Empty Chairs - great title, great book

This is my Booksquawk review of Empty Chairs, which I've been banging on about for a week or two. If you read it there, don't bother to re-read because I've changed nothing. I just think that, for several reasons, this is the sort of book that needs to be read - not for any spurious 'self-improvement' reason, but because it's so honest and so unpretentious. It illustrates and encapsulates exactly what good books do for us - captivate, hold, entertain (yes, despite the subject, entertain), instruct, and forge the empathetic link between author and reader that makes the reading process so magical. It deserves to be a big success.




The review.
Some of my friends have said of this book that they want to read it but, knowing the pain and horrors it chronicles, need to get themselves into the right frame of mind to do so. Others have admitted that they doubt whether they’ll actually get round to it. They should and must – for several reasons.

It’s an autobiographical story, written under a pseudonym, which reveals how a 3 year old was subjected to gross sexual abuses at the behest of her own mother, and forced to continue servicing visitors to the house until eventually, at the age of eleven, she ran away. Thereafter, life on the streets proved equally stressful, threatening to confirm all the negatives she felt about how people behave.

Perhaps that crude synopsis has made you join the ‘I’m not sure I could read this – it’s too horrible’ camp. If it has, it’s deprived you of an astonishing experience. Because this is a page turner and, bizarrely, a sort of celebration. I know that’s a cliché beloved of Amazon reviewers, but here it’s a fact. The story is relentlessly riveting. There’s tension, hidden (and not so hidden) forces at work, powerful characters, and observations of social interaction that are penetrating insights into what lurks behind the facades of sunny, happy-go-lucky Australia, where families picnic in the sun and glory in sights such as the fabulous Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The abuse inflicted on the infant Sassy-Girl (let’s use the street name she earned) was not at the hands of social low-lifes, but ‘respectable’ middle class professionals. When she eventually rebels and runs away, she has to find places to sleep, clothes to wear, ways to get food, and simultaneously avoid the pressure from pimps to recruit her into their stable. She experiences some kindnesses but her whole life seems to have been a denial that trust is possible between humans. When groups of girls at the zoo mock her for the clothes she’s wearing, she asks ‘why do people do those things? What was it that gave those girls the right to make fun of something they didn't understand?’ adding that ‘It would take a very long time to discover how common that trait was in humans’.

It would have been so easy (in theory) to succumb to prostitution to earn her keep, but the abuse she suffered makes her determined never to allow her body to be used again. As she says ‘I knew my soul would die anyway if I made a conscious decision to sell the child's body in which it was housed. I wasn’t being brave, or strong. I simply knew that all of me would survive – or another me would. What point would there be living without my soul and my spirit?’

An author’s note at the beginning speaks of the compulsion Danson had to write this, the promise she’d made to someone to do so, but she also admits that it’s taken longer to get round to it than she thought it would. And that’s part of the spell this narrative weaves. We’re getting the intimate day to day experiences of a 12 year old – the encounters, the threats, the violence, the alienation – but they’re all being recounted by the mature woman she survived to become.

And the narrator herself is aware of this, of course. This is a woman who knows how to write, how to use language, sometimes simply, always directly, to engage the reader, a woman who has come to know that friendships and trust are possible, and yet who’s re-entering the mind of her pre-teen self and reliving those years, with their innocence and ignorance. Because Sassy-Girl is uneducated (in formal terms). She thinks everyone speaks Australian (except Americans, whom she’s seen on TV and who speak American). ‘If someone had told me we all spoke English,’ she says, ‘I would have been even more confused.

At times, the mature narrator lends her voice to the girl. When she makes her way to the War Memorial, for example, she says she ‘spent the rest of the night in the company of the spirits of people who had died in a nightmare as well’. And there’s an awareness of the power of simplicity in sentences such as ‘I wanted to laugh and mean it’, or ‘It reminded me of the way I cried, back when I still could.’

But these aren’t intended to be criticisms. The moment Sassy-Girl suspects she’s feeling self-pity, she forces herself out of it. She’s a survivor and, despite all the torments she’s endured in these early years, what remains is an affirmation of her spirit, a confidence that, despite the enormous forces ranged against her, she won’t be a loser. It’s a compelling read, a reminder of the deepest evils of which we’re capable, but also a celebration of our ability to overcome.

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Kindling

I know I said I’d post my review of Empty Chairs, but I’m holding back on that until it’s appeared on Booksquawk. It’ll be here as well, though, in due course. I’m still busy so this is just a quick musing on reading Kindle books.

The ease of buying them is terrific – see a review, remember a title, get a recommendation, whatever, and it’s waiting for you in less than a minute.

