Out of the Blanket, but Still in the Bed

Hi there. I'm alive. Sorta.

This is my bed.

This is also where I've set myself up with a mountain of yoghurt, endless cups of tea, a large clock, a mobile, a laptop and a filing system that makes use of the mouldability of duvets.

There's rather a lot going on. I wish it was about the wonders of May Day, which is fast approaching. I wish it was about Beltane, jumping over fires and fertility rituals.

Instead, it's about editing notes, new plays and my other projects. Anyone who thinks that being a working writer begins and ends with some divine bolt of inspiration, a clean room in a Mediterranean villa and an Olivetti typewriter has been watching the wrong kinds of movies. I am not Ernest Hemingway. You are not Ernest Hemingway. Not even Ernest Hemingway was Ernest Hemingway, hence the gunshot in the final act.

The 5 Things That Are Making Me So Busy I am Not Leaving This Bed

1. My novel, Burnt Snow. It comes out in September, in Australia. There will be a launch in Sydney, and some other cities. All of that stuff is being planned now, and I'm coming back to Australia in August to prepare for the launch, do media interviews, run workshops, appear at festivals. OK, so it's a totally fun and awesome (if exhausting) prospect.

What is NOT awesome is having to go through all the editing notes. I lied when I said in an earlier post that there were 450 pages to go through - there are 800. The editing process of my book has gone like this:

- I wrote 50,000 words
- I went around meeting heaps of publishers
- I got a book deal
- I finished writing the book (200,000 words)
- the publishers read the book, we had a meeting about it, they gave me some notes
- I incorporated these notes into a redraft
- the publishers wrote back to me with more notes
- I did another redraft
- the copy editor has worked through the manuscript, suggesting cuts and making scribbles about punctuation, word choice, grammar and some content/meaning suggestions on every page. And I don't mean one or two squiggles. I mean 20-40. Per page.
- after receiving the paper manuscript with her notes from FedEx, I have been approving all of her corrections and making counter-suggestions where necessary, as well as cuts.
- I've FedExed back the first 200 pages, which are being edited ahead of schedule for a super-duper first-part-only advanced chunk of book that is going to book industry media to look at
- the honcho editor (different to the copy editor) is working through my rewrites of the copy editor's suggestions, and making her own counter-counter-suggestions. Then I write back with counter-counter-counter-suggestions. Then she writes back.
- ... meanwhile, I'm working through the next 650 pages.

To give you an example of the correspondence that's being exchanged, this is a sample. My notes are in red. From the Editor:

“Her neck-length hair was burgundy in the low light.”

Van, you queried why the copy-editor changed this to ‘shoulder-length’, wondering what was wrong with ‘neck-length’. I think ‘neck-length’ is a little ambiguous as a vertical guide; readers might wonder whether you mean the top, middle or bottom of the neck. Perhaps ‘chin-length’ might be more what you were thinking of, rather than ‘shoulder-length’?

Hmm.  This is difficult. “Chin-length” would be something like a bob, like Posh Spice. I guess it’s okay, though.

Every book you read (unless it's vanity published) goes through this process, this level of detail. Why? Because it matters. It matters that you, dear reader, know whether Taika's hair reaches to her jawline, mid-neck or higher-collarbone. This level of detail is required to make the fictional world believable, else fuzzy descriptions, cliches and poorly-worded sentences cause the literary equivalent of molten magma to ravage your villages.

Do not even get me started on the maps and houseplans I have had to draw.

2. My play, Swamplands. This play is NOT like Burnt Snow. It is not about witches. It is about the CIA and American spy scandals. I am writing it for this theatre company in America, the wonderful Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. When I am not editing my manuscript, I am reading books about the CIA and working on scenes. Which is just as well given that the play is starting rehearsal very soon, for a one-night only preview performance in the Vibrant Festival of New Writing at the Finborough Theatre in London. It is being directed by Ben Kidd, who is very good.

If you want to come along, it's on June 10, at 9pm, and you can book tickets here, and it's only £4. In London, that's actually cheaper than getting punched in the face.

