Kindle Post

Where Did That Idea Come From? by Gavin Extence

In today's guest blog for Kindle Post, author Gavin Extence describes the inspiration behind his remarkable debut novel, The Universe versus Alex Woods.

Where did that idea come from?

Recently, I've been all over London and Somerset talking to lots of different booksellers about my new debut novel. There are three questions that tend to come up again and again.

1. What's the book about?

2. How/why did you decide to write a novel?

3. Where did the idea come from?

The third is the question I most like answering, and it's the one I'm going to focus on here.

I suppose there's a certain mystique surrounding creativity, and the more original or outlandish an idea, the more people want to know where it came from. (I think of it as The Life of Pi effect.) However, in my experience, at least 95% of the creative process is really just a heightened form of logic. You start with an idea of what you want to achieve (in a paragraph, a chapter, a book) and then you sit down and spend a lot of time thinking through your options. It's the sort of creativity that underpins any real-life problem-solving exercise. You have to get character X from one side of the river to the other and he has some sticks, some rope and Z number of hungry crocodiles to contend with. The only difference with writing is that all the crocodiles are self-generated.

So where does that leave the remaining 5% of the creative process? Because however much time and machine-like logic you devote to a story, there are still certain elements that seem to come 'from nowhere', that are based on intuition alone. I have one example that really sticks out in my mind when I think about writing Alex.

At its heart, The Universe versus Alex Woods is about the friendship between Alex, a geeky, slightly odd teenage boy, and Mr Peterson, a recluse who lives in his village. I always knew that this friendship was going to form the emotional core of the story. I also knew it was going to be quite difficult to write convincingly--mostly because the reader has to buy into it despite a half-century-plus age-gap.

Mr Peterson was always going to be an ex-serviceman. My grandfather was in the RAF during World War Two, and this provided the starting template. But it never got past the vague-idea phase. For some reason, I just couldn't make it work in my head. It never felt natural to me. Then, on what felt at first like an absolute whim, I decided to make Mr Peterson an American. More specifically, I made him a foul-tempered Vietnam veteran--and suddenly I could see exactly how his friendship with Alex would work, despite all the logical problems the decision presented to the existing plot. (Why the hell would a Vietnam vet be living in a tiny village in rural Somerset?)

Subsequently, I thought everything through at length and I could see that there were all sorts of reasons why the change made perfect sense--but I won't try to explain that here. It would probably require another 500 words. The pertinent point is that there are some ideas that start life as pure intuition--and these are the ideas it's always worth pursuing.

On a related note, when I find myself confronting a problem immune to normal logic, I tend to stop thinking about it and go for a long run. By the time I get back to my kitchen table, I'll often have several solutions germinating in my mind.

--Gavin Extence

Juggling Like A Complete Klutz by Henriette Gyland

Today's guest blog for Kindle Post come from author Henriette Gyland, who won the 2011 New Talent Award for her debut novel Up Close, which is currently featured in our 100 Books for £2.99 or Less promotion.

 

As a work-from-home-mum I'm getting the best of both worlds. Or so I'm told. And I'm not complaining because sometimes it all falls neatly into place. I get up in the morning, send my kids to school with the correct lunch money, in clean uniforms, and with the bags they've packed themselves the night before. I feed the animals (three cats and one guinea pig), stretch my fingers, and start working. Kids return, get changed, and do their homework without demur. As I said, sometimes it's like that.

Other times, things go to pot. Completely.

Like the other day. Overslept. No food in the house and no coins. Send kids to school with bank card to get cash for lunch on the way. Receive angry text from son, "No lunch, machine not working". Manage to scrape together enough 1p and 2p pieces to buy a loaf of bread. Get dirty look from shopkeeper. Rush home, prepare sandwiches, then beg school receptionist to locate my hungry children. Get dirty look from receptionist.

Behind with work, which is to translate a technical manual for an engineering company, on how to change piston rings. Also, need to finish an intimate scene between my characters in order to stick to my daily word count. Have just pressed "Send" to deliver translation to client when offspring come home (is it that time already?). Still beavering away at the intimate scene, I shout greetings down the stairs. Get grunts in return, then (sigh): "The cats have puked on the rug!" "Which one?" I shout back. "Pinky!" comes the reply. "No, which rug?" "The cream one."

