Year of Indie Debuts: Freefall Into Us

Today’s indie debuts star is Tess Rosa, a fellow Urbane author whose collection of poetry and short stories is a truly lovely thing. I’m delighted to have her along to find out more about her and her writing. Warning – if swearing offends you then stop reading now!

You can win a paperback copy of Freefall Into Us by commenting on this blog to say why you’d like one. More details at the end of the post…

Tess, you’ve been compared to Kerouac and Rollins in a battle of words – how does it feel to be likened to such (in)famous writers with your debut collection?

I remember that day vividly. When I first read the blurb that would go on the back of my book jacket, and a few other places for that matter, I went nuts. I began to panic, swore for about five minutes then proceeded to call a fellow writer friend in NYC. “Jack Kerouac and Henry Rollins?” I screamed. “What the fuck? I mean, Henry, okay, (priding myself on being compared to the likes of him) but Kerouac? Have they lost their fucking minds?” I mean, come on, those are huge ass shoes to fill. I felt the reviewers would have a field day. You may as well put me and my book  out in a meadow and use us for target practice!

Well, a few writer friends talked me off the ledge and said “This is your time. This is your place. It will go down however you want it to go down. Stand tall, and take it with grace.” So, I had a huge glass of wine, smoked a pack of cigarettes and never looked back. Oddly enough, those that know me, know that I love Kerouac. But not so much for his writing, but for who he was and what he stood for as a writer. I did a lot of digging on him because I wrote a short story titled ‘Saving Jack’. I needed to know much about him if I was going to write him as a character. His awkwardness, his battle with alcoholism, his sex appeal, his writing, his hating to be in the limelight (interviews, etc.), his tragic death at a very young age.

When I finished the story, I kid you not, I found the following quote from Kerouac. “I hope that it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others, but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.” Without giving much of the story away, it is about reincarnation. I brought back my beloved Jack. When I found that quote, I swore Jack himself had shown it to me. I had never come across it in all of his work. The coincidence of that moment astounded me.  I am getting off subject here, but, yea, it was a tough pill to swallow. But, as the reviews began coming in, I had also been compared to Raymond Carver, Paul Auster, John Cheever, with F.Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway sprinkled in. I guess now I take it with a grain of salt. We all have opinions and they all differ. If someone is reading my work and they think of another writer as they read me, well, I am honored and humbled. Incidentally, Rollins was changed to Anais Nin. Thank God, I needed a woman thrown in there!
For me you really seem to have captured the essence of life – moments of pure joy, despair, love, loss, grimness, romance and indifference, as well as some mind-blowing and some very mediocre sex. Did you set out to write this collection with that approach in mind or were all the pieces written at different times and these themes emerged as you brought them all together?

Tough question. Pause, ponder….Okay. The first story I wrote and finished quickly was ‘Crystal Blond Persuasion.’ My brother had just died as I had begun to write that story. I was grief stricken. Some of the scenes in that story were actually me, feeling extreme anguish and complete sadness. This will sound morbid to you, but I had thoughts of climbing into my brothers coffin and rotting right along with him. That pain propelled me forward like a rocket. After all, it was through my brother David that I had become an avid reader and writer. I kept diaries for years. Sadly, when I was 17, I burned them all.  Anyway, David was always reading and I followed suit. He hooked me onto Stephen King big time. My book is dedicated to my brother. Without his love, I wouldn’t be where I am today. There is also a lot of sex in that particular story. Sometimes we syphon our pain through sex or other addictions. I began drinking more than usual and ‘acting out.’

There is much pain, sadness, and loss in my book. Much of that stemmed from my brother’s death. A year after he died, I met a man that changed my life. I fell hard in love with him. The last story in the book which bears the title, ‘Freefall Into Us’ is our story. You will have to read it. It’s pretty messed up stuff but I was given barrels of fruit with which to write after all that shit went down. I believe you have to live, to write. I mean really, really live. I have always lived hard, loved hard and taken many risks with my heart. So, yes, there is pieces and fragments of me in those stories and the only way I could heal was to put them on paper. Oh, mediocre sex? I try to keep my relationships of my characters real,  not superficial. Mediocre sex has happened to each and everyone of us, and if one says no, they are full of shit.
Where do you feel happiest as a writer – in prose or poetry form? And why?

