Author burnout

June 8, 2022June 8, 2022 by Anna Vaught, posted in mental health, Uncategorized, writing

It may be that you saw a recent slew of articles in the industry press on burnout in the publishing industry. I then did my best to dovetail with pieces in The Bookseller on this – you can read what I had to say here:

https://www.thebookseller.com/comment/under-pressure-the-authors-perspectiv

Here is the first paragraph of my article:

First let us define burnout. The World Health Organisation, which classified it in 2019, conceptualises the syndrome as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It has three dimensions: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and reduced professional efficacy. When it comes to authors and this definition, it’s important to remember that our workplace is often our home, and the site of a multi-strand freelance career, which can make things harder, rather than easier; I personally have experienced all these feelings over the past three years while launching two books in lockdown, being unwell, home-schooling, teaching online, and being a carer. Writing can make for quite an isolating as well as an overwhelming life, especially in times of strife.

So there is a definition.

Then, I was able to suggest some things we might do to support ourselves, but in a short piece I could not offer much detail. So that’s what I want to do now. If you are feeling rotten, exhausted, what might you do?

First line of defence – and I am not a medical or mental health professional, but these are things I know: if you feel you are in crisis and you are frightened, remember that The Samaritans are there twenty four hours and here is a link. There are ways to access help beyond calling and these are outlined here: https://www.samaritans.org You may be aware of the text line SHOUT but here: https://giveusashout.org/ – this is twenty four hour text support. I also offer you this next page, because there are further resources and it also lists urgent mental health care routes in your area: https://www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/mental-health-services/where-to-get-urgent-help-for-mental-health/ Promise me you will not ever be embarrassed about being scared, feeling vulnerable or needing help? Human beings get ill; they have tipping points. Here are some starting points if things have got very bad and you don’t know what to do. Emotions are massive unwieldy things for a start, no-one is invulnerable and it is estimated that, at any one time, one in four people in the UK is coping with a mental health problem. It may be that you are overwhelmed and exhausted and what you need are rest and pals and respite; or it could be that this needs input. I think it’s important to say that it need not be your call: I have been in and out of mental health care for decades and this is something I would say. On two occasions I got extremely ill and because I had things to do, kids to look after, classes to teach, I did not ask for help soon enough: it resulted in people needing to advocate for me because I fell apart and could not verbalise what was going on. For me, that’s bad! So yes: promise me that you will take action and not feel embarrassed, that someone else’s need is greater or that you ought to toughen up or you’re probably okay really. Bravery is actually asking for help. Now, in more specific terms, that is, in terms of being an author, what might you do? I am going to have to approach this one rather broadly, because being an author may mean that you are first querying work, that you are more established, or that you have stalled. That’s a lot of situations. Some things that I have done, because of feeling awful, have included everything on this bullet list…
Evolve a group of writers at similar stages. Your tribe. It can be online: put the call out on twitter and do not be shy. You could have a writing support group through twitter DMs or WhatsApp, say, considering which option feels best. When people are very down or overwhelmed, the tap tap and pressure to keep up in an online group can be too much, so you could all set some parameters for what is helpful.
Compare and despair. Look: I regularly see people with the opportunities and exposure with one book and after one book (and no other writing) that I have yet to access after many articles, pieces in the national press, a column in the industry press and seven books either published or coming to press. Is it fair? Well no, you could say not, but it’s common, just as it’s common in life. If you are expecting parity of this sort, you’ve come to the wrong industry! Possibly the wrong planet! So you can allow resentment to curdle here or you can smile (I KNOW it is hard) and understand that everyone has a different route in writing and publishing. You do not know what will happen further down the line after a magnificent debut with full voltage exposure, just as you do not really know what else is going on in that person’s life. Be generous and also be kind to yourself. As I said, compare and despair. Plough your own furrow here. If you reiterate to yourself how unfair it is, you will suffer creatively and become – which I know, because it happened to me – less buoyant and more vulnerable. It is hard, but focus on you.
Now, people may write, oh take a break. But that is predicated on privilege and, frequently, ableism, and the assumption that we can all get out for a run, or a weekend away. I have tried to rethink this, so it is the case of finding time and support in your mind supported by, as far as possible, being in and honouring your body as best you can (which you are also not going to beat yourself up about right?) How might you repeat helpful things to yourself, praise yourself? How might you develop that quality of rest? Think about that and do it. Write it down if need be. Because of the serious challenges my family and I have had to face over the past few years, I have had to recalibrate and rethink the notion of success. So, for example, while other families were putting their amazing holiday pictures on socials, I was focusing on the maxim, ‘Everybody fed, nobody dead’ at Bookworm Towers. Do the same with your writing. It takes courage to put your creative work out there, for example: never stop reminding yourself of that. As treats, be very kind to yourself in your head. If I do this, it is like a tiny holiday and it makes me feel less tired. It all helps.
It is trite as hell, but live in the moment as much as you can to minimise panic and overwhelm. You can never BE in the future, up ahead, and the past is a different country: it was and there’s nothing you can do about it now. Focus on right now: what you can do, in this moment, to make yourself feel better. Because I have had a very ill offspring, I have had to do that. I didn’t at first, but exhaustion claimed me. Things are scarier when you are always anticipating and, in my experience, getting too stuck in anticipation leads to catastrophising. Feel free to disagree.
Try using the Kaizen method – google it but there are a number of books (around £2-3 second-hand; I just checked) – where you think about making very small positive changes – VERY small – to change your attitude or practice. That could be a simple to-do list you set down for writing goals; a small piece of industry research. The point is small. It’s all you need to keep moving.
If you are burning out or think you have burned out because of others’ unkindness in the industry – cutting to the chase here, in seven years I have encountered a handful of shockers – take it to your tribe (point 2, above) and don’t be shy about joining and telling a union. In my case Society of Authors – such as here https://societyofauthors.org/advice There is a range of guides, but you can also call and write to them about a specific matter. Something that caused me a great deal of upset led me to ask for help and they replied in considerable detail to everything and also outlined how a professional complaint might be made. My point here is two-fold: don’t suffer alone and, also reclaim some power – which brings me to the next point…
Rejection happens at all stages, whether you are first querying or a few books in. Some have an easier road of it than others but, as in point 3, compare and despair. So know that this is normal and natural. It is actually ghosting and being ignored – from first queries to full books sent to commissioning editors by your agent – which floors me. I got extremely low about this. Talk about it, but look at what you can do – because this is disappointing and feels disempowering, yes? (And I should say, cope with rejection by always being working on something else, at however tentative a stage.) What I have done now in response to the ghosting is to set deadlines in my mind and then move on. In some cases. I have begun, very politely, to ask for deadlines when I have queried independently. For agency work, I’ve asked that we do the same. It has been a way of reclaiming some power.
Don’t see patterns where there are none. It is very easy to assume that because it has been tough, it will always be tough; even to connect other areas of your life where you have screwed up and connect that to feeling terrible as an author. But life is not a place where everything happens for a reason; it is full of happenstance and changes, small and radical, and tomorrow can be different from today. That is easy to forget, isn’t it? I believe that human beings mess most things up and I am absolutely sure that most creative projects fail – because creative endeavour is full of risk. I would say, start each day – each moment – afresh and then it is easier to spot opportunities; to be as positive as you can be. This is something I have been practising in order to feel lighter.
Reading. I am a reader before I am a writer. I think of reading as my saviour, so if you are burned out, increase or vary your reading and into your life will come new forms of beauty, new worlds and new ideas. And do you know, I talk a lot about gentle productivity, so I want to emphasise that it is in play here: you are also working – writing – when you are reading, even though you don’t notice it. Nourishing your imagination, your core; relaxing into it and finding a myriad ways of looking at the world.

