Kaya's Heart Song by Diwa Tharan Sanders - author contribution

illustrated by Nerina Canzi

review by Maryom

As Kaya's mama sits meditating, she hums a little song - her heart song. Kaya wants to join in, have her own song to sing, but, as most children are, is too impatient to sit quietly, so she goes off to play in the jungle.There, she finds a broken-down carousel, and, in bringing it back to life, finds her own heart song too.

Most children are noisy, rushing around playing, not wanting to sit quietly. In Kaya's Heart Song, author Diwa Tharan Sanders encourages them to seek out quiet time, to observe the world around them, and to get in touch with their emotions, while Nerina Canzi's jewel-bright illustrations bring Kaya's world magically to life.

Here today as part of the Kaya's Heart Song blog tour, we have author Diwa Tharan Sanders to tell us more.

"I feel honoured to be able to share my take on mindfulness and children but as I am by no means an expert on the topic, everything offered here has come from personal experience and through conversations with friends. Mindfulness has certainly become a popular topic with children and I hear more and more about schools integrating mindfulness into their curriculum, which sounds absolutely fantastic to me, how I wish I had had those lessons too.

So what is mindfulness? To me, it is being aware of the present moment and tuning inwards with a calm, quiet mind to a state of be-ing and releasing all thoughts of anything else but the now. One of the beautiful things about mindfulness is that in can happen anytime or anywhere, if we allow it to. You could be waiting for the bus, walking through a garden observing the flowers or engrossed doing something you love such as art, cooking, running or you could even be sitting in a busy restaurant waiting for a meal for a state of mindfulness to happen.

When it comes to children, the same mindfulness ‘principles’ apply. Give them the space to pause as it were and allow them to come into a place of quietness and calm. This can create a ripple of positivity for their well-being. I hear the term ‘instant gratification’ being passed around amongst my friends with children and it basically means children (and many adults too, to be fair) today don’t know how to wait. In this current technologically-laden world of instant messaging, ‘instant-gramming’, watching videos on demand and being able to communicate instantly at the touch of a button, we have forgotten the art of waiting. Of noticing and of just being. I personally think that extending time and space to children to simply be with themselves will cultivate more awareness, patience and other sorts of ‘magic’ such as creativity, self-expression and self-discovery. A very real example of this is the process in which I wrote Kaya’s Heart Song.

My inspiration for the story was to write about a little girl who wanted to be happy, because I felt (and still do) that we sometimes forget the importance of following our hearts by unconsciously drowning-out the voice of our hearts living our day-to-day lives the way we’re ‘supposed to’. Thinking about happy hearts, led to the idea of a heart song and it was in discovering my own heart song as I wrote the book, that the theme of mindfulness revealed itself. And so yes, Mama is right in saying, “If you have a heart song, anything is possible. Even magic!”

And it’s finding this magic that I think is the best thing about practising mindfulness. Give your child (and yourself!) space to take the time to feel and listen for the magic that’s in us all. It is found in many different forms: in new ideas, finding new emotions, expressing these emotions, in having the courage to speak up for what you want or love, in being creative and even in simply being happy and content in the moment. Whatever makes your heart sing is mindfulness working its magic.

Here are a couple suggestions of mindfulness practices to do with your child (thank you to my friends who willingly brainstormed some of these ideas with me):

1. The next time your child does something you badly want to discipline them for, be mindful about it. Calm yourself with 10 – 15 deep breaths before explaining to your child why they should take some time alone to be with themselves and think about what they did. Ask them how they feel after.

2. The next time your child asks for your smartphone or gadget to play with, offer them something else like a piece of paper, an empty box or nothing at all and watch what happens. Regardless of how they react, you’re creating a space for them to be with their emotions and essentially express themselves. This also opens their mind to thinking out-of-the-(electronic) box and stimulates their creativity.

3. Set aside joint ‘mindfulness time’, it could be a walk in the park to observe the trees, a colouring activity, sitting down to breathe together in meditation or silence or anything that feels like it would stimulate you and your child.

4. Listen to your heart song. Our hearts are often the truest barometers of how we’re feeling at any particular time. Make a conscious effort to tune in; ‘zoning-in’ instead of zoning-out and take the time to notice what’s going on inside. Sing, hum, whistle, speak, move, tap or drum whatever it is you hear. Self-expression has been for me one of the best ways to connect deeper to my own heart and to feel more mindful.

There are many advantages of practising mindfulness. For me, the most precious one is the love, honour and magic that we give to ourselves when we do so, because this is what then flows out into the world. Mindfulness starts inside, with us all and can be an amazing gift to unravel when we find the time to journey inward. Imagine how incredible it would feel to live amongst those who are creating and sharing magic every single day!"

Diwa is a yoga teacher, Breath of Bliss breathwork facilitator, and owns Tulamala, a brand that makes intuitively-designed mala necklaces and bracelets for healing, happiness and inspiration. Kaya's Heart Song is her first picture book

You can find Kaya's Heart Song here on Lantana Publishing's website

Caroline Wallace - The Finding of Martha Lost - blog tour

Today we're delighted to be taking part in the  blog tour for The Finding of Martha Lost. Martha was found as a baby on the platform of Liverpool's Lime Street station, and has spent all her life there, living in the flat above the lost property office. Setting is obviously a key point to the novel and  author Caroline Wallace is here to talk about just that ... 


The original plan was to set The Finding of Martha Lost in Paris. For many years, I’d been infatuated with the culture, the romance, the language too. At eighteen, I even ran away to France, to find myself and to fall in love; neither happened.

My outline for The Finding of Martha Lost was to focus on a character called Martha being lost, then found, on departures and arrivals in a train station, with a host of quirks that I imagined would feel at home in France. The novel was forming nicely in my mind, despite the many obstacles of the setting being overseas, but everything changed when I walked through Lime Street Station in Liverpool (on my way to a Nik Kershaw concert).

