Author

Anne Skyvington

How I Created My Debut Novel

The Story of the Novel

Those in the know say Write about what you know. This could be my parents’ love story, with the boring bits left out.

My story takes place in a raw and natural setting called ‘Karrana,’ where a stunningly attractive young woman is ready to break out of her universe and demand more from life. She’s clever and, like a bright chrysalis, just knows that she deserves more—like the cows know when it’s time to come home for milking. She meets the love of her life, or is it her polar opposite (?) at a victory dance. This novel takes place in an Australian country setting at the end of the Second World War in the Pacific. She falls pregnant in a moment of raw passion and rebellion. This throws her back into the very environment she is trying to break free from. This is a women’s story, so it’s about love, nature, pregnancies, child nurturing and dissatisfaction. An accident to her first ‘golden child’ sends the young woman into a spin—a bit like a depression—followed by something akin to enlightenment, wherein passion leads her into a forbidden liaison with a sophisticated, refugee doctor in Sydney.

I won’t tell you the ending, but suffice it to say that it’s a bit complicated.

How I Wrote the First Draft

I wrote it chapter by chapter over a period of 18 months in 2013-2014, meeting in a group of four every fortnight, Randwick Writers, convened by Dina Davis. My first mistake was to engage an editor to do a structural edit when I had written the first draft. It was not ready to be assessed at this stage. After this, I put the manuscript away for some time and concentrated on blogging. I was also attending a larger writers’ group, and focusing on memoir writing. Later on, I worked some more on the story, while attending the Waverley Writers at the local library.

The Question of Structure

I had discovered that one of the hardest things about writing a novel is accessing knowledge and skills to do with structuring a longer work. That is, with the overall storytelling aspect. It begs the question of how to hold the whole novel in your sights, in order to appreciate or critique the structure and add significant bits and sacrifice others that might be scaffolding or padding.

Writers’ groups, unless there are novelists within who are aware of textuality, cannot usually help you with this aspect. Participants often focus on the smaller aspects to do with punctuation, words and grammar, all at the level of the sentence or the chapter.

It’s even harder to remember previous scenes or chapters of your colleagues’ works in a group. And, if you are writing a modern novel, you need to consider recent changes that have taken place in this art form.

The Bigger Picture

I thought for a long while that it’s all about understanding Voice, Viewpoint, Point of View, Scenes and other issues, such as pace and narrative arc. And about writing a segment or a chapter from go to woe, that is, from the beginning to the end. But, after getting a grasp on such elements, and finishing the first draft, I was still searching for that elusive missing link, that was how to discover the overarching theme or rationale? for the novel I was writing. This became my next quest.

A Manuscript Assessment

A talented manuscript assessor at Writing New South Wales, requested, for a moderate sum, a couple of chapters of my manuscript, together with a synopsis, and she offered an hour-long Q&A session, where we worked together, asking and answering questions. That was what got me over the hump towards completion. After that, I knew where I was coming from and where I was headed. This was important for structural cohesion of the whole work; it enabled a final culling—and/or perfecting—of relevant motifs and metaphors. Within a relatively short period of time, I felt ready to publish the novel, so that it all hangs together. The missing link for myself, was knowing the right questions in relation to overall novelistic structure, to discover the ‘meaning’ of the work. After all, the novel is about many things, but this needs to be distilled into one or two sentences. Of course, if you plan the novel beforehand, you may not need this process, but there will be other different issues to confront.

Creating a Logline

I came across Jeff Lyons through Reedsy. Jeff is an expert in the art of storytelling. He states that you need a ‘logline’, which is a summary or premise, in one or two sentences, even before you start to write your novel. Of course, most people, and I am one of them, don’t work in this way. However, I have found that it is important to be able to do this, at some stage during the creative process. According to Lyons, the logline should include 7 parts: (i) a mention of the World of the novel (ii) the main Protagonist (iii) the Problem faced (iv) the Goal or Challenge for the protagonist (v) the personalised Opponent (vi) Choices or Decisions (vii) the Action taken by the protagonist.