Just writing makes me happy. It is very therapeutic for me. I suffer from anxiety, panic and loneliness. Therefore, I feel the need to write. It brings me out of that funk. The poetry comes with experiences, so it is all true life. I can’t just sit down and write poetry. Poetry writes me. It moves through me and I never know when that is going to happen. When it does happen, I can’t stop it. It’s as if something is talking to me in my head and placing the words for me. When it is over, and I am finished, I usually feel extreme mental and physical exhaustion. Like I had just run a marathon or something. I am spent. I can’t think. I stare at nothing, my mind completely worn out and blank. Does that sound crazy to you? It’s hard to explain.

The short stories are always rolling around in my imagination. I will piece them together in my head for weeks, sometimes months, before I can actually start writing them. I am always throwing short story ideas at my daughters and friends. It helps to pitch it to someone. I am always looking for validation. I think a lot of writers do. Feelings of inadequacy and self doubt are always creeping around me. I try to stand strong and keep forging ahead. As long as I feel the ‘need’ the ‘want’ to write, I will continue to do so.

I get a lot of feedback regarding my poetry. I never looked at or thought of myself as a poet. In fact, when I sent my short story collection to Urbane there was poetry thrown along with it, which I told Matthew to ignore. He loved it. Said it was brilliant. After the book came out, I had people telling me when they read my poetry, they felt as if I had written it just for them. Statements like this made me cry. I write poetry to understand my pain, sadness, love, etc., and to hear someone say, that I made them cry, or that I expressed something that they never possessed the words to express, well that  is beyond comprehension. We are all connected and feel the same hurts, love, etc.  I feel I was given the ‘gift of poetry’ and it is simply my duty to give that gift away.  I wrote a very tough poem called ‘Shush’ about molestation that will be in my next book, ‘An American Slumber.’ It is a hard piece to read, but I think many will resonate with it. I feel I have really found my voice, through being a poet, and that makes me elated.

One of things I enjoyed most about the short stories in the collection is that they cross genres, and include one of my favourites, dystopia. As a writer are you drawn to experimenting in different genres and can we expect more of this from you?

Yes!! Absolutely. For instance,  I love horror but I can’t write it, try as I may.  Something you may or may not know about me. I belonged to a group years ago called WSPIR – Washington State Paranormal Investigative Research. It is hands down one of the most interesting things I have ever been involved in. Just the people I worked with were incredible in themselves! Psychics, mediums, clairvoyants, even the techies in the group!  As a child, I had many experiences with ghosts. As a teenager, I held seances and played with Oujia boards. Anyway, I saw something horrific and decided I couldn’t do that work anymore. Trust me, that kinda fucks with your psyche. I definitely miss the people I worked with though. (I smell a story about a clairvoyant for sure!)

Anyway, you would think I would be able to write a killer ghost story because of this, but honestly, I have no interest in doing that. I do write somewhat of a ghost story in ‘Gone Awry’ but I never looked at it as creepy (ghosts I mean) so therefore, I can’t make it scary because it’s not scary to me. Does that make sense? Although I LOVE scary stories. Go figure. You will never ever catch me writing a ‘Harlequin Romance’ type book. Let me make this perfectly clear. NEVER!!!  I felt my strangest story in the book was ‘Homeless Baby’. I mean, come on, rats cart off a newborn on the streets of Seattle? Again, though, this story is about reincarnation and being given another chance to make life right.

Many artists, writers, etc. believe that we have many lives. I feel as though the bad people (murderers) don’t get to hell. They come back instead as roaches, rats, or lice on pubic hair.  I mean come on, that is hell right there. I love the story ‘Homeless Baby’ because it explains the whole process of this. It seems far-fetched to some, but honestly to me it is possible. This was one of my favorite stories to write, hands down.
I can’t write spy thrillers. I don’t read them so maybe that is why. Basically, I can write anything that begins building in my head. I get a lot of feedback about the short story, ‘The Pasture/Europa, the dystopia that you mentioned. I never thought I would write a post-apocalyptic story, but boom, it happened. I think a lot about the super volcano(caldera)  that runs under Yellowstone National Park (Montana/Wyoming/Idaho border). I also heard about some underground shelters that were popping up in the United States. One that I stumbled upon, called Vivos, was intriguing as hell. My intrigue with this shelter catapulted into my brain and ‘The Pasture’ was born! Here’s a snippet with my favorite line in bold.  “As I said before, these shelters are popping up all over the place, but, as you can imagine, they’re very private. Heaven forbid would you want to save as many people as possible; poverty, class, social status and ethnicity being of no matter. These dwellings are only for the extremely wealthy. I think, honestly, I would rather die with the vast majority than live trapped underground with a bunch of pretentious motherfuckers with money stashed up their asses.” This sums up how I feel about being in one of those shelters should the ‘big one’ hit.

