Self publishing doesn't mean the end of the world for seeing your name in print

Catherine Ryan Howard has made quite a name for herself- deservedly - in Ireland and beyond with her success at self publishing. But here she's banging the drum for good, old fashioned, hard work and a little bit of luck.

Right now, the self-publishing evangelists would have you believe that it’s easier to get struck by lightning in the jaws of a shark while holding a winning lottery ticket than it is to get published, and statistically, they’re probably right. But as I’ve said before, the statistics take into account all of the books and all of the writers. If you’re a good or great writer, and you write a good or great book, and you write that book at the right time and the book ends up in the right place, then your chances are significantly improved. Then, instead of a pie in the sky dream of publication, your chances of seeing your book on the shelves becomes not only possible, but likely.

I say it often and I'll say it again here: you can make your luck, to a certain extent. And that's what Maria Duffy has done here:

I first met her in person at an Inkwell “Getting Published” workshop soon afterwards, where Maria spoke of her novels and her hope – her dream, really – that she would one day be published. The next time I saw her was at another Dublin writerly event, this time at Irish PEN, where she whispered her exciting news to me: she’d got an agent. And not just any agent, but one who has had phenomenal success with a dizzying array of Irish women writers, many of them household names. Then, a few months later, the big news came: Maria had signed a two-book deal with Hachette Ireland and her debut novel, Any Dream Will Do, would be released in November.

Look how hard Maria worked at that. Workshops, PEN Ireland meetings - and many, many hours (snatched around the care for her four children) - of just sitting down and writing it. And it's all paid off. Congratulations, Maria. And thanks to Catherine for a fabulous, level headed post.

Falling, soaring

Leaves like jewels come down to greet you, floating to the floor or whacking you in the face by way of hello. It’s hard not to feel like a 1950s bride, ducking through the lych gate to a veil-full of confetti as the colours flutter and twirl all around you.

I was driving home from Portland, Oregon in October 2003 when a black cloud of starling burst into the sky above the car. Dropping all at once from the telegraph wire, they looked just like they were practising being falling leaves, hurling themselves towards the nearest pile. Much like this:

I think we’ve all felt like that some days. At least, I hope so.

In defence of the Emerald Isle

We'd been in Ireland about a month when someone (the lovely MD of Penguin Ireland, to give him full credit), told me the truest thing I ever learned about Ireland. 'The thing is', he said,'the Irish feel a far greater sense of kinship to the English than the English do in reverse'.

Three years living in Ireland taught me nothing more useful.The Irish have generations-worth of layers of familiarity with Britain, be it involuntary or (a consequence of emigration) voluntary. The Irish husband of an American friend told me that, in his primary school in the Eighties, his class of 30 were asked to put up their hands if anyone had an aunt or uncle living in the UK or the USA. Every hand in the room shot up. This would have been an unthinkable phenomenon in Eighties Britain.

How this familiarity translates into everyday life is as follows. Many Irishmen (and women) actively support Premier League teams (though I've yet to meet any Vauxhall Conference die-hards). BBC programmes are watched interchangeably, if not more frequently, than RTE ones - when we were in Dublin, there was genuine outrage and consternation about the migration of the BBC to an all-digital service, which would mean that the Irish would have to start paying for the BBC rather than picking it up via the English transmitters.
Everybody you meet has been to England, usually to visit relatives/close friends and often for a few years. The Guardian was cheaper for me to buy in Ireland than in England (go figure) - and available everywhere the Irish Times was sold.

At the same time, Ireland's got its own thing going on. It most definitely isn't an outpost of England (when I commented once that, with all the consumption of British media, it was as if we were standing on the edge of Ireland leaning towards the UK, an Irish friend said, 'just don't start referring to Britain as 'the mainland'. Noted).

I said it when we lived there, and, eight months out, I stand by it; Ireland's an amazing place for a holiday, but as a place to live, you really need to be Irish. In many ways, and oddly for a country with such deep roots, it's still finding its feet, and the Celtic Tiger mess is that of a teenager let loose with a credit card.
Religion, despite a generation that claims to be beyond it, is still pervasive (just try getting your unchristened kid into school, even Protestant school). Family ties are strong in an utterly exemplary way; but that makes it harder to belong if you're not part of an Irish family.
Then there's the preventative layer of the language; both Gaelige, which still sounds like someone talking through a mouthful of Jameson's however long I twist and turn with it, and the Hiberno-English vernacular, which is glorious, but takes a while to come to terms with. 'The day that's in it'; 'the guts of a week'; 'messages' and 'press' and the difference between 'your man', 'your one' and 'yer wan' - don't try and emulate it if you're an outsider. You won't get it right.

I left Dublin before things got truly bad and for entirely personal reasons; simply put, our roots are in England, and a sum total of seven years abroad felt like enough. Given our utter lack of regret at leaving Ireland, I've been taken aback at just how protective I feel of the view of the Irish as reported in the British media currently. The English just don't care about the myriad differences between themselves and their country cousins. If they think of them at all, it's in cliches.