Of course. Always the cream rug. Not the old, multi-coloured one where another stain won't make any difference. No, mine are discerning moggies. Never mind that they began life in a back alley.

Rush to clear up vomit, feed the kids something snacky. Husband calls. His train is delayed, tragically because of a jumper on the tracks. Take a few moments to reflect that our life may be chaotic but it could be worse, when an acrid smell emanates from the kitchen. Dinner is overdone, the meat as chewy as desiccated lizard skin. Predictably kids don't eat up but instead argue over who has to clear the table. Ears ringing, I make my escape to read back my intimate scene before I can call it a day:

Eager to explore more, she let her fingers follow the ridge of the slick head checking each of the ring grooves for wear. She did this by using a feeler gauge to see if they still met the proper specification. "When you are ready to put on the new piston rings, you need to stretch them with your piston ring tool so that they fit over the piston," he moaned.

Which, after my gasp of horror over my own terrible prose, makes me wonder what, exactly, did I send to the client...?

--Henriette Gyland

"The Colonel's Mistake" by Dan Mayland

Guest post by debut author Dan Mayland whose title, The Colonel’s Mistake, is the Kindle Daily Deal for today, Sunday, October 28. The novel is the first of a globetrotting new thriller series that takes readers on an unforgettable ride into the shadows of one of the world’s most volatile regions.

 

Ten reasons to set a spy thriller in Azerbaijan

In Baku, Azerbaijan, CIA operations officer Daria Buckingham is arrested for a heinous crime. Her former boss, retired CIA station chief Mark Sava, is sure she's innocent and tries to help her out--landing him in the middle of the new Great Game, an espionage war over oil that has China, Iran, and the United States clawing at each other's throats. The first half of The Colonel’s Mistake is set in Azerbaijan. Here's why:

 1. Oil. Azerbaijan's got gobs of it. The capital city of Baku stinks of it. There are oil derricks in the city, and vast nightmarish oilfields--many in use since the late 1800s--on the outskirts.

2.  The Caspian Sea. Azerbaijan's 450-mile coast looks east over the Caspian, which makes for stunning sunrises marred only by all the massive offshore oil rigs that dot the horizon.

3. The New Great Game. That's what people are calling the fight over oil in the Caspian region, where Russia, China, Iran, the US, and Europe are all clawing at each other's throats over oil. Tiny Azerbaijan is sandwiched between Iran and Russia, so it's right in the middle of the fight.

4. Fire. In addition to oil, Azerbaijan has lots of natural gas--some of which leaks naturally out of the ground. Throw a guy with a match into the mix, and before you know it you've got a fire that never goes out. One hill north of Baku has been burning since the 1950s.

5. Corruption. On the World Corruption Index, Azerbaijan clocks in at a dismal 143, between Pakistan and Zimbabwe.

6. Mud volcanoes. They’re like real volcanoes, only smaller, and they spew mud instead of lava. Sometimes they explode. There’s a whole bunch of them in Azerbaijan, right next to this political prison.

7. Porous Border with Iran. Much of what used to be Azerbaijan is now part of Iran. Azeris on both sides of the border like to visit each other. That makes for a border that’s easy to sneak across.

8. The KGB. Azerbaijan was a Soviet state until 1991. The new Azeri version of the KGB works out of the same building the Soviet version did. There's a reason for that.

9. The BTC. That's the name of a huge oil pipeline that transports Azeri oil from the Caspian to the Mediterranean Sea.

10. Stilt roads. The Soviets built strange wood-stilt roads that snake as far as the eye can see out into the shallow waters of the Caspian. Thirty miles off the coast, there's a spider-web tangle of nearly two hundred miles of these roads, now rotting, all clustered around a wretched Soviet oil camp.

All of the above play a role in The Colonel's Mistake.

--Dan Mayland

Writing vs School: Guest Post by Abigail Gibbs

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

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18-year-old Abigail Gibbs is the author of The Dark Heroine: Dinner with a Vampire, which gained over 17 million views via online writing website Wattpad. Here she talks to Kindle Post about managing the balance between writing and homework.