With much love and remember that you are not alone,

Anna xxx

Updating, writing, news and a scholarship

May 20, 2018May 20, 2018 by Anna Vaught, posted in the life of almost, Uncategorized

Follow me on twitter https://twitter.com/BookwormVaught

Hello all.

I am just in the process of updating this site so that the rolling twitter feed is engaged and I will also be producing a newsletter. I’m gathering steam – so it’s about time.

I have just finished edits on my second book, novella, The Life of Almost. This will be out on August 31st with some events local to me. If you’d like to invite me further afield to do or share in an event, go ahead. That would be lovely. Also, if you would like to review the book, great.

You can order the book here, from the press website or buy through a lovely indie bookshop. If they don’t stock, they can order. It is available online at both Amazon and Waterstones, but the latter is still not stocking texts by this lovely little boutique press for – I asked a manager – ‘purely commercial reasons’. Well.

http://patricianpress.com/book/the-life-of-almost/ That’s boy Almost on the cover; he’s reading on the sand with a brace of mermaids…

Published August 31st, 2018

This is a dark comedy set in Wales and a spectral reworking of Dickens’s Great Expectations. Almost is a boy, brought up by his sister, Perfection. He is shrouded by bereavement and surrounded by the hauntings of his family’s undead. He plays in the sea caves, visits graves, amongst mermaids, longing mermen, morticians, houses that respire and a poltergeist moss that grabs your foot. A cast of family and friends drawn from sea caves, the embalming table, the graveyard and the dark Clandestine House, which respires heavily and in which time has stopped. And like Pip, he sings into the sea and likes to tell stories – the key theme of the book which is the story of his life, his struggles and triumphs. He is thwarted in love but understands – the night he meets a ragged convict, for the convict is a merman, come on land – that he has deep and commanding powers.

A substantial extract from the first chapter of the book is published on the 25th of May in New Welsh Reader. You can navigate to information on that from here:

https://www.newwelshreview.com/

Next month, two of my (short) short stories are published in volume two of The Shadow Booth, a great place to read weird and eeried fiction. Boom.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-shadow-booth-vol-2-books-horror#/

I have applied for a Gladstone’s Writer if Residence slot for next year because, reader, day job, three kids, assorted other folk to look after, books three and four to edit and A RESIDENTIAL LIBRARY OOOOOH. Fingers crossed for me?

I mean look at this place? https://gladstoneslibrary.org/events/writers-in-residence I am determined to book a stay there if I don’t manage a writer in residence slot – it is, I know, very competitive.

Also, my husband and I are sponsored a weekend ticket for The Literary Consultancy’s Get a Job in Publishing weekend course

https://literaryconsultancy.co.uk/2018/03/get-job-publishing-sponsors-showcase/

and I just did the same for the Bare Lit Festival and it has gone to a wonderful home: you know who you are! Have a wonderful time xxx

http://barelitfestival.com/

Sponsoring the ticket for TLC led me to write this blog post for them; it’s about writing a book when you have no time and managing self doubt as you do it. Here:

https://literaryconsultancy.co.uk/2018/04/managing-self-doubt-write-book-dont-time/

It begins…

I am in my early days of my writing, so you are not looking at someone who is a seasoned professional.

I’ll tell you what I am.

I am a quick learner; I chat and make contact very quickly. I am acquisitive of information, always reading, thinking and noticing. In a way, I am always working. What I thought was not possible has turned out to be something rather different. Not easy exactly, but more accessible than I had managed. And I seem to have written a good deal.

In late summer 2014 I sat at the kitchen table and started typing a question. That question became the first line of an autobiographical novel. That first book was published in March 2016. I realise now that twenty months from first line to publication is a bit of a clip, but didn’t know it then because I was so naive. I do think, for what it’s worth, that naivety is underrated. My second book comes out this summer (2018), the third is placed for 2020, and the fourth is going straight to an agent and I want you to cross everything here. I am also pitching something non-fiction collaboratively with a much finer writer than I (if she reads this; don’t argue) and working on pre-publicity for the second book. At last count I have also published two poems, a very short memoir, reviews, features, guest blogs, short stories, and creative non-fiction. Flash fiction is on its way. I think in all I’ve published twenty or so pieces across journals and magazines, web and print. I’m quietly increasing my stock; my ‘profile’. No-one told me to do this. Again, it’s that naivety. I just thought, ‘Give it a go,’ rocked up and started pitching. And it worked. I also found time in that period for some rejections, lost manuscripts, and serious faffing about when second and third books were written to time for someone who then rejected them with a form letter and didn’t invite me to send further work. That set me back – time-wise, mood-wise – but I’m tougher now. And I realise the passion I felt for one of my rejected projects obscured the paucity of its quality. Or marketability. The fact I had no adequate platform. Cave scriptor.

None of this is my day job.

Now, you may have seen elsewhere on this blog that I have a bursary called The Fabian Bursary. Do you think you might to like to apply for it for this September. Read this, but just something to note: I have removed all age restrictions. My background is largely secondary teaching, but I do see that as I move along with my writing, I could be supporting a broader demographic. Also, it needles me that there are age limits on things, such as literary prizes and funds. Because so many people come to writing – or study – later. Because of lack of confidence, physical and mental health problems, caring responsibilities, prejudice or poverty. So this is a gift. It’s hopefully the gift that no-one gave to me when I was younger. You could use it for a GCSE, an A level or any creative writing project, say! xxx

https://annavaughtwrites.com/the-fabian-bursary-announcing/

Right: what else have I done. Creepy memoir – NOTE MEMOIR: ARE YOU GLAD THIS AIN’T YOU RA HA??? ‘The Shadow Babies’

http://www.theshadowbooth.com/2018/01/memoir-shadow-babies.html

Also, the few reviews I’ve done in the past few months:

http://review31.co.uk/essay/view/50/diversity-risk-taking-and-community-a-celebration-of-2017%E2%80%99s-small-press-anthologies This is about small press anthologies.

http://review31.co.uk/article/view/542/laughter-in-the-dark This is about Takeaway, by Tommy Hazard at Morbid Books.

https://thecontemporarysmallpress.com/2018/02/16/he-built-a-house-and-next-to-it-a-church/ This is my review of As a God Might Be, by Neil Griffiths. This was my book of 2017.

And here my review of the late Naseem Khan’s memoir, Everywhere is Somewhere. https://thecontemporarysmallpress.com/2017/12/01/everywhere-is-somewhere/

And did some co-editing on this https://thecontemporarysmallpress.com/?s=my+europe Currently waiting for commissions for the next anthology from this press, Tempest, which I’ll help to edit and for which I will write a foreword. You’ll be able to follow it here: https://patricianpress.com/books/ And aren’t they pretty books? Such strong artwork.

And finally, I have a July deadline for my fourth book, The Revelations of Celia Masters (news on which will follow, when I can) and my third book, Saving Lucia – which is about the last days of the Honourable Violet Gibson who shot Mussolini in 1928 – oh and her co-patient in Northampton Infirmary, Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce. Bluemoose is a wonderful press and it’s so lovely to see it in the sun for works by Ben Myers and Harriet Paige, and the work the press is doing as part of the Northern Fiction alliance. Here: https://bluemoosebooks.com/ and go and buy the book below now?

