We are delighted to welcome new mystery author E. B. Kavanagh as our guest blogger today.
E. B.'s debut novel is One for Sorrow (CreateSpace, April 2012 trade paperback and ebook editions), a murder mystery set in a small town in the middle of Ireland in 1982 during the Tidy Towns competition.
Today E. B. shares with us how his adventure in writing came about.
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Photo provided courtesy of
E. B. Kavanagh
I wanted to write a novel simply to see if I could. "The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair." (Mary Heaton Vorse) Is that true? Well in my case it actually was.
My deadline was set by the impending birth of my daughter (my wife was three months pregnant when I began) and so she gestated at the same rate as my book. Six months later I bounced a beautiful baby manuscript on my left knee, and the very gorgeous Katie on my right. My writing process was simply to get started as if I was shooting the breeze with a friend that I could relax around. This took the pressure off the blank canvas effect. Don't forget that once you are up and running you can cut off the fat. Move it all around, put the middle at the beginning, whatever works. You are not Jack Karouac. We have the joy of the word processor now. Then when I was up and running I sort of danced around doing dialogue until I eventually found myself just using my natural voice. You have to trust it. Turns out for me it's kind of hard to shut up. There was a lot of walking quickly around parks (sometimes pushing a pram) figuring out how the mystery elements fit together. If you are still nervous about letting your voice out at the beginning, I recommend getting drunk some night and get a start that way. Next day when you look at it you will be forgiven for thinking that someone else wrote it. I don't recommend however that you continue to write in this fashion.
Now that, as they say is that. Or is it? No, it isn't. Not at all. Turns out if you want anybody to read your masterpiece you have to be all things to all men. Firstly it seems that you have to be a computer whizz and to be very au fait with social networking and web design. Publishers are not interested in authors who are not already successful and you have to first get yourself a literary agent. Persuading one of these to represent you is like performing in front of Simon Cowell.
The further adventure continues …
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The prologue to One for Sorrow:
In the shadows…
At the bottom of everyone's ocean, river, pool or puddle, lives a big ancient fish.
Who knows how long it's been there, or what it started as.
It survives, because it keeps it simple.
It stays in the shadows, in the deep parts.
It survives because it never changes, except to become even more of itself, and to gorge on its own darkness when it can.
People don't like change. I have never liked change.
It's been my experience that anything good that might happen to you comes at a price, and you don't collect Green Shield stamps on the bad news either.
My fish loves the darkness.
It's been growing ever larger on the coolness of isolation, become the colourless camouflage of its murky bed. Some fish are better left alone.
You can read the first two chapters of the book at OneForSorrow.net78.net.
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