If two things in this world are incompatible, it's writing and school. At least, that is what the journey from teenage writer to published author has taught me.

Three years ago, aged 15, I wrote a scene where 30 men are brutally murdered: the first chapter of my novel, The Dark Heroine. At that point I couldn't imagine writing interfering with my education: the only people who would read it, after all, were a small community of writers online. Naively, I planned to create my bloodthirsty world only at weekends. I was very wrong.

From nowhere, a voracious fan base began demanding more chapters, and I found myself writing late at night to keep up with both school and the ideas buzzing in my mind. Within a year, millions had read my story and it gained a lot of attention from local media. This was highly embarrassing as only my closest friends knew about my novel, but it also presented another problem: worried teachers. Any subject where I wasn't meeting targets was blamed on my writing; something I furiously denied, insisting the real reason was that I was just bad at that subject. But in hindsight, my long-suffering music teacher was right: if I hadn't been living in my fictional world, then I probably could have achieved an A grade in her subject.  

I moved to a different school for sixth form and my A levels. I had learned my lesson (excuse the pun) and kept quiet about my writing, but a beastly manuscript is hard to hide. It rears its monstrous head in all situations: like when your head of sixth form wants to know why you write so well, or why you want to apply to read English literature at degree level. In any case, things had taken an exciting turn: age 16, I had a literary agent. Cue all sorts of new problems. For example, I had to include this information on my university application, to forewarn them of what they were getting themselves into if they accepted me. That led to a lot of grovelling at interview to insist I was as committed to a degree as I was to my writing.

I was extremely lucky that news of my publishing deal with HarperCollins missed my last exam by days, because coping with the misery of exams and the excitement of seeing my work published would have been too much. But I can’t have missed targets in too many subjects, or put too many professors off with my animated summary of Dinner With a Vampire ('another vampire novel?' was often said with raised eyebrows) because this autumn I start at the University of Oxford to read English language and literature. Thoughts, too, are moving to a sequel. A rigorous academic programme combined with a writing career... piece of cake, right?

--Abigail Gibbs

 

 

 

"Seldom Seen" by Sarah Ridgard

Selected for Amazon Rising Stars 2012, Seldom Seen by Sarah Ridgard is a mesmerising debut novel set in Suffolk. In this guest blog, the author describes the seeds that led to the book's fruition.

There were three books that lived permanently on my desk while I was writing Seldom Seen: All About Goats, The Story of the Potato and English Field Names: A Dictionary. There were obviously many more that came and went, but I became very fond of these books and they stayed on long after I'd stopped using them for research.

Goats feature in my novel, so All About Goats was a reference bible from the beginning. But I also enjoyed thumbing through the book, not least because the author, Lois Hetheringon, had been a neighbour up the road when I was growing up. My parents were starting their own herd at the time so we were always asking her advice on husbandry matters, and the photos of hoof trimming and goats in show rings bring back that time so clearly when life was about goats kidding at night and our kitchen swimming in milk. 
 
When I moved to Norwich funds were tight for a while, so my partner and I lived on a cheap diet that involved a lot of soup and spuds. We got used to living with sacks of potatoes in the hall, the names changing from Nicola and Charlotte to Maris Piper, King Edward and Desiree. The Story of the Potato by Alan Wilson lists all sorts of rare varieties from Gladstone to Red Nosed Kidney, with illustrations and a history of their development. I settled on Desiree as the narrator, a red skinned variety, which does extremely well on heavy land, firm texture but can be prone to blight and virus infection.

I was some way through the novel when my dad happened to mention one day that fields used to have names. The Suffolk landscape was already central to the story at that point, but when he told me about some of the field names and their derivations and that a dictionary existed, I went to find a copy in the UEA library. I remember staring at the author's name on the cover, John Field, wondering if his work came about because of his name. Just a few exhilarating minutes later, after poring over the entries for fields called Twistgut, Make Me Rich and Lovelands, I knew that fields were about to become characters in the novel. The final piece of the story had fallen into place. 