Anyway, head down now with finishing fourth book and teaching (and my own eldest is doing GCSE at the moment so it’s all go) BUT I am having a little two day holiday in London, when I get to go to the launch of this little beauty: There’s a launch at Waterstones Islington on June 21st and it’s pubished by Bluemoose. I was lucky enough to read a proof copy ahead of time and thoroughly recommend it to you. Here: this is a synopsis from the website of Foyles:

Malka grows up in the Old City of Jerusalem in the confines of the Ultra-orthodox Jewish community. Meandering through the narrow streets she finds herself at the door of one of the city’s most renowned and reclusive mystics and discovers her father’s top rabbinical student, Russian immigrant Moshe studying forbidden Kabbalistic texts. She has a disturbing vision of a tree of prayers growing up inside the house, and the prayers all seem to be talking to her. The prayers become a giant bird, and chase her from the house. Malka has unwittingly uncovered a great mystical gift. Kabbalists believe that since the world was spoken into existence, if they can hear and understand that original Divine language, they can use it themselves, to shape and manipulate reality. Once in a millennia, a kabbalist is born with this ability. It turns out that Malka is one of them. After a disastrous first date with Moshe, Malka flees Jerusalem for Safed where she is drawn into a cult called Mystical Encounters, run by charismatic cult leader Avner Marcus. Avner is unsettled by Malka’s authenticity, and she is not allowed to attend classes. Her only friends are former night club singer Shira, and traumatised ex-soldier Evven. Malka sets up her own mystical retreat in the woods, at an abandoned construction site. When she reveals this to Avner, he forces her to take him there and tries to rape her. Malka manages to evade him, and then burns down the cult after manipulating the Modern Hebrew word for Electricity, Chashmal

Malka heads for Tel Avi, and sleeps rough on the beaches of the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Jaffa. Here she is discovered by legendary Arab chef Rukh Baraka, who is seeking to rekindle his career by training Arab and Israeli street children to create extraordinary food for his new restaurant, the Leviathan. Malka bonds with fellow runaway Mahmoud, who is escaping the wrath of his Imam father at his “deviant” sexuality. Mahmoud reveals the city behind the city, the hidden Palestinian history of which Malka has been ignorant. Moshe has been trying to find Malka and is forced to confront some of his own demons, including the disappearance of his younger sister when she was in his care. Moshe swears that he will not lose another girl he loves.]

And that’s it for now!

Anna xx

Writing updates from Anna Vaught

January 13, 2018January 28, 2018 by Anna Vaught, posted in Uncategorized

Hello. I am in the process of transferring my data over so I have a whizzier and more interactive site – with my social media links working properly – but come and say hello. I do post at https://www.facebook.com/annavaughtwrites/ but really, it’s twitter I like.

https://twitter.com/BookwormVaught/status/956086015105564672

Here is what I am up to! The first thing, which has made me extremely happy, is that my third book, Saving Lucia (mentioned below) will be published by Bluemoose Books in 2020. I’ve also started to write weird fiction and horror. More on this as I work, but my non-fiction, ‘Shadow Babies’ will be published soon on The Shadow Booth website, with two short stories, ‘Feasting; fasting’ and ‘Cave Venus et Stellas’, appearing in the next print anthology of the same. It’s a new, crowdfunded anthology. Do look! Here’s the current edition of the print and a website link:

http://www.theshadowbooth.com/p/store.html#!/The-Shadow-Booth-Vol-1-Paperback/p/97253611/category=0

http://www.theshadowbooth.com/

I am currently submitting a piece on the theme of disease for the second edition of the new Lune Journal, so we shall see.

00: DISORDER

Although I can’t say much about this, I am in the process of working on a fourth book, a Southern Gothic novel called The Hollows. This is influenced very much by books I love and pieces of research I’ve been doing. I was fired up, also, by David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, a wonderful piece of scholarship, detailing the folkways of four distinct groups of people who went from ‘Albion’ to America and what was transplanted with them in terms of culture, worship, food…do read it; such a fascinating book. My book is an account of very early settlers from the West Country…but it goes dark, very dark. My own Tidewater ‘Tess’ (do you see a clue to her origins there?) is a complex character and, in building a new life, begins to hold court. She is charismatic, brilliant, well read and to look at her…as you will hear, it is like looking into the sun. Except you should not. You should not look; or attend. Do not visit her in The Hollows of Appalachia. Yes, yes, I know: what’s a British writer, with a language that’s inflected by Welsh family and influence, even thinking of doing here? How on earth is she going to pull off the language? How will she have a ear? Well, for a start we are in the mid to late 17-th century, a favourite period of mine in British literature, history and culture and we have very early settlers, for whom there is little record of language spoken or adopted while in America, but a wealth from their recent ‘Albion’. Even so, mistakes will be all my own, but in case you think I am appropriating something, let me say that this is a region I love and I am married to a Georgian. More on which another time.

I have begun, having been asked by a heroine of mine, to draft with her a pitch for a collection of essays on a theme which I shall be able to detail soon.

A book I’ve co-edited is out this March. My Europe by Patrician Press.

http://patricianpress.com/book/my-europe-a-patrician-press-anthology/

My second book, a novella called The Life of Almost, will be published by Patrician Press this October. Here: ‘This is a dark comedy set in Wales and a spectral reworking of Dickens’s Great Expectations. Almost is a boy, brought up by his sister, Perfection. He is shrouded by bereavement and surrounded by the hauntings of his family’s undead. He plays in the sea caves, visits graves, amongst mermaids, longing mermen, morticians, houses that respire and a poltergeist moss that grabs your foot. A cast of family and friends drawn from sea caves, the embalming table, the graveyard and the dark Clandestine House, which respires heavily and in which time has stopped. And like Pip, he sings into the sea and likes to tell stories – the key theme of the book which is the story of his life, his struggles and triumphs. He is thwarted in love but understands – the night he meets a ragged convict, for the convict is a merman, come on land – that he has deep and commanding powers.’

Almost is a bard boy, you know. And what is more, how can he be there when the eprigraph tells you that he was, some time ago, drowned at sea with his beloved Seren, of Clandestine House on the Cleddau? I’ve sprinkled the novella with original poems, too; all about landscape, love, sea-worlds, magic and longing; that word hiraeth, in Welsh.

http://patricianpress.com/book/the-life-of-almost/

Oh yes, if you do look at the Patrician Press site (link above), here’s my first book:

‘This is a black comedy in which Alison conceived in childhood an alter ego called ‘Hapless Ally’ to present a different, more palatable version of herself to her family and to the world beyond. Ominously, the alter ego began to develop autonomy. Alison deals with this helped by a varied catalogue of imaginary friends. The book is about serious matters: fear, confusion, dark days of depression and breakdowns. It carries a timely message to anyone pole-axed by depression or associated problems — or any reader interested in such things: you can, like Alison, survive and prevail. Ah, if you had to survive — would you kill for it? Now that is an interesting question.’

It’s an autobiographical novel.

My third book, Saving Lucia will be published by Bluemoose Books in 2020…I mentioned this above. I really do feel that this press is one of the finest in the British Isles and I am so delighted that they have accepted my book. Here are its central characters. The Honourable Violet Gibson, who tried to assassinate Mussolini in 1926, and her fellow hospital patient, Lucia Joyce, daughter of the novelist James Joyce.

