Guest Post by R.N. Morris: The unbearable weirdness of being published

Great writer and thoroughly good chap, R.N. Morris’ latest Porfiry Petrovich novel, A Razor Wrapped in Silk, is published on Thursday, and he’s here to talk about it.

Also, courtesy of those good people at Faber and Faber, we have 5, yes FIVE, SIGNED copies to give away. All you have to do is leave a ‘pick me’ comment and at the end of the week I’ll put the names into a hat (or something similar) and pull out five winners – the only restriction is that you have to live within Europe.
So, without further ado, I give you R.N. Morris…


The unbearable weirdness of being published
I’ve got a book coming out on Thursday. My fourth published novel. You’d think by now I’d be used to the experience. But I’m not. I get incredibly apprehensive ahead of the publication date. My overriding instinct is to run and hide. I find the mental image of myself with a blanket over my head strangely comforting. And yet, at the same time, I feel as though I should be doing everything I can to tell people about the event. So every now and then I scribble notes under the blanket and pass them out to whoever happens to be passing (thanks, Nik). Metaphorically speaking, of course.

I veer between being worried that newspapers will ignore it and I won’t get a single review, and terrified that it will be universally and humiliatingly panned. It never occurs to me to hope that people might like it. Amazon exercises a terrible fascination over me. I carefully monitor the ranking ahead of publication, to see if any pre-orders have generated an upsurge in that dread number. But I’m desperate to cure myself of the habit because, to be frank, that way madness lies. Not to mention heartache and despair. So if anyone knows where I can buy some kind of gadget that administers an electric shock whenever I even think about going to Amazon, I would be very grateful to hear from you.

But what truly characterises my feelings about the fact of publication, the thing that I really can’t get over, is sheer incredulity that this is happening at all.

The reason for this, I think, is that publication came relatively late for me. I always tell writers who comment enviously on what they insist on seeing as my “success” (their word, not mine), that I spent longer as an unpublished writer than I have as a published one. In fact, my first published novel, Taking Comfort, came out in 2006, when I was 46. I’m now fifty, as my fourth book, A Razor Wrapped in Silk, hits the shelves. So that’s five years as a published author and over twenty as an unpublished one (counting inclusively, just in case you’re checking my maths!).

I realise that there are writers who have waited longer for publication, but that’s not my point. I’ve been writing all my life, and desperately trying to get published for over half of it. What this means is that I have been living with rejection for years. And years. And years. You know, when you spend so long living with something, you get used to it being around. When it’s gone, you kind of miss it, even though all it ever did was block out the light like a mental and emotional eyesore.

The unpublished writers among you may find all this hard to believe. But I promise you it’s true. I spent so long in rejection’s company, under its dark shadow, that my relationship with it, abusive though it was, became one of the things that shaped and defined me. I was, in my own mind and others’ too I felt sure, a failure. Certainly a failed writer. I still have residues of the massive clump of misery that permanently inhabited me for decades clinging on to my spirit, sapping my confidence and stunting my hope. For that reason, I can’t quite bring myself to believe that the tide has finally turned. And I certainly don’t trust that my new-found good fortune will last.

You may say I protest too much. And perhaps I do. Perhaps I’m also trying to justify my obsessive amazon-checking and auto-googling (in my defence, what I google are my titles rather than my name). What all this activity is about, I would argue, is proving to myself that this is really happening, that I really do have a book coming out. A book published by Faber and Faber, no less. With my name on the cover.
Of course, there’s nothing that proves the reality of publication like walking into a bookshop and seeing your books, ideally on a nice 3 for 2 table at the front of Waterstones. So, yes, I do wander into bookshops and casually look for copies of my own books. Guilty as charged. Strangely, when I see the books I feel even more alienated from the process of publication than I did before. How did they get here? I wonder. Surely there must be some mistake? Or, more often, I must be dreaming.

Sometimes I think that I’m hooked up to a Matrix-like machine that is feeding me the delusion of being a published author (a dream I cherished for so many years and actually came close to giving up on) and almost convincing me of its reality. I must say, if it is a delusion, it’s not quite as great a fantasy as it might be. There are huge tranches of frustration and imperfection – of general crappiness you might say – in my life. So either there are some technical glitches with the Matrix, or it is all real after all: I do have a book coming out on Thursday. Though I for one find it hard to believe.


Roger Morris is the author of four published novels. His latest, written as R.N. Morris, is A Razor Wrapped in Silk, which will be published, or so he’s led to believe, by Faber and Faber on April 1, 2010. The significance of the date has not escaped him. It follows A Gentle Axe and A Vengeful Longing in a series of crime novels featuring Porfiry Petrovich, the investigating magistrate from Dostoevsky’s great novel Crime and Punishment. Roger’s first novel was the contemporary urban thriller Taking Comfort. He has collaborated with the composer Ed Hughes on an opera called Cocteau in the Underworld, an extract of which will be performed at the Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden on April 14 and April 16.
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You can see an earlier interview with Roger here.

The Danger of the Single Story and a Clean Office

Do you mind if I’m a little smug? No? Good. 
But you want to know why I’m smug? Of course I’ll tell you.
I cleaned my office today. It no longer has more dust than a Philip Pullman novel. I can see the floor. I can see my desk. I even threw the stuff I haven’t needed for, like, months out.
I am organised.
Look!



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I saw this on the brilliant Vanessa Gebbie’s blog earlier and just had to share it. It’s brilliant.
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Also worth checking out is Michelle’s interview with Tania Hershman, on giving up the day job. She’s interviewed me about it too, I’ll link to it when it’s up (but I warn you, unlike Tania I sound rather grumpy).