I needed cash but couldn’t recall where the cash machines were located inside the station. After several minutes of searching, and having spotted a man sitting inside, I stepped into Lime Street Station’s lost property office and asked for help. The man behind the counter glared at me. I swear he growled as he pointed at a laminated sign on his desk: ‘CASH MACHINES ON PLATFORM 7’. I laughed, he didn’t. He continued to scowl, so I thanked him and hurried out of his lost property office. As I turned and looked back, I considered the amount of times the man must have been asked that same question before deciding he needed the sign. The thought made me smile.

That was the seed, or perhaps the switch.

That’s when I started wondering if Paris was the correct location for Martha Lost to live. I thought about when I’d first arrived into Liverpool by train, freshly broken from France, all lost and alone. I thought about the city and how its people had embraced me. I thought about falling in love with a local boy, about finding myself, about the friends I’d made, about the stories I’d been told. I thought about how the city had saved me, about walking down the aisle to The Beatles’ When I’m 64 on my wedding day and about how I couldn’t imagine ever living anywhere else. I thought about how the funniest, grumpiest, friendliest people live in Liverpool, a place that was my rescuer and soon became my home. I thought about how the people were defiant, brave and (often brutally) honest, so far from stereotypes in popular culture that had been created to mock. I realised that I was a fan of Liverpool’s culture, the romance to be found, the language too.
It didn’t take long for me to grasp that Paris didn’t hold the passion or the quirks that I needed for The Finding of Martha Lost. I realised that everything and more could be found in my city and that Lime Street Station would function at the heart of my story. Somehow, and unexpectedly, my Parisian novel transformed into a love letter to Liverpool.

Thank you Caroline - I personally can't imagine the novel being set anywhere but Lime Street station. 

If you're now intrigued and want to know more about The Finding of Martha Lost, check out Maryom's review here

Christopher Fowler - Wild Chamber Blog Tour

Today we welcome Christopher Fowler to our blog for the tour celebrating the latest of the Bryant and May books - crime stories about two ageing detectives and the Peculiar Crimes Unit that employs them. We have been fortunate to have had a visit from him before when he answered questions at the time of the launch of "London's Glory". Today's questions contain a few supplementaries from that visit. 

The Mole is currently reading Wild Chamber, which is the latest and wonders at how each book seems to get better and better.

With Bryant's cerebral approach, his not revealing his thinking, and his extensive range of 'expert' (if a little eccentric) contacts, I am reminded of George Smiley. Is there any Smiley in him?
I think he’s not as organised as Smiley. His thinking is untidier and more haphazard but there’s a real technique at work – not deductive but instinctive.

In a previous interview you said "...then Bryant & May are about how I’d like to be". Which of the two do you see yourself as?
I’m May. Bryant is my former business partner, so much so that I once put a photograph of him in one of the earlier books.

You said of London "... Before the mid-1980s it was a city steeped in shadows which bred criminality. We lost something when the lights were turned up and the CCTV was turned on". Surely much of the change then is for the better? But has London really changed that much or is it your perception of London that has changed?
No, London has transformed, and that’s perfectly natural. I grew up playing in the streets, sneaking into theatres off Piccadilly, diving into dodgy cinemas and generally getting into trouble with appalling people. London is less dangerous now if you keep your wits about you. But then my father, a teenager during the war, had to go through so many changes too, And his father was a typical London Victorian. We all have to roll with the changes. The trick is not becoming stuck in an era.

The 'Peculiar Crime Unit' investigates just that - Peculiar Crimes, but where do you get the ideas for those crimes from? Do you have a list of crime ideas for the new books or are the ideas hard to come by? I have a keen notebook fetish, and ideas get piled into those. 
Often I couple several ideas together and start connecting the dots – but it usually takes a final mad leap to join everything up, and the inspiration from that can come from anywhere – people, places, experiences mostly – and library research.

In a previous contribution to our blog you said of PD James' rule 'Read, write and don't daydream' - "This is possibly the worst advice imaginable" do you make time for daydreaming and do you have a special place to do it?
I daydream in parks and since a child I’ve always walked around new cities. Last year I went into the Carpathian mountains  in Transylvania to visit Vlad the Impaler’s castle, just to write a story about Dracula.

Of her rule 'Never talk about a book before it is finished' you said "No, no, no!" which does make perfect sense but who do you talk with about your work in progress? 
That’s the thing; you need a sympathetic ear, and I have several friends who are patient and kind, and offer their thoughts. People are quite timid about giving feedback to writers, as if we’re going to bite them!

Many thanks go, once again, to Christopher Fowler who took time out of a very busy timetable to talk to us.

Beth Lewis - The Wolf Road - blog tour

The Wolf Road is a stunning, hard-hitting, post-apocalyptic novel; a story of survival in the forest wilderness of north-west Canada, and probably the most original book I've read this year. So, I'm delighted that today Our Book Reviews is the stopping off point for author Beth Lewis on her blog tour. Here she is to talk about one of the important images of the novel - fire!

My Life with Fire

There’s something about a roaring fire, isn’t there? Staring into those flames, dancing in the grate, it’s utterly mesmeric. Fire brings a family and community together and that’s something that so many cultures share. I spent most of my teenage summers around a campfire or bonfire on the beach. We shared food, drink, and stories with strangers and made new friends who I still cherish today. Fire took center stage in those years and in many different forms. First, there were the bonfires, the beach parties, the coming together of people from all over the country with one shared interest – performance. Then the fire was harnessed, lit and burning on the end of chains to be spun into beautiful, intricate patterns.

