» Listings for 2017

1. ON SILVER LININGS

   Posted on 2:27pm Saturday 18th Feb 2017

   If it weren’t for the fact that I have also to put food on the table, I would be writing my books full-time. But apart from being reality, that isn’t necessarily a gripe or downside; working with words in a commercial environment is still a fantastic resource, helping me hunt and gather materials for crafting books.

   

   My day job as a copywriter teaches discipline, to write to deadlines and word-counts, to edit and re-write, to take criticism, to research, interpret and ask the right questions, to work in partnership to solve issues of clarity and correctness, to find the right style and vocabulary for each job. It requires mental agility, because the variation of themes is immense - from Scottish land reform, science incubators and bible translation, to business development, colonic irrigation, drug trafficking and domestic abuse, garlic farming, whisky, transvestite shopping chains, and everything else in between.

   And yet … for all its practical focus, and in actual fact because of it, copywriting is a creative process; within the structure, there are elements of poetry and persuasion, of stirring emotion to stimulate a sale … exactly what a writer does when creating a story and putting it out into the world to see if it will find a buyer.

   

   Thanks to my profession, I write almost every day of my life, and while most of it is for commercial clients, the book is always there in the background, a distant murmur most of the time, but accessible on the days when there are no writing clients in the queue except me.

   

   My particular challenge is disentangling the voices of whatever copy jobs are on my desk, so I can hear my own between them. Those are the moments when I remember to be grateful for my day job, the daily writing habit it demands, and the dozens of worlds to which it gives me access.

2. ON KILLING THE CANARY

   Posted on 5:24pm Friday 13th Jan 2017

   The landscapes and climate of the Outer Hebrides cut both ways, drawing schizophrenic responses from both visitors and the people who live here.

   Summertime visitors are easily blown away by the white expanses of the beaches with their rolling green waves and black cliffs;

   

   the hazy sage and purple hills, the picturesque blackhouses perched on the hillsides; the twisting single-track roads and the quaint townships.

    

   

    

   But fair weather friends can quickly change their tune when their roof is blown away by winter gales, the ferries are cancelled, the grey waves crash,

   the moorland turns into black sludge, the power cuts out, and the clouds don’t part for six weeks at a stretch.

   

    

   Celtic Fringe’s cast of characters, some of them locals, some of them incomers, all face the challenges of the extremes of climate and terrain that almost become characters in their own right. The archaeologists discovering the aftermath of an ancient sacrifice, the conflicted, struggling incomer family, the reclusive tanner, the alcoholic GP, and the police inspector trying to solve a long-closed missing person case amidst secrecy and lies, create a spiral of conflicting drives and pressures that steadily drive the characters to breaking point.

    

   

   Who breaks and who is left standing is one of the key themes of the book.

   

   So reaching a conclusion that did justice to all those stories, and was dramatically feasible for the characters, was a complex business. For each one, I had to consider The Mayor of Casterbridge Conundrum: Does the canary fly free, or is it left to die in its cage?

   Matters are further complicated by the book’s status as the first in a series. While the ending had to answer questions, it also had to ensure that while some plot avenues were resolved, others were kept open, so that some tendrils were not woven into the closing knot, but left free to snake over into the next book and become part of a wider continuity.

   

   In working through the question of how to shape what readers might feel about the world of Celtic Fringe and the characters who inhabit it, it came back to the landscape,

   and the love-hate relationship we develop with it. And that became the pressing question of the second book.