Knock yourself out. Go shopping on the Bluemoose site or at an independent bookshop near you. I am about to read Harriet Paige’s Man with a Seagull on his Head.

https://bluemoosebooks.com/books

Here are the other pieces I’ve had published since mid December.

http://losslit.com/feature/give-sorrow-words/ ‘Give Sorrow Words’ – narrative non-fiction

https://thecontemporarysmallpress.com/2017/11/24/an-indie-press-christmas/ a piece about buying Christmas presents from the indie presses

AND

https://thecontemporarysmallpress.com/2017/12/01/everywhere-is-somewhere/ – a review of the memoir of cultural pioneer, Naseem Khan

the contemporary small press

A site for small presses, writers, poets & readers

http://review31.co.uk/essay/view/50/diversity-risk-taking-and-community-a-celebration-of-2017%E2%80%99s-small-press-anthologies An account of my favourite mixed form indie anthologies of 2017 in Review31

And https://visualverse.org/submissions/the-christmas-chrysalid/ one hour to write a piece stimulated by this month’s image…

Coming next, reviews of Neil Griffiths’ As a God Might Be (Dodo Ink),

Tommy Hazard’s Takeaway (Morbid Fiction)

…and Gary Budden’s Hollow Shores (Dead Ink)

None of this is my day job and yet…

Anna xxx

Six months of 2017 in books

July 9, 2017July 9, 2017 by Anna Vaught, posted in agents, amazon, book groups, books, bookshops, Contemporary Small Press, editing, Galley Beggar Press, genre, goodreads, independent press, james joyce, killing hapless ally, lucia joyce, mental health, patrician press, pembrokeshire, poems, poetry, reading, reading groups, reading lists, reviews, saving lucia, short stories, Short Stories, Uncategorized, women writers, writers, writing

Last year, I published a list of what I had read during the year. I thought that, this year, I’d get it down in two instalments. As before, I should love to know what others are reading. So do comment or talk to me! I don’t have time to review all these, but when I am done with the current fit of writing, I will try to post a few reviews, with a focus, I hope, on the independent presses. Also, I will update this list as I’ll likely forget something!

I read as much as I can and I read quickly. In snatched hours, in the bath, on the train, little bits of time carved out. But mainly, I go to bed earlier than I would naturally do purely so that I can read. I want to be frank about this. It’s how, as a child and growing up, I coped with anxiety and trauma. I went to bed and built a world. I do believe that with books, you can rebuild your mind and, to this day, it’s what I do.

Why?

Because every day is a conscious attempt to stay well and to manage, as best I can, my mental health: it has broken several times. Okay, many times. But I am back. Then there’s the pleasure of it all and the way my imagination is hotly stimulated. The way that reading, for me, leads on to discussion and friendship. As, I’ve discovered, does writing. Why did I ever think otherwise? And by the way, if you are feeling low or really, properly battling, I am not an expert, but I can tell you which books have soothed me, including the very few non-fiction texts I have read about mental health – though I have to preface that with, proceed with caution because, as I said, I’m no expert, but I CAN share. x

In no particular order, my reading over the past six months…

Dickens: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Finally got round to it. Also, the second book of his Bleak House (a re-read). I also re-read A Christmas Carol because I was teaching it for GCSE. To support my older children I read Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner and Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree. Now, this I found this an excellent read and was delighted to find a friend had been reading it, too. Cue – memorable and moving discussion en route to the hustings in Swindon, two days before the general election. WHICH REMINDS ME: the same person has left Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (still haven’t read) and C.E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings. Summer reads, then.

At top speed, for GCSE teaching I re-read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Woman in Black. Which led on to my re-reading of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw in one bit, sitting on the floor, because it was next to The Woman in Black on my sitting room bookshelf. I discovered, through the new OCR English Language and Literature spec, the first poetry collection from Jacob Sam La Rose Breaking Silence (Bloodaxe), which led to some wonderful things. Some of his poems prompted me to revisit one of my favourite modern poets, Tony Harrison. There will have been assorted other reading in here too – going over GCSE (and IGCSE) literature and poetry anthologies and the like; reading for A levels in English Literature and English Language and Literature and the EPQ…but it was Jacob Sam La Rose who was my new discovery.

Edith Sitwell: Fanfare for Elizabeth

Ben Myers: The Gallows Pole and Beastings. Shout out for the independent presses – here, Bluemoose. These are wonderful books. Enormously atmospheric. He’s brilliant, I think, on landscape.

On the subject of indies, from And Other Stories (we have a couple of subscriptions at Bookworm Towers), I am currently reading The Gurugu Pledge by Juan Tomas Avila Laurel (translated by Jethro Soutar), which is stunning, and Joanna Walsh’s Worlds from the Word’s End, a series of sharp and funny stories which make me very jealous too: never have I managed to craft one as she does! I’ve just ordered Hold Tight by Jeffrey Boakye – that’s an Influx Press title. Oh, there are so many indpendent presses – but my favourites – that is, of the ones I’ve explored – The Linen Press, Patrician Press, Galley Beggar, And Other Stories, Influx, Comma Press and Bluemoose. I read from all over, but get some of my greatest pleasure from texts published by risk-taking independent presses. That’s not to say risks aren’t taken by bigger concerns. Why not read both?

Dipped into a favourite book on writing (and close reading), Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. This precipitated both editing and reading (I hope she knows how useful she is!) – in this case, going back to Chekhov’s short stories.

I am about to read Jess Butterworth’s Running on the Roof of the World, Jo Barnard’s Hush Little Baby and Amit Chaudhuri’s Friend of my Youth. I love Chauduri’s books. Such restraint, so moving and unmistakeably his. I thought his last book, Odysseus Abroad gently broke a few rules (the rules you read about…) including ‘show don’t tell’ (bit bored with this): oh, he tells beautifully, and I felt the book was wonderfully episodic and that some of these epiosdes would have stood as short stories. More on which when I’ve got round to reading the latest one. Jo Barnard is a lovely lady. Very encouraging to others (including me) and a lean, spare writer at the literary end (what do I know? So kill me now if I have this market appraisal wrong!) of commercial fiction and cool in a hot and crowded market. That is a considerable achievement, in my view. I’d recommend her debut, Precocious. Unsettling and very well judged in tone. Jess is an old friend and I am very excited for her and cannot wait to see what she does in this, her debut, a MG set in India and Tibet, subjects close to her heart, as they are to mine.

For book groups I re-read A Tale of Two Cities, read PD James’s Innocent Blood – do you know, I had never read a P.D. James book – and Gilly McMillian’s What She Knew (which, by the way, is the same book as Burnt Paper Sky – hence the odd furious review by folks who bought the same book twice). Regarding the latter, generally speaking, I seem to fail with psychological thrillers. I read the Amazon reviews and those on Goodreads and generally feel like I haven’t read the same book, in that the ‘twists’ seem obvious to me – you know like in Of Mice and Men, when the foreshadowing smacks you round the face so hard – girl with the red dress/mouse/puppy/Candy’s old mutt/Curley’s wife…Lennie gets shot? Never saw that coming! It’s that kind of experience – and I don’t find them nail biting at all. I’ve been told that this sounds sneering, but it’s only my opinion and a statement of what works for me. Apologies if I’ve denigrated Of Mice and Men (quite like Cannery Row and The Grapes of Wrath, though…) but to me Steinbeck is a pygmy compared with giants like…Faulkner and Wolfe. Oh yes: I have an idea. Why not read – although you won’t sleep afterwards – Ali Land’s striking debut novel, Good Me Bad Me before or after Innocent Blood? Some of the same themes rise up. Criminality. The choices that children and young people make in extremis. (Ali was previously a children’s psychiatric nurse and that gave the book a certain heft for me.) What it might mean…not to feel, or to feel unusual things. I don’t want to give more away. Yes. Do that for a book group.

