Getting a Book Deal Part I: The "I Want To Be a Writer" Litmus Test

So it's started. Word is out that I have a book deal and the emails are arriving from friends and acquaintances wanting to know how I did it, they're writing their own books, can I help?, etc.
As there is a vast amount of information on the internet on this topic, I thought I'd add to the massive volume of existing commentary by sharing my own path to How It Happened. I'm doing this mainly because I don't want to a.) endlessly rewrite the same email to inquiring friends or b.) issue a form letter, which would make me feel like a business, not a friend. So maybe you're reading this because I've popped a link to this post into an otherwise chatty letter about our respective lovelives and plans for the weekend, or alternatively you're someone I don't know wandering the internet looking for guidance on how to have a writing career. In either case: "Hello!" and I'll do a series of little blogs on these topics, adding the caveat that I am totally prejudiced and speak entirely from my own experience.
Okay, so what's interesting to me is that I sometimes get the question "how do I become a writer?" from people who don't actually write. Usually, these are people who love reading and want an "in" to the other side of the page. As a writer, let me tell you, all readers and all audiences are beautiful. People who love to read not only make our worlds worthwhile, but they form the government of those worlds; they become the agents, and assessors, commissioners, editors, publishers, producers and directors, the actors and illustrators who administer, enact and produce what we create - as well as negotiate the contracts and pay us.
But writing itself is neither a spectator sport or an exercise in good government. Writing falls somewhere between a vocation and a pathology depending on how much money you're earning - and the reason why the vast majority of writers spend their early careers in desperate poverty is they're incapable of *not* writing... and it tends to get in the way of holding down a day job. A writer writes AT LEAST 1000 words a day through an act of addictive compulsion, and this behaviour usually kicks in at age 13. Before 13, the "imperative" manifests itself in rambly story-telling, lots of games of pretend, self-made books and an obsessive love of words.
Sound like you?
To people who want to be writers, I ask: How many dictionaries do you own? Do you subscribe to a "word of the day" service? Do you pause a conversation if someone utters a word you don't know and ask for them to explain it to you? Do you look up words you haven't seen before when you strike them in a book or newspaper or online and chant the meaning to yourself until each new word's embedded in your own vocabulary? How do you feel about punctuation? I don't mean this last question in the context of "Are you a fastidious grammarian who gets hysterical in the face of a misplaced apostrophe?" but do you have an intuitive sense of how EVERYTHING changes with the choice of a comma, full stop and ellipsis?
Does this sound like you?
The business of writing is simply "to make words work". In the context of writing a novel, the words and their punctuation are pounded and squeezed to tell a story in its most exciting, beautiful or beautifully exciting way. Great literature - those books that flap their pages like wondrous plumage on lists like these chosen by writers are those where an interesting sequence of events (a story) is told in a uniquely compelling way. It's one thing to retell an interesting experience or recount an adventure - anyone can do that, and everyone does on a daily basis - but the writer's hard work with words is what puts you THERE, in the story, in the landscape, amongst the characters. Consider the difference:
Yeah, I met this hot guy at a party when his friend was hitting onto my sister, but he was, like, really rude to me. My sister was seeing his friend for a while but he broke up with her with no explanation and I heard that the hot guy was behind it because he had, like, totally the wrong idea about everything - and I guess I'd been a bit of a bitch to him, which wouldn't have helped. We had heaps of family stuff going down, it was crazy. Anyway, the hot guy realised that my sister was actually cool, and sorted stuff out between his friend and her, so they're back on, and I found out the hot guy had actually had some problems of his own, and wasn't a bad guy, and turns out that he thought I was hot, too, so we're together now. Yeah.
Kinda banal until Jane Austen gets hold of it and turns it into Pride and Prejudice.
If you like telling stories, that's fantastic. If you want to tell stories for money, you have to slave-drive words with the obsessive control of a master tyrant. This does not mean that writing means learning to pack a sentence with as many obscure, if appropriate, words you can pluck from the depths of the extended OED (Alexander Theroux beat you to it in Darconville's Cat, anyway). It means twisting the language we all use and understand to have a singular meaning; yours. If you want to understand why other writers go dotty for Harold Pinter, Kurt Vonnegut, Caryl Churchill, ee cummings, Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner and ingenious writing like MAUS, consider that the triumph of these authors is to condense chillingly precise meaning into vocabularies that seem restricted, inarticulate or even lost in translation. Of course, it's a trick; these guys know exactly what they're doing.
Disingenuously, and maybe to be polite, I could tell you that if you want to be a writer, write 1000 words a day and buy a lot of dictionaries. Learn more words. Read Vonnegut, he's really good.
Really, though, as far as writing goes, there's only one truth, as I understand it:
If you want to be a writer, you should be writing already.

