EPISODE 1: Early Days
At eight years old, I decided that I was going to be an “authoress”. I wrote my first book when I was twelve. For some weird reason, it was set in Scotland even though I’d never been there.

My first completed serious novel was written in my twenties, a first-person romantic thriller set in Malaysia where, newly married, I was then living. I gave the manuscript to a member of my new Malaysian family to read for comment, but the story horrified her as she erroneously equated the opinions of the central character with my own. Which was when I turned to writing fantasy — I wasn’t eager to upset my new family.

What I didn’t realise was how hard and hellishly expensive it was to get one’s work considered for publication. This was the 1970s. Postal costs were enormous. Worse still, pre-internet the industry was opaque, the people to approach nameless, the hints on how to do it hard to access. I didn’t even know anyone else who read science fiction or fantasy of any kind! Send a book to UK, you waited six months for a reply. I did try, but in truth the closest I came to being published was with illustrated articles in local nature-based magazines, mostly about my other passion, bird conservation. Those paid little, but lord, it felt good to be in print!

EPISODE 2: An Agent
After we moved to Vienna in the mid-1980s, I bought a copy of The Artists’ and Writers’ Yearbook on a visit to London, which ultimately enabled me to find a UK agent. She was married to a very successful and well known horror writer, and had once worked for a big London publisher. The year was 1990, the book I’d written was The Aware. After a few minor changes at the agent’s suggestion, that manuscript began its journey around London publishing houses.

My agent had every confidence in my tale about a tough swordswoman and her utterly feminine, sexually active companion — two vastly different women facing adversity as they travelled together. (Think Zena Warrior Princess — except that TV show was still 5 years in the future!) The 1990s might have been the heyday of fantasy epics, but I just couldn’t break into that largely male dominated world.

I wrote another book. A standalone called Havenstar. My agent sent it to a brand new publishing house, backed by a millionaire businessman with a flare for publicity. The book was accepted as one of the launch novels for this new imprint. I was over the moon. What could possibly go wrong?

A lot, it seems. I ended up renowned as one of the four authors who brought down a brand new publisher’s imprint…

EPISODE 3: Disaster
I don’t know why things went wrong, but go wrong they did for Richard Branson’s Virgin Worlds. Maybe he should have stuck to airlines…

Editors came and went. Publicity seemed scarce. The books of the other authors tanked. The cover chosen for Havenstar was unattractive, dark and messy, and had nothing to do with the actual plot. However, my novel did get some nice reviews and I was chuffed.

This was in the early days of Amazon UK, when they mixed up fiction and non-fiction, kids’ books and self-help tomes, lumping them all together in a single list rated by actual numbers sold. To my utter joy, Havenstar rose up into the top 100 — and climbed even higher. It reached 81 on the best seller list of all Amazon UK books — and then disappeared. Literally vanished overnight. Sold out and unavailable.
Virgin Worlds disappeared without a trace as well. No apology. No reason given. No explanation. Gee, thanks, Mr Branson. You had a best seller on your hands, and you walked away.

Much later, Havenstar was successfully re-issued in English, as well as in Russian and German, but in 1999, the publishing world was a small space and those in the business swapped stories. Guess what happens to a writer whose book apparently helped to crash an entire imprint, presumably one with lots of money behind it? My agent — bless her — was wonderful. She not only kept me on her books, but she sent The Aware out to every publisher and imprint of fantasy in the northern hemisphere. (I’m not exaggerating.) I continued to write, even as the rejections flowed in and my career as a writer was in tatters, torn to bits at its very beginning.

EPISODE 4: Persistence
So ten years after finding myself an agent, the score was one book briefly published before vanishing, and two others traipsing from publisher to publisher yet to find a home: The Aware and a new one called The Heart of the Mirage.

My agent knew the industry inside out and refused to give up. I was exasperated by my lack of success, and insisted we try the Australian market. She was reluctant because 25% of UK book sales were to the Australian market, and she believed if we sold to Australia first, I’d never be published in UK.

She arranged for me to see a London editor interested in The Heart of the Mirage. Full of hope, I did — only to be told I shouldn’t have cast a female as the central character in an epic trilogy. If I completely rewrote the book making the protagonist’s offsider, a guy, as the hero instead, with his woman companion, then the editor would reconsider. Heroic leads should never be women, it seemed. I was NOT happy.

After that, on my insistence, my agent caved and sent The Aware to HarperCollins Australia, and it landed on the desk of the marvellous fantasy/science fiction editor, Stephanie Smith… The reply came back: love it, but can the author turn it into a trilogy?

Oh boy, could I! The Isles of Glory with The Aware as volume 1 came out over the next few years, and all the books were shortlisted for Australian awards.