Some have thought my book was erotica. Let me be very clear here. It’s absolutely not erotica. I will never write a book of erotica, either. That’s been done, and I can’t top Anne RoqueIaure (Anne Rice) so I won’t even try. She is the goddess of erotica. Yes, there is sex in my book,  but isn’t sex a basic need and a realistic part of life.? A few have ridiculed me for all the sex, so I am assuming they have either never had it, or never enjoyed it. It happens to be one of the greatest perks in life in my opinion. Hell, even mediocre sex has it’s place. 😉 Basically, I try not to put my thoughts in a box. Leaving my mind open is best. Sometimes I surprise myself with the shit that I come up with. I will just keep on keeping on and though I am originally from Montana, you won’t find me writing a Western anytime soon. xoxo

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Thanks so much for this, Tess. It’s been fun and enlightening! Leave a comment below by 9pm (GMT) on 16th February for your chance to win a copy.

If you can’t wait that long, then you can buy one here. And you can connect with Tess on Twitter.

Urbane and the Winners

You may have noticed that I’ve been very excited about Urbane Publications since signing with them. And it’s not just because they’re publishing my book! I’ve read several of the novels that have been published by them so far, some of which you can find out more about in the Year of Indie Debuts blog series, and it’s great to discover so many new and diverse voices.

That Urbane genuinely want to collaborate with authors, combined with Matthew’s never ending enthusiasm and decades of experience in the publishing industry, made me want to partner with him for the new annual story prizes, which I’m hoping to establish as an important competition on the annual circuit that gives writers good cash prizes (these will grow as the number of entries do) and also gets them published professionally.

So these are the reasons why I chose to partner with Urbane for the publication of the annual anthologies that will come out of the competition. But it’s not just about me so I asked Matthew why he chose to get involved as well…

Matthew, why did you choose to partner with Retreat West to publish the anthology of winning stories in the RW Short Story Prize and RW Flash Fiction Prize?

Well, many reasons but mainly because Retreat West is rapidly becoming one of the leading resources for new and experienced writers, providing support, information and advice to a growing community of authors. Partnering with you offers Urbane a unique opportunity to engage with this vibrant and energetic community of writing talent.

What excites you about collaborating on the winners anthology?

Urbane is driven by positive collaboration, so to have this opportunity to work in partnership with the most talented authors in flash and short story fiction is wonderful. There’s nothing better than to be part of the creative writing process. And a competition also means that authors that might not have heard of Urbane will find us, and likewise I’ll find authors that I might not have come across otherwise.

What can the authors included in the anthology can expect from being published through your innovative press?

The winning authors will not only be ‘traditionally’ published in a high quality volume, but they will all be involved in the development of that book. Urbane brings every author to the heart of the publication process – it will be a team effort!

What does the market for short story anthologies look like now that the short form has undergone a resurgence and is very popular again?

Interestingly, anthologies seem to fare better commercially than single author collections, particularly in bookshops. Though we are yet to see the excitement and popularity of flash and short story fiction on digital channels truly translate to print copy success. This will be the catalyst!

 

Thanks for coming along, Matthew. I’m really excited about this too!

If you’d like to appear in the anthology and get your work read by leading writers, Vanessa Gebbie and David Gaffney, then you have until 30th September 2016 to enter the competitions. We all look forward to reading your work!

 

Get more info on how to enter the RW Short Story Prize and how to enter the RW Flash Fiction Prize.

