Smyth Díaz

Denis Smyth Díaz – author

  • An excruciating kind of nudity

    Since the release of Dolores and Other Sorrows, I have been to several open mic nights around Brussels. The book is a collection of short stories, so it lends itself to this format: I sign up to read, I enjoy some authors of poems, short stories or songs and then my name gets called. The venue goes quiet as I approach the microphone. This isn’t one of those dreams where you’re naked giving a presentation at university on a subject you know nothing about. This is real. I have clothes on, but even so I’m feeling worse than naked. The stage is too big when I have it to myself. These readings weren’t the first time I’ve ever been on stage because I used to be a drummer in a mediocre band. However, sitting behind my drumkit and three other musicians gave me a safe cocoon that a microphone can’t. I played pretty much naked once (the real naked, the one without clothes on) and it wasn’t as hard. The thing is, reading stories that are close to your heart is difficult. Some of them are nothing but imagination going wild, but with others you’re saying ‘hey, I’ve got these broken bits and I’ve ripped open my skin. It hurts, but do you want to check it out?’ In my case, most images are often suitably smothered in metaphors, but that just adds another problem. What if people don’t get the meaning? You’re exposing yourself out there, maybe reading about something that’s painful, and certainly reading something that you’ve spent months working on. You want people to like it. They don’t need to come up to you to tell you ‘hey, you’re awesome!’ but, rather, simply to say ‘what you said moved me’ or, in the best-case scenario, ‘what you read was meaningful to me’. The sense of communion with the audience is what is critical. Polite applause is painful. Getting ignored is agony. Someone coming up to you to shake your hand and say ‘hey, I liked your story’ gives you the energy to carry on.

    I’m sure there are people who enjoy these performances, or who even relish them. Others will just live with it, consider it part of the job of presenting a book, like waking up early in the morning or putting up with bad coffee and the smelly colleagues who cycle in to work. I’m neither of these. I have a really bad time. On most occasions, I manage to hide my hysteria beneath giggling and speaking fast. I have to make a conscious effort not to rattle off a 2000‑word story in under two minutes. People can get used to all sorts of excruciating ordeals, so I’m sure I’ll grow numb enough to it, if I have to. Probably. For the time being, though, it’s still a work in progress.

    Despite all this, I don’t want this entry to come through as gloomy or a sob story. While what I’ve written above is true, there’s also an exhilaration that comes with performing. Is it because you feel most alive when you’re close to death? Now now, let’s not get too melodramatic. The first thirty seconds are hard, but then it gets progressively easier, and in the end there’s certainly some sort of rush. It also helps if there are lights in your face and you can’t see the audience!

  • Non-Amazon ways of buying Dolores and Other Sorrows

    The world has changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Oops, sorry, I got carried away there for a second. The world is quickly becoming a scary place in an increasingly tangible way. Don’t worry, though, I’m not going to start talking about politics. This is more of a shoutout to all indie bookshops, and a call to action to everyone to use the power we have to make sure it’s not just two or three people who keep most of the profit pie. What power is that we have, you may ask? Why, the power of the purse, of course!

    I appreciate that Amazon is comfortable and easy. However, for a teeny-weeny extra effort you can make a gigantic difference, simply by choosing a different provider for your books. Below is a list of retailers where I have found that Dolores and Other Sorrows is available. Needless to say, I encourage to buy that book specifically, but, even if you don’t want that one, I encourage you to resort to these outlets anyway.

    It will come as no surprise that I’ve put the small bookshops first, since I think they provide an experience that no big outlet can hope to replicate. Phoning in and getting the same person every time is a good thing. Use that connection to explore! Tell them about your tastes and let them guide you to places unknown and unexpected.

    Nevertheless, I’m going to include also some larger online shops. Now, I’m not naïve enough to think that ‘Amazon bad, the rest good’. I’m sure there are other large online shops that have a, let’s say, less-than-ideal relationship with their employees, but I’m hoping that at least they don’t have enough clout to destroy our democracies.

    And with that out of the way, here is the list of retailers. I will be adding more as I find them. If you own a shop and want to be added to the list, please don’t hesitate to write to me.

    Librebook.eu – my go-to bookshop in Brussels. The web site is mostly in French, but I’ve been there hundreds of times and I can assure you they are collectively fluent in about fifteen languages.

    All Good Bookshop – if you’re in North London, check out this wonderful spot, which is both a cooperative bookshop and a gathering space for events. Just the kind of venue we need more of.

    Kennys.ie – online and physical store run by real booksellers. They will find anything you need, even rare books.