BUT …

… with each of the books I’ve read on it (7 at the last count), when I finished, I felt deprived. I enjoyed each one a lot and so, when I switched off after the last page, there was nothing there to cradle, no unique object that held the story inside it. Yes, it’s still in the Kindle and I can return to it, but it’s just in there with all the others, as well as some huge freebies that I downloaded, and they’re all represented by the flat grey thing and a dead screen. So there’s no external thing that holds the emotions, laughs, sadnesses, delights, puzzles, and all the other things I get from reading – each time a different mix. Usually, when I finish a ‘normal’ book, I leave it on the desk or the bedside table before putting it back on the shelf and each time I see it, it reminds me of what’s in it and recalls some of the instants I enjoyed from it. The story has a physical reality.

BUT …

(and here’s where it gets a bit weird), in a way, that gives the reading experience a different quality. Because reading – for me anyway – is an abstract thing. OK, I have physical responses to it – laughing, yelling ‘That’s crap’ now and then, flinging a book aside when it’s been carelessly written or is literally unbelievable – but when I’m involved in it, it takes me away from my physical context, even from my self. And the way the Kindle’s words flash onto the screen and then, as you ‘turn the page’, disappear to be replaced by others, that’s sort of abstract, too. There’s no rustle of paper, no feel of it in your fingers – there are just shifting words, forming on and disappearing from the featureless, unchanging slab in front of you. You’ve no idea how many more pages there are till the end, there’s not the growing chunk in your left hand and diminishing one in your right. Just one page, always one page – the perpetually repeating present of the story and of the reading experience. And when you finish reading the last one, you ‘turn’ it and the screen is blank, the book’s gone, the experience has flitted and there’s only the memory left. So the reader has no physical context, and neither does the book.

I’ll certainly use my Kindle a lot, but I suppose I’m a romantic and I’ll always want ‘real’ books, too.

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Twitter, writing, but mainly Empty Chairs

It’s a busy time, but the compulsion/addiction to add another posting won’t be denied. Why busy? Well, I’ve just started writing another book in the ‘Brilliant’ series, there are 3 commercial commissions (bizarrely 2 of them are on piracy – not book piracy but the real, nasty stuff at sea), and the need to keep promoting Shadow Selves. Then, of course, there’s the nagging of Stanley to deal with. He wants to know whether ‘his’ book’s selling, wants desperately for it to be successful and yet, if I tell him business is slow, he gets a sort of satisfaction out of it.

(Adding to the busy bit is the fact that carving classes have begun again and I've started on a new piece, using a wood whose grain I'd read about, yew. That's it in the picture.)

So, there are two connected but distinct things I want to talk about – both relating to writing. Some of you will have visited (and even contributed to) Anneke’s site for flash fiction, Rammenas. For those who haven’t, she’s recently been running a challenge which involves writing a story about a photograph she’d taken. The entries have been very varied and show how different people respond in different ways to a writing stimulus. One thing that struck me, though, was the fact that one submission got significantly more responses from visitors than the others. It was good, but not better than them. (In fact, for me, there were several others that were much better in terms of their use of narrative and ‘literary’ techniques and their impact on the reader.) I certainly don’t begrudge the writer the admiration his treatment got, but it made me wonder about the value of any comments – not just those directed at him, but all the others. I mean, if the commenters were genuinely appreciative of the genre, why didn’t they read and say something about some of the other stories?

The answer, apparently, is that it’s a function of a Twitter group called #fridayflash. You post your story, tell your followers about it, they retweet, etc., etc. At this point I have to admit that I don’t ‘get’ Twitter. I’m on it, I do tweet very, very, very occasionally, but I can’t imagine logging on and reading through pages of snippets, most of them about things which don’t interest me. On the other hand, another online friend, who knows what she’s talking about, insists that it’s the best way of raising one’s profile.

But my worry is that, in the end, it isn’t about writing at all. If someone reads a flash fiction story and offers a critical analysis (however short), I’d have thought that their interest in the form would extend to sampling others in the genre, especially if they were treating exactly the same subject. And, if it doesn’t, how valuable or legitimate are their reactions or opinions? It seems that they’re simply saying ‘OK, this shows I’ve read it and been nice about it, now go and read mine’.

