books

Character Interview- Mack Walker

~ ChanAtkins ~ Leave a comment

Morning folks! With Christmas just around the corner, many of you lovely bookish types might be thinking about buying books for your loved ones. With this in mind, myself and my friend indie author Kate Rigby are holding a little Christmasssy event today over on Facebook. The Christmas Pop-Up Book Shop will be full of links to paperbacks by fantastic authors. Authors, feel free to add your links throughout the day, and readers, please come in and browse the shelves. We will be leaving the event up for a few days so that you can pop in and out and not have to worry about missing anything. We will also be posting some other things of interest, such as giveaways, competitions, and character interviews. Here is one such thing. Indie author Mark Gillespie is an incredibly talented and prolific writer. I can’t keep up with the number of books he releases! This character interview is with Mack Walker, the main protagonist in his dystopian/post-apocalyptic/speculative fiction style trilogy, The Future Of London. (I’ve read two books in the series so far, and it is brilliant!) Enjoy!

Mack Walker (The Future of London Series)

1. Do you have any negative character traits and if so, what would you say they are?

I suffer from obsessive tendencies. But I don’t know, are those negative traits? To wake up in the morning knowing that only one thing matters above all else? That sounds like clarity to me. I’m looking for someone you see – that’s my thing. You could call it hunting rather than looking, because when I find him, well…

2. What are your most positive personality traits?

Obsessive tendencies.

3. Tell us what your current most pressing ambition or dream is?

To kill a man called Hatchet. In 2011, he did a terrible thing, something that changed all our lives for the worse. Someone has to make him pay and only a few people know what he did back then.

4. What are you most afraid of?

I still don’t know what happened to my parents. Nine years after they locked us up in London I don’t know what happened to them. Did they stay behind to look for me or did they make a run for it and try to get out before it was too late? I’m afraid I’ll never know the answer to that question. Most of all, I’m afraid they stayed behind.

5. Do you have a best friend? If so, why this person?

Friends don’t last long in this city.

6. Have you ever been in love?

I was only 16 when they locked us up in here. I never had much time for all that stuff back then. I’ve got even less time for it now.

7. Have you ever committed a crime?

Yes, but not without good reason. I don’t even know what counts as a ‘crime’ anymore in here. We do what we do to survive. Things like stealing and murder, they don’t mean what they used to.

8. Do you have any secrets?

I have a big secret. I know why no one is a hurry to let us out of London even though it’s been nine years since they sealed off the city. I’m certain they could find a way to bring us all back into society if they really wanted to. Only one other person in the city knows what I know. They’re using us – they’ve installed hundreds of thousands of micro-cameras everywhere, all over the city and they’re filming us. Not only that, we’re part of a reality TV show called The Future of London. Apparently it’s very popular and people pay a lot of money to watch us in here. They gain nothing from letting us out but they stand to lose a lot of money.

9. Do you have any regrets?

I wish I’d never moved to London in 2011.

10. How would you like to be remembered?

There haven’t been any new headstones in London for a long time. But it doesn’t matter if no one remembers me. Not as long as I find him.

Thanks so much to Mark (and Mack!) for this interview! You can find out more about Mark’s books on the link below;

Mark Gillespie books

 

A Letter To The People In My Head…

~ ChanAtkins ~ 3 Comments

Dear Characters,

First of all, thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for showing up, as you do, without fail, time and time again. Thanks for that! Because none of this would be able to happen if you didn’t.

Thank you for many things in fact, like keeping me entertained and ensuring I am never, ever bored. There’s no such thing as a quiet moment to myself because if I should find one, you like to join me too, don’t you? Same thing at night time. Hello characters, there you all are. Old ones, current ones, future ones. So thanks for that. It would be nice if the rush of ideas and revelations could wait until morning, but it seems you can never wait. Between 2am and 3 am seems to be the golden hour for you guys to suddenly need to share things with me. I’ll let you off, because it’s always riveting stuff, but you don’t seem to realise it keeps me awake for hours after you’ve told me. I appreciate the insight, of course, but I also need my sleep!

