What’s your novel about?

My friends have known that I’ve been writing a novel for years, but I’ve always been so cagey about it. Whenever anyone asks me, “So what IS it about?” I’m always very vague: “Um, well, it’s about a lot of things, like, erm, you know….” I’ve resolved to stop being so cagey about my writing, but it’s a hard habit to break. Sometimes it doesn’t feel appropriate to go into a whole long explanation about my fruit salad heritage (thanks, Serah P!) or about the second world war, and anyway, it would be tedious. What I need is a snappy one-liner, something smoky and fascinating, a synopsis that would be Marlene Dietrich if it could be a person (or Greta Garbo, or Ingrid Bergman, or Marina from the L word).

This is what I came up with when I sent the first three chapters of my first novel, A Prawn’s Heart is in its Head, off to Penguin:
“A Prawn’s Heart is in its Head is a novel that explores ethnicity, sexuality, history and the experience of being an immigrant in New Zealand. The novel is set in the 1940s and 1990s, joined by segues. The two main characters are connected by violent events that change the rest of their lives.”
Any other suggestions are welcome!

I wanted to make it clear that it’s relevant to New Zealand, as the first three chapters are set in the UK, so they might think it’s not relevant to NZ readers. Most books published in NZ seem to be set here or have some kind of “kiwi-ness”. NZ literature has a very particular flavour to it, there is a definite NZ ‘style’ of writing, and as a non-Nzer, I do not have that kiwi-ness. But I’m still hoping that my book will be published here.

Yesterday, someone very kindly gave me a desk chair, as since we moved here I’ve been using a very uncomfortable wooden stool (2 wooden stools and a red velvet pouf — I love saying that — is the only furniture we shipped over from the UK). It’s one of those big black leather chairs that looks like it should have JR Ewing sitting in it. Like a lazeeboy, it’s comfortable, but like a lazeeboy, it is also hideous. (You hear me, Cherie, don’t you!)

It says: “Hello, I’m a big black leather chair,” as soon as you walk in the door; there’s no not noticing it. Even when I turn my back on it I can still feel its “I’m a big black leather chair” vibes trying to seduce me. I can’t bear it! How can I get rid of it without offending the kind person who gave it to me? And am I being incredibly superficial by wanting a pretty chair? I mean; I needed a chair, and now I have one. It’s practical, I can sit on it; it works. But still, something in purple velvet would be lovely….

Sending a Prawn’s Heart to publishers

I have finally done it! I stopped faffing around (I’m being polite) with my “dear publisher” letter and with the synopsis, gave myself a mental shake and JUST DID IT. Turn on computer, print letter, synopsis and chapters, place into padded envelope, go to post office, and send. Simple. And then I went to work and forgot that I had just sent my novel off. It was as if it was nothing, as if I hadn’t spent two months psyching myself up to it and endlessly task-evading with domestic chores.

In fact, the hardest part took place not in front of my computer but at the post office counter. I had to provide an envelope with return postage (in case of rejection: publishers are so practical), but this was not as easy as it sounds.

“I can’t print a label for that,” the post shop lady yawned, “and we can’t guarantee that stamps will stick to this type of envelope.” When I asked if there did exist a way to provide return postage, she told me to push the stamps onto the envelope really hard and hope for the best. Which I did. Two days later I got an email to say that they had received my sample chapters. And they wrote the name of my novel! Wow, this is really happening.

I’m trying not to think about it so I don’t get disappointed when / if they reject me. (I know I should say ‘the novel’, but how can I NOT take it personally?!) But of course I also have my day-dreams of being a full-time writer and living in a romantic shabby-chic cottage in a gorgeous, coastal wilderness not too far from a great café.

I just remembered that the home page on the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia today said that the Iranian president made a statement that the Holocaust is a myth. I tell myself off almost daily for being over-sensitive, but when I read that I thought that maybe I’m too hard on myself. I feel numb when I hear things like that; in my brain there is only total incomprehension.