The Underworld and the Afterlife

Turns out I'm not the great symbologist after all, or my intuition is defective.
Maybe Papa Legba needs teach me a remedial course on the meaning of omens, because the morning after my last post, I learned - as sure as the raven flies between worlds - that a friend of mine had died.
Or maybe it is not Papa Legba who I should acknowledge here, but his cousin, Baron Samedi. In Vodou lore, the Baron also lurks at the crossroad between the lands of the living and the dead. Dressed in a white top hat and a black tuxedo, he greets all souls on their passage to the underworld. As everyone must eventually meet him, the Baron can indulge himself drinking rum and coffee, and telling filthy jokes with a cigar between his bony fingers and fleshless lips. Master of the dead, he is their protector, too, for it is Samedi's intercession that ensures the dead stay dead and are not resurrected to torment and misery.

This is The Baron's veve - his symbol:

I went to my friend's funeral this morning. It was incredibly moving. He was a friend from university, and too young to die. As a man who liked a drink and a bawdy conversation, it is a comfort to imagine him greeting the Baron with a slap on the back, a laugh and a rum raised high.
The eulogy given my a mutual old friend was incisive, and truthful, and honorable. It reminded me, in that space in my mind that was set apart from grieving, of the magic of language. If we accept the dictionary.com definition of a "spell" as:

spell
–noun
1. a word, phrase, or form of words supposed to have magic power; charm; incantation: The wizard cast a spell.
2. a state or period of enchantment: She was under a spell.
3. any dominating or irresistible influence; fascination: the spell of fine music.

... then certainly the eulogist was a magician. From the hundreds of individuals present, his words created a single emotional being that, like a witch's familiar, followed wherever his words willed us. It was a dominating and irresistible influence. He spoke, we were dumb. He provoked us, in places, to cry. In others, his words eked impossible giggles even from grieving despair. The words built and unbuilt a unique emotional world and what always staggers me is that for all the books and scripts and blogs fingers and keys commit to screens and paper, for all the conversations that have ever been had, the words - this specific set of words, in this order - had never been uttered before.
If this is my year of magical thinking, I will begin it not only with my eyes attuned to symbols and scenes, but my ears pricked for the spoken spellcraft in everyday life.

Signs and Portents

Argh, I ventured outside today and I think it was a mistake. I didn't go very far, or for very long, but now I'm so tired my eyes feel as ringed and hollow as slices of pineapple. What is this ridiculous sickness I've got? I've had to delay my flight back to Britain, so Imbolc/Candlemas will be an Australian affair... hmm... wonder if I'll have to switch the festivals around... Must.. consult... Almanac...
On my brief walk, I happened to stand near a crossroads. In folklore, the crossroad junction is a symbol of the liminal - it marks an intersection nor merely of journeys, but of worlds. The crossroads are the home of Papa Legba, the trickster god of the Vodou religion. Papa Legba will, if you seek him, show you the way to the spirit world. Tradition states that he taught humankind how to use and interpret oracles.
Now, I didn't see a dark old man with a stick, as Papa Legba is depicted - nor did I see an old man sprinkling water, or a dog - his attendant animal. But I did see a crow.
Crows are also notorious mythological tricksters - not to mention the naughty creatures who copulated on Noah's Ark (according to the Talmud). They are also symbols of the gateway between worlds. The Qu'ran credits the crow with teaching humanity how to bury its dead. Folk superstitions hold in Britain that a crow on your rooftop means that someone in the household is going to die.
I've personally always viewed crows as a luck symbol. They always seem to appear at junctions in my life when my fortunes ride the edge of fair or foul; for me, seeing a dancing crow usually augurs a golden phonecall, an email of good news or one of those marvellous mystery deposits that end up in my bank account and save me from the bailiffs. I always associate crows with my grandmother because they used to gather in her front yard, and caw over the roof of her house. Maybe I think of them as her looking over me. Certainly Nanna saved me from the bailiffs more than once.
So there they were, these two symbols of the permeable world, and what hour of the day was it but twilight, when the wall between worlds is at its thinnest. Behind the crow, dancing on a telegraph pole at a crossroads, the waxing moon was pregnant in a lavender sky.
What does it mean? The symbol dictionaries would tell me that the Otherworld is near. Reason tells me that it's just a crow.
I'm waiting for the phonecall, anyway.