The day after my book launch, I had a message on the phone from Jill, one of my closest friends. We've been friends for nearly 25 years and know pretty much everything about each other's lives and families. However, I didn't know that her sister was married to John Field's son, and had been for the last 20-odd years. This came to light because her husband had read the acknowledgements at the back of Seldom Seen and noticed my reference to English Field Names. After spending so much time on making connections within the story, it turned out to be Jill's sister's father-in-law who'd written the same book that in the end gave me the title for my first novel.  

--Sarah Ridgard

"The Mill River Recluse" by Darcie Chan

Darcie Chan's debut novel The Mill River Recluse became a word-of-mouth sensation on Kindle. Here she talks to Kindle Post about the real-life inspirations behind the book.

Many readers have written to me, curious about what possessed me to write a first novel about a woman who spends 60 years in a white marble mansion, isolated from almost everyone in her community.

I lived in the small southern Indiana town of Paoli during my high-school years. During the 1940s, a Jewish gentleman by the name of Sol Strauss fled Nazi Germany with his mother and settled in Paoli. He opened a dry goods store in town, and he and his mother lived frugally in the apartment above the store for many years.

Mr Strauss was not a recluse by any stretch of the imagination. He was a successful businessman who regularly interacted with his customers. However, he was also one of a very few Jewish people living in what is still an ethnically homogeneous, conservative Christian region--and political correctness was not practised at all back then. Although Paoli was, and still is, a close-knit community of good, hardworking people, it would be fair to say that Mr Strauss was not fully embraced by the town's population.

Upon Mr Strauss's passing in the 1960s, the residents of Paoli were shocked to learn that he had bequeathed to the town a substantial sum, which was to be used to benefit residents of the community. The balance in the Sol Strauss Fund currently hovers around $1 million, and grants are provided from it each year for charitable purposes in Paoli. For instance, funds are routinely provided to the local hospital, for literacy programs in the town's schools, and to purchase clothing and other necessities for needy children. The town's Little League team and the local chapters of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are also annual beneficiaries, and individuals seeking funds for a particular charitable project may apply to the fund for assistance. 

As I was researching this touching story, Larry Blanton, a lifelong Paoli resident and current chairman of the Sol Strauss Fund, explained of Mr Strauss: "He was an interesting little fella, and he must have felt so isolated. Still, for some reason, he adopted us. We didn't adopt him."

I thought that what Mr Strauss did so many years ago would provide a unique basis for a novel. It would be challenging and fascinating to write a story about how someone who was misunderstood or different in some way, or even someone who is seemingly far-removed from his or her community, might in fact be more special and more integral than anyone could imagine.

One final note about the white marble mansion that appears so prominently in my novel--there is a large, white mansion, known locally as the 'Cornwell Mansion', on a hill overlooking Paoli. It is one of the defining images of my hometown and, as I was developing the character of Mary McAllister in The Mill River Recluse, a house situated like the beautiful Cornwell Mansion seemed to be an ideal setting for her--a place where Mary would be simultaneously close to, and isolated from, her community.

--Darcie Chan

Blake Crouch Reviews "Seed" by Ania Ahlborn

Guest review of  Seed by Ania Ahlborn by bestselling horror and thriller author Blake Crouch. 

 

The second greatest pleasure in reading is opening a favourite author's new book. But the greatest, for me at least, is discovering a new voice. It's deciding to give that sample a shot, getting through those first few pages, and becoming awestruck with the mounting feeling that you're reading something new and masterfully created.

It doesn't happen often. There's so much to read, and life is simply too short to slog through bad, or even mediocre books.

Such was my attitude as I began Seed by newcomer Ania Ahlborn, a story about the Winter family living in the deep south and struggling to come to terms with strange occurrences in their house (and themselves).

My hopes weren't high. This was a first novel, and even more than that, it was billed as horror. I love horror, and I've read, watched, and written quite a bit of it. So I'm very choosy. 

By the end of page one, I knew one thing—Ahlborn could write. This was carefully constructed prose by someone who slaves over their sentences, word by word.

