Guest author - Carol Westron
Apr. 8th, 2014 08:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charlie_cochraneLovely to welcome a fellow Deadly Dame back here. Carol's a grand gal. When we last spoke, it was about watching your first book fledge. What does it feel like with the second and the third?
My second book, About the Children, was published a month ago. Like The Terminal Velocity of Cats it's a Police Procedural, but this one has a more serious tone, as the title indicates. Regarding what it feels like: the whole thing's not as scary as the first time round, but there's always the creeping anxiety that this one won't do as well as the first. I feel very proud of this book, it's hard to tackle such a sensitive subject and get the right balance, but I hope I've succeeded in that. I think the feeling of achievement will be ratified if I get reviews that are as positive as I got for my first book and, of course, if it sells well. Even then I guess I won't be satisfied; the feeling of 'could do better' and the desire to push myself further all the time is part of my make-up, but perhaps that's true of all writers.
About the Children is not in the same series as The Terminal Velocity of Cats, but it has some points of contact, both being set in the South of England and having some minor characters that appear in both. I'd like to carry on with that mix-and-match approach in the next two books in the series: Karma and the Singing Frogs and The Tyranny of the Weak.
The third crime book that I plan to publish is a very different matter. It is called Strangers and Angels and is a Victorian Murder Mystery set in Gosport, Hampshire, a naval town on the south coast of England. Its point of inspiration was the story of the two ships full of young Turkish sailors, who arrived in Gosport in December 1850, sent over from the failing Ottoman Empire to learn various seamen's arts. Over a third of these young men died from accidents and disease and are buried in Gosport, in the only Royal Naval Turkish Cemetery in Britain. The setting is a beautiful crescent of upper-class houses with a prestigious private garden. No self-respecting crime writer could resist the temptation to put a dead body in the grounds, murdered under suspicious circumstances. Strangers and Angels will be published in the autumn of 2014, in time for the Christmas market, and I hope will win a lot of local interest.
Apart from that, recently a lot of my time and interest has been diverted into publishing a child's picture book that I wrote for my autistic grandson and will be published in April 2014. Adi and the Dream Train has been illustrated by Adam in his own colourful and unique style. It tells the story of Zoom, the Dream Train that visits children who are afraid at night and gives them happy dreams, and Adi, the little boy who is different from other children and can see the secrets behind the darkness. All the profits from this book will go towards the fund to buy Adam a service dog to improve his quality of life.
What do you think you've learned since you were first published?
Promote, promote and carry on promoting. Writing a book, however good, is only the first step. Getting it out there is much harder and more time consuming. Even now I'm not nearly as efficient as I should be, partly because I am much more comfortable talking to people face-to-face than remotely. All of the social media things are alien country to me, but I'm really grateful for all the people who've been so supportive and tolerant of my technical ignorance and given me good advice, and you're one of them, Charlie.
What do you wish you'd known when you were first published?
To put all of the promotional tools in place and to have learnt how to put books on Kindle before I started. I wasted a lot of time with The Terminal Velocity of Cats before it even got to e-books.
What inspired the latest book?
One major inspiration for About the Children was the heart-wrenching poem by Robert Burns, which starts with the opening line, 'It is the death of children most offends Nature and Justice.' That's talking about the Holocaust but I think it applies to the death of all children, especially those killed by violence.
Did you know where About the Children was going from the start or did it take an unexpected turn?
About the Children is unusual because I can pinpoint an actual scene that was my starting point. I was in Paris with my husband and I saw a girl, walking beside the Seine, with very distinctive make-up and painted jewels on her face. A few minutes later I saw a young couple, two young woman on a bench; one was kneeling, her legs straddling the other girl, as they kissed. Those two scenes came together to create Colette and Sophie, on a far less romantic park bench in England, and in far sadder circumstances. That scene merged with the Robert Burns' poem, The Death of Children that I just mentioned. From that point the two investigating officers revealed themselves gradually: Detective Superintendent Kev Tyler, whose tough appearance conceals his intelligence and vulnerability, and DI Gill Martin, driven by ambition and the determination to keep her personal life private. As soon as I knew the crime, I knew who had committed it, the journey was to follow the cops as they worked out who and how. However, one unexpected turn was that a character I'd planned to kill had to survive, not because I'm getting soft in my old age but because that particular death would have diverted the whole investigation onto a new track.