    Big Green Bookshop – a labour of love if I ever saw one. Simon will go out of his way to help you. Free delivery if you’re in the UK.

    Quinn’s Bookshop – if Heaven isn’t like this shop, it’s got work to do to catch up.

    There are other, larger bookshops that will undoubtedly be able to find the book for you, and you’re free to buy it there (I actually recommend it, nudge nudge wink wink), but I don’t want to give them any more publicity than they already have.

    Again, I would like to encourage any independent bookshops to write to me if they want to be included in this list. I will be writing to as many as I can as well.

  • Honey, I Killed the Cats

    Before anyone freaks out, the title of this blog entry is simply the title of the latest book I’ve been reading, and I wanted to talk about it. Needless to say, there might be spoilers ahead. I’ll try to be discreet, but it’s easy to slip up inadvertently.

    Honey, I Killed the Cats was written by Dorota Masłowska. It’s the first thing I’ve read by her, but she’s apparently written several books already and is popular not only in her native Poland, but internationally.

    Now, about the book itself, I’m still trying to decide whether I liked it or not. I think I did. Yes, I did. However, I got pretty confused at times. I didn’t enjoy that. Having said that, I think that confusion is part of the point of the book. It’s meant to be chaotic. It’s a picture of shallow, modern life and the exhibitionism that goes with it. It’s fear of missing out, but seen from within, where everything is a vortex that makes you lose sight of the big picture.

    The characters are looking, looking, looking but never quite finding. They start the book seemingly in control of what they want, but as the story progresses you realise (they don’t) that their search is their whole life.

    There were some amazing descriptions (she was made almost entirely of faults; [speaking about a restaurant] they didn’t import the meat from a farm outside of Portland where the animals were allowed to have a tape decks in their room and the right to speak to a psychologist before they die; I love taking the subway. It makes me feel something on the border between religion and sex. Which allegedly don’t share a border at all) that feel apt for the subject matter and the book: they’re disjointed and punk-infused, and they make you chuckle and cringe at the same time.

    The whole world is extreme, and that is part of my problem with it. When it’s right, it’s thoroughly good. When the plot goes all over the place, my interest goes right with it. Chaos is fine, but not when readers are so caught up in it that they don’t know what’s going on. Or, rather, chaos is fine for a bit -it’s a wonderful stylistic tool-, but after a while it gets dizzying. Not the nice kind of dizzy either.

    And now the inevitable question: would I recommend it? Sure I would. It’s got enough in it to keep you intrigued. The premise is good, even if the execution isn’t always to my taste.

  • Living in metaphors

    One of the things that I think all writers do is constantly have their mind elsewhere. If you see a writer, from the amateur beginner to the seasoned professional, with their gaze lost somewhere in the distance it’s likely that they’re actually thinking about a story they’re writing or else planning on writing. In some cases they’ll be thinking about a story they’ve already written and wondering how it could be improved. If it’s been published, they’re likely mildly regretting not incorporating some wonderful change that occurred to them five minutes after the book had been sent to print.

    Thinking about stories is actually a ton of fun, to be honest. It might be hard to understand for people who don’t like writing, but it’s actually a great way of keeping yourself entertained. You don’t even need a notebook, although I never leave the house without one in case I come up with a good idea (at least a good idea for my standards, anyway!). Suddenly, commutes are no longer a chore, or at least not such a gruelling one, but instead a time to be in the sole company of your mind and your stories. I liken it to meditation: you have to be enjoying the moment. You don’t think about the shopping list or after-school activities for kids or the lack of hygiene of your co-commuters.

    However, there is one element of this process that drives me slightly bonkers. I’m going to put it out there in the hopes that someone will say ‘that happens to me too’, although I’ve got the nagging worry that this is not all that common. My problem is that I think in metaphors all the time.

    I like to use settings as metaphors, where the metaphor is not just a concrete object, but the whole environment. For instance, I once wrote a story where the main character had dismantled his house brick by brick and was trying to reassemble it in a different way, but he was finding it hard to fit all the pieces exactly where he wanted them. As he spoke to a friend, the reader realised that it was all a metaphor for a huge change that had occurred in his life to which he was having trouble adapting. When I read it like that it sounds kind of dumb, but I can assure you it wasn’t that obvious in the story itself! The problem here is that almost anything that you do in real life can be used as a metaphor. Is the train stopping often? Off the top of my head, that’s a metaphor for either your life not moving as smoothly as you would like or for your colon acting up. Are there workers cursing and blaspheming on the scaffolding? That’s a metaphor for chaos in a relationship or in a neighbour meeting.