Poi have been around for hundreds of years and are now a staple of festivals and fun-loving individuals. I started spinning poi when I was sixteen and lit them on fire soon after. Poi are basically weights on the end of string or chain which you spin around your body into patterns. It becomes a dance and when you chuck fire into the mix, it becomes something so much more. Being inside a fireball is otherworldly. You see only darkness and bright yellow flames, you smell only paraffin and burning and feel only heat and hear nothing but the roar. And boy, there’s nothing like that roar. It’s addictive. One spin with those heavy, flaming poi and I was hooked. I learned to eat fire, trail it over my skin and I took part in a record-breaking attempt to have the most fire spinners going at once. It was well over a hundred, it lit up the tiny Cornish beach. We made a second attempt at a festival a few years later. I made incredible friends doing it too. I met my best friend on a beach, around a bonfire. I had fire spinners at my wedding. It was my life for years and it was magical to be around so many like-minded people from all walks of life. We all shared this very simple love – friends, fun, and fire.

Then I moved to the city and gradually work, life, writing, took over my time. The love of the danger, the addiction to it, have never left me. When I see footage of Glastonbury or old fiery friends post photos of the old days, I get a deep pang of nostalgia and yearning. I can’t get to those festivals as much anymore and that saddens me no end.

It’s no coincidence then, that I wrote fire as such an important part of the story in The Wolf Road. It’s in the background, it’s subtle, but it’s there. Fire appears at key moments in Elka’s story, transformative moments that speak to how she had changed as a character in the time she’s been on her journey. The first is destructive, it’s the catalyst that spurs her into the wilderness. Then it becomes her savior, then her teaching tool, then she shares it with those in need, it brings her close to people she would normally never have trusted. Fire does that. It brings people together and it brings hope, whether to share warmth or food or a couple of beers on the beach, it’s part of the shared human experience. We all need it and I believe that need allows people to put aside their differences and return to a simple, instinctual state. I need a fire, you have a fire, let’s be friends. That’s how I see it and how I see Elka’s journey change from an untrusting, feral girl, into one who sees the value and importance of friendship.

Many thanks to Beth for stopping by. I hope everyone is now intrigued enough to read the book! Meanwhile, you can catch up on the rest of the blog tour as detailed below, check out my review , and read Beth's fascinating Week In The Wild posts on her website.

Carys Bray - Museum of You - blog tour

Today we're delighted to welcome to the blog Carys Bray, author of A Song For Issy Bradley, to talk about her new novel the Museum of You, and one of her favourite museums (you can find more of them by checking out the other stops of the tour).

My Favourite Museums

In my new novel The Museum of You, twelve year old Clover Quinn sorts through her mother’s belongings and curates an exhibition in the second bedroom of the house she shares with her Dad, Darren.
As part of The Museum of You blog tour, I’m writing about some of my favourite museums. In recent months it has been frustrating to read of the museum closures which appear to be disproportionately affecting the north of England. Museums are a great place to learn about our heritage; they’re often a testament to the efforts and dedication of working people, the men and women who built and made many of the things we take for granted today.

The British Lawnmower Museum
This museum is in my hometown of Southport. The museum doesn’t receive any funding so there is a charge for entry: £3 for adults and £1 for children. An audio guide is piped out of speakers that are positioned around the museum so you can listen as you explore. It’s pretty niche – the only lawnmower museum in the world. Instead of carpet there’s artificial turf on the floor and there is something wonderfully eccentric about the whole enterprise.



The staff are friendly and will accompany you and fill you in on some of the stories behind the lawnmowers. For example, the lawnmower in the picture below was used in this advert:

It’s the stories that really make this museum. I learned that James May of Top Gear once reassembled a particular lawnmower without any instructions, another lawnmower was pulled by a horse that wore leather shoes so as not to spoil the lawn, and some people like to participate in lawnmower races (12 hour lawnmower races, in fact).

My favourite machines were the ‘lawnmowers of the rich and famous.’ Below you can see Paul O’Grady’s lawnmower.

And Eric Morecambe’s Dad’s lawnmower, an object which provoked some serious giggling.

My son and I visited this museum wondering why on earth anyone would keep and care for lawnmowers. We left feeling that at the heart of this unique museum lies the determined optimism of people who really love something and want to share it. And even if you’re not a lawnmower aficionado, there’s something contagious about that.





Who would imagine a museum of lawn-mowers to be so fascinating? It sounds well worth a visit though.
Read on now for an excerpt from The Museum of You which Maryom describes as  "tender and compassionate, will make you laugh, maybe bring you to tears, and will have you rooting for Clover and Darren, hoping they can both find happiness and sense of completeness. In short, an absolute joy to read." 

The Museum of You – Excerpt

"When she got home from the museum Dad was kneeling in the hall. He’d unscrewed the radiator and his thumb was pressed over an unfastened pipe as water gushed around it. The books and clothes and newspapers that used to line the hall had been arranged in small piles on the stairs. Beside him, on the damp carpet, was a metal scraper he’d been using to scuff the paper off the wall.

‘Just in time!’ he said. ‘Fetch a bowl. A small one, so it’ll fit.’
She fetched two and spent the next fifteen minutes running back and forth to the kitchen emptying one bowl as the other filled, Dad calling, ‘Faster! Faster! Keep it up, Speedy Gonzalez!’ His trousers were soaked and his knuckles grazed, but he wasn’t bothered. ‘Occupational hazard,’ he said, as if it wasn’t his day off and plumbing and stripping walls was his actual job.

Once the pipe had emptied he stood up and hopped about for a bit while the feeling came back into his feet. ‘I helped Colin out with something this morning,’ he said. ‘The people whose house we were at had this dado rail thing – it sounds posh, but it’s just a bit of wood, really – right about here.’ He brushed his hand against the wall beside his hip. ‘Underneath it they had stripy wallpaper, but above it they had a different, plain kind. It was dead nice and I thought, we could do that.’

Dad found a scraper for her. The paint came off in flakes, followed by tufts of the thick, textured wallpaper. Underneath, was a layer of soft, brown, backing-paper which Dad sprayed with water from a squirty bottle. When the water had soaked in, they made long scrapes down the wall, top to bottom, leaving the backing paper flopped over the skirting boards like ribbons of skin. It felt like they were undressing the house.