I suppose what I’m saying is that this devalues writing. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from writing – quite the reverse. I comment on people’s stories and articles, unless I think they’re bad, in which case I’d rather say nothing than be negative. But the impulse to comment on the work of others in order to encourage them to read yours often produces false notions of the quality of the writing. Because if I read a flash fiction story which is total crap, I’m not going to say so because then that writer wouldn’t be well-disposed towards me and wouldn’t read me. Or, if he did, he’d be inclined to look for flaws, even if only to prove that I was a crap writer and therefore didn’t appreciate him. I was recently asked to review a newly published first novella and, frankly, I didn’t understand why it had been published at all.

The point needs further development but time presses, so I’ll move to the second writing-related topic. And this time it’s a book which not only definitely should have been published, but which is (in the words of another reviewer), ‘a must read for anyone who counts themselves as a member of the human race’. It’s Empty Chairs by Stacey Danson – a harrowing autobiography which chronicles the sexual abuse of the author by her mother’s ‘friends’ (from the age of three), and the trials she then has to undergo when she runs away from home and starts living on the streets. I know, I know – many of you will have the ‘Oh I hate the idea of reading that, it’s too gruesome/horrible/depressing, etc.’ reaction. That’s the way I usually respond to such subjects. But this is such a positive book, despite the evidence of how vile people can be. The narration is beautifully direct and simple (in the best sense of that word) and the combination of vulnerability and power of the central figure (Sassy-Girl is the street-name she’s given and which she lives up to), is ultimately liberating. Whatever they all throw at her, she survives and we know she’ll make it. I’ve posted my review on Amazon and it’ll appear on Booksquawk at some point. I usually tend to hold back from recommending books too heartily because that might be offensive to other books and writers I’ve mentioned, but I really do think this one ought to be read. It’s often painful but, in the end, it’s an affirmation of the human spirit.

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Dragon Academy's blog tour

I'm not sure how blog tours work but I heard that Diane Nelson (who's a friend and a regular commenter here) was having one for her Dragon Academy so, in the spirit of mutual marketing assistance recommended by Linda but also because I've read and enjoyed the book, I've decided to make this blog one of Diane's tour stops. (I know, I don't understand how it all works either.) So all I'm doing is posting the review I gave the book on Amazon. It probably breaks all the blog tour rules but that's what rules are for (except when it comes to grammar and stuff - but that's another blog, and has nothing to do with Diane, whose writing is immaculate).

This is what I wrote.

We all know dragons don't exist, right? Well, once you've read this, you'll maybe reconsider. When the last pod of Greywing dragons is discovered, the scientists of the Bureau of Land Management who are studying them are concerned to find that they're suffering from parasitic worms and in danger of dying out completely.

Husband and wife team, Dietrich and AnnaLise, run a riding school in New Jersey. When Dietrich's sister-in-law, Berit, who's an Adjunct Professor in Large, Dangerous Animals with Anger Management Issues at UNLV, asks them to look after Michael and Nikita, two of the youngsters from the pod, they agree on condition that Berit's son, Nick, comes for the summer to help them.

Transporting the dragons from Nevada to New Jersey is an epic in itself, with the truckers BobbyRay and BillyBob unused to the habits and feeding needs of their cargo and the dragons' tendency to set fire to things. But when the dragons arrive and settle in, the author focuses on the developing relationships between all the people involved and the two dragons. At the centre are the two couples - Nick and Maxie, who's a pupil at the school, and Nikita and Michael. The fascination is that there's an interplay of jealousy between dragons and people. Nick and Nikita start building a relationship, which makes Michael angry, but Michael, in turn, displays a clear affection for Maxie. And so the story builds, with sub plots and adventures, culminating in a glorious set piece involving the military, the scientists, a massive forest fire and the search for Michael among the flames.

Summaries of this sort do no justice to the book's impact. There's humour, tenderness, anger, guilt, love and many more emotions in both people and dragons. Simultaneously, there's an attention to detail in the descriptions of riding horses and dragons which brings an intense realism to the whole reading experience. As they decide how best to saddle a dragon, the nature and textures of scales, wing membranes and shoulders are explicit. We learn how the valves in their nostrils are adapted to the flames of plasma they blow out. And, gradually, through it all, Nick also realises that he and Nikita are communicating through telepathy.

But the combination of the fantastical (dragons, telepathy) and the real (harnesses, anatomical details) makes the story believable. We care about what happens to dragons and people, we laugh and suffer with them. As the teenage anxieties of Nick, anxious to experience a `date' - i.e. a movie and pizza with Maxie - increase, so the dynamics of the relationship between Nikita and Michael develop also. The book ends with Nick being forced to make a difficult decision. It also leaves room for further adventures.

If you believe in dragons already, this book will delight you; if you don't, you might well after you've read it, and it'll delight you anyway.