Have you ever been writing and discovered something totally unexpected about one of your characters?
That happens to me all the time. My characters are allowed far too much liberty and take shameless advantage of me. Don't they know that I am The Creator? Seriously, I think that the secret of good characterisation is to allow your characters to grow and develop; if you try and force them back into a pattern dictated by the plot you get unconvincing characters and, quite often, an unconvincing plot. In About the Children, Tyler surprised me in little ways as I discovered more about his character, but it was Gill Martin who really wrong-footed me. In the first draught, she was actually turning the key in her front door before I realised that the reason she was being so defensive and secretive was because she's a lesbian and didn't want her colleagues to know. Once I'd discovered that about her, everything else fell into place.
Which book do you wish you'd written and why?
That's a really hard question. I admire the late great Reginald Hill and think that Andy Dalziel is one of the greatest detective characters ever created: funny and shrewd, his camouflage as a bully and buffoon hides unsuspected depths of intelligence and integrity, and even, on occasions, kindness. On Beulah Heights is one of Hill's greatest books and I wish I'd written it, or anything half as good.
Which book do you wish somebody else would write?
I wish somebody was capable of writing another book in the style of Edmund Crispin (or even better that there was a miraculous discovery of an unknown pile of Gervase Fen documents hidden in an attic somewhere.) I first read Crispin when working on a Golden Age article for Mystery People and was an instant convert. There aren't many authors that can be funny, dramatic and gentle in the same chapter, and all written in exquisite language. It's a long while since I've discovered an author who makes me laugh out loud.
Have you got a secret you'd be willing to share?
You mean the pile of handwritten, disjointed scribblings that are hidden in our attic and constitute my first, adolescent attempts to write a Regency adventure story, inspired by Georgette Heyer? I really must find time to go through them: one trip down memory lane and then, I think, a bonfire.
My second book, About the Children, was published a month ago. Like The Terminal Velocity of Cats it's a Police Procedural, but this one has a more serious tone, as the title indicates. Regarding what it feels like: the whole thing's not as scary as the first time round, but there's always the creeping anxiety that this one won't do as well as the first. I feel very proud of this book, it's hard to tackle such a sensitive subject and get the right balance, but I hope I've succeeded in that. I think the feeling of achievement will be ratified if I get reviews that are as positive as I got for my first book and, of course, if it sells well. Even then I guess I won't be satisfied; the feeling of 'could do better' and the desire to push myself further all the time is part of my make-up, but perhaps that's true of all writers.
About the Children is not in the same series as The Terminal Velocity of Cats, but it has some points of contact, both being set in the South of England and having some minor characters that appear in both. I'd like to carry on with that mix-and-match approach in the next two books in the series: Karma and the Singing Frogs and The Tyranny of the Weak.
The third crime book that I plan to publish is a very different matter. It is called Strangers and Angels and is a Victorian Murder Mystery set in Gosport, Hampshire, a naval town on the south coast of England. Its point of inspiration was the story of the two ships full of young Turkish sailors, who arrived in Gosport in December 1850, sent over from the failing Ottoman Empire to learn various seamen's arts. Over a third of these young men died from accidents and disease and are buried in Gosport, in the only Royal Naval Turkish Cemetery in Britain. The setting is a beautiful crescent of upper-class houses with a prestigious private garden. No self-respecting crime writer could resist the temptation to put a dead body in the grounds, murdered under suspicious circumstances. Strangers and Angels will be published in the autumn of 2014, in time for the Christmas market, and I hope will win a lot of local interest.