The Logline or Premise of Karrana

In post-World War Two Australia, Bridie, a spirited young woman brought up on a dairy farm, surrounded by beauty and rawness, seeks romance and ultimate fulfilment. She hopes her choice of a mate, who she meets at the Karrana Victory Dance, will lead to a different future than that her mother, and, later on, her husband, want to keep her cosseted in. Her passionate nature, aided by fateful irony, deems that she demands more from life than nature alone; a family accident takes a hand in ensuring this.

July 4, 2020 0 comment

Writing

Randwick Writers’ Group: Sharing Writing Skills

A book about writing groups

Joining a writing group is very popular these days, at least in Anglo speaking countries. There are many different types of writing groups, just as there are various types of writers. Some writers simply wish to record memories for their family, children and friends to read. Writing correctly and clearly will be a main push for them. Others want to hone their skills towards the goal of writing a short story, or a longer genre, such as a novel or a modern memoir. They will need different skills, for example, knowledge of how to structure a particular genre.

I have been a member of three writing groups over the years, and most participants, when asked, expressed a wish to be published. One of the groups I was a part of was Randwick Writers Group, which has recently published a book that showcases work from six members in search of writing excellence. Each of the six participants found that being part of this group brought their writing up to a new level.

This book is unique in that it has followed members from the initial phase of setting up the group, until this point, five years later, when three members have published novels, and the rest are on the point of doing so.

If you would like to find out more about the workings of writing groups, this book is what you are looking for. As well as informational content, it also showcases the writings of the authors. It can be purchased through the publisher, Ginninderra Press or through online book stores, such as Amazon and other online bookstores. Enjoy!

Click on this link to have a peep inside the online digital version of the book.

https://www.book2look.com/book/TPULpSvFiE&bibletformat=epub

Purchase the digital book at Amazon Australia

May 7, 2020 0 comment

Publishing

5 Further Publishing Facts

NIELSEN BOOKSCAN

In December 2000 the situation for publishers began to change a little with the establishment of Nielsen BookScan, a local affiliate of US polling company A.C. Nielsen. Nielsen tracks book sales by barcode from around eighty-five per cent of all retail outlets selling books in Australia. Its main customers are publishing houses which, for an annual subscription fee of up to $100,000, are regularly emailed spreadsheets showing the best-selling books. These include details such as actual copies sold, average selling price and publisher across 140 genre categories and sub-categories.

Of the top 132 best-selling titles listed in the first two pages of the Nielsen top 5000 list for the five weeks ending 1 January 2005, 65 originated from Australia. Of these only four were literary novels: Tim Winton’s The Turning at number 9, Cloud Street at number 65, and Dirt Music at number 104. Winton is unique in Australian publishing, having both a literary and a large popular audience.

This is another problem for writers such as myself whose work might straddle the literary and commercial fields.

THE RISE OF THE GENRE PARADIGM

The appearance of genre fiction in bestseller lists with the advent of BookScan also granted it a new cultural and economic respectability. Genre fiction is highly author-and formula-driven and attracts reader loyalty, while its authors tend to generate new titles on a regular, often annual, basis, making genre fiction far more reliable than literary fiction from a publisher’s list-building point of view. The authors of popular fiction are also more likely to be granted celebrity status than literary authors, maximising their promotional potential.

The availability of data from companies such as BookScan means that publishers, for the first time, have access to accurate, up-to-the-minute sales figures that are transparent across the industry. No longer is it possible to fudge sales.

THE DECLINE OF LITERARY

Of the recent changes in Australian book publishing, among the most striking is the decline of the literary paradigm.

By the early 2000s almost no major Australian publisher was aggressively seeking or promoting new literary fiction at the forefront of their lists, and literary fiction was no longer the cornerstone of the industry’s self-perception. In the late 1990s Penguin Books, which had been at the forefront of the ‘cultural renaissance’ of the 1960s to 1980s period, first dropped its poetry list.

