Posts Tagged "Osiris"

• Not just a pretty cover

  Cover Art

  Books are visceral things. If you’re browsing in a store, or online for that matter, the first thing that catches your attention is going to be the cover. As a writer, this is your book’s chance to make an impression, and you want it to be the right one. The question is: what is the right impression? Your vision of the book is by no means going to be the way everyone else sees it, or indeed how the publisher chooses to market it. Readers will have strong ideas about the way a character or place looks, regardless of how detailed the writer’s description; think of the upset generated by the casting of film adaptations. Personally, I don’t like the reissues of books with a cover image from the film adaptation, and always choose to buy a neutral edition instead. But I don’t mind drawings or illustrations of characters in the same way – perhaps because an illustration seems less concrete, and more of an interpretation, than a photographical portrait.

  

  Cover for OSIRIS - I was dead chuffed with this.

  When I first told people that OSIRIS was going to be published, one of the most common responses was: I wonder what the cover’s going to be. Speculation was particularly avid amongst the House of Swift, where we have long discussed the potential covers of my potential books (my dad having worked in animation and graphic design, we’re an opinionated bunch about such matters). The other question I got a lot was: Will you get to choose the cover? Doubtless for highly successful authors, there must be an element of control, but as a debut novelist, you can only hope it comes close to what you imagine. And actually I feel really lucky with the cover of OSIRIS. When I was sent the artwork my first thought was, wow, someone has come up with that vision from something I wrote… it was a very exciting moment. I thought that the artwork captured both the scale of the city and its claustrophobic atmosphere. But my mum, for example, was convinced it was going to be a blue-toned design, and seemed more surprised by the choice of yellow than anything else. (more…)

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• The life of a writer, now with added Panda Face

  Managing promotion vs. writing vs. your personal life.

  In a utopian world, the writerly life would involve lie-ins and leisurely mornings, perhaps commencing with a perusal of the world news in order to inform yourself, alongside a perfectly brewed double espresso or three before retiring to the Shed (because there would, of course, be a theoretical Writing Shed in the theoretical garden of the theoretical house). This world would contain no day job. Instead each day (wait – each weekday, for there would be weekends, in which fun things were done) would involve Actual Writing, conjuring up sentences and stories and plots and characters and dialogue and ideas and getting them down on the page.

  Alas, sadly this remains, and doubtless shall remain for some if not all time, the trappings of fantasy. Like many other writers, I juggle a day job with the creative side of writing and the business side of writing. And if you’re going to be a professional writer, the two go hand in hand. The creative side hardly needs explaining; but perhaps the greatest consensus on writing advice is to write often, and it’s not easy to carve a piece of time out of every day.

  

  Roald Dahl's writing shed - what every writer needs

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• Everything is autobiographical and everything is fictional

  Writing on other cultures that are not your own.

  This week’s topic is writing on cultures that are not your own, a subject which, rightly so, generates debate. Certainly writing on cultures not your own, as with writing anything that is not a direct personal experience, needs to be approached with care. Personally, I would love to write a novel set in Japan. Japan is a country I’ve wanted to visit for a long time; I’m intrigued by the culture and I studied the language for several years at school (sadly all I can remember now is a few hiragana, and that’s about it – I keep promising myself one day I will learn again). I’m drawn to books set in Japan – Murakami’s works being the obvious example, but another all time favourite is NUMBER9DREAM by David Mitchell (who lived in Japan for some years), set in Tokyo. But for me to write about life in Japan, or about any other culture which is not my own, I would naturally worry about getting the details right, and writing in a way that didn’t reinforce the stereotypes that are automatically embedded in any one culture viewing another.

  In this theoretical project there are some obvious things I could do to mitigate potential blunders – research being the first point of call. I would want to do my research thoroughly. Ideally I would like to visit the place I was writing about, but for most writers, financial concerns are going to limit the feasibility of travel. Fortunately, we are in a unique position compared to the vast majority of writers who have come before – for now we have the Internet. And with the Internet comes such a wealth of information available in the form of visual media, personal narratives, online magazines and podcasts and interactive maps and blogs – that there is no excuse for not doing your homework. (more…)

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• How do you like your heroes?

  "Anti hero" doesn't mean "bad guy"!

  Anti-hero is one of those terms that seemed really obvious when I looked at this week’s theme – taking it quite literally, the antithesis of heroic – but then I started thinking that it depends what you define as heroic, and I found this definition: “the central character in a play, book or film who does not have traditionally heroic qualities, such as bravery, and is admired instead for what society generally considers to be a weakness of their character”.

  The first part of the above is self-explanatory – the second part I found much more interesting in considering what makes a hero or anti-hero, because it argues that the perception of what is heroic, or not heroic, is down to the society in which you, or your characters, are living. The culture I’m part of traditionally idealises traits such as bravery and strength – the hero who fights for his or her castle/country/planet/children/lover, often making personal sacrifices to do so, and generally acting for altruistic reasons. When it comes down to big budget film industry, Hollywood is dominated by heroes who run around saving the world, sometimes in tights, sometimes in a fighter jet, sometimes in court. These characters might be heroic from the start, or they might discover heroic qualities within themselves along the way, but with the hero narrative you know by the end they are going to ‘come good’ and perform their world-saving destiny with suitable panache. (more…)

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• Falling into science fiction

  Introductions

  I’m E J (Emma) Swift, author of OSIRIS, which is released June this year. It’s lovely to be here at the Bazaar! I’m particularly enamoured of the Bazaar theme. It’s the sort of thing you might stumble upon unexpectedly, not quite knowing what you might find, and that kind of encapsulates how I feel about the creative process of writing OSIRIS.

  It’s introductions week, so in the traditions of such things, a bit of background about me and how I got here: I’m an English writer, nowadays living in South London with two cats and a long-suffering housemate. My day job involves communications-type-things for performing arts training, and although the pointe shoes have long since been relegated to the back of the wardrobe, I’ve become obsessed with aerial circus skills. (That’s definitely a future novel. And yep, I have a lot of love for Angela Carter’s NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS.) As I’m sure is the case with many writers, my road to publication is littered with discarded novels, but at the end of last year I had my first sale, a story called THE COMPLEX, in UK magazine Interzone. And that was awesome. A week later I found out that Night Shade were interested in OSIRIS. And that was beyond awesome.

  Finding out that you’re going to be a professional writer is, whilst being the culmination of a lifetime of dreams, in equal measure terrifying. It’s no longer possible to simply fling the book out into the ether and hope for the best; the Internet is waiting, and it’s full of tigers. My immediate worry was: I don’t know enough. I don’t know enough and I haven’t read enough, or not the right things. But you can never read enough. The only way I’ve found to deal with that worry so far is by a) making decisions and b) trying to turn it into an opportunity. There are books and writers waiting to be discovered, recommendations to be made. That’s something to be excited about.

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