

2007-03-26T16:53:00.005+01:00

Probably because my new book, Season of the Witch, is attracting quite a bit of review interest, I have received a number of messages from readers who are new to my work, asking me how my previous novel, Windwalker, got to be classed as a romance novel. The answer has to do with ex agents, publishers, marketing decisions and other gruesome things. Suffice it to say that in the process Windwalker became my most controversial - although biggest-selling - book.

I wanted to write a great love story in the tradition of Wuthering Heights. Not that I would ever be as arrogant as to think myself in the league of the divine Ms. Bronte, but I too wanted to write a dark, gothic tale of two self-destructive lovers. I placed my story inside Namibia, a country I love passionately and whose terrible beauty I believed was the perfect backdrop for a story about murder and redemption. As always I seasoned the narrative with a dash of the paranormal. Readers of love stories, I was convinced, would adore it.

They hated it.

Or at least, some of them did. Up until the publication of Windwalker I had been fortunate: reviewers had been kind to me. So I admit to being a little spoilt and unprepared for the venomous grass-roots reviews that came my way when Windwalker was launched. I’m talking about the kind of reviews you would find, for example, on Amazon. In other words: the views of ordinary readers, the people I care about most.

It is flattering - and from a professional viewpoint essential - for print reviewers to like your work. But I write for ordinary book lovers who rely on stories to add joy to their lives and fantasy to their bread. If I disappoint them, well, then I’m not happy. I should immediately add that for Windwalker I’ve also received some of the most positive and heartfelt reviews I’ve received for any of my books: people have written to me that they’re keeping it permanently on their bedside tables, that they’ve bought it for all their family members, that it is the most heart-breaking story they’ve ever read and so on. It became clear very early on that readers either hated the book with a vengeance or loved it to pieces. Again, take a look at the Amazon reader’s review page for Windwalker: both viewpoints are represented in technicolour.

Below you will find a humorous piece I wrote when the controversy was at its peak. I had meant to submit it for publication but in the end I decided against it. It was written more for own benefit - I was starting to take myself a little bit too seriously - and I needed to remind myself that humour is what keeps us sane. As G.K Chesterton said: "Angels fly because they take themselves lightly..."

So for all of you who had contacted me about this book, I post this one for you. And I would love feedback on the topic. What is the definition of a love story? What constitutes romance? Are they one and the same? Let me know!

