A New Year present
An overlooked end to 2014 came to my attention due to an early-2015 tweet – someone was about to start reading Lupa, my debut novel, following an unsolicited recommendation. A little detective work led me to a review by author Michal Wojcik.
In his list of favourite reads of 2014, Michal puts my novel alongside Nicola Griffith’s Nebula-nominated Hild, multi-award-winning Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, and The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. That’s what I call company! Recommending Lupa, Michal says:
The writing is subdued, sparse, often mesmerizing. It’s a brisk read at only 130 pages, but I found myself thinking about it a long time after I read it. Let’s just say that there’s nary a wasted word here… Lupa is easily overlooked. But it shouldn’t be.
This was such a nice New Year present, and it is very gratifying to hear that a reader -particularly a fellow author – has enjoyed a book of mine. In a comment in the thread below Michal’s article, someone has written “I’m running out to buy Lupa this very instant.” This kind of word-of-mouth is like gold-dust to an author. Well, I’m just away to read Michal’s short story ‘Mrs. Yaga’ here. I don’t know what to expect but I imagine that huts on chicken-legs will be involved…
I have had a re-think about what writing task to tackle in the spring. I think want to leave aside the element of fantasy – and that means any hint of steampunk, magic realism, or what have you – and engage in something which, though it might not exactly embrace the classical unities of time, place, and action, at least is based very much on ‘real world’ happenings. I am thinking of a setting that is historical, exotic (to me), and a story that is already familiar. However, my ongoing projects change like the direction of the wind. Oh, it can be fun being me!
M.
I’m taking a moment to review how things have gone in 2014. Sometimes, at the end of a year, I feel that I haven’t achieved anything; but when I stop and think about it, actually quite a lot has happened.
Waterstones. Then in February my short story Da Trow I’ da Waa was read aloud to the audience at Pitlochry Festival Theatre. This was the fifth time in seven years that one of my stories has been featured at the Winter Words literary festival, and I consider that to be quite an achievement.
Throughout the year both old and new poems of mine have been published in anthologies and magazines. Notable among the publications have been The Milk of Female Kindness (ed. Kasia James) in March, May Prism 2014 (ed. Ron Wiseman) in May, although I didn’t find out about that until August, and Rubies in the Darkness (ed. P G P Thompson) in December.
In September, of course, my third novel was published – From My Cold, Undead Hand – and what more need I say about it! And a short time ago I put the final full-stop at the end of the sequel, KWIREBOY vs VAMPIRE. Since then I have placed it in the hands of a couple of beta readers, and have had first reactions from one of them. Amongst her comments were the words “… great job! … maelstrom of action and adventure…” and I am still basking in that rosy glow; however, a writer herself, she drew my attention to several things in the general readability of the novel about which I am going to have to think very seriously.
Today’s big news is that I have finished writing KWIREBOY vs VAMPIRE, the sequel to From My Cold, Undead Hand. So now I plan a period of leisure – no more novel-writing until well into Spring 2015.
Marie Marshall 