Let’s look at the timeline again here. The Aware (spruced up version) was on my agent’s desk early 1991. It was accepted by HarperCollins in 2003, more than 10 years later, as the first book of The Isles of Glory. (Still later, the whole trilogy was published by Penguin USA, and much later still as an eBook by Orion UK. There were also French and Russian and German translations.)

I had made it. When The Heart of the Mirage became the first book of the next trilogy, my career was really taking off. I was in my fifties, and it was more than thirty years since I’d written that Malaysian novel …

EPISODE 5: Success at last!
We are well into the new century, I’m writing my third trilogy, and all’s right with the world — right?

I have a contract with HarperCollins Australia, under a wonderful editor, my books are coming out in Australia and moves are afoot for more foreign language sales. Money is coming in from book contracts. In the non-literary world I have string of contract jobs that take me into the rainforest to my second great love: working for bird conservation. True, writing deadlines and field work have an annoying way of clashing, but laptop computers and internet connections are making all sorts of things possible. True too, there are times when I am reading book proofs by lamplight in a tent in a tropical rainstorm, or writing up field notes for a scientific paper as I’m about to fly off to a SFF conference, but I can cope.

Oh, and yes, those SF Conventions! I hadn’t known they existed. Now I’d found a whole new world to dabble in, of fans and writers and zines and readers and gamers, of real places, chat rooms and internet meet-ups. I made so many wonderful friends. I was welcomed to a world I’d not even known was there. In 2005 I was at the Worldcon in Glasgow, 2008 in Denver, 2010 in Melbourne, 2014 in London, as well as at local conventions. Life was very good indeed. In 2008, I was a guest at Swancon when it was also the national convention. I would have been a guest again at Continuum if Covid had not intervened in 2021.
Of course, things just had to go wrong somewhere.

EPISODE 6: When things go wrong…
The big upset for all of us HarperCollins Australia sff authors was announced at a horrendous function in Melbourne, billed as a celebration, during a convention. I can’t remember the year — I think I’ve wiped a lot of what happened out of my memory. Basically, HarperCollins Oz was being taken over by the UK parent, and we authors were going from being the stars in Australia to … intruders on a larger stage. The local Australian staff were gutted. It left a sour feeling of betrayal, and we all felt it. It was the end of a golden era, doubtless as a result of financial considerations, but the result for most of us was that when our current contracts finished, we left HarperCollins.

I personally could have taken them to court and won my case over something they did specifically to me, without consulting me or my agent — concerning an offer I received from elsewhere, but …well, what happens to an author who sues their publisher? Nothing good, for sure. It was a sad way to end a wonderful era of success and supportive relationships.

Fortunately the new kid on the block picked up the pieces, and most of us crossed over to them: Orbit UK. Ironically enough, though, in 2011 a trilogy of mine (The Stormlord trilogy aka The Watergivers) was being published by both competing publishing houses, though in different parts of the world.

Then in 2013, the worst happened. My wonderful agent, Dot Lumley, to whom I owed my entire successful career, passed away far too young. She ran her own agency, so it was closed down.
I was on my own.

EPISODE 7: Triumph and Disaster…
In 2013, I was at the peak of my writing career. From a standpoint of SFF friendly faces, I was also better off because I’d moved back to Australia. One SF convention at least was now just a train-ride away every year! I was being shortlisted for prizes. (I remember Kate Forsyth and I laughing as we vied for who had been shortlisted the most times without ever winning.) In the years ahead, I did win, both popular-vote and judged prizes, including the biggest, the Sara Douglass Series Award in 2017 for The Stormlord trilogy. Certainly that’s the one of which I’m most proud.

Not everything was rosey. Though my agent had left me with an Orbit contract for The Lascar trilogy, there was nobody to negotiate on my behalf. Subsidiary rights such as translation were now unwanted anyway because the major income earner, English language world rights, was gone. I was on my own.

Worse still, The Lascar trilogy became collateral damage under the feet of a behemoth and there was nothing I could do. The villain of the piece was Amazon.

Amazon controls a huge slice of sales and info about new books. Early in 2014 they decided to make an example of a publisher, Hachette (which includes the Orbit SF/F imprint), presumably over money. To wrest a better deal, Amazon deliberately set out to hide Hachette’s new books, or to make sales of them difficult or costly or to delay delivery. And guess what, the first book of my trilogy, The Lascar’s Dagger came out the very month Amazon was trying to ruin the sales figures of Hachette’s new publications. Nice one, Amazon. (If you want to read about that, try here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/23/amazon-escalates-battle-hachette-publishing )

Of course, if the first book of a trilogy doesn’t sell all that well, neither will book 2 or book 3. I can’t blame everything on Amazon, but what they did certainly didn’t help.