 

 

Live, laugh and love

Fellow Urbane author, Daniel Gothard, has just had his third novel published. Simon Says is a funny, bittersweet tale of a man trying to get over his engagement ending and find a new way to be happy in the world. Daniel has kindly written a guest blog all about love and laughter and giving his hapless hero the same name as the super suave fictional character, Simon Templar, aka The Saint…

“A little bit of me and a whole lot of you …”

(Harry Connick)

 

Romance and comedy are not the most obvious bedfellows and thousands of films and books have been created using only one of the genres. But I believe, when the mix is right, the symbiosis can summon up a sense of the most entertaining and life-affirming moments we can experience.

Shakespeare is perhaps the starting point for most literary criticism in terms of genre, plot device, characterisation, etc, and he knew the value of romantic comedy; the desire within an audience to follow the travails of his characters and their misunderstandings, misfortunes and resolutions – laughing, crying and feeling for them – until the happy ending.

Much Ado About Nothing” springs to mind as a classic romantic comedy – it perfectly utilises the cliches of men being Men and women being Women, while slowly undermining the facade of gender roles and embracing the frailty of basic humanity and love.

The world of film has made hundreds of millions of dollars from romantic comedy, from the intelligent ‘talky’ films such as “Annie Hall” and “When Harry Met Sally” through to the plain daft end of the spectrum with more puerile-based romance and comedy ‘classics’ including “There’s Something About Mary” (a film I love and would include in any Best Of list when thinking of the genre).

When Harry Met Sally” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral” – for me – are two of the best romantic comedies ever made. Everything seems to have been constructed perfectly: locations, actors, music and – most importantly – the writing. Nora Ephron and Richard Curtis must have spent hours and hours perfecting each line, using every word to convey the characters’ emotions and their unique blend of humour, tragedy, near-misses, unrequited loves and the final payoffs. I have watched both films so many times, and I still marvel at the skill both writers employed so successfully.

Romantic comedy is an artform within writing, and it was deep love for the genre that led me to the decision to try and write my novel – “Simon Says“. I decided to give my central character a relatively well-known name – Simon Templar (the dashing hero in the novels of Leslie Charteris, the television shows and the 1997 Val Kilmer film). I wanted an immediate paradox, a character who, from birth, has been put in an impossible situation, by his thoughtless parents, of having those around him perceive an image – based purely on his name – formed from fiction: unattainable charm and glamour; the most heroic and witty of protagonists.

My Simon was always destined to be the complete opposite to the original Templar when faced with the rush and push of the difficulties in life, and yet he still manages to exist through his own fictions: the mental soundtrack he wishes he could connect with; the cultural reference points he clings to – with his best friend Sean – as a way of ameliorating the worst moments in his life. I confess, I did deliberately use some of the puerile humour I mentioned earlier: Simon, drunk and being chased for urinating on a tree, unable to zip himself up, flapping in the night breeze just made me laugh, so I put it in.

I hope I did a good job of mixing romance and comedy, it’s a grand tradition and I would love to think that someone, somewhere might read my book – perhaps laugh, cry, almost certainly cringe – and feel that incredible drive of the life-affirming and entertaining.

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Many thanks, Daniel. I’m sure readers will laugh, cry and cringe at Simon’s story!

UK readers can win a paperback copy of Simon Says, just leave a comment telling us your favourite romantic comedy novel or film and a brief reason why you love it so much. Winners will be chosen by random number generator. Deadline for leaving comments is 9pm on Sunday 17th  January 2016. The winner will be announced here shortly after.

If you’d like to connect with Dan, you can read his work in After Nyne magazine and find him on Twitter. He’ll also be at Waterstones, Reading, on Feb 17th reading and signing books and all are welcome. You can get free tickets here.

The New RW Annual Prizes

I’m really excited to announce the launch of the new annual short story and flash fiction prizes. After running the bi-monthly competitions for a couple of years it seemed like the time was right to take a step up to an annual competition with bigger and better prizes.

As well as getting significant cash prizes the winning and shortlisted stories in both the RW Short Story Prize and RW Flash Fiction Prize will be published by Urbane Publications in the winners’ anthology.

Matthew Smith, founder and owner of this exciting independent publishers, said: ‘I’m thrilled and honoured that Urbane Publications will be in the very privileged position of publishing the winners from this year’s Retreat West Short Story and Flash Fiction prize in an exclusive anthology. Short and flash fiction continues to grow in popularity as a form for both readers and writers, and the sheer quality of many pieces means the competition will be fierce. I can’t wait to collaborate with Retreat West and the winners to create a wonderful book and ebook for readers.’