Literary fiction will otherwise become the preserve of independent or small publishers and self-publishing. The consolidation of publishing has resulted in a counter-movement from established independent publishers such as Text Publishing and Scribe, who have sought to exploit the potential of niche-audience mid-list titles as profit-making prospects with ‘a long tail’. Midlist is a term in the publishing industry which refers to books which are not bestsellers but are strong enough to economically justify their publication and likely, further purchases of future books from the same author.

In 2004 Text formed a partnership with Scottish publisher Canongate to maximise the value of both lists. New small presses such as Vulgar and Giramondo attempt to offer a home and space for aesthetic freedom an experimentation for mid-list authors disenchanted with mainstream publishers, such as Brian Castro now at Giramondo.

Confronted by the new market conditions, literary writers have begun to look at ways of reinventing themselves, either turning to a commercial model or else looking overseas.

The increasing difficulty of getting published has fostered an underground push for change and a search for new paradigms, reflected in the rise of alternative literary festivals, a live reading circuit, and self-publishing through make-your-own imprints such as Vandal Press and Cardigan Press both collectives that publish short story collections. Such developments point to how literature might become a do-it-yourself culture that will operate, for the time being, at least partly outside mainstream publishing culture, having cleared itself a space for experimentation and the development of new paradigms.

But publishers say there is no harder sell in the world of books these days than literary fiction.

OTHER OUTLETS

Meanwhile, writers around the world can bypass the traditional publishing process if they wish, and self-publish their work, enjoying unprecedented freedom and autonomy in delivering their work directly to readers.

You create an account with KDP and upload your manuscript, cover images and other required details onto Amazon’s KDP platform. https://kdp.amazon.com/ where you will find all the information you require for setting up and proceeding.

ONE SECRET IS the amount Amazon reports paying out in 2019 to indie publishers and authors through its Kindle Unlimited subscription program. That brings Amazon’s total payout for self-published authors up to $2.2 billion since 2012 when it launched this “pay as you read” program that’s much loved by readers around the world.

KINDLE UNLIMITED

Very few indie authors know what Kindle Unlimited is all about!

Kindle Unlimited is a ‘lending library’ that helps readers discover your books in dozens of countries, including the US, UK, Germany, Canada, Mexico, and beyond. Authors are paid by the number of pages read instead of outright eBook purchases.

Kindle Unlimited is just one of many great sales and marketing opportunities available at Amazon, and self-published authors have found great success using them to launch and promote their eBooks.

Establish a price for your book and list your book’s genre and categories. Choose keywords so readers can find your book, and supply more information, called metadata, about your book.

Your book, digital or printed, will go live on Amazon just a few hours after you’ve uploaded it correctly. Millions of potential readers can now find your book. It’s part of a relatively new distribution process called Print on Demand or POD. Amazon sends out royalty payments to authors each month of 12 to 20 percent of the sales price for the physical POD books and 70% for the eBook sales.

You need an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) to distribute your book through retailers globally. Amazon can provide one for you, or you can purchase your own from Thorpe-Bowker Identifier Services https://www.myidentifiers.com/

KBoards is a website devoted to all things Kindle. They’re a small family operation, but they’ve become the largest independent Kindle user site on the web.

April 1, 2020 0 comment

Publishing

5 Facts I Learnt About Self/Publishing

Someone said it takes a village to bring up a child; it’s the same for writing a novel. This was certainly true for me.

Experts say you should write about what you know, so I wrote about my parents’ love story, set in country New South Wales, as Australia was exiting from the Second World War. This was a time when big changes were happening in this part of the world.

I probably showed my work too soon, and to the wrong person/people early on. However, I found an excellent manuscript assessor, and finalised the novel, utilising skills I’d developed over years of creative writing practice and research. I’d also learnt, after long hours in feedback groups, how to self edit my work, both at the macro level and at the micro and middle levels.

I then taught myself how to upload an ebook to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform. [KDP]. It proved to be tricky at first.