But back to Southern US literature and…

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, which I will re-read in a little while (I want to write something about her), well, that is brilliant. Is all this meandering discussion awful, do you think?

Which brings to me to…

Of Time and the River and (currently reading) The Web and the Rock. Thomas Wolfe. In my view, a genius and we lost him so young.

Patrician Press launched its Anthology of Refugees and Peacekeepers and we had a lovely event at the Essex Book Festival; I read everything in it and that led me on to (two indies here) Refugee Tales from Comma Press.

Now, for my own current book, Saving Lucia (or even Passerines – depending on who nabs it…), I’ve been re-reading Joyce, so I’ve had Finnegans Wake and Ulysses to hand. Also lesser known Joyce works – Pomes Penyeach. I’ve been reading up on Joyce, Beckett, Mussolini, the history of psychiatric care (I listed some of this stuff in last year’s post and also it’s in my bibliography at the end of Saving Lucia – one for the future, if you be interested); I read Annabel Abbs’s The Joyce Girl and continued to dip into Frances Stonnor Saunders’s exemplary account of Violet Gibson: The Woman Who Shot Mussolini and Carol Loeb Shloss’s Lucia Joyce. To Dance in the Wake. I’ve been reading articles in The Lancet, articles on Queen of the Hysterics, Blanche Wittmann and accounts of Bertha Pappenheim (there’s a need for a bigger study and, I would say, what exists needs to be translated from the German because she is fascinating!); I also looked (in German) at Bertha’s book of prayers – Gebete and found an English translation of her short stories, The Junk Shop and Other Stories and finally read Florence Nightingale’s posthumously published Cassandra – which Virginia Woolf said was more like screaming than writing. I concur. Also, religious texts, archive work (letters and documents) and miscellaneous articles.

And I think we are there!

Two other things on reading and writing. How good it was to see the Authors for Grenfell auction raise so much and I was pleased to be a tiny part of it. I’ve a tea party coming up – and also a tour of Pembrokeshire, visiting all the settings in my second book, The Life of Almost, which comes out in autumn, 2018 with Patrician Press. Also, in September, for the first time, I have a work experience student and I am so excited. I am still a newbie fiction writer (I put pen to paper in mid July 2014, although I’d been a freelance author before and writing is not my day job) and this kind of thing makes it feel…real. We are going to get a writing project off the ground; she’s going to submit work for publication. She may also help me with editing of and suggestions on two anthologies of which I am co-editor and editor, respectively. Said student (she’s in the upper sixth) is reading the manuscript of my third book – which led to her mum reading it too…which led into a date to discuss it. and, I hope, a super-clever new beta reader. Yay.

I’m sorted on my reading for the next few weeks, the manuscript of Saving Lucia goes out again on the 20th of July – and in the meantime I wait to hear if others are biting…it is a long process and probably a good education for me, seeing as I rush at everything like it’s my last day. (In my defence, it could be: I’ve had a lot of people die on me, some of them very suddenly: another story – some of which is in my first book Killing Hapless Ally, if you are not freaked out by very dark humour. If you are, don’t read the bits of The Life of Almost concerning a love story in a funeral parlour…)

Other booky things: my two Grenfell offers to fulfil in summer and autumn and archive work in St Andrew’s psychiatric hospital, Northampton.

And reading Horrible Histories in bed when stressed or sad. Oh forgot: I had norovirus so badly I was hospitalised. During that period I read Gren Jenner’s (he’s part of the Horrible Histories telly team) A Million Years in a Day. A jolly diverting read.

AND FINALLY

Quibbles and possible spelling errors spotted in some of the books, above (English teacher forevaaa):

prophesise (prophesy) as verb

disinterested (to mean uninterested) – feel free to argue

past (for passed)

Thursday’s…Friday’s…for simple plurals, not possession

it’s when you mean its (ugh!)

passer bys

me/I/myself I won’t blather on about that because I sound like a twat. BUT in a top selling book for which I’ve shelled out, say, £12, it niggles to see a chapter starting (names changed) “Me and Andrew left France…”

I have been spelling fuchsia wrong my whole life. And cardamom. So I’m a fine one to talk. In my Killing Hapless Ally, Myfanwy twice appeared without the first y. My fault. And I swear as if my life depended on it.

Love,

Anna xxxxx

Patrician Press Anthology of Refugees and Peacekeepers

January 30, 2017January 31, 2017 by Anna Vaught, posted in refugees, Uncategorized

‘We are all from an island or a foreign sun and every one of us uncertain; alone—

the human condition isolates us; our experience, our very world

blunted by language of a raggedy drum, our faith sharp and clear

or not so, as we cry out our unbelief, our refugee song,

but together.’

Today, a beautiful and timely book will be published: Anthology of Refugees and Peacekeepers from Patrician Press. Donations from any profits go to http://www.helprefugees.org and I am proud and delighted to be in it. The publisher has given me permission to include my offering, below.

I feel so passionately about the texts in the book – particularly because of the events of the last few days with the Trump administration pursuing (chaotically, I might add) its aggressive path and watching the egregious sight of our own Prime Minister appeasing Trump.

What unites us is strong; what separates – or rather what we choose to allow to separate us – can embitter us and will degrade us – if that is the path we choose. Get on twitter: look at the protests, marches and campaigns going on; see what you can do. You may have seen the crowds at Dulles, JFK; watched the people turn out in Boston. Maybe you are going to be outside Downing Street tonight or at the Bristol event. Our family is Welsh-American; we are doing what we can, both sides of the Atlantic: it makes me cry to see how heartbroken my American mother in law is by what she sees. And yet: out we go here and out I know she will go, too. Don’t lose hope and let’s keep the momentum going.

Who is ‘Emigre’ below? Is he or she a refugee? Well, yes. But he or she is also you. You, Trump, May, Bannon…

Émigré

I was far from home. I stood on the grey street corner.

I was far from home and stood at the mouth of the sea, ivory curls around my feet.

I was far from home. I stood outside the stores and restaurants at night;

sat in the hotel room, the train compartment, the gimcrack coffee shop;

watched the dark frontiers fade out as the yellow jack of the gas station made midday;

I traced the sad cars on the motorway and my eyes hurt from the strip light.

Memory seared and I drank sour coffee and ate a chocolate bar.

I was far from home; an outsider—tossed up as motes from some former life,

composed of Eros, intellect, memory and uncertain dust.

But I was you and I was me. Everyman; foreigner; flâneur; such longueur: étranger—

And did you care? Did you stare? But did you know?

We are all from an island or a foreign sun and every one of us uncertain; alone—

the human condition isolates us; our experience, our very world

blunted by language of a raggedy drum, our faith sharp and clear

or not so, as we cry out our unbelief, our refugee song,

but together. We beat our palms against the past, each a piece of the continent,

a part of the main: our love tremulous in our hands, like water that shall spill.

