Before we kick off today’s blog post – and I promised bells
and whistles with this post, I know – I wanted to say a huge thank you.
Thank you to everyone who has supported me, and supported Every Breath, as we’ve made our way out
into the world. It’s been a truly
extraordinary experience, having this book published, and so many people have
stood up and helped out – I am incredibly appreciative of all of you.
So thank you to
every person who has encouraged, read, reviewed, bought, blogged, commented,
tweeted, shared, and otherwise created such an amazing groundswell of support
for Every Breath, especially for the
friends and family who have kept my spirits high and helped me stay sane!
I can’t express how much this means to me – I am thoroughly
humbled, and really really grateful.
At the bottom of this post I’ll show off a few pics of the
launches, both in Melbourne and in Castlemaine.
They were awesome fun, and I had a great time - and if you came along, I
hope you did too!
But first, the Crime Report…
Next on our whistle-stop tour of YA crime, I’ve invited the
lovely Rebecca James to come and put up with some weird questions!
Rebecca is the author of Beautiful
Malice, and her new novel Sweet
Damage was released this year. In Sweet Damage, rootless sun-bleached
surfer Tim is sucked into the mystery of Anna London, the strange occupant of
his new share-house in Sydney. Initially
sure that he can bring some light and normalcy to Anna’s life, instead Tim
becomes part of an ominous web of family history and half-truths until he’s not
sure what exactly is real and what is paranoia…
Rebecca, so nice to
finally have more than a brief Twitter conversation or five-line Facebook
message with you! How the heck are you?
I am very well. The sun is out in Canberra today and I don’t
even have the heater on. I think Spring may be coming which is a good thing...
We have a couple of
things in common – we both write YA (although you do more psychological
suspense stuff and I do straight murder mysteries), and we both live in large
and busy families. Now I know I have to
fight hard to get my writing time, and I’m sure you have those struggles too. How do you find the time to write? What do you reckon is the key to maintaining
a writing practice amidst all this bustle?
I don’t know that I’ve found the key or if one even exists.
Basically I try to work while my kids are at school and try not to work out of
school hours or on the weekends. That’s about it as far as time organisation
goes. This doesn’t always work, though, because family life is constantly
creeping into my writing time and vice versa.
I write from home and my husband has an office job and
generally this arrangement works pretty well for us. I get the kids ready for
school and drop them off in the morning and then pick them up at 3. It means my
working day is quite short (6 hours) and I sometimes feel like I’m only just
starting to get into things when 2 pm rolls around and I realise it’s nearly
time to stop. That can be a bit frustrating at times and occasionally I envy my
husband – he gets to leave the house early in the morning and can stay at work
until he’s finished.
The bizarre thing is that it wasn’t until I’d had kids that
I actually started writing. Something about becoming a mother made me crave a
creative outlet. It also taught me to use what little time I had productively.
I sometimes think that if I hadn’t had four kids (and thereby discovered what
hard work really was) I would never have had the stamina to finish an entire
book. I was far too scatterbrained and restless before.
I think, ultimately, that having a family and trying to work
is a messy and chaotic business, (kind of like this answer!), full of
compromise and negotiation. It’s hard to find a perfect balance. I always feel
like I’m neglecting something – my work,
my kids, the house, the dog, the tax, you name it. I never feel caught up or
‘finished.’ I always feel slightly frantic. I
think once you have kids you simply have to embrace the chaos and accept
the fact that you’re always going to feel a bit fractured.
Rebecca, you totally
read my mind with that answer! But now,
please tell us a bit about Sweet Damage – there are lots of hints dropped
along the way, about what has happened to Anna, and the whole book is layered
with mystery and suspense, in a stew of slowly-building tension. What were the challenges of writing a
mystery? Did it change the way you
wrote?
I guess the challenge with writing a mystery (and you could
no doubt argue that this is the case in writing any kind of fiction) is keeping
the narrative tight and tense without making it feel too contrived or obvious.
But I can’t necessarily tell you how to do this because I don’t actually understand
my own writing process. I just sit down and write. If I think about it too much
I start getting anxious and self-conscious, and that can be paralysing. I try
to keep the whole process instinctive and organic which unfortunately doesn’t
help me answer questions like these...