Mystery, Anxiety and the Rash

I had a rotten night. I spent it in hospital. Hunched over my keyboard, impossible deadlines biting my elbows, my pale little body betrayed me with some plainly ridiculous rash. It started on my neck and soon consumed half my face and the pain was appalling. I took my battered manuscript with me to the casualty ward; even as they strapped my arm with the pressure pump thing and passed around the little plastic cups with pills in them, I was still marking changes in the margins. Aspiring writers take note: when you do this for money, you too shall become this person.
Part of the plan for this blog is to chart not only my progress to publication, but also the accumulation of the research that informs the book; lore and tales of the witch world. Since Burnt Snow began, my daily life has overflowed with spellbooks and histories of witchcraft, compendiums of crystal magic, herbals, star charts and i Ching coins. As I'm a writer who likes to *know* the things she describes, I've invested in the paraphernalia of witch candles, crystal balls, anatomical models of bears and bagfuls of "magic rocks" - that is, the polished lumps of serpentine, onyx, snowflake obsidian and other geologic delights to which some ascribe spiritual properties and others just think are pretty.
Of my many treasures I count a copy of the annual Witches Almanac, collected on one of my rounds to Treadwell's. The truly enchanting Treadwell's will receive a description in due course, but the my concern today is with the Almanac, and the experiment ahead of me this year.
I grew up in Australia, in a post-colonial, multicultural family where all major religions were represented, the house always air-conditioned and any kind of fruit you want available at the local supermarket all year round. Australia has its popular rituals, and my multi-faith family has engaged with them with only minor vairiations on the theme. Australia's imported the traditional British Christmas, and it's held on the same day it is in Europe, as well as can be imagined when you're eating roast turkey at it's 40C outside. We do a European Easter, too - with bunnies and chickens and the celebrations of the Spring... held at the beginning of Autumn.
What I'm saying is, for all the cultural influences my family and country have inherited, I've got absolutely no experience of how festivals and feasts can work with a seasonal calendar, as opposed to against it. I barely understand harvest cycles, and I've got no idea about seasonal eating. This may be the great luxury of being Australian, but somewhere I think it may be bad for my health.
As a compendium of dates for pagan festivals, calendar of moon cycles and go-to for astrological phases, the Witches' Almanac confronts me in is detail as to how separated from the natural patterns of the earth and skies I am. In Sydney, of course, you can barely see the stars for light pollution and maybe its an apt metaphor for the division the city - or any city - creates between its inhabitants and the rituals of the pre-urban past.
So, anyway, what I'm doing in 2010 - as much out of curiosity as a form of research (as you can imagine, the rituals of the earth are most important to the witches of Burnt Snow) is I'm going to try and live my life around the events of the Almanac, follow the old Celtic pagan festivals and turn with the "Wheel of the Year". I have an advantage in that I'm going back to London on the 1st of February - *just* in time to miss the worst of the cold, and with a calendar of activities laid out for me that doesn't require adaptation of dates. The first event approaching is Imbolc, which is celebrated by Christians under the name of Candlemas. Whatever name it goes by, the tradition demands the lighting of candles and the serving of crepes.
Crepes! I love this experiment already.