Looking at many of the reviews of The Lascar’s Dagger, there is a comment that crops up often: scorn for the main character’s naivety. Saker, the “hero”, a scholar and a priest sent to the heart of the court and the government to be a spy, was easily fooled by the unscrupulous. Unfortunately many readers disliked that and had no sympathy for him because they could not see him the way I did.

This partly had its origins in my own history. I was the country kid sent from a rural background / small country school to a brash city one, and I was as naive as they come. No internet in those days. No understanding of city sophistication, and being intelligent or well-read doesn’t help if you can’t read the signals. I’d wanted readers to feel sympathy for Saker, not scorn. My mistake. Many readers would never buy book 2 or 3 to see how the hero evolved…Weirdly however, the books of the trilogy won more prizes than any of the other series of mine!

Anyway, whether it was fault of Amazon, or the fault of the way I wrote the main character, The Lascar Trilogy did not do as well as its forebears with regards to sales, and no publisher was waiting with bated breath for my next work…

EPISODE 8: Regrets, Advice, the Future, and the Best of Times
Back in the late 1990s, I had received word that Havenstar had been bought by Virgin Worlds just one week too late… The news arrived from my agent, churned out by my sister’s fax machine when I was in Australia to attend my mother’s funeral. She never found out that, at last, I was to be published. She would have been so glad and I am sad she never knew.

What advice can I offer to wannabe published writers now embarking on their careers? I’ve no idea. Self-publishing can certainly be rewarding and successful — but it’s a job that takes a lot of work when you could be writing the next book instead. The one thing I really, really envy writers starting out today is how much information you have at your fingertips. I had nothing, and made loads of mistakes as a consequence. I wasted so much time. And no one had read my first successful MS before I sent it out. No one, because I knew no one who read SFF where I lived, back in the dark ages when email, whatever that was, was unknown to the likes of me.

Another thing I didn’t know until much later was about how publishing houses work. An editor has to work hard to get your MS accepted by those above them. They may love your novel, but they have to persuade the acquisitions editor and all the others who have a say in acceptances. And once an author does get an editor who loves the book and is prepared to push it as hard as possible…what happens when they leave that company and go elsewhere? Sadly, I once had four editors in quick succession…

I remember when The Isles of Glory was accepted for US publication — my editor at the time was lovely, but also very, very new. Her budget for the book’s publicity was…$0. She cared about the book, but I doubt if anyone else above her did… At a guess, my trilogy was considered a practice run for her. Oh, and it was given a cover that was obviously aimed at the young male gaze. If you are going to have a woman swordsman in those days, she obviously has to be half naked. Sigh. Royalties were low, something like 7.5% of the sale price of $US 7.00. Just as well writers were paid advances! Mostly I made far more money from advances than I ever did from sales.

So here I am with what is probably going to be my last book about to be published…Yes, there were times when I had bad luck. But there were lots of times I was enormously lucky too. I’d do it all again in a heartbeat! I’ve met so many wonderful people over the years, fellow writers, editors, fans, convention organisers…
There have been people who came to a convention just to attend my kaffeeklatsch.
There was the guy who wrote to me to tell me about the time he was in hospital in Melbourne for a lengthy and unpleasant sojourn as a lad. What got him through the pain and the depression? Reading The Isles of Glory trilogy.
Then there was the fellow who tattooed his ear after reading those books, in homage to Blaze… There are times when I feel I have been the luckiest person alive.

To everyone who has ever bought or borrowed or edited or published or sold or reviewed a book of mine, thank you. I love you all.

Please consider buying my new work, THE TANGLED LANDS, available for pre-order right now from all the usual places. It will be available in print and also as an eBook.

Here is back page blurb:

All seems well in the Kingdom of Talodiac. King Edwild’s rule is strong, and his young Queen, Thalia, has just provided him with a son and heir. Yet there is unease through the kingdom. The mysterious Redweavers, sorcerers from a land called Kanter, enter Talodiac through woven portals, and one desperate man has plans for the young prince. Sergeant Hervan of the King’s Guard knows little of such issues. He does know that one wet night he and his men are asked to provide an escort for a young woman leaving the King’s quarters. Presumably His Majesty couldn’t wait for the Queen to recover from the birth, and was seeking diversion.
Little does Hervan know that this simple task will one day have profound consequences for himself, his family, the King, and the tangled lands of Talodiac and Kanter.

It has been a long time since I updated my blog…but I am back.

