Almost uncovered

Ratty and Dasychord are picking the sellotape from the cover of the English-Spanish novel Amigas, to be launched this month. The cover image was created by Pablo Accame (some of whose short videos you can see here), son of author, Elena Bossi (talking here with Tim Jones). Isgar and the local hooligan-bird look on while Lily prepares to photograph the unveiling. I'll post the photo next time.

It's been a great collaboration from start to finish. Elena and I met in Iowa in 2007 (thanks to Creative NZ), wrote our novel over the next two years and had its component parts translated into the other's language. When we met in Argentina in 2009 (gracias otra vez a Creative New Zealand), we spent three weeks examining our translations, checking words, facts and intention, and swapping songs on Youtube (our chapter set in 1969 is called 'Hey Jude').  Since then we've heeded the comments of a handful of discerning readers. Emma Neale did a manuscript assessment for us and we're grateful for her fine critique. While I continue to have mixed feelings about being both author and publisher in this case, Elena and I needed to stop tinkering, and to issue Amigas from Rosa Mira Books seemed the most straightforward route to producing a bilingual edition of our novel.

Book designer Caroline Jackson has put links between chapters for those who wish to read in both Spanish and English. By the same means, the letters that comprise the chapter 'Dear Claudia' can be read each in their original language.

In Argentina, besides working, we tried on clothes (everywhere we went but also) at 'Amigas' here in the small pampas town of Ayacucha (was it, Elena?).

Ratty seems to have flown off in his purple ironing board and Lily's distracted, knitting peggy squares for a friend who has produced a litter of lilac Peterbalds and needs all the woollens she can lays paws on. Isgar and Dasychord are itching to make something happen. Their hedgehoglet friend, Apostrophe, does whatever they do, in miniature

So, what is happening?

There's a fresh batch of Slightly Peculiar Love Stories excerpts ready for perusal, by Claire Beynon, Latika Vasil, Brenda Sue Cowley and Linda Niccol.

I've spent time following helpful hints about SEO (search engine optimisation) and am having a few changes put in place this week. Let's see if the collection of slightly odd phrases inserted in the website's pages and meant to sound/look natural will draw throngs to Rosa Mira Books.

I've had a couple of wonderful offers of help recently from publishing students. I'll tell you more about those when they are taken up. I'm saying, Yes, please!

Dorothee has been cooking up a treat which is almost ready to be served – a tantalising side dish to The Glass Harmonica. Speaking of which, have you listen to this entertaining piece of William' Zeitler's, written and performed expressly for the recent transit of Venus?

The English pages of Amigas have been designed; the Spanish ones won't be far behind, and the cover will soon be ready for display.

I have a couple of exceptional manuscripts in the pipeline.

All is well. Slow but well.

Road Markings makes its mark

New Zealand Books is a quarterly magazine devoted entirely to the review of NZ work by fellow writers. For those reviewed it's not usually a comfortable read but considered critique is the magazine's raison d'être. The Winter 2012 edition opens with its editorial: "Two issues beyond the 20th anniversary edition of New Zealand Books and two before our 100th issue, we've reached another milestone. The determined enthusiasts who founded the journal might well have predicted the first two … But we suspect they would have had no inkling of the third: this issue carries our first review of an ebook.   … the word 'book' in New Zealand Books has changed its meaning forever."

That ground-breaking ebook is Michael Jackson's Road Markings, published here at Rosa Mira Books. (Thanks to NZ Books editors, Jane Westaway and Harry Ricketts, for making the leap.) The opening review, it's a generous page and a half of the A3 format by reviewer Alison Gray.  Rather more an outline of content, however, than an appraisal, it's not an easy review to pick excerpts from, but here are a couple:

"Michael Jackson … uses a 2008 road trip … to explore the theme of 'firstness' both in his own life and in the lives of people affected by social and historical events such as adoption, emigration, colonisation, war and illness or death. … It's a grand undertaking …

"The strongest pieces in this book describe how individual people have handled the blows life has dealt them, but the concept of 'firstness' remains elusive. Some people … reshuffle elements of the past to create a workable sense of self; some, like the wonderful Aunt Simone amd Mlle Picard in Menton, struggle not to be overcome by what has happened; some … simply decide to leave the past behind and make a new start, while others, like Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, seem able to recover from loss without 'acrimony, blame or the need for redemption'."

Road Markings is "full of good thinking and ideas about how people construct their lives. I eventually read it twice and was well rewarded both times."

Also in this edition, Chris Else comments on his experience with the Kindle reader.

"a good south wind sprung up behind"

This week albatrosses galore have flown between Buenos Aires and Dunedin. You'll see some of them in due course but the beautiful birds are the work of talented cartoonist and animator Pablo Accame who is putting together the cover image for Amigas. Pablo happens to be Elena's son. Elena Bossi is my co-writer.

As I hinted last week, it's not an entirely comfortable decision, to publish one's own work. It's definitely been seen as the second cousin three times removed to meticulous trade publishing, and all too often the home-grown product is immediately recognisable. However, with the current turmoil of publishing, the scene is changing. Knowledge is available to anyone with an internet connection; there's no reason why the diligent author shouldn't put her work through the same stringent processes that a publisher would, and establish his own sales and marketing base. And I think that's the key: stringent processes. If an author is prepared to seek and pay for assessment/s and editing (their writing apprenticeship is another topic), then find designers who know what they're doing, and oversee the final product, then they can produce a book – hard copy or digital – worthy of their writing efforts.

So, am I apologising or what? I'm very proud of Elena's work and I'm prepared to say that mine is happy in the company of hers. We certainly had a great time working together, and continue to do so. Anyway, we have a publisher: Rosa Mira Books.

