Prize Short List for Story

I received the January 2012 issue of Writing Magazine today, and was pleased to see that I was shortlisted for the Crime Story prize for my story 'Shaking Hands'. I may even post the full story on another page. I would have liked to have won it, but it's an achievement out of possibly hundreds or thousands of readers, I suppose.

The Orange Prize - and the Blue?

Like many, I suspect, I find it hard to justify the Orange Prize for women's writing. When two out of every three purchasers of novels are female, when women win literary prize after international award on their own merits, do they need a ghetto of their own? If the Orange Prize were an old tradition, if it were the only prize of its sort, then there might be some inherited kudos and merit there, but there are numerous other equally - or rather unequally restrictive awards too.

We also have Mslexia, a whole magazine dedicated to women having a second bite of the cherry. Ruth Rendell has commented that women need no such restrictive prizes and that the Orange Prize should be opened up or abolished.

As I find I read a lot of books by women, perhaps it's the crap male writers who need sorting out by being given a special prize (the Blue Prize for the best book by a male writer, maybe) and a leg-up magazine, possibly UnderWrite, for the poor little darlings to show off their best efforts (bless 'em).

Classics - is it getting harder to read them?

I've been struggling (for the second time) to read Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend. A bad cold hasn't helped. This is an unequal struggle (the book is over 800 pages long) and one I have set aside in order to read C J Sansom's Heartstone. Why is it getting so much harder to read even Victorian books?

It's not (just) the length - Sansom's book is over 600 pages - it's the whole approach to what a novel is meant to do. The financial arrangements of circulating libraries meant that multi-volume works became common. People had no radio, TV or internet, which means we have less encouragement to stick with a complex multilayered story. Dickens, like many of his contemporary authors in the UK published pretty much as they wrote. This is clear from a book like Barnaby Rudge, where the story changes central character several times as Dickens tries to work out whose story it is.

Our modern attention spans are goldfish-short. We bore easily and unless there is a whizzbang, sex or a murder every few pages, we book-surf for sensation only. Whilst I have a good knowledge of the English language, I find some of Dickens' linguistic knots hard to follow. Perhaps we are destined to find Great Literature (important initial capitals) of the past unreadable.

Mark Twain once said that a 'classic' is a book everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read. Is this the future?

Salop House Cover Design

This is the cover of the Smashwords edition of Salop House. I created it myself. Any comments would be gratefully received. Well, maybe not that gratefully, but I am receptive!

A Little Bit of Bio

This is the biographical text from the Smashwords edition of Salop House.

 Martin Nichols was born in the English county of Norfolk in 1955. He has degrees in English & French and in History. For many years he was an educational administrator and then a charity manager. He now teaches at the Open University, specialising in Greek and Roman Myth and Linguistics. In the 1970s and 1980s he wrote regularly for several UK magazines. This is his first novel; he is presently writing Meet at this Grave, a second novel involving John Sheldrick and his companions. He is married and currently lives near Cambridge, England.

It's odd writing about yourself in the third person. Julius Caesar does this in his books (On the Gallic War; On the Civil War, but you knew that) and it even seems weird there. Strictly speaking, this is my first first published book, unless of course you include Shun The Dark, which I wrote several years ago and which has been available for over a year on a freeby site. STD is set in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria in AD680. I thought it was pretty competent, but it got no takers from the publishing world.

Salop House Long Blurb

 When death is a daily horror, does one more matter? Ireland, 1845, famine beginning. A woman’s body is found outside Salop House, Co. Wicklow with her head smashed in. Five years ago, two people were hanged for a near identical murder of a servant girl. Rumour then implicated the noble Pursiver family and now returns to haunt them. Family friend John Sheldrick, a young naive Englishman, is asked by his masters at Dublin Castle to exonerate them. But are they innocent? Captain Hugh Pursiver has secrets. His sisters Mary and Agnes are decidedly odd. As Ireland falls part, Sheldrick watches, horror-struck.

Then there’s the matter of the missing boy. Boys go missing all the time in Dublin, but never do they leave one of those expensive new photographic pictures behind. Sheldrick investigates Dublin’s seamy underside. Also why are the Irish Constabulary so interested in Sheldrick’s other friend, Home Rule activist Oliver O’Hannan? And what does the mischievous and headstrong Leonora Butler have to do with it all? Has Sheldrick been set up to fail?

Launching This Blog

In late November or December 2011, I'm self-publishing my novel Salop House. This is a crime novel set in Victorian Ireland and will be on the Smashwords system. It is supposed to sell for $3.99 and will be downloadable from the various e-bookshops (Amazon, etc.).

This book was 'finished' in 2009, although I have continued to bugger around with it since then, as authors tend to do. It has rightly been said that books are never finished, only abandoned. Throughout 2009 a 10,000 word extract was available for review on the UK Arts Council sponsored website You Write On, where it was reviewed and generally highly rated. In September 2009, it was the top rated adult novel (adult as opposed to children, rather than porno, I mean) and won a review from an editor at Orion Books, which was helpful and strongly positive.

Since then I have been trying to get the book published, but although it has gone before several agents and publishers, and everyone says they like it and I write well, no takers so far. That's why I'm self-publishing.