I wouldn’t want you to ever stop though. I’m grateful, really I am. You know more than I do, that’s the thing. Because you started all this. You came to me. Your voices, your stories, your lives. You interrupted mine when I was a kid and you’ve been doing it ever since. I never decide to write a story about a 16-year-old alcoholic singing sensation, or a 30-something woman who can’t leave the house anymore because she hates people so much, you guys just show up! I don’t know how you find me. I guess somehow you know that I want to listen.

You surprise me again and again. When you first show up, out of nowhere. When you start getting chatty, warming up, revealing yourselves. I respect the honesty, because let’s face it, none of us are perfect. You lot are a pretty flawed bunch. But I think that keeps things interesting. You go on surprising me after that. Usually mid-plot. Throwing unexpected twists into the storylines. I suppose you must surprise yourselves too? A sequel? Didn’t see that coming but yes, I can see how you would want to talk about what happened next…A trilogy now, is it? Okay, if you’re sure, if you think you’ve got enough drama, I will keep it coming if you do. And don’t worry, I have already plotted most of the third book, and yes, I will end this one by writing the first chapter of the next. Your incessant babbling has seen to that.

Thank you for keeping me excited. It’s not enough to say you keep me from being bored because it is so much more than that. I have to thank you for the fizzy lurch in my belly every time I think about writing, that excitement, like Christmas, as the time draws nearer. I wake up in the morning and think about writing. I travel through my day and perform my duties, still thinking about writing. You people, you are there, all the time, paving the story, laying it out piece by piece, showing me the way. I race to the laptop in the evening, still excited, and then I bang away at the keyboard, and the excitement never seems to fade.

Thank you for teaching me about people, about human nature and society. I’ve always been fascinated by them, a people watcher from an early age. People pass you by on the street and you watch them go and wonder who they are, what secrets they hold, where they are going, and what they dream of. Being a writer allows me to explore these thoughts and answer all the ‘what if’s…’ You guys, my characters, you keep me curious. You show up with these messy, complex lives. You’re all tangled up, the lot of you. It’s my job to unwind you. To figure you out. Some of you are pretty vile. Some of you have done some very bad things. But all of you are teaching me something about how this life is full of human cruelty, courage, heroes, and villains. I thank you all for that.

You get pretty noisy. You certainly wear me out. I’m always relieved when a first draft is over because you tend to get quieter after that. Sure, some of you still show up years after your story has been told. Maybe you miss me. Maybe you still have something to say. But generally, once the story has been blurted out into an ugly yet victorious first draft, you tend to give me a break, and believe you me, I’m looking forward to it this time! I’m just days away, just chapters away from finishing a first draft. I know there is more work to be done, and yes, somehow you current characters have talked me into a third book in this series, and honestly, I’m grateful and I can’t wait, but I am looking forward to a brief reprieve. I know you’ll start up again pretty soon, but if I get to the finish line on this story in the next few days, maybe you could let me have a few night’s sleep as a reward? What do you say?

Then again, second thoughts, scrap that. If you have something to tell me, don’t hold back. I would never ever want you to fall quiet.

Cheers, guys xx

 

Photo by John Jennings on Unsplash

 

 

My 2017 Reading Challenge

~ ChanAtkins ~ 8 Comments

At the start of 2017 I came across a post on Facebook about a reading challenge. I had seen things like this before and never felt the urge to join in. I’m still not sure why I did this time, actually. But I am so glad I did and I am even considering doing a similar challenge in 2018. So, I thought I would share the books I read for the challenge with you, as well as mini-review of each. The best thing about doing this challenge was reading books I would not otherwise have read. It really dragged me out of my comfort zone!