HEART BURN

Someone once said Agatha Christie gives more pleasure in bed than any other woman. Sadly, I can not match the allure of the redoubtable Ms. Christie, but the great lady has often served as inspiration. As a writer I am well aware that writing is all about seduction. It is about romancing the reader.
But the course of true love rarely runs smoothly as I discovered with the recent publication of my book, Windwalker.Since its release, I’ve had reason to ponder the Scheherazade-like (amuse me or I’ll chop off your head) relationship between writer and reader. Readers can be unforgiving. Especially, as I’ve discovered, romance readers.
By googling myself (a masochistic pleasure authors tend to indulge in from time to time) I have discovered that readers either adore my book, or loathe it with a passion. Some reviewers state that my book had moved them profoundly and had even brought them to tears. Others sound as though they feel like bursting into tears as well, but for wholly different reasons. The venom of some of these reviews has startled me, especially as the main reason for the invective appears to be the fact that I have broken the "rules". Somewhere along the way, I have violated a contract I made with readers when a romance imprimatur was stamped on the spine of my book.
But what then, is "romance?" Is it really a cookie cutter term? Windwalker is my third book. I’m usually marketed as a mystery writer. But Windwalker was my attempt to write a story about soul mates, surely the most romantic of concepts. It is the story of two lovers travelling through time, desperately searching for each other, but the one always walking just a little too far ahead of the other. In this lifetime, however, they are destined to meet.
So what is the problem with this scenario?Windwalker"breaks the cardinal rule" thunders Wendy Crutcher of theromancereader.com. "[It] has an ending that has no business being in a novel marketed as romance." And S.Cook from Alabama complains bitterly on the amazon.com customer review page that the hero "stays around for only a few days and then poof he’s dead."
Well, it isn’t exactly "poof", it is a sensitively – even, dare I say, poetically – described demise, but I sympathise with Ms. Cook. She obviously expected a conventional happy ever after, not an ever after with a twist in the tail.
The great romance characters of all time – Cathy and Heathcliff, Scarlett and Rhett, Amber and Carlton – all loved and lost. Madness, betrayal and hopeless yearning permeate these magnificent tales of grand passion. Consider The Hunchback of Notre Dame: one of the most poignantly romantic books ever written. In the very last scene, two years after the main events of the book had already taken place, two skeletons are discovered in the vault of Montfaucon. The female was buried after she was hanged but the male – a hunchback – shows no fracture of the neck and had obviously come to the vault to die. When an attempt is made to disengage it from the female skeleton in its grasp, it crumbles to dust! Now is that not a scene that will linger in the mind far longer than if the two lovers had hobbled off hand in hand into the sunset with the bells of Notre Dame pealing merrily in their wake?
Another reviewer accused me of not including in my book any of the "good stuff." She did not specify what the superior stuff is and I puzzled forlornly over this comment until I read an article about the success enjoyed by writers of historical Scottish romances. It contained an extract from Devil in a Kilt by Sue-Ellen Welfonder in which the novel’s heroine spies on the hero as he undresses. The sight of so much unadulterated maleness takes her breath away especially when "he rolled a pair of thin woollen braies down his muscular legs. Faith, even his buttocks appeared fierce and proud!"
I like the perky buttocks – yeah! The idea that there can be something erotic in watching a guy take off his socks is more problematic for me although I suspect my husband may not be removing his socks in quite the right way. But I finally "get" what the "good stuff" is. And I agree: I need more of it. Having said that, for much of the book my hero is dressed in rubber (he’s a diver). Titillating, yes? Well, I thought so.
Not enough eroticism and the wrong kind of villain. I was accused of creating an over-the-top villain who enjoys clubbing baby seals. The Romantic Times Book club advises "animal lovers and fans of traditional romance to give [the book] a pass." One Amazon customer who actually liked my book (five stars) states unequivocally that my villains are too "twisted" for a romance novel. She wasn’t prepared for their "sheer evilness – not dark, sexy evilness, but icky, sicko, can-sane-men-really-think-like-this mess."
Ah, not fair. First, I did not want Count Dracula as my villain. Second, my villain isn’t swinging his club about in a mad frenzy because he enjoys watching seals die. He is making a living. He lives in, a country where sealing is, unfortunately, legal business. I certainly do not advocate this line of work and I was careful not to indulge in gratuitous excess: no graphic descriptions of splattered brains and no villain giggling madly with glee. When my villain kills animals he does so not as an exercise in sadism but because he is trying to earn money or wishes to cause my hero distress.
Did I want readers to react to what he’s doing? Did I want to create a realistic sense of place? Absolutely. This is - a beautiful but raw environment. The animals don’t wear cute outfits and the lions don’t burst into song. Well, at least not Elton John songs… But maybe realism and romance are mutually exclusive in the contemporary romance novel and I have unwittingly broken another rule.
We writers have ambitious hearts and we are needy. Some writers even admit to being addicted to the love their readers show them. I think the greater addiction is not wanting to be loved, but wanting to be read. Not all readers will be content with what they find in my books, but as long as they are intrigued enough to continue reading, contented author am I.

On Reading

2007-03-02T17:29:00.000Z

Writers are often asked to name the one book, which triggered in them the impulse to write. I am unable to pinpoint such a Eureka moment but the reading experience I remember best is Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. For a girl just entering adolescence, this novel had everything: passion on a grand scale, dark eroticism (remember the priest's wanton desires for the fair Esmeralda?) and a powerful myth at its heart. I still consider this tale of beauty and the beast the most romantic book I've ever read.

At that time, I was already a serious addict: reading and writing with a voracious, if untidy energy. I wrote pages of overblown prose and read everything -- from Louis L'Amour to Hemingway -- with a joyous, uncritical eye. The child reader/writer is a tiresome child. Either exhaustingly precocious or seething and sullen ( I went through both stages), our imaginations run riot. We're the ones with the imaginary friends. And even as children we tend to prefer books to people.

Ah, books. Both potion and poison. Reading is the creative core of a writer's life, but your attitude towards reading changes as you age. Once the insidious thought enters your mind that maybe you could get published as well, innocence is lost. Of course, you'll continue to read in order to make sense of the world. And you'll always be seduced by the beauty of words. But now you're not just reading...you're competing. Every time you open a book, you are measuring yourself against the voice of another writer.

Despite the pinpricks of envy, writers rely on each other for wisdom. Whenever I'm writing a passage which, frustratingly, refuses to soar, I try to remind myself of what G.K. Chesterton wrote about angels and flying. They fly, he believed, because "they take themselves lightly..."

My Husband, The Taxi Cab and Even the Dead Have Secrets

2007-02-03T09:40:00.001Z

Authors are privileged. Writing is a passion and we are blessed indeed that we are able to share that passion with others. However, the writing life is not without its problems. Moments of serendipity and epiphany are rare. Writing is a lonely business and facing your computer all day long without any-one around can lead to fairly bizarre monologues, not to mention the occasional episode of outright hallucination.