The bare walls weren’t smooth. They were gritty, crumbly in places. As they worked, a dusty smell wafted out of them. It took more than an hour to get from the front door to the wall beside the bottom stair. That’s where Dad uncovered the heart. It was about as big as Clover’s hand, etched on the wall in black, permanent marker, in Dad’s handwriting: Darren + Becky 4ever.

‘I’d forgotten,’ he murmured. And then he pulled his everything face. The face he pulls when Uncle Jim is drunk. The face he pulls when they go shopping in March and the person at the till tries to be helpful by reminding them about Mother’s Day. The face which reminds her that a lot of the time his expression is like a plate of leftovers.

She didn’t say anything, and although she wanted to, she didn’t trace the heart with her fingertips. Instead, she went up to the bathroom and sat on the boxed, pre-lit Christmas tree dad bought in the January sales. When you grow up in the saddest chapter of someone else’s story you’re forever skating on the thin ice of their memories. That’s not to say it’s always sad – there are happy things, too. When she was a baby Dad had a tattoo of her name drawn on his arm in curly, blue writing, and underneath he had a green, four-leaf clover. She has such a brilliant name, chosen by her mother because it has the word LOVE in the middle. That’s not the sort of thing you go around telling people, but it is something you can remember if you need a little boost; an instant access, happiness top-up card – it even works when Luke Barton calls her Margey-rine. Clover thought of her name and counted to 300.

When she went downstairs Dad had recovered his empty face and she couldn’t help asking a question, just a small one.

‘Is there any more writing under the paper?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘She didn’t do a heart as well?’
‘Help me with this, will you?’

They pulled the soggy ribbons of paper away from the skirting and put them in a bin bag. The house smelled different afterwards. As if some old sadness had leaked out of the walls. "

Thank you Carys for dropping by and I hope that's tempted people to read the novel!

Check out our full review here  and the rest of the blog tour 

The Chimes Blog Tour - Anna Smaill Author Contribution

Today we're delighted to be part of the blog tour for the paperback publication of The Chimes by Anna Smaill. I'm always intrigued about what sparks an author's imagination, particularly when their creation is a complete new world, so, having the chance to ask, that was what I wanted to know....
I've seen a lot of people talking recently about how the constant chatter of social media dulls us to the surrounding world, even the friends or family we're actually sitting next to,  and the Chimes themselves seemed to me a more organised, centrally-controlled but similar form of brain-washing.
I don't know if these thoughts have any relevance at all but they left me intrigued about how Anna stumbled upon the original idea for The Chimes. .....

The Chimes is really an exploration of two different human drives – the one towards purity and the one towards mess – and how sometimes art seems to encourage us to view these as existing in a sort of irreconcilable binary.

It will surprise no one that this preoccupation behind the book can be traced to my own experience with music. I started playing the violin at quite a young age, seven years old to be exact, and I was far from a natural musician. I loved it, but the sounds I produced were always quite different from the ones I imagined in my head. My experience with music gave rise to a sort of painful dualism. By which I mean, it often felt like my body was a kind of hindrance to what was going on inside, and the things I wanted to express. I felt exhausted by all that was uncontrollable about playing an instrument – those erratic nerves and wayward physical habits. I also felt befuddled by the fact that, even if I played something perfectly and soulfully, a person listening could fail to be swept up in this, could, in fact, just walk past unmoved.

This kind of overthinking wasn’t exactly compatible with a performance degree; I stopped playing the violin in my second year. However, I’ve remained really interested in the way some art seems to inhabit and draw on these frustrations and impulses. It’s not a strange leap that poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were drawn to fascist politics – the impulse is in the work, in the straining toward a sort of pure, unimpeachable form of expression, and in the setting up of a quasi-religious aesthetic hierarchy.

The idea that we can ever attain some kind of pure expression is a nonsense, of course. Any two-way communication is always fraught – each party brings their own experiences to the exchange. Mess and impurity is where language and art thrives, evolves and adapts. Discrepancies and clashes of perspective allow memory to modulate into story. Yet my own experience with music is why I didn’t want the Order (the powerful musical elite of The Chimes) to appear in the book as a simple force of evil. I wanted to show the beauty in their extreme commitment and fervor. I wanted to suggest that that there is even something potentially admirable in their vision. I think it’s in all of us, that hunger for extremes.

Hopefully, possibly, some of this seething internal debate is clear in the world of The Chimes! But I should make it clear that I never saw the book as an ‘ideas novel’. I didn’t have an agenda to push or a specific target for critique. I’d hate the book to feel didactic or programmatic in any way. I should, however, probably end by saying that if we are ever in a situation where art is divided between the pure and the impure, I – to quote the wonderful NZ poet Bill Manhire – ‘want to go and stand in the corner with all of the impure people’.

Claire McGowan: The Silent Dead Blog Tour - author contribution

Today as part of the blog tour to accompany the publication of her latest thriller, The Silent Dead, we're welcoming Claire McGowan to talk about "Writing the Unknown"....


When I’m teaching creative writing, a question that often comes up is whether people are ‘allowed’ to write something. Can you write a character who’s a different gender or age group to you? What about race or economic background? Can you convincingly use a dialect or vernacular that you don’t know well? Are you allowed to write about things you haven’t experienced?

My answer is usually – of course, you’re allowed to write about anything. You don’t have to ask for permission in fiction and it’s not homework. We can make up whatever we like. But I do understand the anxiety that comes from writing something you haven’t gone through yourself. This seems to be so widespread that authors routinely hide their gender with pen names or initials. I’m writing a series about a forensic psychologist who works with the police. I’m not hugely familiar with these worlds, and sometimes I feel unsure about the details – what colour are the walls in police stations? What do the offices smell like? And so on. However, these details can easily be checked by wangling a station visit or researching the procedural processes.