    The same thing applies to objects, and there the metaphors can get seriously unruly. A kettle can reflect a conversation with your mother-in-law (getting progressively hotter until the pressure is too much and it pops, geddit?) or the slow coming together of two disparate people. A painting can reflect a character’s state of state of mind or its determination to change something. Seriously, I could go on all day.

    So why does it drive me bonkers? Because sometimes it’s too much. Sometimes you have to give your brain a rest, leave it fallow for a bit. Not everything in the world is a sign, you don’t have to use absolutely every second of your day to write something. At times my mind is on at full steam when I’m trying to get it to slow down. That is especially bad at night, when I’m trying to sleep, and I’m going over the events of the day. Good luck trying to convince my head to just sleep, for crying out loud! I try to bribe it with the possibility of dreams, which are also a great source of material, but it’s hard to be scheming with your own brain: after all it’s the one that comes up with the ideas.

    So now for the big question: anyone out there with the same problem?

  • Tsundoku

    Today’s entry is one that will hopefully have all book lovers nodding quietly and smiling to themselves. However, I will get there the long way round.

    Part of what makes a linguist tick is the kind of thing that makes other people think ‘well, if you say so…’ or ‘and how does that help?’ or else utter an unimpressed ‘wow’. However, it will come as no surprise that I don’t agree with these people. Linguistics are the science of trying to understand how the human mind works at its most basic level: how to exchange information in the most efficient way. I don’t need to explain how all the languages in the world each convey information in a different, but completely effective, way. What is fascinating, though, is how some cultures decided to assign importance to some elements that other cultures overlooked or simply did not need (no desert-based civilisation needs many terms for ‘snow’, for instance). Sometimes there are terms that fall through the cracks of one-on-one equivalence.

    For instance, as a Spanish speaker, I find the word sobremesa to be perfectly natural: it’s the time after lunch when you’re just chatting with the other people round the table, maybe over coffee or a shot of something, possibly without even tidying up the dishes because you’re all just so comfortable that you don’t want to ruin the moment. However, I haven’t found that concept exactly in any other language without the need to resort to a longer expression or a roundabout explanation.

    There are other such words in other languages, such as tartle in Scottish English, which means ‘to hesitate when introducing someone because you’ve forgotten that person’s name’, or cafuné in Brazilian Portuguese, which means ‘to lovingly run your fingers through someone’s hair or to massage their head’. The list is endless! As a linguist, it’s beyond me how people can’t find this fascinating. ‘Yeah, well… OK, I guess…’, I hear most people say.

    Personally, I find the slipped-through-the-gaps words from Japanese to be the nicest because everything in their culture seems to be delicate and carefully thought out. My all‑time favourite is tsundoku (積ん読. I must trust Wikipedia with this spelling!), which means ‘the act of accumulating books for reading at a later stage’.

    Book lovers, I can see you! You’re starting to smile to yourselves! You know where this is going!

    As a book lover myself, one of my greatest joys is walking into bookshops. I could even walk into one in Indonesia and feel great, even if I speak not a single word of Indonesian. Librebook, in Brussels, is one of my favourite spots in the city. I will stop at second-hand bookshops even if I’ve got urgent things to do. On a recent trip abroad I made sure to walk my family through the points of a city where I knew there were several bookshops. It follows naturally that I can’t help myself and I usually end up buying stuff, and said stuff gets piled up until a moment when I hope I’ll have time to read it. I don’t know the scientific explanation for this, but I’m guessing it has to do with the fact of anticipating the time when those books will be enjoyed. They are a reminder of the promise of good things.

    Tsundoku can sometimes get stressful, because I get anxious at having to devote too much time to cleaning-cooking-shopping-working instead of to escaping into the pile of books, but despite that I embrace it. I have plenty of negative traits, but tsundoku is one that I refuse to consider a fault. Let’s enjoy the anxiety that comes with looking forward to a time when we’ll be sitting down in the best possible company that a book lover can find.

  • Here’s one I did earlier…

    ‘Art is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration’. You’ve heard this quote before, I’m sure. If you’re Proust or Mozart or Picasso, those percentages may change to 10%-90%, but not much more than that. I’m sure anyone reading this is nodding and smiling. ‘Yep, been there, done that’. Personally, I couldn’t agree more. However, I’d like to think that there’s been some progress in my craft. To prove that, below is one of the first stories I ever wrote (slight tangent: I’ve written about 100 stories to be able to select the 12 that made it into Dolores and Other Sorrows). You’ll see that there’s nothing openly wrong with it, but it’s just not especially good. It’s just… meh. However, there are a couple of images that to this day I still find interesting. Those are the bits that were later adapted into something else, and something more memorable, later.

