Facing Down THE FEAR

Everything was on track. I'd received the fourth version of the converted file of De Nada Nirvana. All I needed to do was a final, final proofread and I'd be ready to publish. At least, that was the theory. The reality turned out to be rather different. I'm going to talk through this part of the journey here. Let's get ready to ramble.

I can't say procrastination paralysed me. Instead, I suddenly found a huge number of things to do that needed to take priority. Except I didn't. Not really. True, I was running a self-edit course, but there was a lull in editing commissions and I didn't have my usual pile of MSs to work through. But there were Other Things getting in the way. I told myself my website had to be updated first. Emails that I'd usually consider to be non-urgent shot up the to-do list. I even cleaned corners of the flat that were shocked to see me.

My mood plummeted and the questions began to roll in. What if this wasn't just a lull in editing work? What if it had dried up forever? Had my career stalled? Was I going to go back to struggling to pay the rent? Eventually, the questions crystallised and I identified the big one, The Fear.

What if people HATED my new novel?

Yep, I'd been beset by the Doubt Demons, as a writer friend calls them. Only one way to deal with them. I had to call each of them out from the shadows and get them to state their case so I could come up with the answers to silence them.

The conversation went like this:

Doubt Demon: De Nada Nirvana is the first novel you've published in ten years.

Me: No need to rub it in.

Doubt Demon: Ah, but this one's different, isn't it. It hasn't been through a gatekeeper.

Me: That's not strictly true. My agent took me on, on the basis of this novel.

Doubt Demon: Wait. You mean you didn't have an agent for the first two? Are you mad? Or just stupid?

Me: Quite possibly both. What can I say? Hindsight's a bitch.

Doubt Demon: So let me get this right. You were signed direct by Orion without an agent. They didn't offer you a third book deal though, did they? Hmmm? Wouldn't you say that suggests it Just Wasn't Good Enough?

Me: Maybe. But it's also true that a lot of that might have been down to timing and circumstances beyond my control.

Doubt Demon: Yeah, yeah. Keep telling yourself that. Or maybe it's because the first two weren't that good either. Your sales didn't exactly set the world on fire, did they?

Me: Sales of Nirvana Bites were not spectacular, it's true, but they weren't disastrous either. Don't forget I had no web presence back then. It was much harder to build a buzz. But Trading Tatiana had a fraught journey before she even got to the published stage. There was a series of events at the publishers - some tragic - that meant she went through four different editors before she was launched. It was nothing to do with me, nor did it have any connection to my novel. The editorial team must have been in total disarray. There was no one in my corner, championing me.

Doubt Demon: Shame you didn't have an agent back then, isn't it, eh?

Me: Oh, do piss off. We've covered this one. Move on.

Doubt Demon: OK, we will. Let's get back to De Nada Nirvana. Your agent loved it but he couldn't sell it, so it hasn't been through any kind of professional editing process, has it. Answer me that one.

Me: I believe I can answer that, since you ask. I wrote De Nada Nirvana over ten years ago and only returned to it last year when I decided to self-publish it. In those intervening ten years, I've worked as a freelance editor, editing an average of 2-3 MSs a month. For the last five years, I've run an online Self-Edit Your Novel course with Emma Darwin, as well as teaching creative writing at events and to writers' groups. I believe I have both the skills and the distance to edit my own novels. In any case, De Nada Nirvana looks very different now from the version my agent was unable to sell. I know it's a better book. As far as I'm concerned, it has been professionally edited.

Doubt Demon: Yeah, but you have some worries about it, don't you. Go on. Spit them out. You've broken rules and you're scared you're gonna be called out on it. And then that'll undermine your reputation as a professional editor and tutor. You're done. This is the end, my friend.

Me: You're no friend of mine.

Doubt Demon: Go on then. Defend yourself against the charge that you've head-hopped.

Me: Right, I will. I've looked very carefully at the areas where some people might think that's what I've done and you know what? I think it works in the story. A newbie to the concept, looking for things to criticise when they read published novels, might spot it and go, 'Aha! Practise what you preach, Editrix!' but I'm willing to bet that readers won't notice any of the dislocation you get when the psychic distance spectrum hasn't been used to good effect.

Doubt Demon: OK, but while we're on the subject of breaking rules, you always bang on about how novels often struggle to sustain more than three or four. Remind me again how many POVs you have in De Nada Nirvana?

Me: Don't forget that I'm a huge fan of breaking the rules, as long as you have a good reason and do it well. I concede that there are several characters, some very minor, who have their own limited POVs, but I maintain that it's very clear that the story belongs to Jo and Jen. Besides, it's not that uncommon in the thriller genre to have brief scenes in minor POVs.

Doubt Demon: Ah, I'm glad you brought up the business of genre. What the hell is this novel? The politics are more in the background than in the two previous Nirvana books. De Nada Nirvana was the first you wrote in third person. There are two threads: Jo's, in Spain, is the crime thread, and Jen's in South London is ... is ... What the hell is that? Are you writing romance, Alper?

Me: Ha! Yeah, I know. It took me by surprise too. But I don't think I'll be joining the Romantic Novelists' Association any time soon. It's a very quirky sort of romance and I think it's the kind of thing that readers who are following these characters would expect and want to see. One of the reviews for Trading Tatiana, described it as an unorthodox mix of comedy, kitchen-sink drama and dark thriller. All I've done with De Nada Nirvana is throw a new element into the mix. The threads are interwoven. What can I say? I believe in the book. I enjoyed writing it and hope others will enjoy reading it.