So why mystery and
psychological suspense, instead of something else? (zombie apocalypses, or
westerns, for instance?)
Oh, because I love psychological suspense. I love reading it and I love writing it and I
love watching it. At heart I think it’s
all about the damage people do to each other and it’s fascinating to consider
how far people will go to get what they want, to manipulate their world and the
people they come in contact with.
I’m fascinated by the cruelty people can inflict on each
other in a kind of everyday way, and how very frequently, if you dig a little,
you’ll find that the cruelty is actually coming from a place of pain and/or
vulnerability. (Which doesn’t necessarily justify the bad behaviour, though it
might sometimes go some way towards explaining it.) I think it’s also
fascinating to think about the psychology of victims and how much abuse or bad
treatment people will choose to put up with in the name of friendship or love.
And someone else has
noted your affinity with Du Maurier, so I have to ask – do you have a favourite
writer of suspense or crime? (and why are they the one that rocks your socks?)
I always feel weirdly uncomfortable when I try and list
favourites and I think it’s because my preferences are so fluid and changeable.
And I hardly think I’m unique in this but whether I enjoy a book or not depends
so much on my mood and the place I’m in, how hard I’m working, how much energy
I have, whether it’s late at night or early in the morning, whether I feel
obligated to read or whether I’m reading for pleasure -- it’s so difficult to
be subjective and so hard to be consistent.
I can definitely say though that I’d always be pretty happy
to have a freshly written book by Nicci French, Sophie Hannah, PD James,
Elizabeth George, Minette Walters, Gillian Flynn, Donna Tartt or Elizabeth
Haynes in my hands. At the moment I’m really enjoying Tara French and Patricia
Highsmith. And I absolutely love Anne Fine!
Now it’s honesty time
– what d’you reckon is your worst writing habit?
Procrastination.
Well, I don’t think
you’re alone in that one (ahem). But what
activities do you find most conducive for generating ideas? Personally I’m a big fan of driving while
listening to Triple J, or doing the dishes…
Actually, I’m pretty
boring that way. When I’m plotting or generating ideas I just sit at the table
with a pen and a piece of paper and think really really hard and write stuff
down until logical links are made and my random ideas start to form into something
that might resemble a plot.
And finally – writing must-haves? Beverages, snacks, music? What do you take with you to your writing
cave?
At the moment my desk is in my kitchen so I’m very close to
the fridge and the tea canister and the kettle. This is handy for satisfying my
tea habit. I drink too much tea. Far too much.
Rebecca thanks for
coming along for the ride! (and for answering my questions so beautifully). Find out more about Sweet
Damage here - it's available where all good books are sold. You can check out Rebecca’s
website here.
So I won’t keep you much longer – realistically, I don’t
think I can fit everything that’s
happened into this one blog post – but I better give a few updates.
Over the last few weeks the tempo has increased, with
reviews and interviews and special stuff appearing on blogs and all over the
place. If you’d like to check out some
of the lovely Every Breath reviews,
go over here to The Rest Is Still Unwritten, or here to Speculating on SpecFic. You can read Carmel Shute’sfantastic launch speech here, at Sisters in Crime, or you can trot over to
Goodreads and check out the nice things people are saying (and there’s still
time to enter the Goodreads giveaway – hop to it!)
The most exciting thing was seeing Every Breath reach Number 3 on the Readings Bestselling Kid’s
Chart! That was amazing, and you were the folks who made it happen
(like I said at the Castlemaine launch, I
wasn’t the one who went out and bought all those books, that was totally you
guys). I did a feature on 'The Story of My Book' for the website - the Readings family was really supportive in hosting the Every Breath Melbourne launch, so thank you, Readings!
Another exciting thing – Every
Breath was featured in Girlfriend magazine, which was awesome! Grab a copy of the mag for their review, or
if you head over to their website you can download a free excerpt of Every Breath to taste test! (And if you’d like to get an early gander at the
covers for Every Word and Every Move, as
featured, have a look here.)
Now – the launch parties.
Rather than describe, I’ve chucked a few pics up here to give you a feel for the occasion/s - I'll put some more up next post. Thank you so much to all of you who came along, and happy birthday to Every Breath – you’re loose in the wild now, baby!
Xx Ellie