For me, I’m hoping that the prize will grow in popularity year on year so that the cash prizes for the winners can increase and more great writers can get their work published and read more widely. The quality of the work submitted in previous competitions has been very impressive and I know that the entries for these competitions will be of the same high standard.

Award winning short story and flash writers, Vanessa Gebbie and David Gaffney, are the judges for the 2016 prizes, which are open for submissions now. Find out more on the links below and we all look forward to reading your work! Let me know what you think of the new awards too in the comments below!

Year of Indie Debuts: Billy and the Devil

Welcome to Dean Lilleyman – this week’s indie debut author who is here talking about his novel, Billy and the Devil, which I really liked a lot. I completely engaged with the troubled narrator, Billy, who we stay with from childhood to middle-age, and was swept away on a wave of different emotions as he self-destructed and ruined all that was good in his life. As I said to Dean – I wanted to shake Billy then hug him. Despite how dark the novel is, it also had moments of real laugh-out loud humour and a vein of hope running through it, and it’s one that’s going to stay with me for a long time.

Dean, despite some of the terrible things he does I found myself unable to dislike Billy. How did you approach writing a character that remains sympathetic when behaving really badly?

That’s encouraging to hear. I don’t think Billy is one ‘self’. Especially when the story gets past the halfway mark. Young Billy sees the beauty in things, is happy in his own company, and despite what’s happening around him, there’s an unquestioned hope. Then comes the drink, an ever-increasing habit that sets up a rhythm of separation, a pattern that to begin with retains some glimmers of the real Billy. And then, over time, Billy becomes split from whatever he was.

Throughout, there are repeated images of him seeing himself outside of himself, a dark mirror. For me, that’s what alcoholism did. The night-before version of me, hurtful and inexplicably uncaring towards those I loved, who loved me, this self-destructive cycle that filled the morning-after version of me with absolute disgust, with self-hatred, which is certainly the main thing I wanted to show in Billy and the Devil. This is why ‘when behaving really badly’ as you put it, I wanted to make the reader feel the same sense of disgust that I felt for myself back then, and while Billy’s acts are not necessarily my acts, the truth is in the repulsion, which is why I chose not to turn the camera eye away. And yes, I understand that this might put some readers off. But it was a gamble I was prepared to make.

When I came off the drink for real and started reading, watching films, I leant towards stories that featured alcoholics, maybe to try and understand something about myself. I got very frustrated with some of these stories. It was mostly a tell through a prettied lens. Oh dear, they’ve lost their job. Oh dear, they’ve lost their husband or wife, etc. The frustration was, of course, that there is so much more to it than that. The disgust, the self-loathing, the losing of self-respect, the losing of self. Because, what do you have left if you lose yourself? I wanted to show that, as vividly as I could, and if it meant people stepping away from me for writing this book, not seeing the reason for using such a device, not understanding the importance of gambling on such a fiction based in truth to tell a truth, then so be it. Thankfully, there are people that have read Billy and understand, that see what I’m doing. And for all the possible misunderstandings of such a ‘dirty’ story, the responses I’ve had so far from people who have had similar experiences, or have lived with alcoholics, has given me much armour.

There are elements of us as writers in every character we create so which characteristics would you say you share with Billy? 

There’s a lot of me in Billy. But Billy isn’t me. We share our alcoholism, obviously. Our waves of depression. Which for me is near-manageable now I’m not drinking. But for Billy, as it was for me back then, these waves get massively exacerbated by drink. Up, down, up, down, and on it goes, until he hits the point, like I did, of down, down, down. In terms of structure, the novel is certainly built to emphasise this cycle, these concentric circles, much in the same way Dante’s Inferno travels. What else? A love of the woods. Of nature. A cynicism of gang mentality. Of self-appointed hierarchies. Of not dealing with rejection too well. But perhaps unlike Billy, this seems to act as petrol for me now, pushing me further to do my own thing anyway.

