by TCW | May 7, 2021 | Uncategorized
I really enjoyed Karen King’s piece last week. She is a consummate professional writer and I wish I had half her energy to write across so many genres. That said, I am not entirely a stranger to writing in different styles myself. In a long career of writing and researching across a range of markets, I have had to learn to write everything from what was essentially boiler-plate text round hundreds of tables of (frankly boring) data to bold selling documents designed to convince advertisers that more pages of tables was the most exciting thing they’d seen in years. Some of them believed it and apparently efforts like my discussion of the readers of children’s comics (even probably including some of the ones Karen wrote for) encouraged a lot of advertisers to take more interest in kiddie print media. I even wrote a ‘proper book’ on complaint handling.
Eventually, though, I produced one too many analyses of the market for paper products in the UK (yes, really) and I gave it all up and started writing fiction.
I had dabbled in fiction before – writing some of those ‘choose your own adventure’ stories that were popular in the 1980s.
My first serious attempt at writing a novel was The White Rajah, first published in 2010. Like many first novels, it desperately wanted to be the Great British Novel and like most first novels it wasn’t. It’s been revised a couple of times since and, though it is still hardly the Great British Novel, I am finally happy with it. It has battles and pirates and lots of traditional adventure, but it is at heart an attempt to look at big moral issues. When James Brooke (a real person) died one commentator wrote:
When his Biography comes to be written, there must be in it, dark chapters as well as bright ones.
The book looks at how somebody who wanted to do good (and often did) was responsible for some horrific acts. Brooke seems to me to symbolise much about the British Empire: it didn’t set out to be evil, but it did a lot of evil things.
The White Rajah was followed by Cawnpore which will be republished later this summer. Cawnpore is also full of moral complexity. On the one hand you have English colonialists: some trying to do their best for India, some who are deeply contemptuous of the native people. On the other hand you have Nana Sahib, hailed nowadays as a hero of the Indian independence movement, but a man who was responsible for a particularly outrageous massacre in 1857.
The John Williamson trilogy finishes with Back Home (also to be republished in 2021). One reviewer complained that John Williamson is revealed as morally weak. Well, of course he is! The whole series is about the moral choices people make and they sometimes get things right and sometimes not so much. Poor John Williamson tries so hard. He really deserves to find some sort of salvation, but you’ll have to read to the very end to discover if he does.
The White Rajah had an agent and was pitched to leading publishers who turned it down. “Too difficult from an unknown author” more or less summed up the feedback. Sales subsequently proved them right – hence the move to a much more traditional style of historical fiction with the Burke books. There are some moral issues there, but they are generally hidden away behind conventional tales of derring-do with a handsome hero, beautiful women and lots of Frenchmen to beat. (We’re in the Napoleonic Wars, so beating the French comes with the territory.)
Clicking on the covers will take you to Amazon. All my books are available in paperback or on Kindle.
Technically both the John Williamson stories and the James Burke adventures are ‘historical fiction’ but they are distinct sub-genres and are written in dramatically different styles.
Eventually the sheer quantity of research that historical fiction requires made me want to take a bit of a break. I had a couple of ideas for fantasy stories – one about black magic and the other featuring vampires. The result was Dark Magic and Something Wicked. Apparently the genre is called Urban Fantasy. (I had to look it up.) It’s not just a different subject matter, but a tighter writing style – and an opportunity to give my dark sense of humour full rein.
Every sort of writing brings different challenges and different rewards, but I’ve enjoyed them all. I can only agree with Karen that challenging yourself to write in unfamiliar genres is always worthwhile.
by TCW | Sep 4, 2020 | Uncategorized
Before I started my WordPress site, I used to blog on a free site called ‘Blogger’. Google are revamping the site and I (mistakenly, it turns out) thought my posts might be archived and quite possibly lost. It’s made me look through my old posts to see if any of them deserve the rather wider audience that they could now get on WordPress. This one originally appeared as a guest post on Adrian Smith’s blog and I later posted it on Blogger back in 2014. This was when I had only one book to my name, The White Rajah. (You can buy it on Amazon HERE.)
The love that dare not write its name
It has always worried me that The White Rajah is often judged as a ‘gay book’ because the main character is gay. This issue keeps on coming up, so I’d like to reprint my blog post here so that I can share my thoughts with people who may not have seen it on Adrian Smith’s site.
When I was growing up, homosexuality was illegal. Most of the books discussed on this blog would have been considered obscene and publishing or owning them might well have exposed people to criminal action. Interestingly, some commentators consider that it is a passing reference to (heterosexual) sodomy in Lady Chatterley’s Lover that was one of the reasons for its prosecution.
Now, of course, we live in a more liberal and enlightened age. Anybody who wants to read about homosexual relationships will have no problems in finding books that cater for their interests. But I do wonder if we have, perhaps, not taken advantage of the hard-won freedoms of the gay community to make a more liberal publishing environment, but, rather, built a gay ghetto which is, in its way, as restrictive as anything that may have preceded it.When I set out to write my first novel, The White Rajah, I was not planning to write a “gay book”. I was writing about real historical character, James Brooke, the eponymous White Rajah. I think there is little doubt that he was inclined toward his own sex, though it’s not clear, in those days, whether he had an active sex life. I wanted the reader to be able to see Brooke through the eyes of someone who travels with him and shares his adventures. I therefore invented a lover for him, and it is John Williamson who tells his story.
As I wrote, the relationship between John Williamson and James Brooke became more important to the novel than I had expected, and I ended up with what I thought of as quite a powerful love story at the heart of what is, in the end, an otherwise straightforward historical novel.