By the way, it’s aimed at the YA audience, but I’m over half a century beyond that and I loved it.

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Writers are not nice people

Well, after Linda’s excellent practical advice in the previous posting (which, quite rightly, got and continues to get far more responses than my own witterings), it’s back to useless, idle speculation. For those of you who seek true enlightenment, I suggest you direct a few judiciously worded pleas to brother Ron to get off his lazy butt and contribute.

Now, if I asked you to name some nice writers, i.e. writers who are nice people, I bet that, in the UK at least, Alan Bennett might be at or near the top of the list. And yet, a few years back, in an interview about his play The History Boys, he said ‘no writer's entirely nice, otherwise they wouldn't be writers. It's quite a sneaky profession really’. The remark was picked up and chewed over by members of an online group of writers to which I belonged. I’m reviving it here as a sort of follow-up to the blog I wrote about the difficulty/impossibility of basing characters on real people.

The implication in Bennett’s tongue-in-cheek remark was that we use people’s experiences as our raw materials, distorting or otherwise exaggerating them to suit our purposes. In other words, we exploit people. Well, we do, but I think our excuse is that we do so for a reason and, trying to follow one of Linda’s suggestions, I’ll use my own latest publication to illustrate my point.

Shadow Selves takes place mainly in a university and a hospital. At one point, as part of his investigation, my policeman goes to watch an operation. The description and details of that operation are all taken from a visit I made myself to an operating theatre to watch a thoracic operation at close range. The surgeons delved about inside a woman’s chest cavity, shoving lungs and other red and white bits out of the way, chopping lumps out of tubes, and, at the same time, chatting away about a concert one of them had been to the previous evening. The patient’s head was concealed by a suspended sheet and the surgeons’ entire focus was on the small area of flesh with its big hole, into which they were dipping their hands. In a way, they weren’t dealing with a person but with a sort of anatomical puzzle.

Despite the fact that their manipulation of the various organs that were in their way seemed a bit cavalier, no one would seriously suggest there was anything ‘inhuman’ about their actions. They just needed to be objective and think in terms of the mechanical aspects of what they were doing. So, while chatting about music as you grab a pulsing organ and push it aside may seem disrespectful, intrusive, it’s actually the reverse. The fact that they were prepared to take responsibility for such extreme interventions to improve the lot of a fellow human was an affirmation of their humanity. They cared. They were doing all that so that she’d survive. And she did.

You can see where I’m going with this, can’t you? Scalpels, pens – same thing, really. Except that very few of us use pens any more. Yes, we pick up news stories, snippets of conversation, fragments of real lives, aspects of real people, and we steal them and shape them to suit our subjective purposes. If you like, we don’t treat them with much respect. But usually, these purposes are positive, affirmative things – we want to add to people’s enjoyment, make them laugh, offer them new perspectives, enlighten them, highlight threats to their security/happiness/culture, and a host of other things aimed at lifting them out of the humdrum or the painful.

Of course there are writers who are definitely not nice – political apologists, religious propagandists, individuals with a personal vendetta against society or one of its groups. Such people thrive on distortion, reductionism, cynicism and a dedication to their own cause which shows little respect for those outside its concerns. But I prefer the glass to be half full and the writers I know and celebrate, famous and unknown, are those who write to make other people’s lives better. Like Mr Bennett, they’re nice.

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A guest posting - great marketing advice from LInda Faulkner

Thanks for hosting me on your blog, Bill. I want to announce, right up front, that my request to appear here was based on purely selfish motives, namely to promote my new book, Taking the Mystery Out of Business: 9 Fundamentals for Professional Success. It was released earlier this month and is available all over the place—just check out my website for more details.

I also want to state that if you’re a writer and you hesitate to take advantage of all your friends, acquaintances, and anyone who so much as gives you the time of day—you’re missing the boat from a promotional standpoint. Writing a saleable book is the easy part of writing—and don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise. It’s also the fun part and it probably takes less time than all the other duties and responsibilities we writers assume if we want to get our precious books in the hands of eager readers.

My “day” job has involved working in sales and marketing for over thirty years. I don’t have a problem with the promotional end of being a writer. It does, however, take me as much time and effort as it takes everyone else. So, because I really enjoy Bill’s blog, his followers, and the entertainment you folks provide on a weekly basis, here are some tips for those of you who either abhor the marketing/promotional end of writing or who would like some free advice:

1. You MUST tell everyone you encounter that you’re a writer. I still haven’t figured out why, but lots of people are impressed with writers. Sure, some people won’t be impressed. Some people don’t like the kind of stuff you write. Other people can’t read. They’re not the ones who count—from a promotional perspective, that is. It’s the people who adore writers and bask in the reflected glory of writers you need to reach. Can’t find ‘em if you’re not looking for ‘em.