What’s more difficult is to write about emotional situations you haven’t been in. I feel qualified to write about Northern Ireland and the Troubles (I was sixteen with the Good Friday Agreement was signed and living near the border), as I know I have an experience of that time which can’t be challenged. However, I’ve now taken my character to a place where she has a baby, and I don’t have children. I like to think I can imagine it – but I can also get things wrong. A writer friend who has children recently kindly pointed out a small mistake I’d made, which I wouldn’t have known unless I’d been around small children a lot. So there’s always the option to have things checked. I think this anxiety about permission can really hold writers back – so my approach would be write now, and ask questions later. You can always correct it!

Christopher Fowler: London's Glory Blog Tour - Author contribution

To celebrate the launch of "London's Glory", a collection of short stories about the detectives Bryant and May, we are delighted to welcome Christopher Fowler's blog tour and take the opprtunity to put some questions and learn the true future of this great pairing of characters.

 Before Bryant and May you had success with a few other books including "Roofworld".  These books were either short story collections or stand-alone novels but then you come up with a series of 15 books about an unlikely pairing of detectives.  Where did you get the idea of such an odd couple as Bryant and May from?


I wanted to create two Golden Age detectives in a modern setting. I made Bryant & May old to

dispense with the ageism that suggests only the young can do their jobs well. Older characters bring a lifetime of experience. I started with a matchbox label that read "Bryant & May - England's Glory". That gave me their names, their nationality, and something vague and appealing, the sense of an institution with roots in London's sooty past. You have to remember that London has only just been lit up. Before the mid-1980s it was a city steeped in shadows which bred criminality. We lost something when the lights were turned up and the CCTV was turned on, and I try to recapture that lost sense of the sinister.

 There is a psychic element in many of  the cases - did you develop these psychic themes as deeply as you would like or did editors hold you back? Or, perhaps, the opposite?


Amazingly I’m still working with the same editor and he never holds me back! I sew threads of ideas throughout the novels that I like to return to, and one of them is that DS Janice Longbright and her mother are psychic, which I’m able to explore in a non-supernatural, realistic way, in ‘The Burning Man’. I think there should always be a hint of the unknown in the stories…


Did you plan on them becoming such a long series?

I hadn’t expected the series to last so long at all. In fact, the first book was written as a one-off. The idea of a couple of elderly, grumpy detectives clearly didn’t sound very appealing to my former publisher, so I took the book to someone who understood what I was getting at, and have been there ever since. It seems to have worked and the detectives have a growing number of fans, which delights me.

I particularly enjoy making them behave like experienced adults and immature children. I think heroes are often boring simply because they have to be appealingly young – well, Bryant & May don’t have to be; they’re as esoteric, eccentric, bad-tempered and weird as the villains, who in most books are more interesting than heroes.


In "The Burning Man" we are presented with a scenario of the end of the series and I, for one, was gutted. What made you decide to bring the series to an end?



I haven’t! There is, as with all the mystery novels I most admire, a sleight of hand going on with clues hidden in several earlier volumes. I love showing that something is utterly impossible, and then revealing how it can be done. Just one reader has worked out what I’m up to, and I may have to kill him. I don’t write the books to be read in sequence, by the way; in fact I think they’re more fun if you mix them up. Perhaps ‘On The Loose’ and ‘Off The Rails’ should be read together, and ’77 Clocks’ is the odd one out, being set in a different period.

London's Glory treats us to a chance to follow their antics once again in a group of short stories - will there be more stories from before "The Burning Man" to follow?

I think if it turns out there’s a market for them, then yes. Publishers always tell you not to write short stories as readers don’t like them, but that’s a red rag to a bull to me, and just makes me want to write more. Conan Doyle’s consulting detective inspired many other authors to tackle stories beyond the accepted canon. Adrian Conan Doyle picked up his father’s mantle, accompanied by John Dickson Carr, for ‘The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes’, based on twelve unexplained cases mentioned by Holmes, and did two more volumes…

You have returned to stand-alone and short story books - do you a plan for a replacement of Bryant and May? 
 

See above – they’re not leaving yet! In fact the next full-length novel, ‘Strange Tide’, is out in March.

If you had to be judged on just one of your books and could choose which it was to be - which would you put forward?

Without question it would be Paperboy, because it’s my life. Well, that and the sequel Film Freak. But if they’re about who I am, then Bryant & May are about how I’d like to be.

Candy Gourlay - UKMG Extravaganza - Author Contribution

Candy Gourlay (@candygourlay) is a Filipino author based in London. Her books have been listed for awards such as the Carnegie, the Blue Peter, the Waterstones and the Guardian Children's Book Prize. She blogs on Notes from the Slushpile and on CandyGourlay.com .

With warm thanks to the UKMG Extravaganza Book Tour and  Maryom and The Mole for hosting me on Our Book Reviews!

The other day, I saw a funny Filipino meme doing the rounds on Facebook. The images were so hilarious, I used Photoshop to repurpose the comic into the one on the right.

I was gratified when a librarian from Culford School Library reposted it with the caption:

I promise not to judge your choice of reading matter.

Thanks, Culford School Library - you totally got the message that reading should first and foremost be about pleasure.

You'd think the idea of reading for pleasure is obvious, but it isn't.

WHO CHOOSES THE BOOKS? 

The younger a reader, the less control she has on what she reads. Grown-ups - parents, teachers, librarians - will dictate what books enter her world.

And when it comes to children, grown-ups will always have an agenda ... since printing began, books have been seen as a means to instruct, to teach a moral lesson, to mould the unformed child into a good adult.

(Teenagers are an interesting mixture of independence and adult influence. The emergence of Young Adult fiction as a strong genre comes as no surprise - there is a commercial element to defining age boundaries. The idea of the 'teenager' emerged after the second world war when teenagers became recognised as a consumer demographic with money to spend.)

MIDDLE OF WHAT?

For forever, I've been aware of 'Middle Grade' as a category of children's books for ages eight to twelve. But that's because I come from a country with strong ties to the United States, where the label first emerged.