The decision to publish with Rosa Mira means that we can produce an edition in which English and Spanish versions sit side by side. Not page for page (most devices are more comfortably read with a single page open, and anyway, our translations are not word for word) but with links at the end  – and possibly the start – of each chapter so that the reader can switch between the two versions if they wish to.

Okay, that's enough for now. It's Saturday morning: the garden beckons, so I'll leave Ratty contending with the bird. More soon. Suggestions, questions and comments are welcomed.

Getting the next show on the road

A rat has little conscience. This one's not even going to apologise for his weeks' long silence.

He's just getting on with it, he says.


Elena Bossi and I met in Iowa, at the 2007 International Writers' Programme. We became friends and when it was time to part Elena suggested we work together on a project – a novel – in order to keep our friendship fresh in spite of language difficulties (mine: Elena's English is vastly superior to my Spanish).  We worked apart for a year or two, writing alternate chapters in our own language, having them translated, then putting the whole together to make a novel in each language. In 2009 Creative New Zealand awarded me a grant to visit Elena in Argentina, where we polished up our versions; checked facts, laughed a lot, sang Beatles songs, completed a solid draft of Amigas, then flew off to Tierra del Fuego.

The decision to publish one's own work is not straightforward. I'll say more about that soon. I'll talk with Elena on this blog about our process and who else has been involved. I'll tell you what's brewing in the way of book design and marketing. I'll keep Ratty busy.

Vita interrupta

Well, the online translator tells me this is how you interrupt a life in Latin but please tell me, anyone, if it's not so. I'm across the Tasman at present (like Ratty, yes! strange that) so my work is being done in even shorter fits and starts than usual.

 I wanted to let you know that The Glass Harmonica: a sensualist's tale has been reduced in price by four dollars to 7 USD.

The cover of The Glass Harmonica will always be dear to my heart. Not only because it covers a novel dear to my heart and Rosa Mira's first (which speaks, too, of the trust and courage of its writer, Dorothee). But also because it was hand painted by Christine Buess of Dunedin, the design suggested to her by a description in the novel of the waistcoat Chjara borrows from her employer, the prurient opium addict, Victor Ravenaugh.

He opened his eyes and saw her: dressed in his own clothes. Dressed in his pantaloons. Stuffing his boots. She turned away from him when she tucked a rolled cloth between her legs, a cloth he couldn’t see hid a single hard gold coin. He would have spoken to her sharply but he had no energy for rebuking her at that moment; her arms were raised, her neck tilted back, and her long hair swept to the middle of her back. She was braiding it.

Victor Ravenaugh had not seen a woman braid her hair for a hundred years. She pulled on his wig from the days of Louis XVI, then she wrapped herself in his ivory silk shirt with the matching ivory waistcoat. The waistcoat had been stitched all over by those Asian devils with silk-thread blooms and pink butterflies and his favorite ornament, the bright red tomato or pomme d’amour, that exotic discovery of the Americas. She did not look at him as she left, and he imagined he saw his better self. Going. At last, gone.

Dorothee has recently been preparing a mixed-media ebook drawing on some of her fascinating findings while writing the novel, about America's first sexual revolution. Such Were My Temptations: Bawdy Americans 1760-1830 will be available soon. I'll keep you posted. 

A new batch of excerpts from Slightly Peculiar Love Stories can be read here.

Meanwhile, here in Victoria, beach walks are punctuated by little gems such as this no-longer-puffing puffer fish which, as you'll know, is the world's second most poisonous vertebrate after the golden poison frog. Almost all puffer fish contain tetrodotoxin, a substance that makes them foul tasting and often lethal to fish. To humans, tetrodotoxin is deadly, up to 1,200 times more poisonous than cyanide. There is enough toxin in one puffer fish to kill 30 adult humans, and there is no known antidote.

I didn't touch it.

 

Helping make new readers

It's only just warm enough for this, but Ratty feels compelled to lie down as he drinks in the vibrant colours of the beach boxes here on the edge of a large Australian bay. He's pondering ebooks, naturally. He smiles thinking of the favourable review The Glass Harmonica received just the other day, online at Historical Novels.

He recalls, too, how the ratadilloes' eyes light up for their bedtime story session with him or Lily. He wonders when they'll begin to read all by themselves . . .

Learning to read: it's a privilege we more or less take for granted where I come from. It's not so everywhere. In Iowa in 2007, I met author and surgeon Kavery Nambisan who has been instrumental in setting up neighbourhood reading schemes in her native India:

The Nalanda Trust offers basic non-formal education to underprivileged children. Our objective is to reach out to those kids who have no access to a good basic education system. We also hope to motivate the parents to send their kids to school by making them understand that learning will help individuals and families earn a satisfactory living and help improve their quality of life in all spheres. We attempt to make them realise that it will broaden the mind, create awareness and stretch the imagination of their young so that they are better able to draw upon in-built strengths and develop various valuable skills.

We also run libraries for the young in mind without easy or affordable access to books but with the eagerness to know more about the world. 

Rosa Mira Books would like to contribute to work of the Nalanda Trust, which runs on a shoestring and is funded largely by the trustees and 'a few close friends'. Lately it has become a registered charitable trust, so can more easily receive donations from overseas. As yet, RMB hasn't broken even, let alone made the net profit of which it intends to share 10% with Nalanda. However, this month I'm going to send some money anyway, and thought I'd give my blog readers a chance to add to this sum — a couple of dollars, or a handful: any amount will make a difference. If you'd like to, leave a comment or contact me directly and we'll work out how, depending on where you live.