    All this is to say that I hope people reading this persevere in their craft. Not even the greats create masterpieces every single time. They can be hung over too!

    And now onto the story:

    A miracle, no doubt

    The kid moved closer to the window. ‘Look, Granny, I’ve got a miracle,’ he said.

    ‘Hey, watch your mouth! Those things are serious.’

    ‘I mean it. Look at this funny peanut. It looks like a frog.’

    Mary Morgana, known as Morguie among her friends, picked the object her grandson was holding. Her incredulity and disinterest soon turned into an uncontrollable shaking: there, between her index and thumb, a brown and lightly salted frog stared peacefully at her. It was a frog, no doubt. No, it was a peanut. But that look… it could only be a frog. No, it had just come out of a bag of snacks. It had to be a peanut.

    ‘Actually, no-one pays attention to those details,’ she concluded. ‘It’s definitely a miracle.’

    She ruthlessly emptied a pot of freshly made stew in the bin and placed the discovery inside, for protection. Then she pulled it out again, cleaned the pot and put the discovery back inside. Maybe the frog found the smell disturbing.

    ‘But it’s not a frog, it’s a peanut,’ she thought. ‘Anyway, same thing.’

    She put her shawl round her shoulders and headed toward the church with her new treasure in her arms, leaving her grandson alone with the rest of the snacks.

    ‘Father Godfrey is going to be so happy! And when the guys at the top of the town see this, they’ll know who the boss is!’. She glanced upwards, where the spires of the cathedral poked out from behind the buildings in the upper part of town.

    Entering the chapel was always welcome, with its warmth, its gentle lighting and the quiet, which stood in contrast with the constant drizzle, the stink of manure and the air that always found a crevice in your clothes to chill you to the bone. Morguie trotted heavily through the central nave, reached the centre of the building and realised that in the excitement she had forgotten her manners. She trotted back to the holy water and crossed herself. Father Godfrey was at the back, polishing some chandeliers.

    ‘Father, I’ve found the solution. We can make the town what it used to be. I’ve found the miracle that we’ve been praying for for so long.’

    Father Godfrey wasn’t aware that he had been supposed to pray for anything specific beyond the general salvation of humanity, but he bit his tongue because Morguie was a great help in the church and he didn’t want to offend her.

    ‘And what is it?’ he whispered in his Mass-and-confessions voice.

    ‘Look, Father. Look at this beauty.’ Morguie opened the pot slowly, afraid her miracle would jump out in search of flies. Father Godfrey stuck his nose in the pot, moved the peanut out of the way and asked ‘What’s miraculous about an empty pot? The really nice smell of stew?’

    ‘No, Father, this is the miracle,’ replied Morguie with the peanut between her fingers. ‘Can’t you feel the look of intelligence?’

    Father Godfrey looked incredulously from the peanut to Morguie and back.

    ‘It looks as if it’s going to escape if we let it,’ insisted Morguie. ‘If you look closely, it even feels as if it’s breathing.’

    ‘Magnificent, Morguie,’ whispered Father Godfrey. ‘Tell me, what is it you see exactly? Miracles sometimes present themselves in different ways to different people.’

    ‘I see a frog, Father. What do you see?’

    ‘Ah, yes, I see a frog too,’ breathing a sigh of relief. ‘It must be a different type of miracle, not the type I was thinking about.’

    ‘But this is better, isn’t it? It’s better if everyone sees the same thing, isn’t it?’

    ‘Yes, it’s a category two miracle instead of a category four miracle, that’s all.’

    ‘Not category one?’ asked Morguie, slightly disappointed at the lack of enthusiasm from Father Godfrey.

    ‘Don’t worry. Category one miracles are those performed or discovered by holy men. Category two is the highest we can aspire to in this town.’

    ‘Do you think we could show it in the Vatican?’

    ‘Possibly, yes.’

    ‘And will we be able to change the name of the town? That’s what the town regulations say, isn’t it?’

    The expression on Father Godfrey’s face suddenly lit up, and he even started seeing a frog where before there was only a peanut. ‘Of course, of course! The town regulations state that the half of the town that has the most important relic controls the city council, except if the other half can prove it has witnessed a miracle. How could I not think of that before? Let’s gather everyone together and go to the council to present this.’