Still; all the front pages depicting Ballymun slums and piebald ponies; the co-opting of Michael Flatley as spokesperson for Question Time (not yet, but surely only a matter of time); the fundamental indignation that Britain's helping to bail out Ireland, a Eurozone country; it all speaks to one, slightly sad, truth.
Namely: though a strong percentage of the Irish people could take Britain as a Chosen Specialised Subject on 'Mastermind' and ace it, the odds are that the average punter in any English town wouldn't know the name of the Taoiseach if you stopped them in the street. It's peculiar, and it wouldn't have occurred to me as odd before the years spent in Dublin, but now it makes me angry at my fellow Englishmen. I know Britain's far bigger than Ireland, but still. The USA is bigger than them both, and the Americans, even on the Scandinavian-dominated West Coast, all seemed to know heaps more about Ireland than the British do.

These people fought in our wars, they helped to rebuild our towns, and they have their own country and culture. Let's let them keep some dignity, at least, and acknowledge that.

What words are worth

I went to a wedding once where the lead singer of EMF was a guest (it was a Forest of Dean wedding, natch. Everyone's related there, via sheep). After the wedding breakfast, he took the mic and informed the assembled crowd, 'Tonight I'm going to sing some songs about trains'.

Uh...OK?

And then, he did. I can't remember a single one of them (see again: Forest of Dean wedding. There were many old friends, and much booze), but I remember his set being (a) surprisingly great and (b) full of trains.

******

I've been overdosing on This American Life podcasts this month thanks to all the sodding running I'm doing. I'm sure there's a train of thought that says you shouldn't listen to something that makes you slow down in the driveway when you're training for a race, but I'm all about the endurance part of endurance running, and far less about speed. Hmm. Not at all about speed, that should probably read.

Anyway, This American Life has a little story before the main deal which sort of introduces the topic, but somewhat tangentially. And apparently the genius of Ira Glass has woven itself into my brain (if only), because that's what the wedding story is. A tangential introduction.

*****

All of which to say; tonight I'm going to tell you some stories about poems. Well, just the one, really; but 'a story' rather than 'stories' would have knocked out the rhythm.

I got lucky at college. My first term in, I made friends who have, with very few shake-downs, been with me ever since. Theo (he of the flowers) and I were pretty much inseparable in those days, and for years after. We fought more or less constantly; huge, incensed arguments about the supremacy of language over science; huger, still more incensed arguments about whether it was OK for him to eat my food whilst I was still eating it too (Theo's point was that he always ended up finishing my meals every day, so he may as well eat it whilst hot rather than wait for it to be congealed). Theo was family from the outset; whatever we were bickering about at the time, the fact that we were friends always seemed obvious; irrevocable.

At the end of the first term, we met to exchange gifts - the vogue was for those hideous carved candles of naked people embracing that you could buy for a fiver in the market. In an Emperor's New Clothes way, everyone thought were unbelievably sophisticated (they were unbelievably ugly, more like). So I was expecting wax, and was pleasantly surprised when Theo gave me two envelopes. One was a Christmas card.

I opened the other one. That was a Christmas card too.

(To understand Theo, you have to think back to early episodes of Friends and imagine Joey mixed with Chandler in proportions of about 70:30. Right at this moment, he was all Joey).

Theo grinned at me. 'Read it!'

It was a poem. I don't remember much of it, though I still have it somewhere; congenital pack-rattage combined with a commitment to never discard other people's emotions means we have an entire sea-chest upstairs filled with randomata.

What made it so utterly brilliant, though, was the dedication that preceded the poem:

'Saz - I wrote this for X (whichever the latest of Theo's conquests had been)but she ditched me so I thought you'd like it'.

He was right; I did. And I especially liked that he knew me well enough, after only eight weeks, to understand that a poem written for me would've felt unbearable and inappropriate; but a poem written by Theo and given to me (proof that language wins! Ha! Except that we continued the language/science argument for at least another ten years) was a beautiful and touching present. And at least it wasn't a sodding candle.

*****

There are lots of things I think I could usefully change about myself. I could be less verbose. Less twitchy. Less hopelessly optimistic in the face of life. But what I absolutely love about being me is that, for some reason, my male friends (never my female friends, and never romantic entanglements) have always felt comfortable giving me their poems to read. I think poetry's amazing, and I think my friends are amazing, so they know it's a safe bet. But it's still a total act of trust, and it blows me away every time.

Happy National Poetry Day.

I had to cut this post short to go and do a little light dusting

Jonah was on the phone to my Mum, on loudspeaker.

'Yeah, nice weekend...Daddy is doing the gardening and Mummy is doing the cleaning'

I choked on my muesli and had to resist grabbing the phone away from him. I could hear Mum, on the other end, howling with laughter. '

Jonah, bless him, is only saying what he sees. Most of my life, personal or professional, is spent working with the premise of 'show, don't tell', and it would appear that when it comes to giving children role models, the traditional ones are what's being served up. So it is that, with two small boys in the house, I'm being more to active feminism than at any other point in my life.

