I heard New York Times bestselling author Joni Rodgers give a wonderfully rousing speech at the launch of the Alliance of Independent Authors back in 2012 - it was a real whoop whoop! tour de force right at the start of the self-publishing revolution. Here are the compelling reasons she had for writing her novel Crazy for Trying:
'Tulsa, my
heroine, is a bookish, zaftig misfit, much like I was in my early 20s, and I
drew on my experience as the lone female disc jockey at a rock station in
western Montana. The themes of body image, forgiveness, making peace with one’s
past were important to me, then and now. I also wanted to write about a
healthy, loving union between two women (Tulsa’s mother and her partner) and
how unfair it was—to them and to their daughter—that they weren’t allowed to
marry. I was turned down by a number of agents because I refused to cut that
storyline, and back then (in the mid-1990s) it was still a verboten topic for
commercial fiction.
I started
writing this book when I was living on a fire tower in the Northern California
wilderness and finished it almost ten years later while I was undergoing
chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (blood cancer). I had no immune system,
which meant mandatory isolation. That gave me the space and quiet to write 16
hours a day simply because I loved placing words in rows. This purely creative
purpose breathed joy and peace into what was otherwise a very dark time. My
prognosis was poor; I was told I’d live five years if I was lucky, and my son
and daughter were just five and seven years old. When I started seriously
pursuing getting the book published, I was driven by the reality that this book
might be the only way my children would ever really know me.
Crazy for
Trying was originally published by a prestigious small press and was a finalist
for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, which launched my career and gave me
a whole new life. This book, I truly believe, is the reason I’m still alive.
Had I not found the purpose and peace I gained from writing it, I don’t think I
would have made it. It gave me so much pleasure to revisit Tulsa and her crew.
The book is a lot funnier than I remembered!'
The Centauress is a compelling tale of family conflict about a disputed inheritance, written by another best-selling author and Royal Literary Fund Fellow, Kathleen Jones. Not only am I loving the titles of the books in this collection, but I'm finding it absolutely fascinating to hear how these stories emerged!
'The
Centauress was inspired by a meeting with an extraordinary Italian sculptor who
was officially female, but was very open about the fact that she was a
hermaphrodite. She appeared to revel in her dual sexuality, although there was
an underlying note of tragedy in the stories she told about her life. I began
to wonder what it must be like to be born without any specific gender identity
and what it might mean for relationships.
Almost by accident, I was present when she was being interviewed for her
biography and there were a lot of discussions about the ethical questions her
life story raised; how much the biographer should tell and how to protect the
people she’d shared her life with.
When she
died, her story wouldn’t let me go. Meeting her had changed my life – as she
had changed many people’s lives, not always for the better. Fictional episodes
started writing themselves in my head, often centred around one of her
reminiscences. I kept thinking ‘what
if?’ and gradually the novel began to take shape. Fiction can often be closer
to the emotional truth of something than factual biography.
The
Centauress is set in Istria – a very beautiful part of Croatia that used to
belong to Italy and has the turbulent historical background I needed for the
novel. The family of my main character, Zenobia, has been torn apart by
conflict. Living in Europe means living every day with echoes of a violent,
recent past; sharing your village or street with people who may have betrayed
your relatives, or be relatives of someone your family also betrayed. Just
below my house in Italy, at the bottom of the olive grove, is a memorial to six
young boys who were dragged from their houses and shot, only a year before I
was born.
As a biographer myself, I’ve often felt
uncomfortable ‘eavesdropping’ on the most intimate moments of someone’s life,
so it’s not surprising that my narrator, Alex, became a biographer researching
the life story of celebrity artist Zenobia de Branganza, who is the Centauress
of the story. Alex has to struggle with the problems of her subject’s desire
for honesty and the wishes of friends and family not to have their lives
exposed. Alex has her own private tragedies, because the novel is also about
surviving some of the worst things that can happen to you. It’s this knowledge
that enables Zenobia to trust Alex with her most intimate revelations. And the message she gives to Alex is that it
is possible to heal and that you must always be ready to accept happiness and
love when it comes your way.'
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Finally, Jane Davis has chosen An Unchoreographed Life for the collection. Jane's debut won the Daily Mail First Novel Award and she has gone on to produce six novels - I've already read A Funeral for an Owl and was much struck by the way she observes relationships, deals with issues of class and background and writes brilliant dialogue. Here she describes how she came to write An Unchoreographed Life:
'I was gripped by a 2008 court case, when, in an interesting twist, it
was ruled that a prostitute had been living off the immoral earnings of one of
her clients. Salacious headlines focused on the prostitute’s replies when she
was asked to justify her charge of £20,000 a week. But the case also challenged
perceptions of who was likely to be a prostitute. The answer turned out to be
that she might well be the ordinary middle-aged woman with the husband and two
teenage children who lives next door.
Whilst I was
writing the novel, it became especially relevant when change to the laws
governing prostitution were proposed and became headline news.
I grew up within the footprint of Nelson’s paradise estate. The story of
his mistress, Emma Hamilton, has always fascinated me. Born into extreme
poverty and forced to resort to prostitution, she later became a muse for
artists such as George Romney and Joshua Reynolds and a fashionista by bucking
the tight-laced trends of the day. Cast aside by an aristocratic lover, she
went on to marry his uncle. Completely self-educated, Emma continually
reinvented herself, mixing in diplomatic circles and becoming confidante of
both Marie Antoinette and the Queen of Naples.
But Emma’s story is unusual. I had a clear understanding
that, had I been born in another age, the chances were that, living in London,
I would have been either a domestic servant or a prostitute - but quite
possibly, both. Prior to 1823, domestics under the age of sixteen didn’t
receive a salary. They worked a sixteen-hour day in return for ‘bed and board’,
a very generous description of what was actually on offer. And, in return, when
they reached the age of sixteen, they were cast out onto the streets.
During my research, I used the Internet extensively to source personal
accounts, diaries, blogs and newspaper reports. How did sex-workers come to the
attention of the police and social services? What were the main reasons they
ended up in court? (The answer was generally tax evasion and financial crime,
things I knew about from my day job.) How did sex workers see themselves? How
did they view their clients? How did this perception change if they stopped? I
also consulted The English Collective of Prostitutes, who very kindly allowed
me to quote them in my fictional newspaper article.
And then I began to imagine what life was like for the child of a
prostitute. There was nowhere I could research that hidden subject. And it is
always the thing that eludes you that becomes the story.'
So, seven dedicated, dynamic writers serving up seven amazing and diverse novels in one set for only GBP7.99! Only for 90 days, though, starting on February 20th - though you can pre-order now here. 'The authors of these books are at the forefront of [a] strong cohort of groundbreaking, boundary pushing women writing and self-publishing literary fiction. i cannot recommend this collection highly enough.' Dan Holloway, Guardian book pages columnist and publisher.
Visit the Outside the Box: Women Writing Women website here.
To pre-order Outside the Box: Women Writing Women: visit these links at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com. Price £7.99. The set will be available for 90 days only from February 20th 2015.
For more information, visit www.womenwritewomen.com
Watch the video trailer at https://animoto.com/play/oTQrHVfeHYOqtS5V1o6RSA
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