    They hurried out of the church and split up to meticulously search the town for people who would accompany them. There was nothing on TV at that time, so the town streets quickly filled up with retirees milling around the miracle. Among coughs and complaints, the crowd made its way towards the upper part of town. Morguie was trying not to cry so that the cold wouldn’t freeze her tears in the creases of her face, but it was hard not to be excited about what a little frog had achieved. No, a peanut. A miracle, in any case.

    The road wound its way dangerously upwards, with a wall on one side and a high drop on the other.

    ‘We’ll soon change the name of this road too,’ thought Morguie. ‘No more “The Five Tits of Satan”, but rather “The Fingers of Saint Peter”’.

    In turn, Father Godfrey was busy with more down-to-earth thoughts: ‘with the money we make off the miracle we can fix this road, leave it straighter than Christ’s holy chandeliers. Oops, sorry for the blasphemy. When I get back I’ll pray four Hail Marys. No, three: I didn’t mean to offend.’

    The rest of the group simply enjoyed the walk, chatted with neighbours they hadn’t seen in a while and complained about wanting to go to the loo. A few of them shuddered slightly as they passed the sign with the name of the town: Deviltown. ‘Godtown,’ though Morguie. ‘Soon, soon’.

    They all shuffled towards the city council, which lay at the end of the main square, opposite the only temple dedicated to the eight day and the second coming of the Antichrist. Some members of the party stood still in awe of the façade of the cathedral. It really was incredible: the bas-reliefs with the main scenes of the Black Gospel of Ephesus, the various names of Beelzebub in several tongues, both dead and living, gargoyles than hung menacingly from the towers, the wonderful rose window, the only one in the world that was inverted, and, of course, the enormous and heavy bronze doors in Neoclassical style. Incredible.

    ‘Incredible, yes, but it’s for the Antichrist,’ Morguie reminded everyone.

    The city council was abuzz with activity. The whole population of the upper part of town was gathered around Mrs Satana, the mayoress, and Father Oswald, who took care of the cathedral. After the necessary cold handshakes, Morguie went straight to the point.

    ‘We have something you’re going to like. Your control over the town is at an end. Look what I’ve brought,’ and she grinned uncontrollably.

    Father Oswald looked into the pot and handed it to Mrs Satana, who passed it round the rest of the citizens of the upper part of town. They all looked indifferently at the contents of the pot, but they agreed that the stew smelled really nice.

    ‘I don’t see what’s so impressive that you’d want to come all the way here,’ concluded Father Oswald.

    ‘You’re just jealous, that’s it! Jealous!’ screamed Morguie, out of herself with joy.

    ‘You know what the town regulations say: the part of the town…’, continued Father Godfrey.

    ‘Yeah, yeah,’ interrupted Mrs Satana. ‘But what is it we need to be seeing exactly?’ she asked innocently.

    ‘Ah, clearly God only gives eyes to those that are worthy of them. It’s a perfect frog. So perfect that it’s a miracle. It’s move valuable than your cathedral.’

    A slight incredulity blew, or, rather, breezed through the citizens of the upper part of the town.

    ‘Jealous?’ started Father Oswald. ‘Nothing like that. In fact, we’ve just discovered something that we were planning on setting somewhere visible in the cathedral.’

    The citizens of the lower part of town gathered around a soup dish placed in the centre of the meeting hall. In it lay an almond in the perfect shape of a snake. Not even Morguie could deny it. She know felt something else in her throat. It may have been acid reflux, but it was more likely anger. Clearly a snake was more valuable than a frog. After all, snakes eat frogs. Everyone knows that.

    The crowd slowly moved away. Some stayed behind to have a coffee with their neighbours and eventually they all made their way back home. The passed in front of the cathedral, wound their way down the Five Tits of Satan and switched the TV on as soon as they reached their homes.

  • Beta reader checklist

    I’m in the process of writing a novel (yep, brain about to explode, paranoid about changing even a comma in case there’s a butterfly effect and it causes continuity problems downstream), and I realise that one of the things I’m going to need is beta readers (people who read the book before it’s published to give their opinion). However, beta readers need a bit of guidance as to what is expected of them, so here is a list of questions that can be useful. Whether they write something detailed or succinct is up to them.

    Since I’m sure there are other people out there in the same situation (keep going, everyone!), I figured I’d share my list, in the hopes that someone can find it useful. I’ve included a ton of questions that I think would be relevant, plus some that are optional, depending on the style you’re writing in. Feel free to add or remove depending on your needs. I have taken inspiration from many lists I’ve seen over the years, so maybe between all of us we can make the Mother of All Beta Reader Checklists.

