Ian Ayris interview: Abide With Me

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Can you sum up Abide With Me in no more than 25 words?

'Of Mice and Men' set in London's East End during the seventies and eighties, incorporating football, gangsters, and biscuits.

What did you learn while writing it?

The entire book is written in the first person vernacular of an East London lad.  The thing I learnt whilst writing the book is vernacular has its own very strict rules of grammar, just like any other language or dialect.  To be convincing, everything has to be spot on.  Consistency is paramount.  One missed letter, one dropped ending from the wrong mouth – each character speaks a slightly different way in the book – and the whole thing crumbles.  The Caffeine Nights copy-editor for AWM was the brilliant Julie Lewthwaite – a Geordie.  Talk about a clash of cultures.  But, bless her, she did a fantastic job. 

Provide a YouTube link to a song you'd like to be the title track to the movie adaptation of your book.

To what extent do you view writing a business?

I was always one of those writers who believed business has no place in writing, that a writer's job was to write, and it was the publisher's job to look after the business side of things. But, I was so wrong.  Blimey.  See, as soon as I'd finished ABIDE WITH ME and started sending it out to publishers and agents, I'd become a businessman – pitching my product,  seeking the most profitable connections.  I didn't see it then.  I see it now.  I thought I was just a writer wanting people to read my book.  That was all.  Ah, bless.  But the submission process is the tipping point where writer becomes businessman – where writer needs to become businessman.  Then there is the promotional aspects of the job of a writer, the interviews, the social networking, the blog posts – all of these are to advertise your product, to pull in the punters. 

A writer needs to be both writer and businessman.  Whether he/she likes it or not, once you've sent you precious darling out into the world you've become a businessman.

What do you do when you're not writing?

I work twenty-two and a half hours every weekend in a residential care home for adults with learning difficulties and mental health issues – so that's my weekends shot to pieces, writing wise.  During the week, I play the part of house-husband – with varying degrees of competence, it has to be said – and I am also currently completing an Open University degree in English Lit.  Apart from these admirable pastimes, the remainder of my time is filled in with eating chocolate, drinking coffee, and staring out the window.  Oh, and following the fortunes of the Mighty Dagenham and Redbridge.  Take away the coffee, and I could be ten years old again.  A little disturbing, that, thinking about it.

How much time do you dedicate to writing? How much time would you like to spend writing?

As I implied in my previous answer, my writing time is pretty limited.  Add to that my complete inability to organise myself, the writing happens in fits and spurts, as they say.  Most of ABIDE WITH ME was written in my head waiting in the playground for the kids to come out of school, walking the littl'un round the park in her push-chair, or waiting in the queue at Tescos. 

How much time would I like to spend writing?  I'd like to say, 'My whole life,' but the honest answer is I need a degree of pressure, a degree of emotional rawness to be able to write the stuff I write.  I have a feeling given all the time in the world and a massive study, instead of no time and a place in a corner covered with the kids' bits and pieces, last month's bills, and dust, I wouldn't write a single word. 

What was the last book you bought and how did you find out about it?

The last book I bought was Nick Quantrill's latest Joe Geraghty novel 'THE LATE GREATS'.  Myself and Nick are both with Caffeine Nights, and we exchange emails almost daily about writing and other odds and ends.  I've had the pleasure of seeing TLG birth from an idea to what is a brilliant novel.  It really has been a privilege.

How effective is social media as a marketing aid?

As a marketing aid, I think social media has its limitations.  As a writer, it can very quickly become an exercise in either advertising to other writers or preaching to the converted.  Facebook is great for building relationships – for me, the essence of good marketing – whereas Twitter appears to me to be a better forum for spreading the word, although the relationship thing there is still key.

How do you feel about reviews?

I love reviews.  Good, bad, or indifferent.  As long as they're honest.  That's what matters most. 

Do you have any other projects on the go?

I have almost completed my first novella, entitled JASON DEAN, due out later this year through Byker Books.  I've also begun my second novel, and hope to have another collection of short stories out by the end of the year.

Nick Quantrill interview: The Late Greats

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*** FREE ON KINDLE MARCH 20th-25th ***

Nick Quantrill is a crime writer from Hull. His Joe Geraghty novels are published by Caffeine Nights. His short stories have appeared in volumes 8 and 9 of “The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime.”