Going Back to the 2000s

As Amazon released its first eReader, the kindle, in 2007, I became increasingly interested in the slowly emerging ‘Internet’, and the opportunities it brought to writers everywhere. Just as I was experimenting with all things digital, I joined a writers’ group at Waverley Library and ended up volunteering as a creative writing convenor in 2009. My first step was to create a list of guidelines for giving and receiving feedback; I’ve found that it’s essential for the happy functioning of a group and many others have caught on now.

I had completed Creative Writing Studies at The University Of Technology, Sydney in 2005. And gradually I’d become fascinated with the concept of ‘blogging’, digital marketing and self-publishing. My own blog The Craft of Writing, journals the past ten years of my educational experience, beginning as a complete Internet newbie, to a digital expert in the field of publishing and creative writing.

What I learnt about Traditional Publishers

A Definition: To greatly simplify matters, a traditional publisher acts as a gatekeeper and pays an advance to authors.

It wasn’t long ago that if you wanted to be published, there was only one route: submitting to a publisher. A traditional publisher, if you are lucky enough to have your manuscript accepted, will pay you an upfront amount of between $5 and $10, 000 or anything up to $50 000. Obamas, the former first couple of the United States, received $60 million for two books. There are exceptions. The catch is that royalties gained are deducted from the cash payment.

Most of the large publishing houses require an agent to represent you. It’s almost impossible for a new writer or author to get published in Australia by the big 5 unless an agent is involved. And it is just as difficult to gain an agent as it is a publisher. Pan Macmillan, Penguin Australia, Random House, Hachette, Harper Collins and Simon and Schuster are busy representing established authors, or taking on famous people such as presidents, sports stars and politicians.

With the onset of digital publishing, printing a book has become cheap. In fact, you can use POD (Print-On-Demand), which prints and mails books out as they’re ordered. To order one of my own books from Ingram, I pay about $25, of which half is the printing and half the shipping costs.

In the US fewer than one percent of submitted manuscripts are published. Without counting self-published titles that makes upwards of 300,000 new titles a year. (If you count self published works, it’s 600, 000 – 1,000, 000 books. Publishers nowadays are positively swamped with submissions. There is so much material to choose from that naturally publishers have become more selective. Queries outline ‘the bones of the story structurally and thematically’ and are written by the author. The competition is intense. 90% are culled just from a query letter. (Source: Jane Friedman).

Large commercial publishers receive hundreds and even thousands of unsolicited manuscripts each year. Some, such as HarperCollins, read only half of them and of those that are read, only about five end up on the shelves of a bookstore. In 1998, Penguin publisher Julie Gibbs noted that her company received an average of 70 unsolicited manuscripts per week – that is, some 3,640 a year – of which only three or four were considered worthy of publication.

The Truth Will Set You Free

First the bad news: Most people who write a book will never get it published; half the writers who are published won’t see a second book in print; and most books published are never reprinted. What’s more, half the titles in any given bookshop won’t sell a single copy there, and most published writers won’t earn anything from their book apart from the advance.

The truth is that you and I will still go on writing and enjoying writing because of the passion involved. And you might find that your writing improves greatly, when you are freed from the pressure of seeking a publisher. Plus, there are nowadays other options to the traditional approach.

For a long while, I decided not to expect anything from my writing apart from the personal fulfilment of having learned my craft and believing that I would, maybe, one day create a work that hadn’t existed before.

Authors seeking traditional publication undergo a tortuous procedure that involves identifying appropriate publishers, querying, pitching, contract negotiation…. I went through the hoops, even though I was already published on my own creative writing blog, where I’d learnt how to be correct and dot all the I’s before I ever pushed the publish button.

A blogging mentor suggested that I go through the ropes of being published traditionally and trial the ‘literary speed dating’ event held by the Australian Society of Authors (ASA). All six of the publishers and an agent I met at this event expressed glowing interest in my pitches for Karrana, and gave me their cards. I tried about seven or eight in the Independent Publishers stream. Nothing much followed my queries and written approaches.