Doubt Demon: You do realise that by writing this blog you're going to draw people's attention to the very things you're twitching about ...

Me: Sigh. I know. What can I do? I'm a writer. Lots of us have a tendency to over-share.

Doubt Demon: Right, howzabout this for the killer punch then. You're crap at self-promotion. You'll sell a few copies. You have loyal friends, many of then writers themselves, who will buy it because they know you. But you'll never spread the word beyond that small community because you have neither the will nor the skill to tell the rest of the world your books are out there.

Me: You're absolutely right. I'm not going to try arguing with you on this one. I'm fully aware that self-publishing also means self-promoting. That doesn't have to mean you should be ramming your novel down people's throats at every opportunity but there's an enormous gulf between doing that and doing sod all. I know I should be thinking about mailing lists and competitions and blog tours and special offers and all that but I'm not.

And you know what? I'm OK with that. It all depends on how you measure success and what it is you want to achieve. I wanted to write books I'd enjoy reading. I've succeeded in doing that. I wanted to make the rest of the Nirvana series available for those who want to read them. The job's in hand and making progress. I also want and need to balance being an author with my role in working with other people to perfect their novels. I'm simply not prepared to devote the time and energy it takes to do more than the occasional blog post, or FB post or tweet to promote my novels. But I'm cool with this. I'm not settling for second best. It feels right to me. De Nada Nirvana will be out shortly and then I'm going to start looking at Me, John and a Bomb. It's gonna happen.

Doubt Demon: Bollocks. Looks like we'll have to go off and find some other poor author to torment.

And there we have it. I've faced The Fear and I'm still standing. De Nada Nirvana will be published on 1 May. Because Mayday, y'know. Over the next day or so, I'll set it up so it's available for pre-orders. Meanwhile, Nirvana Bites and Trading Tatiana are still on special offer at 99p each. Let's get this show on the road.

UPDATE: DE NADA NIRVANA IS NOW AVAILABLE HERE IN THE UK AND HERE IN THE US.

Love your local library (before it's too late)

UPDATE FRIDAY 8 APRIL
AN EVICTION NOTICE HAS BEEN SERVED ON THE OCCUPIERS OF THE CARNEGIE LIBRARY. THEY HAVE 24 HOURS TO LEAVE OR FACE ARREST. PLEASE SUPPORT THE DEMO TOMORROW. DETAILS AT THE END OF THIS POST. 

When I was growing up, my parents couldn't afford to buy books but I was addicted to stories. I swept through the children's library, exhausting the stock well before I'd left primary school. A kind librarian agreed to allow me to enter the hallowed halls of the adult library, where the biggest excitement was that I could now borrow five books at a time, instead of a paltry three. It was during my teenage years that I ploughed through almost all the books on the lists of 'classics you should read' that come out every so often. I worked through biographies, as well as novels, discovering the likes of Tolstoy, Kafka, Hesse, Austen, de Beauvoir and many more. Genre was meaningless to me: strong stories were what I was after. It was on the shelves of the library that I discovered that stories could take many forms.

In secondary school, I discovered a new use for the library and was there almost every day in the study room, revising for exams. Once I had my children, I was once again in my local library several times a week, pulling books from the shelves and attending reading sessions and after-school clubs. As an author, I've read at many events organised in libraries, connecting readers with writers. The staff were invariably warm and welcoming. One heard that the day I was appearing in their library was also my birthday - and baked me a cake!

When my father was in his nineties, and before he moved to a care home, I would often go over and find he wasn't at home. Needless to say, my initial response was always a stab of anxiety. My first port of call was to check his library, just a few doors away from his flat. And nine times out of ten, there he would be, sitting in an armchair, chatting to other people, or reading a newspaper or books pulled from the shelves. 

As a member of the East Dulwich Writers' Group, I was part of an event at the glorious Carnegie Library in Herne Hill in June 2011. We read in the gardens on a beautiful summer's evening and it was clear to us all that this was a perfect example of a library that was deeply rooted in the community. Libraries like the Carnegie operate as community hubs, offering so much more than book loans, though Gawd knows that would be enough.

And now the local council has decided to close the library and re-open it a year or so later as a fee-paying gym, with a single room with books, but no librarian.

On 1 April (the council has no sense of irony) the library was officially to close but a group of about 80 people, including some families, occupied the building.

The council has since served them with an injunction - which they're determined to ignore.

It's worth remembering these words from Andrew Carnegie: 'A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a spring in the desert.'
In other words, the library belongs to the community, the people. It's not the Council's to take away.

The campaign website is here. Lots more info on Brixton Buzz. If you're on Twitter, there are numerous accounts to follow but this is the one for seeing tweets from those inside the building. There's also a Facebook page. And, finally, this is a map of the location of the library. If you live locally, why not pop along. They have no cooking facilities so gifts of food are welcomed. After snipey tweets from Labour councilors in response to a photo of the occupiers drinking wine, loads of people turned up the next day - bearing gifts of wine. This is community activism at its best.

In case you're still wondering if libraries are about much more than 'just' borrowing books, have a look at the list of events which will not take place if the closure goes ahead.

 Please don't let this happen:

Hope to see lots of you there on Saturday.