3. The Classics Book Club I co-host on ABC Canberra Radio. Once a month I do something marvellous with communications technology and I chat 20th Century classic books with Genevieve Jacobs while I'm in London and she's in Canberra. Our last book was White Noise by Don Dellilo. If you want to hear the last show, you can follow this link, here.

Our next book, which I have to reread for our bookclub on May 4 (at 1pm EST, ABC Canberra 666) is my favourite book ever, Brideshead Revisted
by Evelyn Waugh. So if you want to talk "the operations of divine grace on a disparate group of characters", tune in, or catch the blogcast: details are here.

Do I sound busy enough yet? How about we throw in a full-time job?

4. Literary Management at the Finborough Theatre, London. I am very lucky to work for this prestigious new writing theatre in London. What I do is: read scripts we are considering for production, have script meetings with writers whose work we are developing or programming, maintain relationships with new writing programmes in London and new writing theatres across the world, scout writers, directors, actors and designers by attending a lot of productions and run development workshops of new scripts. Those of you who may have noticed that I am also having my show performed there for one night in June please note that this was programmed BEFORE I took over the job. Swear.

If you are a writer who has had the play in them removed, you may wish to consider sending it to our theatre. We've championed writers like Mark Ravenhill, Anthony Neilson, Susan Grochala, Joy Wilkinson, Laura Wade, Nicholas de Jongh, David Eldridge and James Graham, and you can aspire to their ranks by following the directions here. We accept plays from all around the world.

Upcoming fun business at the Finborough includes not only my play, but me "In Conversation With" the fabulous playwright Mark Ravenhill as part of the Vibrant Festival, at 9pm on May 29. To be in the audience for Mark's fabulousness, you can book here.

5. My play, Black Hands / Dead Section in Queensland. Actually, the wonderfulness of this event is that I don't have to write or read anything - I wrote the play five years ago, it won some nice awards and finally, finally, it's getting a production in my home country. It's the debut production in the new Geoffrey Rush Theatre at the University of Queensland, and it's about the Baader-Meinhof Gang and urban left-wing terrorism in 1970s West Germany. It's got lots of guns and pretty young people, and if you can get to Brisbane on May 19-22nd at 7.30pm you can see it for between AUD $5-$12.

The booking number is +61 7 3365 2552. You can read about it here. They get the name of the show wrong, but they get the name of the theatre RIGHT, which is always the most important thing.

... in addition to this, I'm working on the next book, and the screenplays of three films, and a TV series and pitching 4 large-cast plays to a theatre company. Because I am dealing with all of those next week... Well, let's just say I am NOT GETTING OUT OF THIS BED.

Back to the witch-world soon, I swear it.

xx Van

10 Things I Didn't Know About Writing a Book Before I Wrote a Book

Again, I apologise for my absence before my last post. I don't know if you missed me... but my dad did - a couple of days before my last blog, a cute email arrived reading: "Your mother and I have noticed you have not been posting your blog, but you are on Twitter. Yo, lady, what gives?" (he is so down with the street-talk, Dad).

What gave was that I had to retreat to the Organic Vegetable Cave to complete the first re-edit of my book. My book! Burnt Snow! First re-edit! Done! A little Twitter I can justify, but a blog takes - ahem - significantly more focus.

The "Michelle Ozolins" Page in my Burnt Snow Character Scrapbook

Not to mention, I've also started co-presenting a radio book club for Australia's ABC network. It's all getting a bit exciting: you can read about the radio show, and even make recommendations about what we read here.

But to give readers of this blog a thorough understanding of just what's been occupying my time, I present to you a special Book of the Witch literary feature:

10 Things I Didn't Know About Writing a Book

Before I Wrote a Book

1. Getting a Book Deal Doesn’t Write the Book For You
Burnt Snow was sent off by my agent to publishers when it was at 50,000 words; it’s true that publishers don’t need more than that to make a decision and my agent didn’t want me wasting my time. The deal process is agonizing, even if it is handled by an agent. There’s waiting for the thing to be read, reports at their end, meetings at their end, further enquiries, offers, meetings about offers, meetings about your book that you have to go to (that their marketing person also goes to), people come in, drop out, come back again. Money gets offered. Rights get negotiated. Choices have to be made – what they can afford, which publisher you want to go with. And after it all, after the meetings and the contracts and the money and the rights, they hand you a deadline, which comes as a bit of a shock. After all this effort, it’s overwhelming to think you have to finish the bloody book.