Geographically, me and Billy share much. All of it, really. And yes, that self-destructive nature. This has caused me trouble at times. But then again, sometimes it seems to work for me. Smashing things up puts me in a place where I have to put things back together again, and more often than not these things get put back together better, stronger. But that’s the thing with Billy, isn’t it? He doesn’t put these things back together. It’s an anger that’s fired outward, but really, it’s always inward, towards himself.

Once, I read such a chapter out at a spoken word event in Sheffield, the chapter where Billy pours scorn on the people of a working men’s club in the pit village where he lives. He’s pretty hateful towards them, really petty and self-righteous, arrogant. He takes the piss out of them for playing bingo, for living under the cosh of working class life. Of course, he’s stereotyping them terribly. The chapter ends with him climbing on a table and telling them they’re wrong and stupid, and that he wants something better than they have. The irony is of course, that he’s falling to pieces, that the hate he pours upon them is hatred for himself, at their contentment, a contentment he sees as a subservience to a lesser life.

After the reading I was cornered in the toilet by an angry ‘poet’ in a flat cap, who shout-asked me if I’d ever been to a pit village, insisted sideways-on that I had no idea or experience with what it means to be working class. I couldn’t answer him. He was too angry to listen, had already made his mind up, had already decided that the writer was the character, that Billy’s opinions were my opinions, mistook show for tell, missed the point that his anger meant that I’d done my job right, that I’d made him feel like he was there, listening to this gobshite drunk stood on a table ranting against himself. And you know, here’s the thing. Like Billy, I come from a poor working class background. You can’t fib that stuff. I spent the first few weeks of my life sleeping in a bottom drawer because we were so skint. I still have no money. And frankly I don’t care if I ever do. Happiness is the single most important thing to me. And happy is writing, making, my family and friends, my cats and chickens, a book, music, a movie, home. This is where me and Billy differ considerably. But really, it’s all that Billy wanted, happiness, love, and it was right there in front of him, waiting, but drink took him away from that.

I recently read about a study done on addiction that argued that it stems from emotional need rather than a physical addiction to the drugs, or alcohol, themselves. Do you think love is all Billy really needs?

I haven’t read that study so I can’t really comment on that. Instinct, experience, and from what I’ve read, would lead me to disagree with that statement to some degree. But saying that, I would probably agree that the two, the emotional, and the physical need, are linked. My own feelings on the matter are that determinism is the biggest factor, in all senses of the word. We know for sure that genetics play a big part in addiction. I think I can vouch for that. Unless of course, it was all just a bad joke of fate, a trick played by some fuck-awful prankster gods. My terrible drunk of a grandfather did indeed stick a knife into my grandmother’s chest, as happens in the novel. From everything I know about him, from the outside looking in, he was an erratic mix of wanting her and wilfully destroying their relationship, along with that of his kids. I do not believe for a moment that he would have been so destructive without the drink.

Thankfully, such dark violence wasn’t in my make up, but I believe, through reading my grandmother’s diary, that I inherited both his condition and his hurtful mouth when pissed. Was there some emotional need in him? I don’t know. I never met him. But I know for me, drink became a way to a more confident self, initially. As a kid I kept myself to myself. As a teenage drinker I became loud and centre-stage. I enjoyed this. Flash-forward ten years and I’m coming downstairs in a posh hotel after a works do, and my co-workers are eating breakfast, avoiding eye-contact with me, mumbling into their bacon and eggs, because, apparently, Dean climbed on the buffet table last night, dropped his trousers and underpants, did some improv hip-shaking, karaoke tipping the table up, landing bare arse on the MD’s wife’s lap knocking her flat to the floor, before pelting the room with assorted desserts. Funny. From here.

I’ve been incredibly lucky. I hit a point in my thirties where I was waking to drink. Where life was wholly the bottle. Everything else emptied out. Sound clichéd? I’ve been incredibly lucky. I did what Billy did not. I came to in my bed after an apocalyptic three-day walkabout, my wife and two kids stood looking on, a doctor mouthing words at me I didn’t understand, and I knew that was it. Done. I had to stop. Emotional need? Well, for days the walls crawled with small insects, and I tried to pull my tongue out because the itch wouldn’t stop. And then I sat in the garden. And then I started writing. If this thing was an emotional need, then the writing, the reading, filled something of that need. And love? Billy loses sight of what he’s got. He sees love as a fuck. That’s his bridge to a lie of love. Which is why the sex in the book isn’t sexy. It’s a fake paradise, a palace on sand. Like the drink. A loveless fuck isn’t making love. Fifteen barley wines isn’t the path to real happy. I’ve been incredibly lucky.