Apart from that, recently a lot of my time and interest has been diverted into publishing a child's picture book that I wrote for my autistic grandson and will be published in April 2014. Adi and the Dream Train has been illustrated by Adam in his own colourful and unique style. It tells the story of Zoom, the Dream Train that visits children who are afraid at night and gives them happy dreams, and Adi, the little boy who is different from other children and can see the secrets behind the darkness. All the profits from this book will go towards the fund to buy Adam a service dog to improve his quality of life.
What do you think you've learned since you were first published?
Promote, promote and carry on promoting. Writing a book, however good, is only the first step. Getting it out there is much harder and more time consuming. Even now I'm not nearly as efficient as I should be, partly because I am much more comfortable talking to people face-to-face than remotely. All of the social media things are alien country to me, but I'm really grateful for all the people who've been so supportive and tolerant of my technical ignorance and given me good advice, and you're one of them, Charlie.
What do you wish you'd known when you were first published?
To put all of the promotional tools in place and to have learnt how to put books on Kindle before I started. I wasted a lot of time with The Terminal Velocity of Cats before it even got to e-books.
What inspired the latest book?
One major inspiration for About the Children was the heart-wrenching poem by Robert Burns, which starts with the opening line, 'It is the death of children most offends Nature and Justice.' That's talking about the Holocaust but I think it applies to the death of all children, especially those killed by violence.
Did you know where About the Children was going from the start or did it take an unexpected turn?
About the Children is unusual because I can pinpoint an actual scene that was my starting point. I was in Paris with my husband and I saw a girl, walking beside the Seine, with very distinctive make-up and painted jewels on her face. A few minutes later I saw a young couple, two young woman on a bench; one was kneeling, her legs straddling the other girl, as they kissed. Those two scenes came together to create Colette and Sophie, on a far less romantic park bench in England, and in far sadder circumstances. That scene merged with the Robert Burns' poem, The Death of Children that I just mentioned. From that point the two investigating officers revealed themselves gradually: Detective Superintendent Kev Tyler, whose tough appearance conceals his intelligence and vulnerability, and DI Gill Martin, driven by ambition and the determination to keep her personal life private. As soon as I knew the crime, I knew who had committed it, the journey was to follow the cops as they worked out who and how. However, one unexpected turn was that a character I'd planned to kill had to survive, not because I'm getting soft in my old age but because that particular death would have diverted the whole investigation onto a new track.
Have you ever been writing and discovered something totally unexpected about one of your characters?
That happens to me all the time. My characters are allowed far too much liberty and take shameless advantage of me. Don't they know that I am The Creator? Seriously, I think that the secret of good characterisation is to allow your characters to grow and develop; if you try and force them back into a pattern dictated by the plot you get unconvincing characters and, quite often, an unconvincing plot. In About the Children, Tyler surprised me in little ways as I discovered more about his character, but it was Gill Martin who really wrong-footed me. In the first draught, she was actually turning the key in her front door before I realised that the reason she was being so defensive and secretive was because she's a lesbian and didn't want her colleagues to know. Once I'd discovered that about her, everything else fell into place.
Which book do you wish you'd written and why?
That's a really hard question. I admire the late great Reginald Hill and think that Andy Dalziel is one of the greatest detective characters ever created: funny and shrewd, his camouflage as a bully and buffoon hides unsuspected depths of intelligence and integrity, and even, on occasions, kindness. On Beulah Heights is one of Hill's greatest books and I wish I'd written it, or anything half as good.
Which book do you wish somebody else would write?
I wish somebody was capable of writing another book in the style of Edmund Crispin (or even better that there was a miraculous discovery of an unknown pile of Gervase Fen documents hidden in an attic somewhere.) I first read Crispin when working on a Golden Age article for Mystery People and was an instant convert. There aren't many authors that can be funny, dramatic and gentle in the same chapter, and all written in exquisite language. It's a long while since I've discovered an author who makes me laugh out loud.
Have you got a secret you'd be willing to share?
You mean the pile of handwritten, disjointed scribblings that are hidden in our attic and constitute my first, adolescent attempts to write a Regency adventure story, inspired by Georgette Heyer? I really must find time to go through them: one trip down memory lane and then, I think, a bonfire.