The Blank Page

Hello, and welcome to "The Book of the Witch".
I've started this blog as a place to record my experiences as the writer of Burnt Snow. It's my first book, it's about witches and it comes out in September, 2010.
I never intended to write a book. For the past 10 years I've been mostly a playwright, sometimes a university lecturer and variously a medical test subject, newspaper delivery supervisor, community arts mentor, stand-up comedian, transcription clerk, learning support assistant, cabaret MC, screenplay assessor, theatre festival director and home tutor. In between, ahem, *temporary assignments* and plays, I've written musicals and screenplays and radio plays and done bits and pieces for television. Sometimes - and usually at the behest of other people - I've scribbled up articles and the odd chapter of an unwritten book... the idea being that an idea that may not fly for a film or a play might work in prose, but they rarely did.
Then, of course, about eighteen months ago, something weird happened.
I was in my ridiculously small London apartment, half-sleeping in my bed-in-the-ceiling, when I had a thoroughly creepy dream. It was one of those dreams that you know is a dream but can't get seem to get yourself out of. There was something dark and menacing in it - a hooded figure on the edge of my vision. Maybe a crow.
Whatever symbol my brain had conjured in that dream, I knew it meant bad news... but when my phone rang suddenly, and I was shocked out of sleep, I wasn't grateful to be rescued. Because of the dream, because of the weird darkness in it, before I picked up the phone, I knew that it was my mother calling me from Sydney to tell me someone had died. And, sadly, I was right.
Nothing like that had happened to me before, and nothing like that has happened since. What did happen, though, was that I started talking to people about it... and was amazed that everyone I knew had a story about dreams or visions or bigger things, stronger things - clairaudience, telekinesis, weird stuff. An exboyfriend told me his grandfather was a seventh son of a seventh son who had all kinds of unusual, inexplicable abilities. I learned of twins who would often have the same dream. Then people in my family started talking about a relative whose freakish ability to find lost things was actually based on visions.
I found that it didn't matter if people were conservative or liberal, religious or agnostic, or even what religion they were; most people had a story about paranormal phenomena. The explanations differed, but the weirdness was the same.
It got me thinking, about the human world and the natural world and the vast universe of phenomena that we don't understand... and I asked myself: "What if someone DID understand what these forces are, and how they work? What would they do with that knowledge? Would they keep it secret? Would they have to so other people wouldn't come after them?" These questions led to me to thinking about the Burning Times - that ugly period in mediaeval and Renaissance history when vast numbers of women and men were executed as witches across Europe and North America. We know most of the victims were midwives and apothecaries, the socially marginalised and those caught enjoying naughty pagan traditions in austere Christian times. But what if... what if there were "real" witches that the Witchfinders were pursuing - real magicians, with a valuable knowledge of how to manipulate the world around them? If they were around us then, are they still around us now?
Every society on earth believes in witchcraft and magic practise in some form. Even today, Mediterranean cultures whack amulets against the Evil Eye over doorways, traditional Chinese wear red bracelets or belts for the duration of their Fate Year, American Baptists take the "cursed" to exorcisms, the British weave the old pagan Yule wreaths for the Christmas table setting. The witch, the psychic, the fortune-teller, the wise-woman exists in the pages of women's magazines giving advice in the same way shamans or priests are still called in when someone's inexplicable situation requires an apparently improbable solution. Even the patriarchs of the Christian bible sought help from witches when earthly answers were short (1 Samuel 28 tells the whole story).
All of these notions were bubbling though my head when another weird thing happened; I ran into someone from high school at the mall near my parents' house.
I went to two high schools, starting the second one in 4th term of Year Eleven. At my first school, a girls' selective school, I'd been an arty weirdo amongst groups of dedicated nerds. At the second, I was still an arty weirdo but, inexplicably, on my first day one of the girls from the popular group asked me if I wanted to sit with them. I remember the temptation I felt to shed my arty weirdo skin and experience the world of the beautiful and popular, but my self-preservation instincts kicked in. I politely declined and had lunch in the art room alone until I found the other arty weirdoes who were kicking around (they weren't there my first day - they were off being arty and weird).
I'd forgotten completely about all of this until I ran into this girl from the popular group at the mall, and I remembered it because even though I hadn't seen her in 10 years, and even though she was perfectly nice to me, there was still something vaguely arch and condescending about the way she spoke while I was there.
I've had an enviable life - I've traveled, done glamorous and fun things and had relationships with amazing people but ONE SINGLE MINUTE with this girl and I went back to feeling like the old chubby Goth girl who the boys didn't like.
I had witchcraft on the brain at this point and thought, man, this is why societies need to believe in magic; you would grasp every amulet within reach to protect yourself from the withering stare of the popular girls. You would light a hundred candles to be spared. You would seriously consider the practice of Dark Things if you thought you'd get out alive.
Which led to the thought; what if I *hadn't* politely refused that offer on my first day? What if I *had* found myself amongst those girls and their sporty boyfriends? The situation would have been a disruption to the natural order so vast that mountains could have cracked, lava poured through shopping malls, black snow fallen over the NSW South Coast...
And that was it. The thunderbolt. With no idea what I was doing or where it was going, the story poured into my keyboard so quickly that sometimes it seemed that I was typing faster than I could think. Take a nerd from a nerd school and let her join the popular group at her new school in a coastal town. Let her wriggle and squirm as she tries to maintain social status while falling head over heels for the brooding school badboy her new friends despise. Let trouble bubble in family secrets, mysterious warnings from strange girls at school, dark presences at nighttime, unnatural animals, the girls messing at spellcraft and explosions whenever our heroine and the badboy get too near...
And that is the origin of Sophie Morgan, and the premise of Burnt Snow.