The land of the long white cloud

I am still taking in the news that Eleanor Catton, beat off the competition to win this year’s Man Booker Prize. And as my thoughts are turning to an upcoming trip back to New Zealand in a few weeks time, I’ve been planning what am I going to read on my Kindle when I’m away. The Luminaries – of course!

Here is Eleanor Catton in the Guardian writing about growing up in New Zealand’s South Island, where I lived as a child. I particularly like the paragraph where she says this: ‘To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see.’ I also agree with her when she says that she doesn’t feel the same way when she looks at a city because a city has been ‘formally determined.’
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/17/eleanor-catton-booker-new-zealand

Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King: a masterclass in how to write compelling characters

As Stephen King’s much- anticipated follow-up to The Shining has recently been reviewed in the press, one or two broadsheet critics just couldn’t resist taking a swipe at King, accusing him of manipulating the reader as well as writing a sequel that doesn’t quite match the original. I can’t help feeling that there are still critics out there who resent King’s right to be taken seriously as a good writer, just because he specialises in the horror genre.
Steven Poole’s Guardian review of Dr Sleep, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/25/doctor-sleep-stephen-king-review I am glad to say, shows King the respect he deserves, making the point that it was thanks to ‘more culturally acceptable novels such as the claustrophobic masterpiece Misery that King has grudgingly been admitted by the lit-crit folk into the ranks of “actually good writers” as opposed to mere megaselling dimestore artists.’
I would put King’s earlier work, Dolores Claiborne in Poole’s category of ‘more culturally acceptable novels,’ if a psychological thriller about domestic violence is considered more culturally acceptable than one with supernatural themes. It is a testament to King’s phenomenal output that other works of his have overshadowed this particular novel. I was drawn to it primarily as it is not only written in the first person but Dolores tells her story entirely in her own dialogue as she’s being interviewed by two police officers. I might just be able to tell a story in one character’s dialogue for the duration of a short story, but to do this over an entire novel where you have to rachet up the tension and suspense, believe me, takes some doing.
Dolores, who is in her sixties, is taken in for questioning over the suspicious death of her employer, Vera Donovan. Although Dolores and Vera had their differences, Dolores is adamant that she didn’t kill Vera. Dolores does have a confession to make but it’s not about Vera, it’s about Joe, her husband, who died back in 1963.
As well as admiring the way this tale is told, I found the voice of Dolores particularly effective. Housekeeper would be too grand a title for what Dolores does for Mrs Donovan – she’s more like a cleaner and general dogsbody and although I know next to nothing about how such a person from an island off Maine might speak, I’m convinced by Dolores’s speech patterns and dialogue. Here is Dolores explaining what it’s like to be poor: ‘With Joe out of the pitcher and no money coming in, I was in a fix, I can tell you – I got an idear there’s no one in the whole world feels as desperate as a woman on her own with kids dependin on her.’
King tells it like it is for the struggling and the down-trodden and in this era of celebrity-obsessed culture, Dolores Claiborne is a masterclass in how to write meaningful and compelling characters.

Kindle Singles: Short Formats on Amazon

 

When I first heard the name Kindle Singles, I thought that it was Amazon’s foray into the dating business – a place, perhaps where bookish nerds, fed up with just their e-readers for company, could hook up. 

 

But I am being flippant here, and Kindle Singles isn’t merely a lonely hearts club, but a far more serious initiative, where anyone can submit original, quality work of a length of 5000 to 30,000 words. Amazon has spotted a gap in the market as these word lengths fit somewhere between the space limitations for magazines and journals and the longer format of print books.  For the few remaining outlets that still exist for the print publication of short stories, for example, you still have to write to a word length.  But because of space constraints the limit even for literary fiction is 5000 words.  But if you want to write a longer piece you really didn’t have anywhere to send it to – until now.

 

And of course, many of the writing competitions or journals that still publish short stories want either chick lit and women’s fiction or literary fiction.  If your work doesn’t fit into either of these categories then your options were limited.  

 

Kindle Singles is work that is commissioned and has to, therefore, go through a selection process.  You can submit a written pitch, a manuscript, as well as a recent self-published ebook, provided that you have published via their Kindle Direct Publishing platform.  This can be fiction, essays, memoirs or personal narratives.  At the time of writing the genres that Amazon were not accepting are children’s books, how-to manuals, public domain works, reference books and travel guides. 

 

So to all of you writers out there, who may have shorter pieces of writing languishing about, all dressed up with nowhere to publish them, why not give Kindle Singles a shot?

 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000700491