OUR SITUATION:
A lot has happened, not all of it good, much of it related to the health of my husband and me. And of course, Covid has interrupted much of life just by existing. Even now, we are worried about my husband’s family members who are suffering its inroads, and one much loved member is currently in hospital.
My husband and I, however, are about as safe as it is possible to be. Both of us have had two AstraZenica jabs. We live in a place which goes into lock-down whenever the disease pops up. (Unfortunately we also live under a federal government who gave very little attention to obtaining vaccines, which has meant that Australia has one of the world’s worst vaccination rates as a percentage of the population.)

WRITING NEWS:
I have finished a new book, in the sense that there is a beginning, a middle and an end — however, I was not happy with it. I’ve sought the help of wonderful readers and, and as a result I have now embarked on a very thorough re-write, mostly to do with the structure of the novel, rather than the story which I still think is sound.

When and how will it be published? Not sure. Probably self-published…

LOCK-DOWN (West Australian style) : At the moment we are three days into a lock-down where we must wear a mask when we leave the house…which can only be for grocery shopping, medical reasons and an hour’s exercise nearby. Luckily we have lovely wild places just outside our back gate, see below.

What’s the difference between me (and other professional writers) and a
professional athlete? You know, like those talented young folk now
showing us their skills and brilliance at the Commonwealth Games?

Let me tell you.

I had to have a job unconnected with being a writer, which enabled me
to earn a living. In my spare time I laboured alone to hone my craft. I
sacrificed time and money I could ill afford, sending manuscripts off by
snail mail (back in the day), buying self-help
books, attending courses, etc, etc. Eventually I made it, and started
to get paid. A bit. I still had to fork out money to help me —
attending conventions, for example, and I still had to work. 

After some
10+ years, I actually made enough to earn a living (although I doubt it
was enough to support a whole growing family–but by then my family was
grown).

Now let’s look at athletes. They also had a talent and a
passion, probably noticed while they were still at school. They came to
the attention of sporting bodies or trainers. Like me, they worked hard.
Unlike me, they had so much help. They had trainers. They had
encouragement or paid professionals devoted helping them, along with
tech experts, videos and science labs… Most would have had financial
help, perhaps in kind, or even in cash. They were sent off to compete at
meets, in and out of Asutralia, mostly not at their own expense.


And now we hail them as heroes, mention them on TV, applaud their
achievements, offer them endorsements, free trips and adulation. Good
for them.

What I wonder is why do they deserve it, and we writers
don’t? Why is there so little money for us, especially while we are
still struggling? Why do we give so much adulation to athletes and not
to writers — to physical achievements, not intellectual ones?

I’d
do it all over again, mind you, and I don’t regret a minute of time
spent on my writing career, and I’m very thankful for the financial help
I have had (from the Public Lending Rights for example) –but I do
wonder sometimes about the imbalance …

The Problem:


How do you write the boring bits between the interesting bits?

In other words, how do you breathe the magic on to the page to keep your readers awake, even when you aren’t writing the really exciting action bits?

Personally, I find that writing the exciting parts of the story – the adventures, or the emotionally charged character confrontations – is the easy task. What is tough is to get the hero in the door to start with, or to get the army to the battlefield, or to get the heroine up and dressed in the morning, or get the travellers from place A to place B.

Take the travelling. In a mainstream novel set in Megacity, no problem. You can say “She caught the train.” It’s somewhat harder in a fantasy. She walked. Um, she walked six days. (Reader is immediately thinking: what did she eat, was it safe to walk, where did she sleep, etc, etc, and they expect answers.)

But what if the answers are unimportant and have no bearing on your overall story arc? How do you get her from point A to B? How do you get the hero in the door?

1. Sometimes the answer might be simple. You use a trick:

e.g. the end of a chapter

Your hero goes to bed in his room at the inn at the end of chapter 10. At the beginning of Chapter 11 you have him knocking on the door of the villain’s house for the great confrontation scene. Voilà, you have avoided all that tiresome business of getting up, getting dressed, having breakfast etc, all of which is irrelevant to the story arc.

e.g. the division of your book into parts.

At the end of Part One, you have your king declaring to his councillors that they are going to march to war on neighbouring kingdom. Part Two opens with the king’s army besieging the walled city of the neighbouring king. None of that tiresome business of how you raise an army, supply it, arm it, march across the border…

e.g. the section break (seen in the book as a blank line or sometimes an asterisk or equivalent.)

Seen in the typed text as –TEXT BREAK HERE–

You write a scene where Mary is trying to decide which of her numerous dresses she is going to put on for the ball. You insert a text break, and then continue on to show Mary as she sweeps into the ballroom clad in her older married sister’s bright red gown, to the horror of the conservative dames. And you, the writer, have avoided the details of how she pinched her sister’s dress out of her closet.