By the end of page two, I knew she had a story to tell. But it was more than just that. It was that mounting feeling. It was how well she had drawn her characters. And most importantly...how freaking scary it was to read an intimate portrait of a family falling apart. This story is not about a haunted house, but something infinitely more unsettling. Haunted people.

It touches brilliantly on two of a parent's greatest fears: fear of your own child, and fear that your own failings, your own past, might derail their lives. I was deeply moved.

The ending of Seed is every bit as twisted, gut-wrenching, and horrifying as Stephen King's Pet Sematary, and that's no easy feat.

Great horror instills you with that twinge of discomfort and then it just keeps ratcheting it up. It takes you to places you're not sure you can handle or want to see. But if the writing is amazing and we care about the characters, we can't stop ourselves from turning the pages.  

Seed is great horror—a dark, fearless, unflinching blast of suburban spookiness that reminded me of early Stephen King. It's easily the best debut novel—in any genre—that I've read in years.

 --Blake Crouch

"Communion Town": The Story of a City

Sam Thompson’s debut novel, Communion Town, describes a strange and remarkable city made of stories. It blends together the quotidian and the fantastic, and was selected as an Editors' Pick for July.

Where did I get the idea? All I know is that my suspicions began as soon as I arrived in the city. I had come here like everyone else, in search of the usual things: a room, a life, a district whose alleys and gardens I would call mine. I wanted to ride the trams, haunt the cafés and dine on the street food. I wanted to be changed beyond recognition. I wasn’t asking for more than that, and I certainly didn’t intend to write any of this down. Even then I knew that to do so would be a mistake.

But good intentions aren’t enough, and one sunny evening I stood on the pavement transfixed by the sight of an ornamental tree beside a set of iron railings. It was nothing, just a fragment of the city, but standing there in the smell of exhaust and magnolia I found myself unable to make sense of it. I couldn’t move on. Commuters were brushing past. Then a hand tugged at my sleeve and I turned to find a shabby figure looking up at me, grey-faced, half-starved but smiling as if he understood my predicament. He opened his mouth to speak.

Appalled, I fled, but the damage had been done. In the weeks that followed I fell out with my friends, caught a persistent cold and failed to keep my appointments. I grew weary and aggrieved. Running late for work I saw that face in the crowd. The flesh was patterned with bruises as if it had undergone surgery. Everyone knows what you’re after, I wanted to say as I pushed past: you can only tell one story at a time and I have my own to get on with. But did I still believe that? The idea was with me and I couldn’t shake it.

Indications mounted. At a tram stop I thought I heard a voice say ‘the ant will never know the anthill’, and that same night I dreamed that cities were built not from iron and brick but from memories. When I woke up I was on the point of recalling where I had seen this place before. Later, browsing bookstalls at the market, I opened an old paperback at the words remember how you came to this city… I left quickly but not before I had noticed the grey figure watching at a distance. It trailed me through the streets as if to demand credit where it was due.

I’m nervous, of course, but I won’t be leaving the city. That wouldn’t help. The figure is always with me, now, its hand always on my sleeve, and it is no longer willing to be ignored. Although I pretend otherwise I hear its voice all the time. We both know there is nothing I can do. In spite of myself, I have begun to listen.

--Sam Thompson

Author Francesca Brill on "The Harbour"

The Harbour by Francesca Brill was shortlisted in Round 2 of our 2012 Rising Stars Award. Her debut novel, a gripping and atmospheric story of love between a journalist and a spy, is set in China at time of imminent danger. Here she tells us about her earliest memories of writing, and the relationship between acting and writing.

 

 

The Harbour is my first book. Well, strictly speaking it’s my first book since I was about ten years old. Before then I was prolific. My first prose was nothing if not ambitious. I entered the fray with a book about a mermaid called Araminta. She had many sisters and their names each began with a different letter of the alphabet, starting at the beginning and getting quite a long way through. Fascinating! No? Well, it was to me. I had an odd obsession with the birth announcements in The Times newspaper. I followed it avidly and rushed home from school every day to make lists of the names in columns for boys and girls, and for years I had my own version of the most popular names of the year. Or at least the most popular with readers of The Times...