    And without further ado, here’s the list:

    Engagement

    1. Did you find the opening of the book interesting? Did you feel like reading on?
    2. If you didn’t, why not?
    3. Was it clear from the beginning what was happening, who the characters were and what the relationship between them was?
    4. Were there points where you lost interest and found it hard to continue?

    Main plot

    • Was the plot believable?
    • Were there any points in the story where you were confused?
    • Did you find any plot holes, inconsistencies or continuity mistakes? Were there any factual errors?
    • Were the protagonists’ goals clear?
    • Was the plot fulfilled in a satisfying way? (even if not the way you wanted or expected)
    • Did you find the plot to be overly complicated?
    • Did you find the plot predictable?
    • Were there any unanswered questions left that you felt needed answering?

    Side plots (if any)

    • Were the side plots necessary? Did they add anything important to the main plot?
    • Were they believable?
    • Were they well integrated with the rest of the story?

    Pacing

    • Did the pace of the story feel natural and appropriate?
    • Were there any points where the pace is too slow (especially at the beginning)?
    • Were there any points where the pace is too fast? Why?
    • Were there any points that felt repetitive?
    • Were there any points where you find there are ‘information dumps’ (a lot of information in a short time, making it difficult to remember everything)?

    Characters

    • Was the protagonist relatable? What did you like about him/her? What didn’t you like?
    • Did you find his/her actions believable, even if you didn’t agree with them? (this is useful for unlikeable protagonists)
    • Was there enough information to understand his/her motivations and actions?
    • Was the antagonist relatable? What did you like about him/her? What didn’t you like?
    • Were the main characters’ motivations, personality and backgrounds clear?
    • Were the secondary characters’ motivations, personality and background clear? Was there too much/too little information about them?
    • Was it easy to remember who the characters were?

    Descriptions

    • Were the descriptions clear? Could you clearly visualise all the important elements (e.g. characters, settings)?
    • Were the descriptions evocative/vivid?

    Language

    • Was the language appropriate for the story?
    • Did the dialogue suit the characters? Was it clear who was talking, even if it wasn’t explicitly stated?
    • Was the dialogue realistic?
    • In general, was the book easy to read? (this doesn’t mean language should be simplistic. It is possible to use complicated words, but in a way that isn’t ambiguous or obscure)
    • Was the language clear or did you have to re-read any bits to understand what was going on?
    • Was the language consistent throughout the book? (e.g. same level of formality/colloquialism, no changes in verb tenses)
    • Were there words or expressions that stood out as being used too often?
    • Did you find any typos, grammar mistakes or spelling mistakes? (careful with how you tell the author about this. Some of them will start weeping uncontrollably if they know they’ve made a spelling mistake)

    Miscellaneous

    • What is your favourite scene/chapter, and why?
    • What is your least favourite scene/chapter, and why?
    • Did you feel immersed in the story? Did it cause clear feelings of happiness, anger, sadness, etc?
    • Were there places where you couldn’t suspend disbelief?
    • Did you like the ending? Do you feel it suited the story as it had developed up to that point?
    • What were the strong points of this novel? What were the weak points?

    Romance (optional)

    • Did the main characters have chemistry and did their relationship make sense?
    • Were there any scenes that would need expanding upon? Were there any that were too detailed?
    • Was there anything that made you uncomfortable?
    • Did the relationship advance in a natural way?

    Mystery/thriller (optional)

    • Was the answer to the mystery obvious before you got to the end?
    • Did the answer to the mystery come out of nowhere or were there enough clues along the way?

    Non-fiction (optional)

    • If you knew about the subject beforehand, did the book teach you anything new?
    • If you knew nothing about the subject beforehand, did it hold you interest?
    • Was the research and presentation thorough enough? Was it too detailed?

    I hope this is useful. Feel free to suggest more questions if you think any more are necessary.

  • You can learn from everything

    Continuing on my series about the life of a struggling amateur author, the other day I got a rejection letter from a competition. Another one, I should point out. I keep them in a folder on my computer, and the day I get an acceptance letter I’ll count how many rejections it took me to get there. I hope I do so before my computer crashes under the sheer weight of the rejections.

    Of course, this isn’t fun. Some days it stings more than others. I was half expecting this one, so it’s OK, but I still would have loved to have been surprised. It’s a bit like being disappointed when your lottery ticket hasn’t got the right numbers for the jackpot. You were sure this time they’d be right, they just had to be!