But MG is a recent arrival to the United Kingdom, prompting irritation from people like Carnegie-winning author Philip Reeve (Mortal Engines) who described the label as a "nonsense".

Reeve wrote: "If you call your books 'middle grade', you are associating them with 'grade', which sounds vaguely educational, and 'middle'. That's 'Middle', as in 'middle England', 'middle class', 'middle of the road','middle of nowhere', 'middlebrow','middling'."

Phew! Strong words (although, as an immigrant, I have always wondered why there is such a negativity attached to being middle class in my poor native Philippines, middle class is what everyone aspires to be).

Personally, I'm happy to embrace the label ... though I agree that the use of the word 'Grade' is problematic in that it suggests children should be reading for educational purposes.

Really, we are not talking about a Middle Grade Reader but a Reader in the Middle.

READER IN THE MIDDLE

Under current legislation, middle schools in England have to 'deem' themselves as either primary or secondary. The 'middles-deemed-primary' is enjoined to stick to a primary-style curriculum. The 'middles-deemed-secondary' is enjoined to follow the approach of a secondary school.

It perfectly captures the conundrum of the Reader in the Middle. Too old for baby books and beginning readers. Too young for the Young Adult free for all.

In fact I have written two books that are being marketed as middle grade, but they occupy opposite ends of the Middle Grade spectrum.

Technically, the first, Tall Story, is written simply enough for a seven-year-old bookworm to cope with. The themes of family and the smattering of magic is ideal for a reader from nine years old up. If Tall Story were a school, it would be a middles-deemed-primary.

My second book, Shine, is a different matter. The themes are more mature, the writing - with a mysterious storyline sewn into the main narrative -  will be challenging for a middle grade reader who is only just beginning to develop a reading habit. If my first book had not been MG, I suspect it would easily be classified as a teen novel. In any event, if it were a school it would be a middles-deemed-secondary.

PUTTING THE OMG INTO MIDDLE GRADE

My friend Jane McLoughlin (The Crowham Martyrs) came up with a witty label for the more mature end of Middle Grade the other day: OMG, for Older Middle Grade.

I love it because it so aptly captures the surprise and emotional satisfaction of an excellent Middle Grade title.

What makes a book middle grade though? Ahh ... dare I attempt an answer? There is great resistance to attempts to pin down targeted reading ages in children's books.

 In 2008, when publishers floated the idea of age-banding books with labels (5+, 7+, 11+, 13+/teen) there was an uproar.

Philip Pullman led the charge. Here is what he told the Telegraph: "I don't want to see the book itself declaring officially, as if with my approval, that it is for readers of 11 and upwards or whatever. I write books for whoever is interested. When I write a book I don't have an age group in mind."

My own publisher, David Fickling, liked to say: 'Tall Story is not just for children. It's an ALL-READ.' Which was very nice of him. But when people ask me, I say it's for 10 plus. (It's considered Young Adult in the Philippines, but that's another story)

After the Age Banding furore died down, I couldn't help noticing that publishers quietly printed suggested reading ages on the back covers of books anyway. If the reader is not the person with the wallet, I guess it helps to have advice at point-of-sale.

THE WHAT AND THE WHO

When I visit schools though (whether they are middles-deemed-primary or deemed-secondary), what Middle Grade is becomes very, very clear to me.

I see it in the children who loved my books. I see it in the children who found some of it a bit difficult to read. I see it in their enthusiasm for the magical elements in my stories. I see it in the way each child seems to know somebody who is just like their favourite characters. I see it in the way every favourite book a child mentions reflects an aspiration.

In writing Middle Grade, I've learned that you cannot separate out the what from the who, because the Reader in the Middle is what he reads. 

I don't know if the label 'Middle Grade' will be supplanted by some other marketing category. But authors like me would do well to remember that the label means nothing without the reader.

And who is that reader in between?

The Reader in the Middle

The Reader in the Middle is always looking for adventure.

The Reader in the Middle has experienced enough life to identify with social reality, but not enough life to have hindsight.

The Reader in the Middle wants a story in which things happen.

The Reader in the Middle can figure things out for herself but not all the time, so sometimes it's okay to tell as well as show.

The Reader in the Middle has his whole future ahead of him - and he needs hope.

The Reader in the Middle can be anybody she wants to be - and characters will help her achieve that.

The Reader in the Middle wants a story not a lesson.

The Reader in the Middle wants to be the hero of every story.

The Reader in the Middle wants to visit another world.
The Reader in the Middle is growing the reader he is going to be - and we authors in the middle are so lucky to be there with him.

Graeme K Talboys - guest post

Today as part of Harper Voyager's week-long celebration of their digital authors we're welcoming to the blog Graeme K Talboys, author of Stealing Into Winter to talk about his youthful influences





I grew up in a home with books. Reading was encouraged and I learned at an early age. I borrowed from the school library, the public library, and I read what was in the house. By the time I was eleven I had an adult library ticket, although the library only allowed me to borrow non-fiction, presumably to protect me from the adult fiction I was reading at home with my parents’ blessing. Mix in with that all the normal fiction and non-fiction a boy would be reading along with his weekly Beano, TV21, and Look and Learn and you get a potent brew.

In those days I was fairly solitary with very few close friends. Those I did have all went to different secondary schools to me. In terms of education, that was two years of utter misery. Away from school it was balanced by the fun of becoming a young flâneur and of haunting museums and old buildings in the city where I lived. Although my walking days are done, museums are still inspirational havens I enjoy.

This was preparing the seedbed. I was writing already. Making up stories, doing research for projects, and writing them up were all fun. It seemed as natural a thing to do as playing with my construction set. But it was playing at that stage and nothing more.