2. You MUST seek every promotional opportunity available, such as online opportunities (Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, My Space, Goodreads, blogging, a website, guest blogging, etc.), local events (radio and TV appearances, book signings, workshops at the library, etc.), and the unconventional. My latest book is a business book, so I’m promoting it to businesses by seeking occasions to provide complimentary 15 to 30 minute workshops in exchange for the opportunity to sell my book. I also have postcards printed and ask (okay, bribe) family members to pass them out. The bribe part comes into play when I give them a free copy of the book if they personally hand-deliver or mail at least 25 postcards to their friends, business associates, and total strangers. Oh, I also beg all my friends who have blogs to let me to appear. If I haven’t reached out to you yet, feel free to send me an invitation.

3. You MUST be generous. If you want other people to promote you, you must promote them. Example: my Author Exchange Blog, which I started months before my first book appeared in print. If any of you would like to make a guest appearance on it, or would like to send me announcements and other stuff, just check it out and shoot me an e-mail Be sure to mention you’re a friend of Bill’s—that gets you preferential treatment. Seriously.

4. You must be persistent, you must have a thick skin, and you must operate from the mindset that what you’re doing is both fun and beneficial. Otherwise, promotion will become a chore and—with all my sales and marketing experience, I promise you this: if you hate what you’re doing, it will communicate itself to the people you’re talking to and will negatively affect your efforts.

If you have a specific question about any business aspect of writing (or any other profession), I will be happy to spotlight you and your question on my Taking the Mystery Out of Business blog. Just shoot me an e-mail.

Another option is to post your question here and wait for my answer.

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The real question is why

OK, for a change, here’s a quick biology lesson. It’s about something that sounds as if it was a warrior in some ancient battle – Ixodes ricinus. But we know it better as a sheep tick. (By the way, the ricinus part of the name is a bit sinister. It relates to its other common name, the castor bean tick, and it’s from castor beans that you get that horrible poison, ricin, which, of course, features in my novel The Darkness.) Anyway, Ixy, as we’ll fondly call it, is a very common tick indeed. It can live for anything between two and six years.

It starts life as one of a couple of thousand eggs, hatches out as a larva (with its 1,999 brothers and sisters), and is ready to feed within a few days. So it climbs up a nearby plant, grass stem or whatever, and waits. Eventually (after maybe minutes, maybe days), it smells butyric acid, which tells it that a mammal is nearby and, as the animal brushes past the grass, Ixy leaps onto it and starts gorging itself on blood. This lasts for 2 or 3 days, during which it puts on weight and is eventually 10 to 20 times heavier than when it started.

When it’s had enough, it drops off and, after several months, it becomes a nymph. During those months, it doesn’t eat, mate, play football, watch movies or anything. It just gets older. So far, remember, it’s had just one meal. Not surprisingly, then, the following year it feels peckish again, climbs up another stalk and waits for a bigger animal to come along. The first snack was from something like a vole, this time it might choose a squirrel and the meal will last longer – 4 to 5 days – then it’s back to the undergrowth.

Finally, as adults, Ixy and his pals climb even higher and wait for larger animals from hares up to deer. The females then go to town, feasting for about a week and sucking down up to 5 ml of blood. Ixy, being a male, hangs around for longer but only takes small snacks because he’s busy mating with every Ixy female he can persuade into thinking it’s a good idea.

Then the female drops off, lays her eggs and dies. Ixy just drops off and dies. He doesn’t even get to see his kids. Remember, all this can take two years or six. Two or six years of hanging about, climbing up bits of grass, having three meals, mating, then dying. Now, apart from the mating bit, which I’m guessing doesn’t involve much foreplay, that doesn’t sound like a very interesting way to spend a life, so the question that always strikes me when I read of the wonders of nature and the processes of evolution is – Why?

And, of course, simply by asking that question, I’m back with my old mate Sisyphus and his rock. What on earth is the point of it all? Maybe evolution is making the hill smaller with each ‘advance’, but why? What’s it for? I don’t suppose Ixy is much of a thinker but if he is I bet he’s cursing God for making him a sheep tick when he could have been something with more apparent purpose like an Aardvark or a merchant banker. Imagine his thought processes as he dangles there on his bit of grass, feeling hungry and just waiting. He doesn’t even have the comfort expressed by Estragon in Waiting for Godot ‘We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?’

Good fun, though, isn’t it?

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