Mostly, though, the problem of tiresome, irrelevant but important details is more difficult to solve.

2. Use a sentence or two rather than a paragraph of explanation. Gloss over the unnecessary details by the way you structure your sentence(s).

Problem: Your travellers, led by Jokum, have just arrived in a town. They are very hungry and very dusty. The reason they are there is to hunt out the local mage for help, only to discover that he has been arrested for treason. It is unlikely they would visit the mage ravenous and dirty, but you don’t want to dwell on how they eat and wash up – it is unimportant. You want to get to the exciting bit. However, if you don’t say something, your readers won’t find your story believable. So keep it succinct – explain but don’t bury your reader in detail.

Solution:
e.g.
After a meal and a wash at the first inn inside the city walls, they asked the way to the street of Mages. Ten minutes later, Jokum was knocking at Hokus’s door.
or
After stopping at the town pump for directions and to wash away the worst of their travel dust, they bought a loaf of fresh bread. By the time they reached the house of Mage Hokus, there wasn’t even a crumb remaining.

You may be able to think of even better ways to reduce the information down to a snappy minimum.
I am recycling some old posts

3. Spice up the boring in-between-bits with interesting world-building or character info.

(Remember, if it tells you something important about the world or the character, or if it pushes the story forward, then your info becomes important and interesting.)

For example – the army preparations might be boring – or they might not, if they include arguments between the king and his advisers or sons or brothers, or if they include the oddities of your world. For example, how do you feed your fighting dragons? How do you get your mages to the battlefield if they can’t cross water without losing power? Can you use magic or dragons or something else fascinating to supply your army with food?

4. Use dialogue to give the info.

It’s a lot easier to make something interesting if it is delivered in speech.
Here’s some info in text form:
By the time they reached Emitiville, the horses were thin and losing condition, so Tom bought some oats.
Spiced up with dialogue:
“Tom, did get any oats for the horses? If they lose any more condition, I reckon I’ll have to put another hole in my saddle girth.”
“Yeah, don’t worry. I bought some cheap, from the ostler’s wife. Only a shilling and a kiss. Well, a bit more than a kiss.” He grinned.
“What? You seduced the ostler’s wife?”

5. Condense specific info into a general paragraph

Here’s a section of text from “The Last Stormlord.” It covers six days of walking by the protagonist down a tunnel that supplies water to a city from the hills. He has just entered the tunnel and lit a lamp.

Now he could see what he was doing, he used the walkway built along the side. When he was tired or hungry, he stopped. He slept fitfully at intervals, stretched out on the walkway in the smothering dark with the lamp extinguished. When he awoke it was always into panic at the utter blackness, and the panic remained until his fumbling with flint, striker and tinder produced enough of a flame to light the lamp or a candle.

The next paragraph deals with him arriving at his destination. So those four sentences are all there is to cover six days – and (I hope) conjure up a bit of how it felt. The above paragraph gives all the necessary information (except perhaps the problem of waste disposal!!) without being boring. The waste disposal? Yes, I do deal with that too – it is one of the first questions the indignant water reeves ask him when they catch him at the city end of the tunnel. (Want to know more? Buy the book!)

6. Getting the hero out of the room by diverting the attention of the reader to something else. 

You have to get our teenage protagonist from, let’s say, the kitchen (where he’s just had an unsettling conversation with this mother about his elder brother), to the letter depository a mile away, because he wants to send an important message (that the reader already knows about) on the next coach out of town.

One way to do it is to ignore the uninteresting method and deal with the interesting thoughts he has. Let’s call him Jaydon.

He slammed out of the kitchen in a temper and, on his way across town to the letter depository, dwelt lovingly on numerous impractical plans to wreak revenge on that sneaky, mean-spirited liar of a brother of his. That bastard! How could George have behaved like that and upset his mother so – so callously?

By the time Jaydon arrived at the depository, the scowl on his face made the man behind the counter take a step backwards.

I’ll guarantee your reader won’t notice that you didn’t bother to tell them HOW he got across town. Did he walk? Take a coach? Ride?
Who cares? It wasn’t important. What he was thinking, though, was. And it was much more interesting.

________________________

Remember: Don’t worry too much in your first draft about what is boring and what is not. Get your story down first. Then start attacking the details. In your rewrites, aim to have NO boring bits. The above were just suggestions of some ways to do this. Look for other ways writers deal with the same problem. Learn by reading!

And your general aim should be:

I really don’t get this whole thing about not reading reviews of one’s own books. To me, that’s like writing into a vacuum. 

Most of us novel authors write because we love to create a story* — few would do it, then never ever let anyone read those stories.