I like Jessica’s idea of having excerpts from the novel… I can show you all my favourite pieces, how indulgent! My favourite pieces are actually the most fantasy-based. There’s one bit where Erszi travels to Australia after the war on a luxury cruise ship — or what seems like luxury to her. That was all imagined, and so much fun to write. And of course there is Claudia. She’s only a minor character, but the one I most admire. Claudia is the person I would love to be — daring, sophisticated, posh, seductive, and doesn’t care what people think of her. Hmmm, perhaps Claudia deserves to reappear again in another novel, as the major character this time! I think she would approve.

A Prawn’s Heart is in its Head

Wow, this thing really works! Amazing. Thank you, Nicola!

Okay, so the point of this blog is that I recently finished my first novel, A Prawn’s Heart is in its Head, and I’m trying to get it published. I actually finished the novel a while ago, and since then I’ve been spending / wasting the past few months fine-tuning my ‘dear publisher’ letter. Then I was polishing up my ‘writing CV’, and once it was completely perfect I decided that I didn’t need to send one after all. And then I was working on the synopsis, which I found quite difficult because it’s not a straight-forward narrative.

“A Prawn’s Heart is in its Head” is one of those two-protagonist, two-time era kind of novels. I’m in two minds about the title, too. On one hand I love it because it’s true. The title was on the ‘fact of the day’ page on the Hamilton Central library intranet when I worked there about 6 years ago, so thank you to Hamilton library!

The title also expresses one of the ideas in the novel, which is that love would be so much simpler if we were prawns and had our hearts in our heads, instead of in the usual place. But it’s not a love story as such. It is about love, and different kinds of love, but it’s not a character-meets-character-and-falls-in-love story. It’s about much more than that. That starts the story off, but it’s only a starting point, it’s not the point of the story. It’s more abstract, I suppose. It’s hard to explain, which is why I hate it when people ask me, “So what’s your novel about”? Not because I don’t want to answer, but I haven’t yet thought of a simple way to summarise it without sounding too poncy and grandiose.

A Prawn’s Heart is in its Head is also about the Holocaust, which I never say either, because that makes it sound so depressing. It’s not a depressed book, or at least I hope it’s not. It does talk about difficult issues, such as different kinds of violence – the violence of war, violence in relationships, and the difference between wounds which are publicly visible and invisible.

That it’s about a violent relationship is also something I never mention; I don’t want to put people off reading it! There are so many books already published about war, about the Holocaust, about violent relationships. I don’t like to classify A Prawn’s Heart as coming under any of these headings, because it doesn’t fit neatly into any one category. If my novel were published and I was working in a bookshop, I would shelve it in general fiction.

It’s not autobiography, although some of the material is taken from my own life and from my family history. It’s not a lesbian book either, although the main relationship is between two women. If I say “it’s a lesbian story,” then that makes the lesbian part the most important factor in the book, and negates the other important issues in the novel. Love is universal, and issues of trust and safety exist in every kind of relationship. So it is impossible for me to classify it either as “a lesbian novel” or “a Holocaust novel” or “a domestic violence” novel. The first box makes it sound titilating, and the other two boxes make it sound much too serious and humourless.

Some of it is set in New Zealand, does that make it “a New Zealand novel”? Maybe that’s what I should say the next time someone asks me what it’s about! But although I’m living here, I’m not a New Zealander, so I don’t know if I’m qualified to write a New Zealand novel. This makes me nervous about approaching a NZ publisher; since I’m not a Kiwi, is it okay for me to write about Kiwis?

I do think that people from outside a culture or country are able to see some things that are invisible to the people from that place. I was talking to a Kiwi friend (let’s call her Robyn) some time ago about cemetaries (can’t remember why) and casually commented that cemetaries in NZ are outside of towns. She was absolutely incensed. “I don’t know why you say that,” she fumed. “Ravi said that as well, I don’t know where you get these stupid ideas from”. Ravi was another friend, also a migrant, who I didn’t know very well. I thought it was interesting that two people who were not NZers, who hadn’t been in contact for about five years and had certainly never spoken to each other about NZ cemetaries had said the same thing about them.

Cemetaries in England, at least the old ones, are literally in the towns, it’s quite an ordinary thing to walk past one or two on your way to the shops, and perhaps Ravi had said the same because it’s the same in India. I must have offended Robyn without meaning to, but as she refused to explain, I am still mystified. So I do worry that I will inadvertently offend New Zealand readers. It is safer to keep your mouth shut sometimes, rather than to speak the truth. But then a truth should be able to stand on its own, it shouldn’t need to be pampered and protected from examination.