But it is not so much the writing as the publishing process, which is the test. Bring together a group of authors, open a bottle of wine and some searing tales of publishing woe are bound to follow. These usually have to do with the publicity - or rather lack of it - given to the novels of less well-known authors. Publishers reserve their publishing dollars for the latest Clancy or J.K. Rowling. For us lesser scribes the logic of this strategy is a little hard to follow although, admittedly, there probably is still the odd nomad in outer Mongolia who hasn't heard of Harry Potter and who needs to be informed...

My husband, bless his heart, decided to take matters into his own hands. Ever since he was a little boy, Frederick had dreamed of owning a Ferrari, an Aston Martin, a fire truck and a London taxi cab. The first three have as yet eluded his grasp, but a year ago his fantasy of tooling around London in a handsome black sixteen year old Fairway, became true. Not only did he derive great enjoyment from driving down the bus lane illegally and waving airily to would-be passengers trying to flag him down, but he also had the satisfaction of knowing that he was making a contribution to furthering his wife's career. On the doors of the cab were reproductions of the covers of my first two books.

Even the dead have secrets it proclaimed mysteriously on the back left-hand door. The catchy slogan, You will never listen to the world the same way again, was stencilled on the other side. Whether this exposure led to an increase in my sales is debatable but the cab certainly drew some appreciative - if slightly mystified - glances from passers-by.

Sadly, the cab has since been sold: parking problems becoming too onerous. Added to this, I had to ride in the back (no passenger seat next to the driver) and my husband had developed the annoying habit of simply closing the little window behind his head whenever we had an argument and he was tired of listening to me.

Before the cab left my life, however, we took some pictures. They are posted here and I hope you enjoy them!

Planet Sound

2007-01-03T17:36:00.000Z

In ancient times, man was a fly walking across the piano keys of the universe: he made no noise. But that has changed... From: The Other Side of Silence

At the heart of The Other Side of Silence, lies a warning: sound, and music in particular, is a powerful force. If you abuse it, you do so at your peril.

Years ago I read a book by Mickey Hart, drummer for The Grateful Dead, called Drumming on the Edge of Magic. My knowledge of the band and their music was scanty and vaguely mixed in with what I knew of the potent mythology of Haight-Ashbury, the Summer of Love, Timothy Leary and psychedelic drugs. A different continent; a different generation. From where I sat these events seemed sloppily self-indulgent - even quaint. But I was in for a surprise. Hart's book blew my mind and one passage, in particular, rocked:

"I stood in the woods... my ear to the trunk of a tree...trying to push the edges of my sound envelope. I realized that everything must be making sound; the process of photosynthesis must be producing vibrations, if only we had sensitive enough ears. I began hearing the sacred in the music."

A world assembled with building blocks made up of sound. The words thrilled me, knocked me into awareness. I started reading about the power of sound and music; everything from the thoughts of philosopher-mathematicians like Pythagoras, who believed in a musical cosmos, to the theories of modern-day particle physicists who propose that atoms react as though they have resonance. Brilliant minds, cool ideas. They made me listen to the world in a different way. And what I've come to believe is this: Sound is not for the faint of heart. Music is staring at the sun. And maybe, just maybe, we are a little too much at ease. Perhaps the time has come to think consciously of what it means to live on Planet Sound.

We live in a world that is drenched in noise. Unless you dunk into a sensory deprivation tank or go down a very deep worked-out mine -- the kind they have in South Africa -- you will be unable to find any spot on earth where there is absolute quiet. Such a place no longer exists.

Even our oceans are polluted. As we test for global warming, we rig up giant underwater speakers which send out soundwaves that travel right around the globe. Air traffic pollute the skies and deep in space are satellites: an army of whispering spies. In our daily lives we are insects caught in a sticky web of noise. Around us the sounds of sorrow and laughter; the sounds of the dying and the living; ambulances wailing, police cars screaming, frenzied chatter, jackhammers throbbing, cellphones beeping, the incessant beat of music, pounding, pounding. Man's activities - his resonance patterns - are impacting on the whole of the planet. And now the earth itself is humming. Japanese geophysicists have identified 50 notes over two octaves that make up the earth's background hum: a constant low frequency noise.

Sound affects every one of us every single day but we appear sublimely oblivious to its power. We go to the movies and sit happily munching our popcorn, largely unaware of the background music even though for two or three hours it will cause our heartbeats to fluctuate and turn our adrenaline on and off like a tap. We turn up the speakers on our CD player and rarely consider that music can drive up our blood pressure, lead to a drop in body temperature, a decrease in the skin's conductivity, a change in mood. Parents fret about the headbanging sound of an AC/DC song, but all music has insidious power. Even, it seems, music as innocuous as Country and Western. Garth Brooks packing the kind of visceral punch of Eminem or Trent Reznor? The hatted one deserving a spot on the hit list of Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center? The mind boggles. But some research suggest that country ballads, those 'tears in beers' songs, may increase the risk of suicide.