Yes, we sometimes get scathing reviews. You can’t please everyone. But you also might get called “This decade’s best fantasy writer” as one recent Amazon reviewer said about me. I don’t actually believe that, mind you, but boy, does that boost the ego, and inspire me to write!

*Few do it  for the money — most of us don’t make sufficient income from books to live on!

“Downton Abbey Continues Its Sadistic Streak Against Women” is the title of an article in Slate Magazine by June Thomas, and I’m afraid it annoyed me. Perhaps I’m not qualified to comment, as I haven’t seen the latest episodes of that TV series. In fact, I stopped watching about halfway through the second season. 

But I wonder if the reason for the trauma of Downton Abbey women is perhaps this: 

Almost every culture throughout history has been stacked against women. One could argue that the writer of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes, is just telling it as it was (taking into consideration that any drama is going to up the trauma beyond the norms of most normal lives, for both men and women). 

 Life was often particularly nasty to those women who didn’t conform, and to women who were the first to step away from cultural restrictions. If they were backed
by money, or possessed power in their own right, or were protected by
the power of the men in their life, they could get away with it.
Otherwise? There were unpleasant consequences. 

Portraying women in fiction as perpetual victims is annoying, especially if they are always being saved by a man–but we can also go too far if we are critical because fictional women have a tough time. I don’t want to see writers making women too powerful and confident to fit their culture and upbringing and influences. I don’t want to see writers making the repercussions of rebellion too mild for their historical or cultural setting. I don’t want to see writers glossing over how tough it was to be female, how careful you had to be, and how painful if you were unlucky. 

June Thomas ends with these words:
A woman loses a baby, sister, daughter, or husband, or is humiliated in
front of her family and friends, and we get to watch them recover.
Raping a beloved character is just latest of the show’s experiments in
sadism. 

 Er, what? When a woman loses a loved one, isn’t someone else usually just as traumatised by the death, like…a husband or a father by the death of a child? And when a husband dies…um, isn’t he a man? He just lost his life …and nothing bad happened to that character? And if a woman is raped–well, you know what? It still happens! 

It seems to me that when we underplay the traumatic events in the lives of women, we are ignoring historical (or present day) truths. Where we as writers can excel is in showing how strong women can be when confronted with trauma. We can portray our fictional women characters as survivors and heroes. But if we downplay the kind of horrors that happen to fictional women simply because they are women, then we are pretending something that’s not true in the real world. 

Historically women do have it harder. In many, many parts of the world, even in our own societies, they still do. Let’s not gloss over it.

Here is the present state of my career and my books:
 
The Lascar’s Dagger (Trilogy name as yet undecided)
Book One has gone to copy edit. Publication date expected to be early 2014.
Book Two is being written. All being well, publication date will be no later than mid-2015, possibly earlier.
Book Three will be written in 2014. All being well, publication date not later than mid-2016, possibly earlier.
In this business, all publication dates are always tentative!


OTHER WORKS
1. In Australia:  
Harper Collins Voyager paper editions of my books may possibly be scarce in the future. If you have a missing book of one of the three trilogies, now might be the time to get it.

2. Ebook editions of  The Mirage Makers: 
Should be available in Australia, NZ, UK,  Europe and the Commonwealth, in English. Ebooks are also available in German.


3. Paper editions of The Mirage Makers:
Published 2006-2007
Should be available almost everywhere except USA, but could be becoming scarce in Australia.

4. Ebook and paperback editions of  The Watergivers aka Stormlord Trilogy:
Should be available in English worldwide.


5. French editions of Mirage Makers:
Alas, after the first volume was published, the publisher changed hands and the new publisher decided not to proceed with volumes 2 & 3, leaving readers high and dry. My deepest apologies to French readers. I don’t know what to say…

6. Havenstar ebook
Available at Smashwords.com for various formats except Mobi (for Kindle).
Will be available shortly, Ticonderoga edition, for Kindle/Amazon. Watch this space.


7. Havenstar print versions:
Will be out soon, hardback and paperback editions, from Ticonderoga Press, worldwide. Watch this space.

8. Ebook Isles of Glory:
Will be out soon from Fablecroft, worldwide, in English. Watch this space.


9. Isles of Glory, print editions:
Getting very scarce indeed in English. Still available in French and German.

Last week, Rowena Cory Daniells tagged me to write a post about my “next big thing” by answering a number of questions.

Which presented me with a problem: I certainly have a next big thing coming — my next trilogy, but I don’t really want to talk about it, other than saying the first book, The Lascar’s Dagger, is finished and the second book is started … But to be published by whom, and to be out when, is not settled yet. Let’s just say, discussions are ongoing.

So I am going to talk about my immediate thing, which for you may be BIG or not — depending on whether you have read Havenstar, or not. So here goes.