It was when we moved to Sussex that the light went on and the seeds began to germinate. I was moved from a school where bullying was rife to one that was much more relaxed yet had far fewer problems. I made friends. There were girls. I was surrounded by people who were interested in the arts – dance, music, theatre, film, painting, sculpture, and writing. And this was the ‘60s. My immediate circle of friends was embedded in a culture of freedom and exploration, of sex and drugs and rock ‘’n’ roll. And books.

At school I had a succession of very good English teachers from Bill Euston who introduced me to T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, a book important to me on so many levels, through to Colin Silk who taught me at A Level and instilled not just a love of a broad range of literary fiction, but analytical and synthetical reading.

With money coming in from weekend work, I could buy records and books. I could get to London for the theatre. I could go to festivals and concerts. And yes, you really could do all that on what a teenager earned from stacking shelves in a supermarket. The endless summers of youth seemed like a long party. I read for days on end, explored the countryside, left flowers on the river bank where Virginia Woolf stepped into oblivion, and sat under the stars with friends to dream of what we thought would be a better world.

We made our own festivals at school, put on plays, trooped along to Phun City, went up to the Roundhouse and Hyde Park, were in and out of the Dome, tried to sink the Isle of Wight, spaced out to Hawkwind, cheered on the Deviants, and chanted along with Edgar Broughton.

When not out of my head on music, I read and read and read, buying books from the Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton and mixing there with all sorts of wonderful people. This is, perhaps, when I began to find my voice. I read New Worlds, Bananas, OZ, IT, and other underground magazines. And I swallowed books whole – one a day, sometimes. On top of all that activity I still had the energy to pull all-nighters to finish a book. It didn’t exactly enhance my performance at school, but I seem to have done well enough to go on to become a teacher.




Those magazines opened up a world of writing that I hadn’t imagined existed. Michael Moorcock’s work became a firm favourite and I later discovered that he had written for Look and Learn as a Fleetway staff writer. And of course, if you read New Worlds your mind was being expanded by all sorts of wonderful writers – Peake, Ballard, Aldiss, Sladek, Zoline, Harrison, Spinrad, le Guin, Russ, and so on. All of these are writers who are invariably pushed into the science fiction/fantasy ghetto, yet they were writing the most powerful literature of its time, using sf&f to enable them to explore issues that were not getting an airing elsewhere as well as exploring different methods to get their message across. I was also reading those writers when they discussed their influences and explored those as well, stepping from world to world of an ever increasing literary multiverse.

And of course, I wrote and wrote and wrote.

And wrote.

And then I wrote a lot more.

Follow the author on Twitter @graemeKtalboys and at http://www.graemektalboys.me.uk/

Anne Goodwin - guest post

Today we're delighted to welcome Anne Goodwin to the blog to talk about her debut novel Sugar and Snails and the changes it underwent between first draft and finished book....

Three generations of a novel: the transformations of Sugar and Snails from inception to publication

When I worked as a clinical psychologist, I met many people who were disturbed by their failure to live up to their own ideals or the standards set by others. It wasn’t until I moved to a small town in the former Nottinghamshire coalfields that I saw this perceived failure in terms of gender stereotypes. The 1984 miners’ strike had torn communities apart, and the failure of the strike to prevent the pit closures brought both economic and psychological depression in the area and a sense of emasculation among the men.
Around the same time, the country was marking the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Amid the pomp, reports began to filter through of elderly men being re-traumatised by repressed memories of their wartime experiences coming back to haunt them. As my own father was of this generation, I was touched by the notion that the stiff-upper-lipped version of masculinity might be unsustainable and curious about its impact on the offspring of such men.

I was inspired by Evie Wyld’s impressive début, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, to have a go at writing something similar. Like her, I would explore masculinity and war across three generations but, instead of being set in small-town Australia, my novel would feature the rise and fall of a mining community in England.
My main character was Leonard, the clever only child of solid working-class parents, brought up to want to be more than a miner like his father, yet always a little ashamed at his mental and physical unsuitability for a job underground. Going straight from school to the army, and from there to a German prison camp, he dreams of the life he’ll have when the war is over: a steady job with a wife and kids.
As I delved more into Leonard’s character, the less need I felt to flesh out the parents who had made him who he was. I was more interested in how he’d fare as a husband and father, and what it was about his wartime experience that he so needed to forget.

So what began as a story of men across three generations was transformed into one about a man, his wife and their problem child. In the early drafts of Sugar and Snails, the story unfolded through alternate chapters set in different time bands: the tale of Leonard and Renée’s marriage over almost three decades interspersed with that of Diana, one of their children, a socially-awkward university lecturer in the early years of the twenty-first century, with a secret troubled past.

One of the problems with this structure was that, because Diana had gone by a different name in childhood, it was difficult for readers to trust that the two strands of the narrative would eventually connect. Furthermore, as Diana’s backstory developed, it came to eclipse Leonard’s, unbalancing the novel as a whole. I was advised to rewrite the novel solely from Diana’s point of view.

I didn’t relish the prospect. It wasn’t so much the extra work – I was starting to appreciate that writing a publishable novel requires numerous re-workings and repeated drafts – but that I had grown attached to Leonard and was reluctant to let his story go. Furthermore, as Diana’s life-changing experience occurs at age fifteen, her parents’ beliefs, attitudes and behaviours have a significant impact on who she becomes. In particular, Leonard’s ambitions for his children are shaped by an event of which Diana would have no direct knowledge, it having occurred at the POW camp before she was born.

Cutting Leonard’s scenes was painful. I’d so enjoyed his solitary hikes in the Peak District; his impatience as a father; his confusion at the funeral of his friend from his army days. But the incisions, and the reworking of some elements, make Sugar and Snails a much better novel. Different readers will find different things within it but I was gratified that one early reviewer felt that “One of the best parts of the novel is her relationship to her father, who is himself troubled by his own actions in the past.” Others, if they look closely, might still detect the theme of masculinity across three generations. But this is very much Diana’s story. I hope you enjoy following her journey towards narrowing the gap between the woman she is and the woman she feels she ought to be.