One of the problems for me was that learning how to write these written pitches involved using the left (logical) side of my brain, and took me away from creative writing, which had become my passion.

For a new writer, especially, this process is intimidating and scary as they try to navigate the competitive, unfamiliar territory of the publishing world. It’s exhausting and, at times, disheartening. No one likes rejection. It’s your baby, for goodness sakes!

Reputable Independent Traditional Publishers in Australia, such as Text Publishing, Scribe Publications, Ventura, Allen&Unwin, Affirm Press, and Black Inc are also often unwilling to accept a writer’s unsolicited manuscript without an agent’s referral, even though they may advertise to the contrary.

There are Small Presses and Small Presses…

Small presses are an important alternative for writers who don’t want to go the agent-to-big-publisher route, but prefer to avoid the DIY work of self-publishing. Most reputable small presses cannot afford to pay advances, but nor do they charge you an upfront fee.

Respected Small Presses, such as Pantera, Giramondo, Cordite, and Transit Lounge, usually cannot afford to pay advances or assist authors greatly in having their books placed in large bricks-and-mortar bookstores.

These smaller publishers are often under-staffed and not always able to provide complete editing or distribution facilities for new writers. But they’re a good option for a writer starting out.

If a small press requests payment for services, this should be a red light to a writer. Legitimate publishers do not charge an author to publish their book. Important side note: If the small press makes you pay upfront for their in-house editing, design, or production—or makes you pay for copies of your book—they’re not a traditional publisher, but a hybrid publisher or a publishing service. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with utilising these services if you choose to. And you may finish up with a book, or a publishable manuscript, of which you can be proud.

Hybrid publishers combine certain aspects of traditional publishing and self-publishing.

In the case of assisted self-publishing or publishing services (called ‘vanity presses’ in the old days), these companies sometimes adopt the moniker of ‘hybrid publisher’ to look more innovative or attractive to authors. You can’t blame them for doing this. But know that they’re not really a hybrid publisher, unless they can offer value and/or distribution and marketing muscle that can’t be secured on your own as a self-publisher, or with a small publishing press.

The best hybrid publishers conduct some level of gatekeeping, offer value that the author would have a hard time securing on her own, and should also pay better royalties than a traditional publishing deal. (Fifty percent is common). If the hybrid publisher presents itself as little more than ‘Here’s a package of services you can buy’, then it’s most likely a dressed-up self-publishing firm.

Keep in mind that…

Traditional Publishers get a lot of manuscripts, and may take a while to respond — preferring to work on the basis of ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’.

March 23, 2020 0 comment

Mythos

Births Deaths and Marriages

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Hamlet [Act 1, Scene 5]

Something extraordinary occurs at the occasion of a birth, and also at the time when a loved one is dying. If you are open and ‘tuned in’, you will experience this as something otherworldly and mysterious. William James coined the word ‘numinous’ to explain what can only be otherwise understood as the holy.

Since these are highly charged events, you might be inclined to say that it’s only natural, and nothing-out-of-the-ordinary that loved ones are hugely impacted.

But I’m referring to something much deeper and more mysterious than simply the extremity of the effects of births and death. Special feelings and resonances occur, accompanied sometimes by omens and portents. The dying person calls out: Lift me, as he smiles, tranquil, and subsides into peaceful stillness. The newborn comes out quietly, blinking up at the lights, as if pleased to be here.

Sometimes there’s a shattering of the laws of cause and effect; a breaking down of the veil that separates our three dimensional world from other, perhaps parallel, universes.

Around the time of my father’s death, and for many months, probably years, afterwards, time and space changed for me. It was not that my earthly relationship with my father had been a deeply intimate one. In fact, quite the opposite. He was a quiet and deep thinker, whose ambition for land was a driving force. I was deep but bookish and in search of emotional fulfillment. We weren’t that close in a pragmatic sense. But on a deeper level, we shared important things.