1) What’s the name of your Next Big Thing?

Well, it’s actually an old thing big thing. A stand-alone fantasy, Havenstar, that was first published in 1999 in the UK under the name of Glenda Noramly, and which was soon out of print because the Virgin sf/f imprint folded. (Yes, that Virgin. You didn’t know they published books, did you?) Havenstar was also published in German and Russian.

As a very new author at the time, I found it hard to figure why a book should wend itself up to 81 on the general Amazon best seller list (of all book types) only to be out of print the very next day…  Talk about from supreme happiness to despair in 24 hours! (I know better now — weird stuff happens all the time in the world of publishing!)

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

Long before the days of GPS or Harry Potter, I had a conversation about how cool it’d be if you could look at a map in the car and see what was happening on the ground in real time — and dodge traffic jams, accidents etc. And my niece, the same one who did this map for Havenstar, said, “That’s an idea for a book…”  Which is kinda like waving a sardine under the nose of a starving cat…

3) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I wouldn’t. I think the great glory of reading a book instead of seeing a film is to imagine everything yourself. So go read Havenstar and imagine! 

4) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Do you really want me to reduce a 160,000 word novel down to one sentence? Go read it instead! Oh, all right. It’s a book about a mapmaker. And magic maps. And the looming end of a world. And … ah, see? I can’t. 

5) Will your book be self-published or…?

I am self-publishing it as an eBook. With help from my friends (thanks Patty and Rowena for advice, Jo for helping with the copy editing after I made a mess of it, Perdy for art work and gorgeous map) of which you can see a clearer version here.

6) When will
your book be available? 

It is available already. You can buy it at here at Smashwords. Just scroll down and click on the title, pay and download it straight onto your Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony reader, iPad, iBook and just about any app you care to name! It’s also already up for sale on the Kobo site and will eventually turn up on Barnes and Noble sites too. I am in the process of putting it up on Amazon as well, but it will take a few more days for it to go live.

7) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I don’t need specific inspiration to write a book! I was born wanting to write books…


8) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?  

It’s a book for those who love traditional fabulist stories — it has all the tropes of the very best fantasy: a fellowship of unlikely companions, going on a journey, a land under extreme threat, a Dark Lord and his minions, adventure, tormented heroes, unlikely heroines, adventure, battles and unexpected twists and turns. And a love story, of course. And no, even though it has all those things, it’s not at all like Lord of Rings.

I guess the other intriguing thing about it  is how many people have told me they have re-read it multiple times.

And here for your amusement (its preservation showing just how obsessed I was with ratings at the time) is Havenstar at 81 on Amazon’s bestseller list, beating Visual Basic 6 Objects by Peter Wright…
Tom Clancy was at No 78 and 79, while Sword of Honour by Alexander Kent came in at No 80…

 (I wonder if it was possible to take screenshots back then? I just printed it off…ah, how things have changed!)

Me with my Mac in Perlis State Park a few days back

This the the row of chalets where we were staying In Perlis State Park

The view out of the back door after rain

The chalet in the evening

The view out of the front door

The journey to Perlis is long — more than 500 kms — but most of it is straight highway and a smooth run. so when I wasn’t driving, I wrote, achieving about 1,000 words going up and a similar number on the way back.

From the back porch

View from the bedroom window

Sometimes seats and table for writers are provided…

There’s been a bit of an internet discussion, sometimes quite heated, and some of it incredibly silly, about George R.R. Martin’s world as portrayed in his series that starts with Game of Thrones. You can read the main posts and comments  here and here if you feel so inclined.

But I am not getting into the discussion except to say a few general things that astonish me. In fact, I’m a bit taken aback that they need to be explained.

Firstly, don’t be a reader who confuses the story with the author in odd ways. For such readers, I have some news:  a writer who portrays a misogynist world in his story, is not necessarily a misogynist. In fact, s/he may be quite the contrary. Such a writer may be trying to say quite uncomplimentary things about misogynists, or about the society that allows them to have power.

The selection of the setting for a story says nothing whatsoever about the writer’s beliefs in his or her own life. Really. If I set a book in France, I’m not necessarily Francophile. If I write a story that is set entirely within an army at war, it doesn’t mean I am pro-military. Or pro-war. If I set a book in a matriarchal society, it doesn’t necessarily mean I think a matriarchal society is a good thing.

Secondly, do not confuse a reader’s desire to read certain types of books with their desire to visit the setting — or to hanker after a past that is no more, or to think it was a better world, or to live on the other side of the world. I am jaw-droppingly astonished that anyone has to actually SAY that.