Anne Goodwin writes fiction, short and long, and blogs about reading and writing, with a peppering of psychology. Her début novel, Sugar and Snails, was published last week by Inspired Quill. Catch up on her website: annethology or on Twitter @Annecdotist.

See photo above for more of Anne's blog tour, read Maryom's review of Sugar and Snails here,  or catch up on the book's launch

Christopher Fowler - Author Contribution

Today we welcome Christopher Fowler, author of (amongst other things) the Bryant and May crime novels, to the blog. The latest book, The Burning, was published yesterday and we will be posting our (dare I say "glowing"? Yes.) glowing review on Monday 30th March. If you can't wait then checkout "The Water Room" and/or "The Invisible Code".

We see authors discussing PD James's "10 rules for writing" frequently across social media and here Christopher shares his views.

Phyllis Dorothy James was, without doubt, the grande-dame of crime writing, and issued her top ten tips for writing novels. It's heresy to contravene the rules, but what worked for PD James was clearly not what works for every aspiring or professional author.

1. You must be born to write

James says 'You can't teach someone to know how to use words effectively and beautifully.' Not everyone has the benefit of supportive parents or a good education. Much as a brilliant chef may grow up in a home where no good cooking is ever attempted (Nigel Slater wrote about this in his elegant memoir 'Toast') a writer can be taught to understand the beauty of words. You must be born with a curiosity about the world and its people. How that curiosity is shaped depends on a good teacher, nurture, opportunity and passion, not birthright.

2. Write about what you know

Many of us believe in writing about what we don't know. We write what we hope, we dream, we love and fear. You can learn what you need to know easily enough. HRF Keating started the Inspector Ghote novels without ever setting foot in India. Many crime writers have set their stories in California without going there, and what about historical crime? We understand human emotions, but we make a lot up - it's called fiction.

3. Find your own routine

Life is changing fast. Routines are a luxury few of us now have. Write when you can, where you can - that's all. But write regularly. And don't break the three-day rule (when working on a novel, never leave it longer than three days without writing).

4. Be aware that the business is changing

Yes, but you're writing something that will always be needed - a story. And that doesn't change though all the formats and selling systems around it do. We should concentrate for the main part on what we’re good at, the words, and let others help decide how, when and where they will be sold, or we end up becoming the harassed, endlessly networking business managers of our own livelihoods.

5. Read, write and don't daydream

This is possibly the worst advice imaginable. Without space and air and light and calm, those lacunae of everyday life, there is no imagination, and the ideas can't form. I could sit and produce dull prose, or spend a day wandering around a city and come back with my head filled with plots, characters, consequences, dialogues.

6. Enjoy your own company
Safe advice, but the most productive time I ever spent was in a cramped office with four other very noisy writers. Do what's best for you. Only the thinking-out part has to happen inside your lonely head.

7. Choose a good setting

This is the point I most agree with. Without a clear plot location, stories often feel empty and unformed. Although I'd mitigate it by pointing out that two of the greatest short stories, Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery' and Alberto Manguel's 'Seven Floors' have no time or place attached to them at all.

8. Never go anywhere without a notebook

It's a good idea, but now that just means carrying a phone, iPad or electronic device, which you probably already do.

9. Never talk about a book before it is finished

No, no, no! If you stay silent and only seal it inside you, you'll never iron out the improbabilities. Talk to a friend, discussing the book in natural conversation and I swear you'll quickly come to spot all of its faults before the other person has said a single thing. You need a real-world sounding board for something that has only lived in your head.

10. Know when to stop

Talent of Ms James' stature probably allowed her to circumvent this, but unfortunately most publishers specify length of works in their contracts and ask us to pump up the word count accordingly.

The days of writing as a higher calling are over; we write on the fly, as we can, talking to everyone and anyone, as part of world society, not in a room with a desk and a view. Those days are over. For better or worse, the information age has changed the way we write for good.

Cecilia Ekback - guest post

Last week I had the delight of reading and reviewing Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekback - a murder mystery set in eighteenth century Swedish Lapland. Today I'm delighted to welcome Cecilia to talk about the inspiration, setting and meaning of Wolf Winter.....



The expression ‘wolf winter’ in Swedish (vargavinter) refers to an unusually bitter and long winter, but it is also used to describe the darkest of times in a human being’s life – the kind of period that imprints on you that you are mortal and, at the end of the day, always alone.  The old Nordic religions talked about fimbulvetr, ‘the ’large winter,’ that preceded the destruction of the world. It took place when Fenrisulven, the ‘wolf of the wolves’, had eaten the sun…

My father was my best friend. The period preceding and just after his death was my wolf winter. As he lay dying, I interviewed him about his life. He died and I continued speaking, with my grandmother, her sister, their friends, my mother... WOLF WINTER came out of those conversations. Thus the book was not as much an idea I had carried around with me for a long time, as a reaction, or a riposte, to a life event. I became very interested in ‘place’ – setting – in the largest sense of the word and the impact it had on people, versus ‘heritage’ – how many things do we not chose, but that are just there, in us, inherited from generations and generations.

Blackåsen Mountain does not exist as a physical place, but its nature is something I remember from my childhood: a combination of the places and memories I have from Hudiksvall, where I grew up, Knaften and Vormsele, the two small villages in Lapland where my grandparents lived, and Sånfjället, a mountain close to the Norwegian border, where our family had a cabin. Blackåsen is the embodiment of what I felt like growing up in the north of Sweden. It represents the fear, the doubts, the religious fervour, the loneliness and the need to fit in and to belong.

I began writing with the idea of several characters passing through their wolf winters at the same time. I wanted 'place' - the mountain - to be a character in its own right. Blackåsen Mountain watches the settlers. It doesn't care. It is dispassionate. It has already seen many of them come and go and it will see many more come and go after them. I brought this ‘place’ down onto the characters and let it impact them to the fullest. The characters and the plot grew out of the idea and the setting.