Can you sum up your book in no more than 25 words? 

Joe Geraghty is employed to look after a reforming band. It goes wrong. It’s a story about friendship and what really constitutes success in life.

Can you provide a YouTube link to a song you'd like to be the title track to the movie adaptation of your book?

That’s an easy one! “The Late Greats” is a song by Wilco, who are one of my favourites. It’s about an imaginary band, so it tied in nicely to the backdrop of the book.

What are you reading now?

I’ve just finished “The Impossible Dead” by Ian Rankin. The premise for the book is great, but the conclusion seemed a bit off the money for me, which is unusual for Rankin. Next up is “Murder Mile” by Tony Black. DI Brennan is an excellent character. A little snappier than most fictional police officers, shall we say?

What do you do when you're not writing?

I gave up the day job to look after my daughter, so that’s exactly how I spend my time. She’s a handful. It was a decision taken to benefit all of the family, and it’s working out well, if being more demanding than I ever thought possible. Other than that, I’m a pass-holder at Hull City. That keeps the anger levels nicely topped up.

How much time do you dedicate to writing? How much time would you like to spend writing?

As much as possible, really. I get child care help a couple of days a week from my mum and my wife obviously does her share when she’s not working. I do something every day, at least a couple of hours a night. Weekends and school holidays I do more. I suspect even if I had a free run at writing, I’d still think I wasn’t spending enough time working at it.

What kind of promotion has most effect?

I don’t think you can really look beyond the mainstream media. I always see a noticeable bounce in sales when I’ve been on the local radio or appeared in the newspaper. The obvious trick is to try and spread that wider and further afield, which is no easy task for a writer with a small press. Online, where it’s a slightly more level playing field, I wouldn’t really be able to draw any firm conclusions. Personally, I’d rather write a guest blog post or something similar, rather than just sling Amazon links up for my books. I think the more engaging you are, the more willing people are to take a look at your work (hopefully). The key is maybe not to get too fixated with outcomes.

What kind of promotion doesn't work?

Where to start…relentless spamming (boring), emailing Kindle files attached to generic emails asking for a review (that person will remain nameless…), tit for tat review swapping (looks obviously false)…I don’t think anyone has yet found a magic formula, but I think it comes down to your own personal boundaries. Just try and be a decent person first and foremost and remember that your main job is to write.

What are your long-term ambitions?

I suspect like everyone who writes, I’d love to make a living from it. I’ve had a taste of freedom away from the 9-to-5, and I’m in no desperate rush to go back to it. Obviously, making a living from writing is no easy task. It’d be great if my novels sustained me, but more realistically, I’m working with arts professionals in different fields and I’m looking to develop what I can offer organisations as an individual. If I can get up in the morning and look forward to the day, that’ll do for me.

Which author should be much better known?

I keep going back to him, but I do think Ray Banks is a class apart. His work so far is such an evocative telling of contemporary Britain, and as I’ve said before, I’m sure he might just have a story in him that goes massive, maybe even the next “Trainspotting”. I hope so.

Do you have any other projects on the go?

I certainly do. I’m hard at work on the third Joe Geraghty novel, which has the working title, “The Crooked Beat”. There’s a Kindle-only novella, “Bang Bang (You’re Dead)” coming later this year via Byker Books and I’m involved in a screenplay project with a group of Yorkshire writers, including David Peace. I’m thinking about the next novel, which will probably be a little bit different and I’ve got an idea to develop for another novella. Plenty to be going on with!

Steven Torres interview: The Concrete Maze



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*** FREE 17th/18th March ***

Steven Torres was born in the Bronx, spent part of his childhood in Puerto Rico and has authored six previously published novels. He teaches English in Connecticut where he lives with wife and daughter.

Can you sum up The Concrete Maze in no more than 25 words?

Jasmine Ramos, 13, goes missing from a skating rink in the Bronx, and her father, Luis, will do anything (to anyone) to get her back.

What was your motivation for writing it?