If a reader likes reading war stories — do you REALLY think that says they want to be dropped into a war setting? Let alone one with swords and no modern medics? Do I hanker after medieval Europe because I like reading fantasies set in that world? I’d run a mile rather than be dumped in the middle of the real Wars of the Roses, even if I had a stack of magic at my disposal!

Nor do I want to work in a morgue/police station/hospital/space ship because I watch TV programmes about pathologists/detectives/doctors/spacemen, ok?

Thirdly, this icky question of rape. Believe me, I understand if you don’t want to read a book which has rape inside the pages, let alone several rapes. But please, don’t tell a writer what s/he should and should not write about. Rape and sexual assault is part of — probably — every society on the planet right NOW*. To write a book about war, or about medieval times, and leave sexual assault out of the scenario, and you might just be viewing a story through rosy glasses… My Stormlord Rising was criticised because it portrayed quite a bit of sexual assault (most of it during war and invasion) against both men and women. If you don’t want to read about it, put the book down. Don’t blame the author for being realistic.

Fourthly, don’t assume a medieval society has the same mores as your own, and is only different because they use swords and horses instead of bombs and cars. Some folk were saying Martin was writing about rape and paedophilia. By our standards, yes, he did. But – and it’s a big but – transpose a 13-year old bride to another society, forced to oblige her husband whether she likes it or not, and it is neither paedophilia nor rape. In fact, there are societies right here in the present day (even in Malaysia) where people think of this as normal. Sorry to disallusion those critics who want to think they have a handle on what’s morally right and wrong. It’s not so easy. And be careful about you own sins before you jump down my throat on this one.

Yes, to us, the handing over of a 13-year-old girl to a mature man as his bride is horrific. But for most of history, including YOUR own, children were adults long before we nowadays think of them as adults today. A boy of eleven or even younger was expected to work the same length of day as his father, doing the same sort of physical work, and he didn’t get paid for it, moreover.

A boy milked cows for a neighbour, starting at 5 a.m., before he walked the long distance to school. He was eleven and the year was 1901. At 12 he left school altogether (he had no choice in the matter, even though the legal age to leave was 14 in Australia at the time) and he started farmwork in earnest, all day, every day of the week, every week of the year. No holidays. Cows and harvests and farmers don’t take holidays. That was the 20th century — and he was my dad.

Back to medieval times. A woman became marriageable the moment she had her menses. And once married, there was no question of EVER legally refusing her husband his conjugal rights. Of course, one hopes most men are a lot nicer than that, even back in 1135, but legally? He had the right. And this is still so in many societies today. You can close your eyes to it, if you like, but don’t tell a writer s/he’s being crappy to write those sort of things into his/her story. They are real.

Fifthly, don’t think that if a writer portrays a dark skinned people as having a different culture from that of white Westerners, they are portraying them as barbaric. In actual fact, the commentator is identifying themselves as an arrogant Westerner who believes that any culture — other than their own, of course — is barbaric.

I’ve got news for that kind of reader too. Every culture is barbaric. In the wonderful enlightened West, we hound gay kids to suicide, murder transwomen, sell our teenagers drugs that will kill them, and drop bombs on civilians and call it collateral damage, refuse medical treatment to the poor because they can’t afford to pay.

So dark-skinned “barbarian” metes out some horrible punishment to another he perceives as a threat. No lawyer, no trial, no regular sentence, no chance of appeal. And in the West we stick them in Guantanamo. No lawyer, no trial, no regular sentence, no chance of appeal.

Many of George R.R. Martin’s main characters are white-skinned and sort of Western in a Middle Ages sort of way. They are also — by our present Western standards — brutal, undemocratic, living in a world lacking any legal recourse for the wronged (especially if they are poor or don’t have a sword).

In Martin’s world, the dark-skinned are … brutal, undemocratic, living in a world lacking any legal recourse for the wronged.  So tell me, just which were the barbarians again?

My point?
If you don’t like a book, any book, then criticise the writing or simply say, it’s not my kind of story. Don’t attack it by attacking the author because s/he must be like the characters. Don’t attack it because the world doesn’t match up to the one you think it ought to be (unless it’s supposed to be a historical novel). If you think a book promotes sexism/racism/monarchism/homophobia or whatever then be careful of how you illustrate your case.

Otherwise you end up saying more about yourself, than about the book and the writer you wanted to condemn.

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*I think decent men have a hard time understanding how prevalent it is. I’ve never been raped, but I have been physically assaulted in a sexual way, twice, by complete strangers. Once when I was fifteen, once after I was married. Both times I immediately launched an attack on the attacker, they skedadled and nothing much really happened. (The second time, I clobbered the guy with a heavy pair of Zeiss binoculars … threaten a birder when they are biridng, and that’s what happens!)