2. The Way You Work is the Way You Work: Stop Fighting It
It took Joseph Heller 8 years to write Catch-22 while he worked his day-job in an advertising agency. It took David Guterson 10 years, around the peripheries of his job as a teacher, to write Snow Falling on Cedars. Writing around your need for an income is admirable - and takes enormous discipline. I can’t do it, so while writing Burnt Snow I had to forgo an income and live on my credit card in disgusting poverty because I can’t – I just can’t – get any writing done without warming up for two hours. Sure, once I get through two hours of excruciating, staring-at-the-computer despair, something clicks and I can churn out 1000 words an hour until I pass out at my desk, but it makes working around anything difficult. Knowing how you write and reorganizing your life around it is how you ACTUALLY get the thing done.

3. Commercial Publishing Companies are NOT Charitable Organisations
Your book may indeed be a brave and brilliant reinvestigation of everything we know about the English language. You may have done several creative writing degrees, sailed through your PhD with structural flair and have difficult and uncomfortable truths about existence to share with the world. That’s awesome, but commercial publishers are still under NO obligation to publish your book, even if you’re really, really clever and really, really talented. If their books do not sell, their company fails and they lose their jobs. So when you present them with your book, their interest is in how they can sell it, and how many they can sell. From my experience, they ask:

• Who is the target market for this book? (tip: if YOU are lucky enough to get asked this question in person, the answer is not “people like me”, because that equates precisely to 1. You are a unique and beautiful individual, remember?)
• Are you familiar with other books in this genre? (tip: the answer to this question is YES, you CERTAINLY should be, because otherwise how do you articulate what the Unique Selling Point of your book is?)
• What IS the Unique Selling Point of this book? (they don’t ask this directly, but answering it anyway is VERY important)
• What do you understand of the commercial publishing industry? (the answer here is to know that it’s super-competitive, high-risk and with extremely tight margins, meaning that you will pledge to work like a lunatic within the meager resources of the company to make your book successful).

4. Knowing How To Answer a Marketing Question Does Not Undermine Your Credibility as a Writer
Do not, for one minute, think that there is a separation between literary excellence and marketing; literary excellence is marketing. The reason why a lot of talented fiction writers fail to sell a book is because:

• They have not thought about their market and can't actually articulate who would read the book except themselves. Not exactly a flag-flyer for a publishing option, this.
• They think that their book is so awesome, everyone will just flock to it. This is not borne out by reality. I think White Noise by Don Dellilo is one of the greatest books ever written - and even though it's sold well, and for 25 years, not everyone has either heard about it or read it, get me?
• They think they are smarter than the people who are reading the genre they are writing for, and believe they can cynically exploit an established market. The reverse usually proves to be true, as a patronising attitude is rewarded with staggering indifference, from publishers, readers and everyone else.

When you sit in the room with the people who are about to dedicate literally years of their professional life to your project, who are risking vast amounts of money and resources on getting your story out to the world, the heavy, heavy reality of what is involved here lands like a punch to the head. The obligation is to make something fantastic that your market will want to read, and it's the most demanding challenge to your literary skill in the world.


5. You Should Pencil in Some Thinking Time
When I was an undergraduate, I studied English Literature with a man called Richard Harland, who is now a full-time author. Richard came back to the university a couple of times after he left to give masterclasses on writing. One of the things he spoke about was how in his writing practise, he scheduled in thinking time; he would sit in a comfy chair for a couple of hours each afternoon, thinking about what he would write the next morning. Research shows that sleeping on a problem is one of the best ways to solve it, and doing some quality thinking for a defined period in the day will certainly help this. Narrative is HARD. Characterisation is TRICKY. Working your brain properly is the only way to survive.