Many things, but part of it is that I was involved in the periphery of a similar real life story when I was a teenager. I had long wanted to say something about the Bronx in the early 1990s when New York City suffered through a half dozen murders daily. To the outsider, New York probably looked like a cesspool, and it would have been except for one fact – people suffered. I mean, if there were two thousand murders and nobody cared, that would have been a cesspool. But people cared. Desperately. I wanted to show that. Luis Ramos searches the streets of a city that could be incredibly cruel for his daughter. Compelling and true. I don’t know that a writer needs more than that as motivation.

How long did it take you to write?

The book was started while I was spending three weeks of January in Puerto Rico. I wrote about the first fifteen thousand words between trips to see family and to the beach. Then I set the book aside for about a year and wrote the other sixty thousand words during a spring semester. I can’t for the life of me remember what other writing projects I carried out in the time between starting the book and taking it up the second time. There wasn’t any problem with the book itself. It had been going swimmingly; I just ran out of vacation time, started the semester of teaching, worked on other stuff for the rest of the year and never returned to THE CONCRETE MAZE again until the next winter break. Then I picked it up again without missing a beat – like I’d just stepped away to fetch a soda from the fridge. Probably the best writing experience of my life.

Sent early mock-up copies to all the best hardboiled noir type authors I could think of – Ken Bruen, James Sallis, Megan Abbott, Sara Gran, Russel McLean, Al Guthrie and the list goes on. Everyone had kind words, and I knew I’d done something good.

What are your strengths and weaknesses as a writer?

I write action and dialogue well. Those are my strengths. I am also getting better at the architecture of a novel – juggling character and narrative arcs so that one becomes the other seamlessly. Oh, and I’m usually pretty good at proof-reading my work.

Hmmm, weaknesses? Is this where I put down “too much humility”? I’m not sure it’s a weakness, but I have been trying to write a full-on thriller for several years now and so far it has been dud after dud. There is something about the architecture of the thriller that I’m not getting. Not sure what. They say a thriller is just putting two trains on a collision course – preferably one carrying a load of orphans and nuns and the other carrying a doomsday device – but I guess I’m just not working the formula right.

What crime book are you most looking forward to reading?

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran. I think she did something extraordinary with her novel Dope, and I’d love to know if she managed the feat again.

What makes you keep reading a book?

There are a variety of things that can keep me reading – compelling characters, tightly woven plot – but perhaps the one that gets the least attention is an attention to language. The individual words that get selected and the phrasing of sentences. Economy in language. I just read a couple Edgar Allan Poe stories and the man was an absolute master of this economy. You might think 19th century writers tended toward being verbose – they got paid by the word – but not Poe. He was a mean one. Read “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Cask of Amontillado,” and there’s not a word wasted. Everything is doing something. Perhaps harder to sustain in a novel length work, but where you find this, you treasure it.

Of course, I don’t mean that every sentence has to be clipped. Megan Abbott has a luscious prose style – long sentences, poetic passages – but never a word that didn’t need to be there. Ken Bruen may not have the same overall style – tending toward shorter sentence, sometimes the entire sentence is just a heavily weighted word – but every word earns its keep. Write this way, and I’ll read.

Ever tried your hand at screenwriting?

I have. It’s wicked difficult for me. I think it’s that I haven’t read nearly as many scripts as I have novels. Novel and short story writing seem like much better fits for me as a writer, but I think that’s practice. My first screenplay – great concept, sci-fi, space opera, but the execution needs a lot of work. I’ve done bits and pieces of other stories, but I’ve got a story in mind for a relatively quiet movie, and I’m collaborating on a Nazi mad scientist story. We’ll see where that goes.

It is a curious process – writing without getting into the character’s minds or even very much description. It stretches the writing muscles though I’m not sure how much of those skills can be brought back into the novel-world.

Do you read outside of the crime genre?

Absolutely. As an English professor, I really don’t have a choice. I could just teach the same stories, poems, and plays each semester, but that would be dull to me and I have no doubt that boredom would be picked up on by my students. I try to add new works to the syllabus each semester. Just read a short play by Terence McNally called “Andre’s Mother.” It’s not new, but I’d never heard of it before. Ten minutes on the stage, but devastating.

Not to say that non-crime is better than crime. Some of the best stories out there are about crime and punishment including, of course, Crime and Punishment. The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” they’re all crime stories.