A Couple of Places to Go

My ol’ chum Roger (mostly N nowadays) Morris is running an exciting free books competition to celebrate the release of A Vengeful Longing paperback.

I’ll be back shortly to do a meme I think, which might be more intersting to me than to anyone else. Maybe. We’ll see.

Spreading the Word

Rosy Barnes has tagged me with this rather useful little meme. Basically it’s this: you get tagged by someone who’s mentioned, on their blog, three to five books they think should be given more attention. Then you post something on your blog, mentioning these, along with three to five of your own.

Rosy’s are:

Wisdom of Whores by Elisabeth Pisani
Prince Rupert’s Teardrop. Lisa Glass
Borderliners by Peter Hoeg

and mine are:

Love that Dog, by Sharon Creech
Willful Creatures, by Aimee Bender
Taking Comfort, by Roger Morris
Something Beginning With, by Sarah Salway

I’m not going to tag anyone specifically because I’d like as many people to do it as possible. It’s a terrific idea. So, come on people – SPREAD THE WORD!

Forgetful

Honestly, I’ve a memory like a sieve at the moment.

The two books I’ve mentioned recently (Willful Creatures and Out of a Clear Sky) were not discovered by accident. No sir. Out of a Clear Sky, I found, via Roger and Vulpes Libris; and Willful Creatures came to me courtesy of the Short Review.

I meant to mention that before. I forgot.

So now you know. Anyway, what was I doing…?

The Inspiration Machine

See details here. I have already told Mr Morris that I want one. And I trust its inventor because she provided me with a rather super quote for my world book day promotional posters earlier in the year. I think she’ll go a long way.

Oh, and I can just about feel my face again.

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Also, for those of you interested in children’s literature, may I direct you in the direction of the ever-fab http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/ please? They’re having a children’s themed week or two, starting on July 5th, which will even feature a certain Julia Donaldson.

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And if any of you have a slightly evil sense of humour, maybe you should have a look here, or here.

What Do YOU Think?

I think this post over at the fabulous Short Review is an incredibly interesting and relevant one. It’s about self published books being reviewed.

I’m curious, what do you think? You can leave your thoughts here, or more helpfully over at the Short Review.

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Also, The Chigaco Tribune’s paragraph of the month is one of Roger’s. Woo! Now that is cool.

One for The Children, and One for The Adults.

Children first.

I think I must have first read Derek Keilty’s, Alien Science Bus, in some form or other, a couple of years ago. It was, if memory serves, around the time when I was writing, or had just written, I Met a Roman. I remember thinking then how much I liked it and how I thought it deserved to be a book.

Well today, ladies and gentlemen, it is.

Congrats, Derek!

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And for the adults…, an interesting article by Roger Morris over at Vulpes Libris on the marketing of books. Interesting stuff, but I warn you: it does contain some strong language.

Less About Me

So, a post that’s not about me for a change.

It’s an interview with top author, and top bloke, Roger (sometimes N) Morris, whose third book, A Vengeful Longing (Faber and Faber) was released earlier in the month.

So, over to Roger…

So, who’s it for and what’s it about?

Ah, these are deceptively simple questions! Who’s it for, I suppose I always write the kind of books I would like to read. So my ideal reader is someone like myself! It’s a historical crime novel, so I’m obviously hoping fans of that genre will go for it. I try to balance the needs of a good crime novel with other perhaps more literary demands – characterisation is important to me, as well as the quality of the writing. It’s set in St Petersburg in the 1860s and features Porfiry Petrovich, a character I’ve taken from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. A series of apparently unconnected murders take place in a stifling summer. Porfiry is distracted by the unsanitory stench of an open drain, so it takes him a while to piece things together. A bit I like from the blurb says “Delving into the hidden, squalid heart of the city, he is brought face to face with incomprehensible horror and cruelty, in this vivid rendering of a brutal and stifling nineteenth-century St Petersburg.”

Why did you write it?

There are so many ways to answer this. I love writing historical novels, I love researching a particular period and setting, getting deeply involved in it, and letting the stories and characters develop from how that research impacts on my imagination. I read this quote about the historical novel that described it as “the fruit of the seductive fornication of history and imagination.” I for one do find it very seductive!

What do you hope readers will get from it?

My primary aim, always, is to entertain. A good story, good writing, characters that intrigue and with whom the reader can engage. A real vivid sense of the time and place.

How long did it take you to write?

Between a year and eighteen months. Probably more like the latter. I was supposed to do it in a year but I got a bit behind.
Did you use a fountain pen to write it?

No, a quill! No, seriously, I do write in longhand first and then transfer to computer, but I use Pilot Ball pens for preference. Or anything. A biro.

Tell us something about you.

I’m a dad. I live in Crouch End, which is in North London. I’ve just had a birthday. I got a Dennis the Menace T-shirt from my son, a guitar strap from my daughter, and a Sea Sick Steve CD from my wife.

What’s next for you?

I’m researching and generally working myself up to start writing the next Porfiry Petrovich adventure. I’m also working with a friend, who is a composer, on an opera. I’m providing the words. Libretto, I believe it’s called. I’m learning lots of fancy words like that!

Anything you’d like to add?

Just like to say thanks for the opportunity, Nik.
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And while I’m on the subject of interviews, there’s a great one with Laura Dave over at Vulpes Libris.
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(Added: Apologies for the inconsistent line spacing. Blogger is misbehaving.)