    All sorts of images tend to come to mind at this point. One of them is Sisyphus, a character in Greek mythology who was condemned for all eternity by the gods to roll a rock up a mountain, only to have it roll down the other side when he got to the top. Another Greek torture that comes to mind is that of Prometheus, who was also tied to a rock but he had his liver chewed up by an eagle every day (on a side note, who was the god in charge of coming up with these punishments? Seriously, they’re all really, really sick).

    I’m trying to give this bad news a positive spin by thinking that you can learn from everything. That’s it: I just found another way that doesn’t work. I can keep on working on my craft to get better until I find a way that does work.

    Whenever this happens, I inevitably think of a book I read some time ago. It was a gothic mystery story that had all the clichés you’d expect from a book of that kind: the setting was a dark abandoned house with a garden full of crumbling statues; the bad guy didn’t have a single redeeming feature, he was just pure evil. He probably didn’t even like kittens; the book wound aimlessly for 150 pages, only to have an information dump that solved the whole mystery in a 40‑page letter from one character to another (on another side note, who writes 40-page letters anyway? Even Jane Austen would have said ‘whoa, mate, easy on the literature, I’ve got chores to do, you know’); to top it all off, we got the shocking news that the protagonist was going to die, only to realise that he didn’t really die in the way we all understand that word, but instead just had a life-changing experience. Whatever.

    Suffice it to say, I didn’t really enjoy this book, but it did teach me a lot of things that should not be done in literature: avoid clichés; careful with the pacing; three-dimensional characters, please. The bottom line is that you can learn from everything, even from things you don’t like or things that are hard to swallow. I try to keep that in mind to put up with the next time the eagle comes to pick at my liver, I mean, the next time I get a rejection. It’s also important to keep in mind that even the greats had bad days. I’m sure even someone like Gandhi farted and blamed someone else at some point.

    I will end this post on a beautiful note with a poem that sometimes comes to my mind whenever my rock rolls down the hill again. It’s by the amazing Mary Kennelly and it’s called Today, from the book From the Stones. For some reason, I feel a strange sense of community when I read it, because it’s a poem we can all relate to. I’m sure she’s got her own drawerful of rejection letters.

    Today is hard.
    I don’t know why.
    Today I cannot
    climb out from underneath
    a thousand little slights.
    Today there is no colour
    and no music in my world.
    Today is hard,
    laughter is a million
    miles away or yet to come.
    Today a tear is just
    too hard to find.
    Today I am too tired,
    today I am used up.
    Today is hard.

  • Books that I wish I’d written – Middlesex

    Today’s entry is going to be slightly shorter because it’s going to be about the book Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides. Plenty has been written about it, and by people way smarter than I am, so there’s no real need for me to explain why the book is great. It’s actually one of the most important American novels of the century. I will just focus on a couple of things that stood out for me so as to encourage you to read it. Needless to say, there are spoilers ahead. Read at your own peril.

    First, the imagery is evocative and original. This is one of the things that always most draws my attention when reading a book because it’s extremely hard to come up with something that hasn’t been done before. You can always tell if writers have put a lot of thought into an image or whether they’re just going with the flow of what their culture has been putting into their imagery database throughout the years. Years ago, my wife and I were discussing about a couple of songs and about whether it was more valuable, from an artistic point of view, to sing about holding hands under the moonlight or to sing what the Red Hot Chili Peppers would sing (in the 80s and 90s; not so much now). I was actually referring to one Red Hot Chili Peppers song in particular, if you’re curious. Personally, I’m all for the Red Hot Chili Peppers way of doing things. That’s why this book was enjoyable. Off the top of my head, one image that struck me especially was when Cal was undressing for the first time in front of one girl in particular who, like him, has had a troubled adolescence: ‘While Olivia and I were both intellectually capable of handling the college curriculum, of excelling in it even, we remained in key ways emotionally adolescent. We cried a lot in bed. I remember the first time we took off our clothes in front of each other. It was like unwinding bandages’. With that image alone you know that the author knows what he’s doing. You can picture the characters undressing and hesitating about doing it and revisiting the pain they have experienced up to that point and trying to overcome it, and it’s all done beautifully in five words, in an almost tactile way. The book is full of suchlike images.