The story is written as prose, poetry, screenplay and transcripts – is this how it came out at first draft?

It is, with a few exceptions. I decided early on that the format for each episode should declare itself, should be the most effective way to present what’s happening, what’s being said, and let the whole go on and form itself. For example, in the Punch and Judy scene, apart from the bookended descriptive passages, the main thing was what was being presented on that little stage in front of Billy and his daughter, a time-tested puppet show about domestic abuse that slips so easily into our culture that we laugh when the wife gets beat with a stick, ha-ha, funny isn’t it. No. And in terms of format, the script does all the work here, adds a dark sense of threat to the stories around it, no need to dress it further.

Likewise with the sometimes short poetry-driven episodes, the form chose itself. How to describe something that is near impossible to describe logically, in concrete prose? Like depression. Sylvia Plath’s Sheep in Fog says nothing of logic, of a concrete ‘this is how it feels’. But it does. Because it’s the thing itself. And it carries.

Which writers’ work do you enjoy and who would you say has been the greatest influence/inspiration when writing Billy’s story?

The first writer that started me off was Raymond Carver. Clean, unadorned, to the point, and very selective in what he shows. Less, is more. Suggestion everything. Leave on the half-step and let the reader walk it from there. He opened a big door for me, and several of the pieces in Billy are heavily influenced by his writing. Another big influence was Hubert Selby Jr, especially Last Exit to Brooklyn. Not afraid to show the vulgar realities of things, of how the ugly can produce the beautiful, that Disney morals are not the way to get the reader thinking for themselves.

Likewise Robert Browning. Put the reader in that space, let them listen to this speaker, let the reader decide what’s going on. For the music and travel of some of the more ethereal passages, most definitely Dylan Thomas. Clashing concrete un-fussy words together to make a hard poetry that has the music of a bird in flight, the imagery very clear, yet the whole a dense undergrowth that spits. And on that same note, Allen Ginsberg. Dangerous, risky, truth-telling writing that has no fear of an authoritative naysayer stood over his shoulder, the music, the music, say it out, no censor.

Novels that had a big influence on me and Billy were Camus’ The Outsider, Kafka’s The Trial, and most definitely Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Camus for the stripped back stark defiance of alone; Kafka for the gnaw of guilt from a source unknown; and Sherwood Anderson, a novel of short stories, all interlinked, all with a heavy profundity that’s delivered almost fairy tale light at times, all the dirt of what it is to be human, to be driven by animal needs, a massive influence. Aside from these, there are quite a few other influences: Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Sillitoe, Nabokov, Bukowski, John Fante, Jayne Anne Phillips, Ali Smith, Kelman, Knut Hamsun, Henry Miller, the British new wave films of the late fifties, the films of Lars von Trier. I also read deeply into devil folklore and scripture, of which several of these tales are riddled broken glass scattered within the Billy stories.

What are you working on now?

I’ve just finished writing my second novel, which is due out next summer. I’m very excited about it. An isolated Derbyshire village, carnival day, two timelines, 1979 and 1999, characters crossing over, nothing quite as it first seems, a complex shape that reads surprisingly easy. At the core is a love story, with several other strands bouncing off it, all coming into dialogue with each other as the story progresses. The whole thing reads in pseudo real-time, one day, morning til just gone midnight. And there’s disco. It’s strong.

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A huge thank you, Dean, for your unflinching honesty and telling emotional truths both in the novel and in this interview. I’m very much looking forward to your second novel.

You can buy a copy of Billy and the Devil here and connect with Dean on Twitter.

Next up on Year of Indie debuts is Ben Johncock talking about The Last Pilot.

Year of Indie Debuts: Beauty, Love and Justice

This week’s Year of Indie Debuts spotlight falls on Alcina Faraday, whose debut novel, Beauty, Love and Justice, was published by Urbane Publications earlier this year. It’s the first in a trilogy and poses some very interesting questions about physical and emotional beauty, love and getting old. Not all of which are answered in this book so I’m now hankering to get my hands on the second one!