  1. A Book You Read In School – Lord of The Flies by William Golding. This was great to revisit. I had actually been meaning to re-read it again at some point, as the post-apocalyptic YA series I have planned has some similar themes. If you’ve not read it, this chilling adventure story of what happens when a group of kids become abandoned without adults on a deserted island, is well worth a read.
  2. A Book From Your Childhood – King of The Vagabonds by Colin Dann. To be honest, I would have chosen Watership Down by Richard Adams, as this is my absolute favourite childhood book, but I had already re-read it the year before. I couldn’t quite recall the title and author of this book about a pet cat who wants to live with the ferals in his neighbourhood, but a  bit of Googling soon helped me out. I ordered the paperback and thoroughly enjoyed a little trip down memory lane. I was probably about ten when my oldest sister bought me this book for Christmas. I wrote similar stories myself after reading it and drew pictures too.
  3. A Book Published Over 100 Years Ago – The Terrifying Tales by Edgar Allen Poe. I had high hopes for this, but I really didn’t like it! I enjoyed the first one, The Tell-Tale Heart, and I thought The Pit and The Pendulum was also excellent, but the rest? I kept skim reading them. They totally lost me. I was bored.
  4. A Book Published In The Last Year – The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engels. At the start of 2017 my friend author Kate Rigby asked me to join a Facebook group called Book Connectors. It’s an awesome group made up of authors, bloggers, readers and reviewers. Because of this group, I am constantly adding more books to my to-read pile! This was the first one that caught my eye due to so many people reviewing it in the group. A dark tale about the twisted lives of the enigmatic and tragic Roanoke girls. I couldn’t put it down.
  5. A Non-Fiction Book – How To Keep Ducks. I’ve had ducks and chickens for years and have three chicken books and not one duck book. So I decided to tick this one off by buying a duck care book! It was very interesting!
  6. A Book Written By A Male Author – History Is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera. I would like to read more by this author, but this book didn’t exactly thrill me. Brilliant plot, excellent characters and dialogue. It was just all a bit too tragic and depressing.
  7. A Book Written By A Female Author – Thalidomide Kid by Kate Rigby. I was a fan of Kate’s before we became friends, and I am slowly working my way through her many books. This tale of a working-class disabled boy who falls in love with an able-bodied middle-class girl is just classic Kate Rigby. I just want to cosy up with her books and immerse myself into the little world’s she creates so lovingly. I always fall in love with her characters.
  8. A Book By Someone Who Isn’t A Writer – Coreography by Corey Feldman. This was a bit of a challenge, as if you think about it, anyone who has written a book is a writer! But I interpreted it to mean someone who is better known for something else, and I had wanted to read this book for ages, so it was a good opportunity to tick another off the challenge. I was a massive fan of Corey Haim back in the day, fancied the absolute pants off him, if truth be told. Me and my sister obsessed over Corey films. The Lost Boys, Dream a Little Dream, Licence To Drive and so on. This book is eye-opening in the most tragic of ways. I thoroughly enjoyed the glimpse behind the scenes of classic films like The Goonies and The Lost Boys, but everything else Corey Feldman had to reveal was rather disturbing and I truly hope the two Corey’s get justice one day for what was done to them.
  9. A Book That Became A Film – Miss Peregine’s Home For Peculiar Children by Random Riggs. I think this was the first book I read in 2017! I bought it for one of my kids for Christmas and ended up reading it before she did. Brilliant book, and although they alter things a bit, it’s also a brilliant movie!
  10. A Book Published In The 20th Century – The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Attwood. One I had been meaning to read forever! And yes, I stupidly watched the TV show first. I was disturbed by it, yet could not stop watching. The same thing happened when I read the book. I think her writing style is superb and I desperately want to read more by her!
  11. A Book Set In Your Home-Town/Region – Tree Magic by Harriet Springbett. Half set in Dorset, half in France, I absolutely loved this YA magic realism novel. It’s a fantastic story about a girl who can bend trees. Really special.
  12. A Book With Someone’s Name In The Title – Searching For Ethan by Robert Cowan. I discovered Robert Cowan when I reviewed one of his books for Underground Book Reviews. I’d been meaning to read another one for some time, as I really liked his style and content. This book was great. Gritty coming-of-age!