The book is a collection of poems and short stories from a wide range of writers. Robert McCrum described it as ‘A gripping, rare and brave collection of new work written in extremis, the classic source of truly original poetry and prose through the ages.’ It has a deeply moving afterword by the jazz musician, Ian Shaw, who volunteered for a year at the Jungle in Calais and two fine epigraphs; one by the poet George Szirtes, on seeing refugees camped in Keleti railway station in Budapest, and the other by The Bishop of Barking, on seeing the refugee children trapped in the Calais Jungle camp. (There is more on the plight of the children at this camp in Ian Shaw’s afterword; I struggled to read this but insisted I did: conscience dictates that we know.)

Do please comment and share. x

(So, you can order it here at Amazon, https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0993494560/ref=cm_sw_r_fa_api_2xRByb1ZJV3FV or go here, to the press site http://patricianpress.com/ or to bookshops where it is on sale; if it is not, you can, of course, order it from them, its ISBN is 978-099349-456-7.) The book is available in both paperback and kindle versions.

Epigraph of The Life of Almost

September 26, 2016September 26, 2016 by Anna Vaught, posted in And other stories, books, Contemporary Small Press, Drafts, editing, emma press, Fitzcarraldo, Galley Beggar Press, genre, Great Expectations, patrician press, pembrokeshire, poems, reading, Uncategorized, writing

For Ned. Because Almost is also a love story: Seren, Mfanwy, Perfection, Mammy, the sacred headland and the mermaids. And you are my story and my song. x

This is what it says at the beginning of my next book, The Life of Almost: wish me luck, as it has gone, by kind request, out to an agent who liked the writing in Killing Hapless Ally; the ms has also gone to a press; later in October, it is going out elsewhere and, to my utter surprise, a really lovely person at one of, you know, the big five, said they would look at it just to be helpful. I said it wasn’t really, as far as I could see, a commercial proposition, but then it is the next story I had in me. I know it’s ambitious and I do know about Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs. Ah, but bear with now. This one now is comical, I hope; indebted to Dickens and to Dylan Thomas; to generations in Pembrokeshire and beyond; to the coffin hatch in my own house; to the dead, who are legion and all around; to mermaid lore; The Mabinogion; Celtic Magic, Gwyn Williams, Danny Abse, the earliest Welsh poems, the Southern Gothic I married, books on sex, embalming and death practice, John Donne and Dickens again. And don’t you want to know who or what Almost is? How mermaids love? Why a child was found sleeping on a headland gravestone? Why moss creeps and sucks at your feet as you dare to tread? How a love story happens over the embalming table and how Almost feels, when he meets Derian Llewhellin, both fear and happiness and a blurring of his edges and how it is he begins to understand what he is capable of. The story begins this squalid summer, June 2016, but oh…it is old, old, old.

THE LIFE OF ALMOST OR,

A LIFE OF VERY LITTLE EXPECTATION

Anna Vaught

Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction, I swear on The Mabinogion and the sacred headland. Characters in this book are fictional, although I have drawn upon the history of my own Welsh family and diaspora and many things which to me seem normal and maybe which, to you, do not. I make no apology for references to the political situation in the summer of 2016 while a cunning clown and cohorts and a tide of rage pushed through the always unexpected rain. Real places named in the book are at least partly fictionalised and the dead and undead are somewhat mixed up. But enough: don’t you want to know about Almost? He was mine; now I am giving him to you.

All poems (unless otherwise attributed, but out of copyright) are by the author.

Lewis, the Younger, who went away

When I was a kid, Lewis took his own life.

I heard them say he took it, but where it went,

I couldn’t say or wasn’t told. Perhaps it had

been drained, in The Sloop, with all his pints,

or thrown gladly off Stack Rocks with a shout

that he married well and was a man they liked,

but I don’t know. For once, though I was very young,

I saw a look from out the corner of his eye as he shipped

off, went laughing with the pot boys and his girl:

that look it said, I think, that Lewis wanted rescuing,

but no-one came, as the sea foam danced in Cardigan Bay.

“Look’ee here, Pip. I’m your second father. You’re my son—more to me nor any son.”

Abel Magwitch, Great Expectations, chapter thirty nine.

Not the Booker, 2016

August 6, 2016 by Anna Vaught, posted in books, bookshops, killing hapless ally, not the booker, patrician press, poems, reviews, The Guardian, Uncategorized, writing, writing competitions

So…if you have read and liked my debut novel, Killing Hapless Ally, and it meant something to you; if it made you laugh; you thought it had weight; if it made you fall madly in love with Albert Camus or understand what mental health problems or mental illness might be like (my publisher makes it clear at the beginning of the book that I drew on many episodes in my own life; if you like semi colons, Dolly Parton, poetry and laughing at the dark things…go on, vote for it. The article that follows is from ‘The Guardian’ and below is the link you need to click on, register with ‘The Guardian’, then offer your vote. Actually, there should be two votes, but you need only comment on one of the books.

And look at all those indies! What follows, then, is from ‘The Guardian’; just underneath it, I’ve copied my votes.

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Not the Booker prize (very) longlist 2016: votes, please!

If you felt this year’s Man Booker selection was not broad enough, get a load of ours. And help decide which books make the shortlist

Composite: Authors Julian Barnes, Don DeLillo, Kei Miller, Sarah Perry, China Miéville and Lionel Shriver — A very small sample of the authors on our longlist … (clockwise from top left) … Julian Barnes, Don DeLillo, Kei Miller, Sarah Perry, China Miéville and Lionel Shriver. Composite: Alamy/Rex/Getty Images/Graham Turner/Graeme Robertson/Sarah Lee for The Guardian

Sam Jordison

Save for later

Last week the Man Booker longlist was announced. A little surprising, right?

OK, I’m happy to admit that the main prize has a few things going for it. But I always feel that its longlist is just as notable for its omissions as the books that are chosen. This year was no exception. A few good books sometimes sneak on there – but dozens more don’t make it. And you know what? The Booker’s so-called longlist isn’t even that long. Not like the Not the Booker. As you will see below, our list really is long.

There are well over 100 books, making 2016 a record year already. So thank you to everyone who has contributed so far. And I hope you stick around as the real work begins. Because we somehow have to whittle this mighty list down to a manageable half-dozen books.

And how do we do that? We vote! If you want to take part, all you have to do is choose two books from the longlist, from two different publishers, and accompany those votes with a short review of at least one of your chosen books. It would also be very helpful if you included the word “vote”.

The review should be something over 100 words long, although as our glorious and shining Terms and Conditions state, we won’t be counting that carefully. Just make it look like you care.