Thinking back, I was lucky. I didn't ever ponder feminism too much (or 'boys vs girls' when I was too small to give it such a multi-syllabic name) because there was no need. I was one of two sisters with sports-loving parents; weekends were just as likely to be spent by the side of a minor-league rugby pitch or helping to mix cement as they were doing the grocery shopping. We had a Scalectrix, and tools; and anyway, books very quickly usurped anything remotely gender-specific for me (unless you're going to claim that reading is inherently female, which is a whole other issue). 'As soon as you learned to read everything else stopped' my Mum has been known to remember wistfully.

I went to an all-girls' secondary school, where CDT and woodwork were taught alongside ceramics and jewellery. When I reached sixth form, one of my general studies classes involved donning overalls and learning how to change the oil and a tyre in our car mechanics class. We were also taught the far-more-useful skill of hotwiring; probably something not being taught to the boys down the road.

I was lucky, too; whilst I had a terrific group of girlfriends at school, my out-of-school friends were predominantly boys (with two key exceptions). And again, I honestly don't think I ever felt that I couldn't do anything the lads were doing. Sometimes there were things I wished I wasn't doing, like abseiling down a disused quarry or leaping off a bridge attached only to a piece of rope (and there was nothing 'professional' about this; it was just an idea cooked up in the pub).

If I'd abstained, nobody would have cared; some of the gang just didn't fancy some of the activities. But there was never an assumption that I would or wouldn't do something based on gender.

I suppose it could be said that I was the ultimate beneficiary of the generation before me, who burned bridges (and bras) so I didn't have to. Honestly, though, I think it was more down to a matter of luck and attitude. I never actively engaged in fighting for feminism not because I didn't care, but because I didn't have to. If I wanted to do something; great, get on with it.

Having boys has made it an issue, though. Maybe having children would do that anyway, in the way they make you reexamine your stance on, say, TV or jaywalking. But as the sole female representative in a house of men, I'm at the diametric opposite end of where I grew up. So we try to ensure the boys know two things:it's possible for them to aspire to anything they like; and secondly: that would be also be true even if they were girls. My boys love to cook (although, as with reading, I fail to see why that should be gender-biased; cooking's a basic human skill set, for crying out loud). They love to play rugby. They love to read endless books, and they love to climb trees. For the most part, I think we're doing OK. All I need to do is figure out how to persuade them that Mummy doesn't clean...

Croeso, boyo

I was going to show you pretty pictures, but Blogger has other ideas. Oh, the joys. So you'll have to make do with a mental image instead.

Imagine yourself crossing the 'big bridge', as they always put it in Gavin and Stacey (imagine yourself too, if you like, loving Gavin and Stacey for its frequent mentions of the A48, then you'll be in the right mood). Search in your pocket for the ridiculous quantity of change now required to entering the principality. Find the manned toll booth ('always use the one with the person in it' as my lovely pal Alex says, 'because that way you're keeping someone in a job').

And as you put your foot down on the accelerator and head towards the wingspan of the bridge, sing this as hard as you possibly, possibly, can:

Age shall, of course, wither us, but we'll continue in denial

I was at a wedding earlier this month with some of my favourite people, one of whom was (duh) getting married.
It was everything it needed to be. The wedding itself was gorgeous; sincere and lovely and just so HAPPY but loads of fun too (Depeche Mode to come back down the aisle to, anyone?).
Three-line-whip get-togethers of the whole gang are relatively rare nowadays, so there was a Mexican wave of a cheer every time the next familiar face arrived. And - maybe significantly in the context - the various offspring had all been left at home, so we were in utter party mode, and also, for twenty-four hours, able to pretend to be the irresponsible yoofs we'd once been.

***

I was in the car today and looked up at the date, and thought, 'blimey, Tim's birthday tomorrow - is he 41 or 42 now?'. And then I remembered that, whilst I'll almost certainly associate the Glorious Twelfth with Tim, he's not around to have any more birthdays. It seems impossible, just impossible; perhaps all the more so because he was someone I didn't see much of recently, so I don't notice his absence on a daily basis the way I know others do.

***

Whilst I was thinking about this, and almost resenting the fact that we can be old enough to have friends who've died (and I know that I've just been extraordinarily lucky, really, to get to this age without bad shit happening before) I remembered something that one of our gang had said at the wedding. We'd been doing the usual, 'what's the next excuse for a party?'. Since most of us are married at this point (and happily, so second weddings aren't in the offing as the festivity-provider), it's likely to be the rash of fortieth birthdays that start for us next spring.

'Forty?' said K.; blonde, beautiful and several years younger than us (married into the clan, and we're very glad of her). 'None of us are old enough for that to be happening. Forty's what...grown-ups....do'.

I don't know whether this is related to the one semi-coherent point Tony Parsons made, in Man and Boy, when he observed that our post-war generation hasn't had to work at anything so it doesn't know how to do anything but live in perpetual youth. Maybe that's part of it, but we looked around. Amongst the dozen or so of us, we'd experienced what's probably the normal amount of life stuff; serious illnesses, a couple of football-teams' worth of kids, redundancy, fertility issues. None of those things was tackled lightly, or could be anything other than adult in nature.

But K. was right. We still don't feel old enough.