  13. A Book With A Number In The Title – The Six Train To Wisconsin – Kourtney Heintz. One I picked to review for Underground Book Reviews. A really interesting and unique story about a woman who can read the thoughts and feelings of others.
  14. A Book With A Character With Your First Name – A Little Bit Of Chantelle Rose by Cristine Hodgson. I was really struggling with this one, until a fellow Book Connector author posted about her book in the group. This is not the type of book I would normally read, but I actually really enjoyed it.
  15. A Book Someone Else Recommended To You – We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. My daughter read this book because the librarian at her school recommended it to her. She then recommended it to me. It was utterly brilliant. An extremely moving and complex story about family secrets.
  16. A Book With Over 500 Pages – The Bachman Books by Stephen King. I may have cheated a bit with this one. I had already read all the books in this collection, except for The Road. So, I just read The Road. (Compelling YA dystopian plot about a Hunger Games-esque contest that sees teenage boys walking until they drop)
  17. A Book You Can Finish In A Day – The End by Justine Avery.  Another one picked for Underground Book Reviews, this novelette was extremely short and also unputdownable. A fast-paced story about a man who witnesses his own death on his Go-Pro camera before it has happened.
  18. A Previously Banned Book – In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. I had a great reaction on my Facebook author page when I asked for recommendations for a banned book to read. In the end, I chose this one and I’m really glad I did. The story of a murdered family and the subsequent manhunt and trial of their killers, is written in such an extraordinary way, I can’t help but think it would struggle to get published these days. You know who did it from the start. The plot is all about the killers, their lives, and attitudes, and the authorities attempt to catch them. Fascinating read.
  19. A Book With A One Word Title – Bloq by Alan Jones. Another book I had picked to review for UBR. This gritty tale of a missing girl and her father’s desperate attempts to find her was shocking, brutal and also very moving.
  20. A Book Translated From Another Language – Piglettes by Clementine Beauvais. I came across this in the Book Connectors group. One of the lovely bloggers had reviewed it and it sounded like something I would enjoy. Three girls are voted as the ugliest in their school in a Facebook contest. How they react to this makes one hilarious and inspiring story.
  21. A Book That Will Improve A Specific Area Of Your Life – Rise Of The Machines: Human Authors In A Digital World by Kristen Lamb. A great book for indie writers just starting out. I wish I had read this before I started!
  22. A Memoir Or Journal – How Not To Be An American High-School Girl In The 70’s by Gail Spencer Choate. Another book I picked to review for UBR. I really enjoyed this; a cringe inducing recollection of awkward teenage moments. Great fun.
  23. A Book Written By Someone Younger Than You – The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. I saw this in Book Connectors, bought it, devoured it and promptly passed it to my daughter who did the same. One of those books you think about for a long time afterwards. I urge everyone to read it. A powerful portrayal of racism and class in modern America.
  24. A Book Set Somewhere You’ll Be Visiting This Year – The Butcher Of Glastonbury by David Bowker. We went to Somerset in April, and there are a fair few books set in that region, but this one seemed so bizarre I just had to pick it. It’s the story of a girl who returns home one day to find her entire family brutally butchered. She then helps the local detective try to solve the case and catch the killer, but she knows it was not a human who dismembered her family. This book gets more surreal with every page, but I really enjoyed it! A strange and satisfying little find.
  25. An Award Winning Book – Aristotle and Dante Discover The Secrets Of The Universe – Benjamin Alire Saenz. I absolutely loved this book. The tender story of two lonely boys who become best friends and have to face their true identities and desires. My daughter just read it and she loved it as much as me. Short, snappy chapters, more dialogue than narrative. First person narrative. It’s beautiful.
  26. A Self-Published Book – Uncivil Wars by Wendi Kelly and Deborah Dorchak. Another UBR pick, I have been reading this series for a while now. Not a genre I would ordinarily pick, (shape-shifters, werewolves, vampires and more) I’ve been pleasantly surprised and impressed with the character development and complex plots. Brilliant sutff.