6. Your Thinking Time is NOT Your Down Time 
It says in the Bible that the Sabbath should be a day of rest and it’s advice for healthy living. You can’t and shouldn’t work 7 days a week. Your brain needs rest. If you don’t spend a whole day NOT writing your book, you will enjoy it more when you get back to it. If you live breathe and eat your book 24/7 you will start to hate it and it will hate you back; your writing will become internal if you have no external stimuli, and internal writing is inaccessible to any reader who isn’t you. Whether you take your Sabbath in church, at the pool, or dressing up as a poodle, it is very, very necessary for your mental health and writing clarity.


7. The Printing Budget of a Fiction Book is Actually only 1% of its Total Budget 
This is one of the reasons the publishers are so worried about the impact of the iPad, the Kindle and digital downloading on the book market. If the digital books were only going to be priced 1% less than the print version, there’s be no problem – but the digital booksellers (like Amazon and soon Apple) have been trying to drive down the price of new books as downloads as being up to 33% cheaper than the print version. Which may be great for consumers price-wise, but which will lead to a staggering drop in either variety or quality as publishers struggle to make money on books by reducing their main cost-centre: labour. Editing labour and marketing labour.
A good book is as easy to read as it is emotionally engaging and intellectually challenging. This is such a difficult trick to pull off that it relies on an army of readers, senior editors, junior editors, copy editors and proof-readers to get right. Everything is scrutinised; are the characters consistent? Is the door of this room in the same place on page 43 as page 3? You have used the world “sentimental” eight times on one page. This comma doesn’t belong here. We are confused about the motivations of the central character…
This is also why vanity publishing is a risky proposition; people train and work through the ranks for years to become senior editors; do you really have comparable experience? Will your book be as good as it can be without it?

8. Your Editorial Report is Not Going to Fit In An Email
I was offered three deals from three different companies, and went with the team that I felt I had the best “click” with. They loved my book, they were enthusiastic about me. I knew there were fun times ahead.
Then I got the editorial report. 10,000 words of it. I almost fell off my chair. Pages and pages of criticism – everything from the fundamental story structure to questions about characterization, feedback on my writing style and some flat out rejections of plot points.
It’s about making the book better, but, like any recovery, it takes time. I sat on the couch with a printout of the manuscript and a biro and went through it page-by-page. It took me a month.


9. You Finishing the First Draft is Not the End. It is the Beginning.
I’m learning there are lots of beginnings in this business. I thought that everything was over when we got the deal – then I remembered I had to write the book. I thought everything was over when I finished the draft – then I got the editorial report. I thought everything was over when I incorporated all the changes… but, of course, there’ll be another report. And another draft. And then an uncorrected proof. And then a corrected proof. And even when Burnt Snow goes off to the printers, it will not be over… The marketing cycle will just be beginning. And then there’s TWO MORE BOOKS in the series to go. “You know, you and I are embarking on a three-year relationship?” said my publisher. I’ve had boyfriends that didn’t last that long. Oh, my!


10. Did I Mention That It’s Really Hard Work?
I had a burst of inspiration for Burnt Snow – an idea that crystallized into magic, literally. The words poured onto the keyboard in the first two weeks. At the beginning of the story, everything is possible.
But this process is demanding. The story goes places you don’t expect it to, and you have to keep up. Characters develop complex personalities and all of a sudden the thing you wanted them to do at a certain point in the novel they aren’t likely to do anymore. Outside of the actual story and plotting and characterization, there’s all the technical stuff. Is it okay to repeatedly use the word ‘said’? Are there other words for ‘face’? Which is the best preposition for the verb? Is the tense consistent? Is there a tonal shift in this metaphor?
It takes months, years - even with help - to get this right. It costs money in lost work, it costs time in dedication. You have to think in at least 10 directions… and your communication skills aren’t just for the page; they’re for the meetings, the questions, the conversations, the blogs (!), the tweets, the festivals, talks and workshops. It is a commitment of life, for life.
But, of course, this is what I’ve trained for. And I love. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.


Is that a good enough explanation, Dad?!