It was simply that matter, phenomena, moved aside at the time of his death, and I had a glimpse, for a moment, into a different dimension. When I try to explain what happened in words, it comes across as the utterings or ideas of a religious nut, an extremist, a fundamentalist freak, a fool. I suppose it is akin to being crazy; I had a breakdown at some stage afterwards. I lay in the foetal position for months in front of the open fire. But then, a moment of grace: the madness lifted, and the light descended. Afterwards, it was as if my whole psyche had been shaken up and reformed into a different mix by the descent into the underworld. Afterwards, I was free of that demon Depression, which had shadowed me up until that time.

In other words, I had learnt that a wish for enlightenment involves a breakdown, a falling into the abyss, and a slowly coming up, shaken to the core. At least, that’s how it had been for me. I arose from this experience with a message for others: Be careful what you wish for.

A similar, if reverse, phenomena happened at the time of my children’s births. They were radiant experiences, even though the second one ended up as a caesarian. With my first baby, Kate, I experienced a change in consciousness as I opened up like a giant evening primrose and offered her up to the world and to the light. You might say it was the drugs; my bed was surrounded by entities, whom I later learnt were student doctors; but they played a role, like actors, in my super-charged experiences. You forget the pain afterwards, and the bundle of joy placed into your arms makes up for the struggle, the hard labour and the exhaustion. But I still remember the strangeness surrounding the birth events, reminiscent of stories of near-death experiences (NDE’s) I’d heard of.

During my first grandson Lee’s water birth, there were suddenly, and without explanation, five of us: the midwife, the husband, the mother-in-law, the mother and the father, surrounding Kate and her oversize stomach, as she lay in the tub of warm water ready to push. Andrei got in with her to support her body, and the rest of us each fulfilled a small task or offered a word of encouragement as the birth progressed. The energy and love in that small room was evident for all of us to witness. Warmth and the light of love seemed to flood us with its wonder and miraculous energy.

I felt alive for the first time in a long while, aware that this was what life was all about: giving birth, nurturing and developing a human soul, so precious, so vulnerable, so strong. There is nothing quite like it on earth, no feeling so powerful as that of pushing out a little human into the world. This is what has made me stronger, capable of protecting another life against all adversity, of mustering up courage in the face of fear, of drawing on all my human strength to nourish and nurture another being. Does this sound far-fetched, extreme, the mouthings of a fool?

If this is what a fool is, then, yes, I am one!

Marriage, too, arrived with foolish trappings. I’d been lonely and falling into negative relationships for a long while. My main focus had been on gaining higher degrees; I was a perpetual student, striving to prove that I was not stupid. It wasn’t even making me happy. In fact, the academic exertions, although successful, had played their part in my breakdown.

I was thirsting for emotional success, not intellectual satisfactions.

I hurried along the bleak corridors of Fisher Library, surrounded by rows and rows of books in metal and timber shelvings, the musty smell, the cold. I was crying silently. I don’t know if it was my spirit guides, or a god that I scarcely believed in, that I summoned that afternoon. But it was to someone or other that I cried out, wordlessly, pleading for them to come and rescue me from my alonenness. Perhaps it’s just that I was ready for change, ready for the next stage of beingness. Or maybe I was heard. Within a very short time, I’d met my life’s partner—an unlikely soul mate, in the person of an unemployed actor, ten years younger than me—at the theatre we’d both joined. It was as if that unreliable narrator that is Life, were playing tricks on me once again: I’d have to support us for years, for God’s sake!

But I was in love and ready to try out this new togetherness thing. Little did I know that the struggles that would confront us would be like those of Sisyphus with his ruthlessly downhill-rolling stone. And I learnt that no one survives this period without a struggle, especially if children are involved, as they were soon for us, too.

And then one day, out of a clear blue sky, the future and the past were conflated with the present. And we arrived at middle age with our lives intact and without having suffered any great tragedies. And with the ability to share a sort of peace and satisfaction together, just the two of us, at last.

February 1, 2020 0 comment