So, that’s my list! My 2017 Reading Challenge. It’s been tremendous fun seeking out bookt so fit the criteria and meet the challenge. I’ve discovered some amazing new authors and read some books that will stay with me forever. I am pretty sure if I can find a good challenge for 2018, then I’ll do it. How about you? Have you read any of these books? Any take your fancy? Have you ever tried a reading challenge and if so, how did you get on? Please feel free to share and comment!

When Blogging Becomes A Struggle…

~ ChanAtkins ~ 10 Comments

Confession time. I’ve been having trouble blogging for a while now. There are many reasons why, which I will go on to explain, not really in the hope of offering advice to anyone who may be experiencing the same struggles, but more to help myself make sense of them. As always in my life, I work things out better when I write them down! So…

In The Beginning…

When I first started this blog, I did so with great trepidation. I used it to post extracts from my works in progress, which at the time were my novels The Boy With The Thorn In His Side and The Mess Of Me.At that time, they were both unpublished and I had no social media pages or profiles set up. It was all very much the beginning!

I recall how nerve-wracking it was when I first published a post on this blog. I shared it on my personal Facebook page and couldn’t decide what would be worse; having no one read it at all, or having people read it and not like it! It was the start of me sharing my work and it had taken decades for me to gather the courage to do it.

Luckily, it went well. It was a positive experience, as a number of Facebook friends started to read the extracts and enjoyed them so much, they asked for more. And for a long time, that’s all this blog was used for. Extracts of work in progress, read by a very small amount of people who already knew me. Ahh, easy. Not much to worry about back in those days!

And then came the books…

But things progressed. Eventually, I self-published both of those books and decided to set up my Facebook author page, Twitter and Goodreads accounts. I was reluctantly embracing the realities of the indie life and the cross to bear that is self-promotion. By this point, the tone of the blog had changed a little too. Now that some of the books were available, I no longer shared extracts from my work. Instead, I started writing about everyday life. Thoughts and feelings and memories. Anything that sprang to mind. The reason for this was quite glorious. I had been bitten again by the writing bug, and the result of that was that the more I wrote, the more I wanted to write, and the more I had to say until I began to feel like I was bursting with it. This felt like a very good thing.

I didn’t have many followers, but those who did read those first honest essay style posts, left lovely, encouraging comments. I had no urge to blog regularly. I had not even designed the blog site or customised it in any way. It was all still rather basic, but I was actually having fun. Every now and then, I would feel the urge to share something, and I would spew it out onto the blog, refine it, redraft it a few times and then hit publish. Again, fun times. Now that I had the hang of ‘blogging’ I was really enjoying it.

blog all the things!

I began to feel like a real writer…

As time went on, I published more books, as well as articles for Author’s Publish and a local parenting magazine. I began to feel like a real writer and described myself as one. Tentatively, I began also blogging about writing. Writing tips, writing problems, that kind of thing. Nothing too heavy-handed, after all, I was hardly in a position to advise anyone, but I did feel I had enough knowledge under my belt to share a few things and I enjoyed doing it. My blog was growing and evolving. It was becoming more confident and so was I.

realwriter.jpg

Around this time, a friend of mine also gave me some much-needed advice on how to make the blog more user-friendly. I customised it a bit, added the various share buttons and started using images and tags, and generally, became a tad more savvy about it all. I was still having fun. No pressure. I blogged when I wanted to. Sometimes once a month, sometimes more often if there was a lot to talk about.

I rebranded…

And then over a year ago, I rebranded the blog, again taking valuable advice from another friend. I thought about what one thing my books all had in common and realised that it was that all of my characters were outsiders. Proud ones. I renamed my blog The Glorious Outsiders, I thought more about who my audience was, what kind of people would like my books, and focused on drawing them in and talking to them. I decided to blog weekly from then on, having read lots of articles about how important it was to blog at least once a week.