My novel is an honest account of what is was like for me to migrate here, and the things that made me stop and look, and think. The landscape; giant, untamed flowers and ferns spiralling everywhere. The people: the Moko and how it scared me to think of marking your identity on your face, the one part of the body that you can’t hide. Of course I couldn’t help but compare it to the tatooed numbers of the concentration camp. Those numbers were all that a person’s identity was reduced to, and after the war the first thing many survivors did was to have the numbers removed.

I think that for many European people the face is sacred: facial piercings are common, but they can be removed, and many people have tatoos, sometimes on the chest or neck, but very rarely on the face. The Moko interested me because I wanted to understand this fear I had about it, a fear in me that was not logical or conscious but a kind of instinctive, primaeval fear.

Perhaps it’s not a general European thing, perhaps it’s only my own fear as someone whose grandparents were both Holocaust survivors, a terror of having an identity that is so visible, a terror of being spotted. As Ellen Galford says about her modern-day Jewish heroine: For our Eastern European ancestors, if you stuck your head out too far of the sand, a passing coassack might just gallop past and lop it off. (This is as best as I can remember it from “The Dyke and the Dybbuk”, one of my favourite books. Highly recommended, and as an added bonus – for me – it’s set in North London, where I grew up).

So, today I am supposed to be doing the final-absolutely-final polish-up of my “dear publisher” letter and my synopsis. And then tomorrow I will (in theory) be able to walk into the post office (here it’s annoyingly called a post shop) and send them, together with the first three chapters of A Prawn’s Heart, to the first publisher on my list. I may also send them one of the later chapters that is set in NZ, but no doubt it will take me ages to decide which one.

Another thing that has set me in back sending the chapters is the paperclip issue. For months I was determined to buy some pink paperclips to clip the chapters together. Or rather, not actually paperclips, but those other paper-clip-like things, I don’t know what they’re called. I read in Mslexia that publishers don’t like you to use staples. I have no way of knowing if this is true, but they probably know better than I do, so… fine. But could I find pink paperclips? I must have scoured every Warehouse, Whitcoulls, Bennetts and Dymocks in Wellington, but I could only find ones that were either black or horribly industrial yellows and blues. I really wanted to send off my chapters, but I couldn’t bear to use ugly paperclips, so I couldn’t send it off until I had found pink ones.

It’s not that I’m particularly girly, in fact when I was in my late teens I shaved off my bum-length hair and did my best to go for the androdynous look (unfortunately not to same effect as Shane from The L Word). I just love the colour pink, it’s so happy. As soon as I walk into any clothing shop I am immediately magnetised towards the pink, shiny tops that are meant for 10 year olds. I usually manage to tell myself “No!”Pink on a 10 year old? Adorable. Pink on a 20 year old? They can get away with it. On me? (I’m 29 for the 4th time) Put your hands in the air and step away from the pink! If I forbid myself something it’s all I can think about, so of course not letting myself buy any (more) pink clothes, I became completely obsessed with hunting down pink paperclips.

For months I couldn’t find any, and then finally! I found some last week in Warehouse Stationary. Beautiful pale, transulent pink, the kind of pink on a ballet-dancer’s tutu. Fabulous! So by the end of today (it’s now lunchtime, I think the times at the top of the post are US times) I should have my letter, my synopsis, my first three chapters, possibly a NZ chapter, and my gorgeous pink paperclip-like things. I’m all set and raring to go! Here we go, publishers in NZ! But first I might go and have some lunch.

my first time

This is my first attempt at writing something (anything!) on the web!

I’ve just finished my first novel, A Prawn’s Heart is in its Head, and this is about my journey in getting it published.

It would never have even occured to me write a blog, or indeed anything like this at all; all this newfangled technology is so intimidating. But my friend Nicola is one of those brainy computer people and over a bottle or so of wine she convinced me that having a website or a blog these days is absolutely essential. Her job is summat impressive to do with the web but I can never understand what exactly it is that she does. She says she spends alot of time curled up in the foetal position under her desk hiding from deadlines, but I’m not quite sure I believe her.

Okay, so here goes…

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