It’s that simple. So let’s get voting. You’ve got just over a week. The deadline is 23.59 on 14 August 2016. The contenders are:

Megan Abbott– You Will Know Me (Picador)
Lesley Allen – The Lonely Life of Biddy Weir (Twenty7)
Deborah Andrews – Walking the Lights (Freight Books)
Louis Armand – The Combinations (Equus)
Kate Armstrong – The Storyteller (Holland House)
Jason Arnopp – The Last Days of Jack Sparks (Orbit)
Jenn Ashworth – Fell (Sceptre)
Chris Bachelder – The Throwback Special (WW Norton & Company)
Jo Baker – A Country Road, A Tree (Doubleday)
Julian Barnes – The Noise of Time (Jonathan Cape)
Shirley Barrett – Rush Oh! (Little, Brown)
Kevin Barry – Beatlebone (Doubleday)
Louise Beech – The Mountain in My Shoe (Orenda)
Claire-Louise Bennett – Pond (Fitzcarraldo)
Bill Beverly – Dodgers (No Exit Press)
Lochlan Bloom – The Wave (Dead Ink)
Lisa Blower – Sitting Ducks (Fair Acre)
Megan Bradbury – Everyone Is Watching (Picador)
Caroline Brothers – The Memory Stones (Bloomsbury)
Liam Brown – Wild Life (Legend Press)
Rowan Hisayo Buchanon – Harmless Like You (Sceptre)
Tom Bullough – Addlands (Granta)
Paul Burston – The Black Path (Accent Press Ltd)
Jackie Buxton – Glass Houses (Urbane Publications)
Louise Candlish – The Swimming Pool (Penguin)
Joanna Cannon – The Trouble With Goats and Sheep (The Borough Press)
Emma Chapman – The Last Photograph (Picador)
Anna Chilvers – Tainted Love (Bluemoose)
Dan Clements – What Will Remain (Silvertail)
Clár Ni Chonghaile – Fractured (Legend Press)
Chris Cleave – Everyone Brave Is Forgiven (Sceptre)
Emma Cline – The Girls (Chatto & Windus)
Paul MM Cooper – River of Ink (Bloomsbury)
Mark Connors – Stickleback (Armley Press)
Isabel Costello – Paris Mon Amour (Canelo)
Jack Cox – Dodge Rose (Dalkey Archive Press)
Justin Cronin – The City of Mirrors (Orion)
Rachel Cusk – Transit (Jonathan Cape)
Shelley Day – The Confession of Stella Moon (Contraband)
Don DeLillo – Zero K (Picador)
Ruth Dugdall – Nowhere Girl (Legend Press)
Sophie Duffy – Bright Stars (Legend Press)
Ken Edwards – Country Life (Unthank Books)
Jo Ely – Stone Seeds (Urbane Publications)
Guillermo Erades – Back to Moscow (Scribner UK)
Pamela Erens – Eleven Hours (Atlantic Books)
Lyn G Farrell – The Wacky Man (Legend Press)
Julia Forster – What a Way to Go (Atlantic Books)
Harry Gallon – The Shapes Of Dogs’ Eyes (Dead Ink)
Ruth Gilligan – Nine Folds Make A Paper Swan (Atlantic Books)
Jules Grant – We Go Around in the Night and Are Consumed By Fire (Myriad)
Guinevere Glasfurd – The Words in My Hand (Two Roads)
Garth Greenwell – What Belongs to You (Farrar, Straus and Giraux)
David John Griffin – Infinite Rooms (Urbane Publications)
Michael Grothaus – Epiphany Jones (Orenda Books)
Lee Harrison – The Bastard Wonderland (Wrecking Ball Press)
Adam Haslett – Imagine Me Gone (Little Brown and Company)
Noah Hawley – Before the Fall (Hodder & Stoughton)
Matt Hill – Graft (Angry Robot)
Catherine Hokin – Blood and Roses (Yolk Publishing)
Anna Hope – The Ballroom (Doubleday)
Michael Hughes – The Countenance Divine (John Murray)
Dave Hutchinson – Europe at Midnight (Solaris)
Amanda Jennings – In Her Wake (Orenda Books)
Elnathan John – Born on a Tuesday (Cassava Republic)
Anjali Joseph – The Living (Fourth Estate)
Avril Joy – Sometimes a River Song (Linen Press)
Mireille Juchau – The World Without Us (Bloomsbury)
James Kelman – Dirt Road (Canongate)
Claire King – Everything Love Is (Bloomsbury)
Hannah Kohler – The Outside Lands (Picador)
John Lake – Amy and the Fox (Armley Press)
Jem Lester – Shtum (Orion)
Ashley Lister – Raven and Skull (Caffeine Nights Publishing)
Carol Lovekin – Ghostbird (Honno Welsh Women’s Press)
PK Lynch – Armadillos (Legend Press)
Martin MacInnes – Infinite Ground (Atlantic Books)
Kevin MacNeil – The Brilliant and Forever (Polygon)
Seraphina Madsen – Dodge and Burn (Dodo Ink)
Brooke Maganti – The Turning Tide (W&N)
Ayisha Malik – Sophia Khan is Not Obliged (Twenty7)
Michael J Malone – Bad Samaritan (Contraband)
Iain Maloney – The Waves Burn Bright (Freight Books)
Sarah Ladipo Manyika – Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun (Cassava Republic Press)
Alex Marwood – The Darkest Secret (Sphere)
Colum McCann – Thirteen Ways of Looking (Bloomsbury)
Tiffany McDaniel – The Summer That Melted Everything (Scribe)
Ian McGuire – The North Water (Scribner UK)
Elizabeth McKenzie – The Portable Veblen (Penguin Press)
Wyl Menmuir – The Many (Salt)
Sarah Meyrick – Knowing Anna (SPCK Publishing)
Dan Micklethwaite – The Less Than Perfect Legend of Donna Creosote(Bluemoose)
China Miéville – This Census Taker (Del Rey Books)
Kei Miller – Augustown (W&N)
Alan Moore – Jerusalem (Liveright and Knockabout)
Alison Moore – Death and the Seaside (Salt)
Claire Morrall – When the Floods Came (Sceptre)
Yelena Moskovich – The Natashas (Serpent’s Tail)
Sarah Moss – The Tidal Zone (Granta Books)
Sylvain Neuvel – Sleeping Giants (Del Rey Books)
Carl Neville – Resolution Way (Repeater Books)
Suzy Norman – Duff (Patrician Press)
Claire North – The Sudden Appearance of Hope (Orbit)
Barney Norris – Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain (Doubleday)
Edna O’Brien – The Little Red Chairs (Faber & Faber)
Paraic O’Donnell – The Maker of Swans (W&N)
Maggie O’Farrell – This Must Be the Place (Tinder Press)
Harry Parker – Anatomy of a Soldier (Faber & Faber)
Sarah Perry – The Essex Serpent (Serpent’s Tail)
Cherry Potts – The Dowry Blade (Arachne Press)
Laura Powell – The Unforgotten (Freight Books)
Christopher Priest – The Gradual (Gollancz)
Lucy Ribchester – The Amber Shadows (Simon & Schuster UK)
Mary-Jane Riley – After She Fell (Killer Reads)
Adam Roberts – The Thing Itself (Gollancz)
Lou Rowan – A Mystery’s No Problem (Equus)
Amanda Saint – As If I Were a River (Urbane Publications)
James Sallis – Willnot (No Exit Press)
David Savill – They Are Trying to Break Your Heart (Bloomsbury)
Anakana Schofield – Martin John (And Other Stories)
Helen Sedgwick – The Comet Seekers (Harvill Secker)
Lionel Shriver – The Mandibles (The Borough Press)
Karin Slaughter – The Kept Woman (Century)
Ethyl Smith – Changed Times (ThunderPoint Publishing)
Francis Spufford – Golden Hill (Faber & Faber)
Sarayu Srivatsa – If You Look For Me I Am Not Here (Bluemoose)
Elizabeth Strout – My Name Is Lucy Barton (Viking)
Emma Claire Sweeney – Owl Song at Dawn (Legend Press)
M Suddain – Hunters and Collectors (Jonathan Cape)
Graham Swift – Mothering Sunday (Scribner UK)
David Szalay – All That Man Is (Jonathan Cape)
Jonathan Taylor – Melissa (Salt Publishing)
William Thacker – Lingua Franca (Legend Press)
Yusuf Toropov – Jihadi: A Love Story (Orenda Books)
Anna Vaught – Killing Hapless Alley (Patrician Press)
Dan Vyleta – Smoke (W&N)
Natasha Walter – A Quiet Life (The Borough Press)
Simon Wan – Love and a Dozen Roast Potatoes (Urbane Publications)
Eleanor Wasserberg – Foxlowe (Harper Collins)
Jemma Wayne – Chains of Sand (Legend Press)
Aliya Whitely – The Arrival of the Missives (Unsung Stories)
Chis Whitaker – Tall Oaks (Twenty7)
Hugo Wilcken – The Reflection (Melville House UK)
Matt Wilven – The Blackbird Singularity (Legend Press)
Charlotte Wood – The Natural Way of Things (Allen & Unwin)
James Yorkston – Three Craws (Freight Books)