    The other thing that has stood out for me is the characters themselves, especially the one of the grandmother. They brought to mind something that a teacher of mine used to tell me about writing: always try to go one step further with your story and your characters, even if it seems ridiculous and outlandish. Once you think you’ve reached the limit, keep going a bit further. That will make sure that you’ll surprise readers, and therefore hold their interest. The characters in this book move within what could be a pretty standard story about immigrants in the US, but simply go further than you would expect. The grandmother is obsessed with superstition, marries her own brother but keeps it a secret from everyone, even their children, and, upon her husband’s death, decides to stay in bed and never leave it again. It’s an extreme character, and one that is intensely fascinating. It’s so well developed that you believe everything that happens to it, and you just want to read and read about it. It’s really hard to make a character such as this one not feel far‑fetched and exaggerated for the sake of exaggeration.

    The only thing I’m in two minds about is that I do feel that the author misleads readers a bit. From the beginning, you’re pushed in the direction of believing that the main character (Callie/Cal) will have a sex change operation and become a man. The first lines of the book are pretty memorable, and that’s what they’re leading you to think (I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974). However, that’s not quite what happens. There is more a change of perspective, and an acceptance. You could get technical and analyse the actual words as if you were a lawyer, but the point is you’re being led to believe one thing, but another happens. Now, is this really serious? No, not really, but it does bug me slightly. However, I don’t recommend doing this, because you run the risk of having your readers feel cheated. I do think it could have been done better, especially since the idea of the change of attitude is more beautiful. Should it discourage you from reading the book? Hell, no!!

  • On the need for small bookshops

    I have just come back from Librebook, a bookshop in Brussels where my book is on the shelf. This sounds nonchalant, but it’s a big deal. Not for the world, granted, but it is for me. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s a surreal feeling to know that my book is available for other eyes, beyond those of friends and relatives, to read. It was next to books by other grown-ups, and it sure felt as if my book was a baby among the big boys. I almost felt like going up to it and asking it if it was doing OK. I didn’t, though, because I’m sure it would have cried, the way little kids cry when you leave them in the kindergarden. I would have also cried, like parents do when they leave their little kids in the kindergarden.

    I would like to give a special shoutout to Librebook. It’s a small corner bookshop that has an amazing range of books in over thirty languages, mainly English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish (or those are the ones I can read, anyway, so they’re the ones I pay attention to). The best thing about it is that it’s run by people who love what they’re doing, and that’s the big difference between it and any big chain. I try to do as much of my shopping as possible in small shops, and even more so when it comes to book shopping. In a large chain you can get the latest bestsellers, yes, and they’re comfortable, sure, but in a small shop you can ask the assistants ‘what other books would I like if I’ve liked X?’. That’s an advantage that money can’t buy.

    Expanding on this shoutout, I would like to briefly use this small platform (anyone there? Hello?) to encourage everyone to buy in small shops instead of large chains. I could get political about this, but I won’t. Actually, I’ll do it, but only briefly and tangentially: I’ll just explain how I was recently in Namur, Belgium, which is a lovely town with a medieval centre that is peppered with the same shops I have seen recently in Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, Amsterdam, Madrid, Rouen and others. I find it extremely impoverishing to a city to have the same uniform experiences as every other city in the world. Why would you travel if it’s not to see different things?

    But back on topic, on a related note, there’s a big Brussels bookstore, Filigranes, which is moving to a smaller location. There are reasons beyond economy for this move, but it’s still a tragic sight when a repository of culture and civilisation has to move to a smaller venue.

    Now, my book is also available in other places, including Waterstone’s and that web site with the name of a mythological tribe of warrior women and the largest rainforest in the world, and those locations are handy if you don’t live near a bookstore. However, there is nothing that compares to going into a physical space full of books and knowing that behind each of those covers is a story that you could find fascinating. In a small shop such as Librebook, those stories are given the importance they deserve, because each one is acknowledged as having required years of work by an author. Then, when you visit a different city, you can find bookshops that you’ve never seen in your life. I was in Montreal last year and I was able to ask the owner of a bookshop about a good Canadian author along the lines of X and Y, and I came away with a lovely comic book by Julien Paré-Sorel. In a big chain you can buy books, but you could just as well be buying yoghurts. As long as it makes money, everything is fair game.

    It’s going to seem as if I’m completely opposed to large shops and that I would be spray‑painting mean messages on their doors at the slightest chance, but that’s not the case either. I appreciate that not everyone likes the same things and that sometimes you have one of them nearby and it’s simply more comfortable. That’s fine, but, given the choice, I would encourage you to opt for the smaller shop whenever possible. That applies to any kind of shop, really, but most certainly to bookshops.

    I realise that I sound like a hopeless romantic and that this kind of attitude hardly fits the modern world. Sure, I’ll accept that. I also won’t back down.

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