 

Next up was my deeply-felt opus about Queenie, a much-abused slave girl in the southern States of America. Clearly I had not heard the advice that it’s best to write about what you know. I didn’t feel the least bit restricted by the unromantic reality of being a middle class white girl growing up in a flat in late 20th-century London. The Harbour is set in China and Hong Kong in the nineteen thirties and forties so it seems that despite having heard the above advice many times I have still chosen to ignore it.

 

I started my professional life as an actress and my passion for it was fired by the incredible challenge of occupying someone else’s psyche. To be someone else. To have an insight into how it feels to live a life very different from the one I went home to. It seems to me that this transformative trick was what I was attempting with Araminta and Queenie. In addition, real life is a vortex of unforeseeable and unpredictable potential disasters and triumphs. What’s going to happen next? Who knows? However as an actor you can be sure of one thing - the show is always going to be the same. You will inevitably be going to that place, speaking those words to those people in that order and there will be a pre-ordained conclusion. (And, with any luck, some applause).

 

Perhaps my secret yearning for that unrealistic template has translated into my urge to tell my own stories. In this instance it has led me to create the world of The Harbour in which I have tried to marshal my spiky, independently minded characters through passionate love affairs, traumatic and challenging times, moral decisions and murky choices towards something resembling a resolution.

 

On many levels the step from acting to writing is a small one – it is the opportunity to be, for a short time at least, a brave mermaid, a frightened slave girl or a compromised journalist; to breathe the air of another country or see the landscape of another century. What’s going to happen next? Who knows?

 

Rebecca Coleman on Writing About Scandal

In her controversial debut novel, The Kingdom of Childhood, Rebecca Coleman tells the story of a boy and a woman. Thrown together to organise a fundraiser for their failing private school and bonded by loneliness, they begin an affair that at first thrills, then corrupts each of them.

Call me naive, but all through the time I was writing The Kingdom of Childhood--the story of a middle-aged teacher who has an affair with her son's 16-year-old friend-- I didn't realize I was being shocking. I thought I was writing about the news. As sure as earthquakes, elections and wardrobe malfunctions by Lady Gaga, every year there will be a salacious tale--or three--about some female teacher who gets caught in a sordid, ill-considered affair with a male student much too young for her. The pertinent question raised by such crimes--and I think I speak for the majority of women when I say this--is, "What on earth is wrong with you?" After all, I didn't even want to date 15-year-old boys when I was 15. They don't exactly have a reputation for being the most compelling romantic partners. What in the world would possess a seemingly normal woman to risk everything--her family, her career, her self-respect, even her freedom--for a dalliance with a schoolboy?

Now that is a question for a novel.

But writing a controversial story is not a project for the faint of heart. "You're brave", several other authors said to me once they'd read the manuscript--clearly code for, "you're insane, but let's try to give it a positive spin". Still, the impact didn't fully strike me until I saw a Twitter conversation between two erotica writers blustering about the indecency of my subject. That amused me, I admit, but overall I felt perplexed. Are we still in the Victorian era that we can't look frankly at the circumstances in which minors are victimized? Do we really believe it is a crime to prey upon someone's daughter, but not upon her son?

And therein lies the controversy: the notion of a predatory woman. In my research, I felt heartbroken by some of the posts I read online. "I watched it happen years ago to a friend of mine in high school," wrote one woman. "He was the coolest guy in school and had a relationship with one of the hottest teachers. That relationship really screwed with him bad and in one way or another it's messed him up his entire life." In Notes on a Scandal--Zoe Heller's wonderful book on a similar subject--the young man, Stephen, bosses teacher Sheba Hart and brushes her off when it suits him. He's not too bright to begin with, and we all know, in the end, he'll shrug it off and move on. But in The Kingdom of Childhood, we see Zach's mental state deteriorating. At times we're not even sure if he'll make it out alive. That's not how the fantasy is supposed to play out. Sex is supposed to be sexy.

Yet the interesting stories are rarely found among those who follow the rules.  Sometimes we must sit down with someone appalling and ask, "What on earth is wrong with you?"

And listen.

--Rebecca Coleman