I’ll be back here on 15 August to post the results – and no doubt feeling slightly frazzled from all the counting. Let’s go!

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/aug/02/not-the-booker-prize-very-longlist-2016-votes-please#comment-80656904

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And here are my two votes:

annaVaught

30m ago

My two votes. PK Lynch’s Armadillos (Legend). Aggie’s voice clear as a bell and has stayed with me; excellent, sustained narrative. Admittedly I did find elements of this difficult to read because of experiences I share with Aggie, but I am glad I kept going. One of the biggest compliments I can give to this book is that she has (and I want to qualify that I am a huge Faulkner fan and of Southern literature in general plus it’s my second home and I’m married to A Georgia Boy!) pulled off the voice, the vocabulary and the nuance, which is no mean feat and something I have seen done poorly elsewhere. The settings are haunting and there are elements of joy and humour in the blackness. It reminded me of a book that is too little known – Erskine Cauldwell’s God’s Little Acre – with its grisly portrayal of the characters PK has as ‘subs’. I think Armadillos is a skilfully written book and its prose is spare but allusive. At least, that is how it seemed to me! I felt I knew all along what the ending would be. Knew it inchoately. Didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the story at all. A familiar -oh yes- and beautiful book.

Book two. Duff by Suzy Norman (Patrician Press). Skilfully done; restrained prose; funny; love the journey and the landscape – its sweep of places, visited and remembered. It is sweet, sad and moving. I felt the rhythms of Dylan Thomas, prose and poetry, moving within it.

I’d love to discuss both these books with their authors. Both are debut novelists. Right, I am off to read A Country Road, A Tree, Solar Bones, The Blackbird Singularity and Sometimes a River Song…I am only sorry I cannot nominate more books. It has, for example, been such a brilliant year for smaller presses!

Anna

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To keep going…

July 30, 2016 by Anna Vaught, posted in A Life of Almost, agents, books, Contemporary Small Press, depression, editing, emma press, Goldsmith's prize, Great Expectations, killing hapless ally, mslexia, patrician press, poems, poetry, reading, short stories, Short Stories, Uncategorized, Wellcome book prize, women writers, Writers and Artists, writing, writing competitions

I am crying a little bit here. But read on. It’s fine, really.

Do you know, I am nominated several times for ‘The Guardian’ Not the Booker prize, I am entered for the Goldsmith’s Prize, the new Republic of Consciousness Prize and The Wellcome Book Prize. I also put in a poetry pamphlet for ‘Mslexia”s annual competition.

Do I have a shot? Naaah, not really.

Well, frankly, only a tiny one, at best.

I’m small fry; I’m a newbie and pretty unrefined, still. I blundered into this in the same naive way I have blundered into most things in my life! I sort of…had a go when theoretically it wasn’t supposed to be possible with all my other commitments. I’m a hard worker because, I think, I have had so much experience compromised by mental health problems, illness and bereavement that it has made me more imaginative and keen to seize the day in case we are hit by an asteroid or I go bonkers again (which I am not planning to, obviously). If this is you too, be collected; be encouraged: you would be amazed what is possible and at the way which can be made from no way and from despair.

AND SOMEHOW

In two years, I have written and published a novel, a poetry pamphlet, guest blogged, authored ten articles or so and at this point I am approximately two thirds of the way through a second novel and have poetry and short story publication this autumn and in the spring. So HOLY F*** three kids and a day job and the volunteer stuff. I have to keep going now, don’t I?

On, blunder on. xxx

Not The Booker Prize 2016

July 18, 2016 by Anna Vaught, posted in books, goodreads, killing hapless ally, patrician press, reading, reading groups, reading lists, reviews, Uncategorized, writing, writing competitions

Super short post this! I was just reading the information on this:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/jul/18/not-the-booker-prize-2016-vote-for-your-favourite-book-of-the-year

And here is a wonderful thing, now in its eighth year. I am just about to place my nomination and I wonder: if you have read Killing Hapless Ally, my debut novel, and you liked it and it meant something to you, do nominate that, if you like!

Every year, the list gives you some brilliant reading. Say, a book that we might not otherwise have heard of and which turns out to be outstanding. Oh – there are a lot of writers out there. (Not to mention a lot of small but exceptional presses.)

Have a look? The picture featured is of the lovely mug that a writer might win!

Anna

‘Yes, Mfanwy: in the midst of life we are in death and here with the Dead Dears it is fair to say that we are in love.’

July 15, 2016July 15, 2016 by Anna Vaught, posted in books, bookshops, Drafts, editing, emma press, Galley Beggar Press, genre, Goldsmith's prize, Great Expectations, killing hapless ally, patrician press, pembrokeshire, reading, Uncategorized

From The Life of Almost as I draft it…

And there was another book that had only been seen by its owner.

Evans the Bodies wrote poems. Often for the Dead Dears who had no-one and whose lives must, he thought, be recorded for posterity. So the timid lady from the post office, who had customers and bread but no friends and a mother who would have tossed her out with the peelings for the pigs, became a cowslip in a warm meadow and drank deep of the sun and was happy; so a coarse and crooked man, who lived in the last house before St Brides Bay and whose children hated him but sang like larks for his money, was limned as a quiet man, skimming stones on the beach and smiling into the auroras of a coastal morning when no-one knew. But Evans the Bodies was a watcher for the sad and lonely. He was a dresser of bodies, to be sure, but he also had a talent for the sad soul and the lonely. And alongside his careful stitch and suture and his eye for the sick at heart, he had always loved Mfanwy: when she was someone else’s, as she laboured for and lost her child, when both times he bought her milk-white lilies and she said, ‘Evans, there’s a soft man you are’ and he cried with his back to her, as he did when she lost her husband. He put poems in the book for her, too. Imagined he was taking pictures of her, watching her written into the world all around and, as he watched the frosty lines on the windows in his cold parlour and saw the feathers and curlicues of winter, he scratched her monogram in the frost and rime and, again, he cried, and saw himself at a window as the beautiful ship Mfanwy his Love sailed away and thus he wrote again.

I had seen the rapture and the writing called ‘Mfanwy’, of course, though he did not know. I had learned it by heart and whispered it into the Pembrokeshire night, whose kind tendrils carried it to her and caressed her, then softly laid waste to sadness and silence and made her think clearly about Evans the Bodies, who loved her and always had, just so.