Against all the odds, The White Rajah was represented by a very reputable agent who pitched it to four leading publishers. All of them rejected it. The consensus seemed to be that it was “too difficult” for a first novel by an unknown writer. Now that could be that, being a first novel, it just wasn’t that well-written. As it’s a first person account by a mid-19th century writer, it certainly uses longer sentences and a more challenging vocabulary than a lot of modern novels. But I couldn’t help feeling that part of the problem was that there is a distinct absence of female characters but there’s still sex.
I decided that I would like to see the book published before my dotage, so I sent it to JMS Books, who specialised in LGBT titles. They took it straight away, for which I remain very grateful. The trouble was that it was then seen as an LGBT book. Unfortunately it fails to satisfy a lot of LGBT readers, who complain that it does not have enough explicit sex scenes in it. Straight readers, on the other hand, seem much more interested in the sexual orientation of James Brooke than in any of his quite significant historical achievements.
What nobody seems happy with is the idea that you can write about somebody who has adventures, achieves quite remarkable things in his life, and has a satisfying romantic relationship, but who just happens to be gay. For both straight and gay readers, the sexual orientation of the main character becomes the point of the book.
I find this quite remarkable. Living in 21st-century London, I accept that I will have friends and colleagues with a diversity of sexual orientations. My favourite comedy club (now sadly closed) was a gay comedy club, but that didn’t mean that the audience was exclusively homosexual or that the jokes all related to gender issues. I liked drinking in a gay bar (also of late-lamented memory), because the ambience was more civilised than a lot of other bars and they sold the drinks I enjoy. When I first went in there, I was worried that I might not be welcome, but they were as happy to serve straights as gays and it was simply a very successful town-centre watering hole. If I’m out dancing, some couples embracing on the dance floor will not be the conventional male-female pairing. I was talking to a gay friend about this and he said that a few years ago straight men would be uncomfortable dancing with other men, but this has become so normal that it is no longer an issue for most people.
It goes without saying that, particularly as I used to work in a “creative” industry, many of my colleagues were gay, although the business was a very mainstream publisher.
So when I work, drink, or socialise the sexual orientation of the people I am working, drinking, laughing or dancing with does not define what I am doing. Yet when I am reading, it seems that it does. I am either reading a “gay book” for gay people, which has to emphasise gay sexual behaviour or I am reading a “straight book” (or “book”) where everyone seems much happier if nobody is gay at all. (Often there’s a minor character who’s gay, so everyone else can demonstrate how liberal they are.) The distinction is particularly ironic as many of the writers of M/M fiction are heterosexual women, as are many of its readers.
It’s not just my personal paranoia. I was delighted when Foyles (one of London’s most prestigious bookshops) stocked my titles, but I was surprised to see that they were shelved in a department dedicated to GLBT literature.
Obviously, it’s a good thing that, after centuries of repression, gay people can write and read books that cater for them. A gay press was an essential part of the battle for equality. But is it still the best way forward? Or have gay readers and writers created a ghetto that is itself discriminatory and a sort of repression, all the more damaging for being self-inflicted?
by TCW | Aug 25, 2020 | Book review
My choice for a book to review this week is a little strange because it’s a book I wrote. Well, not exactly – but I did write 10% of it.
Yes, it’s a book of short stories: Victoriana, produced by the Historical Writers’ Association together with Sharpe books. There are ten stories with the only common theme being that they are all set in the Victorian period. It was not only an honour to be asked to contribute alongside some rather better-known names – like Elisabeth Gifford and Hilary Green – but it gave me an opportunity to revisit James Brooke. When I finished The White Rajah, I knew there were so many more tales I could have told about James Brooke’s life in Borneo, but the sequel saw my narrator moving on to the Indian Mutiny (in Cawnpore) and there was no real chance to revisit Brooke. I’d always thought it would be fun to write some short stories about life in Borneo under Brooke rule and now I had the chance. I’m really happy with it, but I’m not going to review it here because That Would Be Wrong. You’ll have to read that one for yourself and make up your own mind.
As with every book of short stories there will be something that appeals to everybody and not everybody will like all of them. There were a couple that were definitely not my cup of tea, but I’m not going to single them out because I’m sure there will be somebody who will love them. Instead I’d just like to highlight some of my favourites.
Carolyn Kirby’s Ladies and Gentlemen is the best kind of historical fiction. It takes an actual event and the author uses her imagination to paint a picture that lets us understand the reality of a situation that, thank goodness, nobody in this country has to face nowadays. I’m being deliberately vague, because I don’t want to spoil the story. It’s not exactly a twist in the tail, but you will enjoy it more for not knowing what is coming next. It’s a stunning story and, given that Victoriana costs only £2.99 on Kindle, it justifies buying it all by itself.
Sophia Tobin’s The Unwanted Suitor is a disturbing tale with fantastical elements that leave you uncertain exactly what has happened but, despite this, it gives a wonderful insight into the way that marriage probably worked (or didn’t) for many “respectable” couples in the Victorian age.
Inevitably there are stories of Empire, reflecting not only how the British viewed the nations that they conquered but also something of how the colonial natives viewed the British. Elisabeth Gifford’s The Last Resort has an unusual take on the way that the British saw some of their colonial endeavours contrasted with how they looked to the natives. It takes a step away from the nowadays somewhat conventional view of exploiters and exploited and provides an interesting insight into the stories the British told themselves about the project of Empire.
A couple of the contributors, like me, have chosen to tell stories about characters who have previously appeared in books of theirs, but all the stories stand up well even if you have read nothing previously by the writers.
There are detective stories and romances. We visit Russia, Greenland, India, South Africa, and, of course, Borneo. It’s a lovely cross section of writers and writing about the Victorian era. Each story is accompanied with a brief interview where the writers talk about their background and inspiration. Some of them might well encourage you to look for more of their work.
Even without my 10% interest, I would be happy to recommend this book of short stories. At £2.99, really what have you got to lose?