It was easier than I thought to begin with. I found that the more I blogged, the more ideas for posts I got. I had undoubtedly put pressure on myself though. I decided to release posts on Wednesdays, which meant I really needed to have another idea decided on by Thursday, and a rough draft of it completed by Monday. I was now aiming to be a lot more smooth and professional about things, which meant I started putting much more effort into my posts, crafting them with more care, that sort of thing. Basically, they took longer to write and perfect. Or was I just getting picky?

Which brings us to now…

This routine has worked very well up until very recently, but now I have to admit I am struggling. I am struggling for a number of reasons. First, is time. Being an indie author means you do everything yourself. I go through phases of quite enjoying promotion, and phases of actually hating it and backing off from it entirely. I have so much I want to write, and like a lot of indies, I cling to that thin hope that the next thing I write will be snapped up by a big publisher, or will hit the big time, make me famous, bring me success and end my money worries. We all dream! But it’s not just a dream, it’s something you actively work at, day in, day out. Because I’m trying so hard to write better books, I’m getting fussier, and it’s taking longer each time to get them finished.This means, the many, many other books planned and plotted and waiting to be written, have to wait even longer. I just sometimes feel I do not have time to devote to weekly blogs if I am ever going to get these books written! And then other times, I know I have to blog and promote and be seen, in order to try and sell my others.

Decisions, decisions! Do I spend time on this or that? Crafting a blog takes time! It’s not just the wording and the structure and the focus, it’s the images and the tags! I am rubbish at finding images and making memes. Sometimes I will ditch a blog post just because I can’t be arsed to find images for it!

nogoodmemes

And because I am getting fussier about my books I am also getting fussier about my blog posts. I go over them again and again. Have I lost confidence? I don’t know. I can’t say what it is. But I must have about fifteen unpublished blog posts now. I keep writing them and not publishing them. They just don’t feel ready. They just don’t seem to have a focus. Am I running out of things to blog about? No. definitely not. I have a list and the list grows weekly, so maybe that is the problem? Another case of too much to write and not enough time to write it?

Maybe I am having a crisis of confidence? I’m pretty sure we all do from time to time. Being a writer is a delicate business and we all have fragile egos. I’m lucky that I have never had unpleasant feedback or criticism, not on my books or on my blog, but that could just be a reflection of the small number of people reading them. Still, I think blogging was easier when I didn’t think anyone at all was reading it!

Over the last few months, my weekly blog posts have diminished to fortnightly ones. I’m not going to be hard on myself for this. I would rather post nothing, than post something I am not happy with. My personal life is a bit fraught, and I can honestly say I have never known what emotional exhaustion is, until now. There is just only so much a brain can deal with, I guess.

So, you might ask, why bother blogging at all? Why not have a big break from it? Why put the pressure on myself at all? I don’t know. I suppose pressure is part and parcel of the indie life. I want to sell books because I wrote them to reach people. I know how much effort is needed to be seen, and I don’t want to go backwards or be forgotten. And also, I enjoy blogging. I love this little blog of mine and the journey it has been on. I’m quite proud of it really, and a bit like writing a diary when I was a kid, it gives me an outlet. A chance to express my views on just about anything. I’m not the best talker, but writing a blog post gives me the opportunity to argue back, to make a case, to ask questions, to reminisce or just be silly.

So, in conclusion…

I’m still here. And I have every intention of always being here. Thank you if you’ve been following me from the beginning and are still with me today. And thank you to anyone who is a new follower of this blog. I suppose my advice to anyone about blogging would be this. Yes, it is important and yes, it should be fun. Lots of fun. But if life gets in the way, and other issues suck up all your time and emotions, then don’t be hard on yourself. Your blog will still be there waiting when things calm down again.