Self-publishing is damn hard work!

For all my brash enthusiasm for self-publishing, I'm beginning to discover the downside of it: distribution.

It's a complete pain. I've just packaged up and sent off over 100 books to about 10 different addresses and I'm totally pooped. There's got to be an easier way. Tomorrow I'm phoning up Nationwide distributors and seeing if I can fob it off to them. Paper Plus has embraced my book but each shop is an individual franchise and you have to post small orders to each shop instead of to one central warehouse. So what started as a delightful gesture by Paper Plus Merivale to take on big quantities for sale has leapfrogged into a nationwide distribution nightmare with heaps of other Paper Pluses wanting copies too. Not that I'd ever want to look a gift horse...

Meanwhile Whitcoulls is thinking about selling it into their stores. At least they have a central warehouse point. 

I don't think I was ever meant to be a postie. 

Give me a pen or a laptop any day.

A real writer like Joanne Harris and Nicky Pellegrino

Yesterday, I took part in a session at the Christchurch Writers' Festival, chaired by the delightful Graham Beattie, that looked at how fiction both embellishes and reflects the "stuff of life" - a subject that is increasingly close to my heart. It was a wonderful experience, up on the stage with Joanne Harris and Nicky Pellegrino, pretending I was a real writer like them, talking about writing and even, at the end, getting asked some questions ( I thought they'd all be for Joanne Harris) and to sign some books (ditto).

As my fiction has become closer and closer to reality, I’ve become interested in what Chris Cleve said at the festival: the blurring of the line between fact and fiction, the blending of make-believe with what really happened – yesterday or years ago. I think it’s a very interesting development in fiction – making us think about how real life informs the best fiction and fiction mirrors real life. Because it’s in fiction – in the way that characters behave and react to an issue – that stimulates us, often unconsciously, to form our values about that issue.

I was heartened to hear Kate Grenville say that “the reality of life is so fascinating – you could never make it up!” And that anything we could imagine is still not as interesting as life itself”. And I found this when writing “In Her Mothers’ Shoes” – that some of the things that actually happened to my mothers make the book far more quirky and interesting than anything I could have made up.I think it’s this sense of reality – that the events in a novel could actually have happened – that people like about a book. They’re not expected to suspend disbelief interminably while vampires and changelings and all sorts of other incredible beings do weird things to each other. I’ve become an avid advocate for good old-fashioned realism in literature. I don’t care that all this fantasy fiction is selling by the billion. I’m all for the stuff of life we can believe in – the sort of fiction where the reader recognises the situation, but it takes them a little bit further than reality into realms of imagining, so that they can identify, but they are also transported out of themselves to inhabit, for a few hours, somebody else’s world… to live through somebody else’s seemingly mundane but nevertheless gripping problems and recognise, in the pages of the book, their own world – and make it seem all the better for it. 
 

An elephant in the writers' room

Today at the Christchurch Writers' Festival I was able to enjoy the rare experience of being a writer for a whole day, and the feeling will continue over the weekend, talking to other writers and editors and publishers and booksellers. But the elephant in the room that no one has mentioned so far is the future of publishing under the onslaught of the internet.  

That aside, the festival represents a bit of a turning point for me, being an accepted writer now compared to my first writers' festival when I'd just had my first novel published by a small local publisher and was overwhelmed by all the famous literati. Now I feel I can stand among them, at least to some extent. Now I have an online presence, a website, a twitter account, and this blog.

Now I am part of the onslaught of the internet. Outside the writers' hall (well, it's actually a giant blow-up igloo), in the coffee shop, they're keen to ask how the books sales are going, how I did it, was it difficult to publish online, to get copies printed too. Inside the writers' hall, ebooks aren't part of the conversation - not yet anyway - and they aren't mentioned in the programme. They weren't even mentioned during the special session yesterday on how traditional books and social media might exist together. Why wasn't it part of the conversation, I wonder? Have they buried their collective heads in the sand on this big, scary subject? Does it actually not matter? The festival's focus is definitely on writers, their craft, their inspiration and this is how it should be. But something in me stirs. Surely the product of their labours should be considered too - the printed word in the printed book. The conversation needs to be had. Because if we don't advocate for the printed word, we might lose it.

 

Adoption is more common than you realise

Ever since I started mentioning the book I've been writing (and have now published) about being adopted, about finding my birth family and finally feeling that I fit in, I've discovered that I'm far from alone. At times it seemed that just about everyone I spoke to had their own personal experience of adoption - whether from a brother or sister they never knew existed suddenly turning up in their lives, from being adopted themselves, or from having adopted - or their partner having adopted - a child, often many years ago.

Being adopted has always been integral to the way I am, to my DNA! From the time my mother sat me on her knee and read "The Chosen Baby" to me, I knew I was someone special. But when I became a teenager, I wanted more than that - I wanted to know who my "real" mother was, where I came from.

Later, when I had children and the doctors asked me what hereditary diseases were in my family, I wanted to know what was in my genes that they might inherit.

Eventually, my search provided the answers. Now I have two families - my genetic family and my adoptive family - and I am doubly blessed.

Writing about the adoption triangle - standing in the shoes of both my mothers, hence the title - has absorbed me for several years now. It's been a story I wanted to tell. I knew it would have to be fiction, because there are so many details of my birth mother's life I simply don't know and similarly, details I know she would prefer to keep a secret. And I knew it would have to be written in a different style from my earlier novels. That's why I enrolled in the Victoria University creative writing course last year. It gave me the motivation, the encouragement,  the advice and assistance that I needed to get the story down on paper. I'm so glad I took the course and finished the book.

You can have a free look at it here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008KQ4G42