Sound can set in motion an avalanche. Soldiers have to break step when they cross a bridge. Loud sounds can put a person at higher risk of having a heart attack. Certain frequencies can kill off bacteria. Studies of plant life show that it can be affected adversely by a constant onslaught of sound. Noise from underwater sonar systems have caused whales to beach themselves and die.

Think what it was like on earth a thousand years ago. Imagine how quiet it must have been; how incredibly rare and precious music was. Now imagine that right this minute, sound waves are suddenly becoming tangible like long trails of fibre. Everyone unable to move. All of us choking, smothering - enmeshed in a dense, unforgiving tangle.

The casual way in which we treat sound stands in sharp contrast to the belief systems of ancient civilisations. In the mystery schools of Egypt, Rome, Tibet and India the knowledge of sound was a highly developed science based on the understanding that vibration lies at the heart of all matter and energy in the universe. Pythagoras reduced music to numbers and mathematical ratios and believed the very same ratios to be applicable to the universe and everything within it. This view of a musical cosmos was adopted by Plato and became the standard throughout the Mediterranean world. Sound was regarded as the very cornerstone of civilisation. Music, especially, was never to be at the disposal of the stupid or the wicked. Said Confucius: 'If you wish to know if a people be well-governed, if its laws be good or bad, examine the music it practises.' In the Shu King, the Book of Odes, it tells of the emperor regularly travelling within his kingdom to test musical instruments to ensure that they corresponded with the five perfect tones and with each other. If they did not, conflict and political instability was sure to follow.

Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensees: 'The silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.' And as we start our journey into the twenty-first century, we do indeed seem to find terror in silence. When we're by ourselves, what is the first thing we do? We switch on the CD player or the TV. Some people have radios in the shower. Bill Gates even have speakers inside his swimming pool. And music is the drug of choice. Everyone from the paper boy on his rounds to the surgeon in his theatre works to its beat.

Churches are empty but rock stadiums are full. In the last week in March, 592 million songs were downloaded from Napster - this after the site attempted to block copyrighted music. With earphones clamped to our heads and minds blissed out by Deftones, Massive Attack, Chopin or Bach, we hook onto a strand of sound a billion years long and we're given wings. Under the influence of Mozart, rats run through mazes faster and more accurately, Alzheimer sufferers function more normally and women giving birth find relief from pain. Yes, not all the music we listen to is Mozart. Some of the music we become addicted to speak of unrelenting alienation; of pain and anger and violence. Demon poetry. But poetry all the same.

But is there something in our genes which predispose us to become addicted to sound? Why is it that music speaks to us so? Scientists are now proposing that the human brain is pre-wired for sound. With PET scans and MRIs they seek to establish that music has biological foundations and that musical preferences are wired into the music centre of our temporal lobes since birth.

But maybe the answer is simply that music brings us close to what is sacred. There must be a reason why sound plays an important role in creation myths; why it is seen as the tool with which cosmos was created out of chaos. The Ancient Chinese believed the origin of the world to lie in an inaudible sacred sound. In the Upanishads it says the sound that is OM is the universe itself. And for Christians the beginning started with a Word. We even talk of the Big Bang - although as David Hykes, musician extraordinaire points out, this term is modelled on the 'noisy violence of our own culture.' Hykes prefers the concept 'Big Ring' for that moment when unknown forces brought the universe into being. Michael Hayes, in his remarkable book The Infinite Harmony, sees in the composition of the DNA molecule - the four nitrogenous bases, the triplet RNA codons, the 64 possible combinations of bases and the 22 signals at the amino-acid stage of development - a biochemical manifestation of the heptatonic musical scale. He concludes: 'As I looked deeper and deeper into the workings of the genetic code, I became convinced that God himself was a musician.'

Maybe it is simply a question that in the presence of music we find grace. As Tori Amos says: 'My fear is stronger than my faith but I walk.' Music will give you that strength. Or to borrow a phrase from Thomas Carlyle, dead these past one hundred and twenty years: 'Music is well said to be the speech of angels.'

In ancient times man was a fly walking across the piano keys of the universe. He left no noise in his wake. That has changed forever. Modern man with his myriad of activities is creating excessive sound. What the long-term impact will be on our environment and our mental health remains to be seen. But maybe the time is now to start listening to the world anew; to be a little less profligate when it comes to noise. Our fragile blue planet is spinning through space like a tumescent, pulsating drop of sound. Earth: pumped up and wired. Feverishly vibrating.