 

Alcina, by writing the book from the point of view of two gay men you really took the advice given to new writers about writing what you know and showed that it doesn’t have to be that way. Why did you decide to write in these characters’ voices and what inspired this story?

I think that fiction should enable readers and writers to explore lives beyond their own. That said, if my characters work, it’s because in writing about the big stuff – like love, lust, ambition, virtue, loss, deception, regret – I’m hoping to find new things to say about human experiences and emotions that translate across all genders, sexualities and cultures.

To be slightly more mysterious, my inspiration for the “Spiral Wound” trilogy is the black and white photograph I saw in the local graveyard when I lived in a remote village in southern Portugal.

This is the first in a trilogy and it poses some really interesting questions about desire, lust, love and ageing – are these themes going to continue throughout the next two books and why are they important to you as the writer and to your characters?

Very much so. Extra-terrestrials would be totally baffled by the mess that humans get into in pursuit of sex, love, intimacy and companionship – and astonished at our personal vanity. From a writer’s perspective, love and sex scenes provide a great snapshot of the relationship between two characters – and are terrific fun to write. As for getting old – well, it’s a drag. The way beautiful people respond to ageing – usually with denial – fascinates me. I suspect that truly happy people spend less time looking in mirrors – and more time looking at the people they love – as they get older.

Which authors would you say have had the biggest influence on you as a writer?

In true geeky Tiago style I’ve created a “writers’ block” on my web site, which summarises the writers whose work I most admire in chronological order. They’re a pretty eclectic bunch, but Anthony Trollope, Emile Zola, Thomas Hardy, EF Benson, William Saroyan, John Wyndham and Armistead Maupin are probably the authors I most frequently re-read. I also re-read a lot of plays by Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration dramatists, and I’m a huge fan of poetry; I nearly always have a book of Ovid, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, Keats, Eliot or Auden on the go.

If there is one book you wish you’d written which would it be and why?

Persuasion by Jane Austen. I love all of it; the inexorable rise of Anne Elliott, the degeneration of her useless family, the great pacing of the plot, and the elegant and understated denouement. I love stories in which letters power the plot – I’ve tried it a bit in “Beauty” but look out for something more ingenious in the third book in my Spiral Wound Trilogy, “The Commodity Fetish.”

Can you tell us why you chose to publish this trilogy with Urbane, a very new indie publisher?

Two reasons really. Firstly, I work full time in business and have always valued the help provided by true experts who know their stuff and have a passion for what they do – I’d say that’s not a bad sketch of Matthew. His advice, editing skills, and simple enthusiasm for beautiful words, have been invaluable. Secondly, my plots are beautifully-crafted, dark, naughty, mid-brow literary romcoms with a sci-fi twist – I simply don’t have the time to persuade the big six to take the risk of publishing them.

When will the next one in the series be released and what can we expect from it?

In “These Modern Girls”, which will come out in late 2016, Sophia Blake, a spiritually washed-up English engineer with a lucrative ex-pat job and a run down flat in Lisbon, meets Ines Pereira, a hedonistic young communist doctor working in a Lisbon emergency ward. Ines is the cousin of Tiago da Silva – they share the same hero grandfather, Avo Joao – and as the story wraps around the events in “Beauty”, and pulls in echoes from Tiago and Ines’ family history, there’s a strong sense of continuity between the two books. In the second half of “Girls”, which takes place after the events of “Beauty”, I’m really pleased with the way that Raphael steps up and plays a pivotal role. We finally see the depth of character, courage and loyalty that counterbalance the darkness in the first book, and he becomes a whole person.

The third part in the trilogy, “The Commodity Fetish”, which rolls out the story of the Lux plot that Tiago and Raphael hatch in “Beauty”, will come out in 2018. It’s more or less the same cast as “Beauty” – but someone important leaves the stage early on.

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Well, that’s certainly an intriguing note to end the interview on! Many thanks for your time, Alcina, and I look forward to the next installments.

You can get a copy of Beauty, Love and Justice here and connect with Alcina on Twitter to keep up with her writing news.

Next up in the Year of Indie Debuts is Anthony Trevelyan and The Weightless World. Get in touch if you’d like to feature in the series.