It Ain't Rocket Science!

I read a blog this morning about the benefit of tags and it offered some useful tips and hashtag suggestions. 

"Oh yeah," I thought to myself, "that's a bit like that one I read last week. That had some good ones in too - now what the heck were they?"

Now ain't that the problem?

I read heaps of stuff online and off it. If someone says, "I found this helpful..." then I'm there like a bee round a donut, desperate to learn anything that will get me ahead of the game. I mean, obviously it's not always like that, sometimes I have to go to work, do other stuff like maybe sleep.

In my other life, I write everything down. At work, I have a diary and literally everything goes into it, appointments, jobs in hand, notes to self. Basically, anything that I'm likely to forget. I could do it on my computer, but we aren’t flash enough to have hand-held devices and I can’t see my boss being amused when I wheel in my base unit on a trolley, dragging my monitor under my arm and asking where the power socket is. Nobody likes that person. I do just fine with a diary/notebook.

So why, in my author life do I think that I’m going to mentally absorb 400 different hashtags, which categories I put whichever novel into and web addresses that could be hazardous to forget?

I did have a sheet saved as a Word document on my laptop. I thought I was clever putting all my different passwords to Facebook and Goodreads and Amazon and lots more. My ever patient technical specialist raised his eyebrows and suggested that perhaps I passworded it, seeing as everything to do with the laptop was being stored in a file on the laptop. He's clever like that. Now, I'm blowed if I can remember the damn password that I used to protect my passwords. Not funny.

Anyhow, in a light bulb moment this morning, I did it.

I solved my problem.

I got myself a bloomin' notebook for all that stuff about hashtags and categories and things like that. I might not be able to remember a password but in 45 years of life, I have never lost a single notebook!

So much as it might sound like traversing the great ether back to the Dark Ages of Ye Olde Worlde, I'm happy. I've already filled 3 pages with great hashtags that I’m going to use on my posts and lists of the categories that my novels are already in. That way, when someone says to me, "Have you tried putting your book in this category?" I don't have to scratch my head and go to Amazon.com and scroll down to the bottom to see where they're ranking, just because I don't want to go through the hassle of logging onto KDP and getting distracted and fiddling with something else, like a blurb or a cover.

So there you go.

Notebook.

It ain’t rocket science but then I, somewhat disappointingly am not Wonder Woman either.

Carry a notebook. Lose the frown.

KEEPING IT REAL - Giving the reader the benefit of your real-life experience.

I read a novel once which contained a foreword by the author and referred to a week that she had spent in the bush doing research. I sat back and began reading, excited to see her experiences drifting through the pages at me. I was severely disappointed. By the end of the book, her lead male had made a fire without matches and built a small bush hut. That was it. She had literally spent a week living rough for a few lines about how delightful it was and how clever her man could be.

  

Whilst writing my latest work, I sent my two main characters into the New Zealand bush, on Mount Pirongia to be exact. I was keen not to make the same mistake and so I used my own experience to hopefully put the reader into that situation. The bush is beautiful and challenging and utterly terrifying. It is not the kind of place that you can afford to disrespect. I hope that I have managed to get that across.

The first night I ever spent in the bush was up in the Kaimai Ranges in the middle of a wintry July. It was a Youth Search and Rescue event and I was accompanying my fourteen year old daughter on a Parent Camp, having drawn a very short straw.

Let’s make this clear. I am a 5* hotel kind of girl. I don’t do camping.

Yet there I was, waking up in a tent packed with snoring adults of both genders, fervently telling myself that I didn’t need the toilet. Unfortunately, I did and let me tell you, once you’re out of the tent, there ain’t no point trying to crawl back in again. It was freezing cold and into the minus figures and the promise of home and bed felt like the Holy Grail. We had camped next to an elderly scout hut with a toilet and freezing cold running water, but that, I am reliably informed, was a luxury.

My daughter had joined this motley band of crazies a few weeks after her fourteenth birthday and they trained rigorously every second weekend on any of the mountain ranges surrounding Hamilton. Over a period of three years, she morphed from an outdoor loving teenager into a finely honed machine, able to survive alone in the bush for days, navigate anywhere with an ordinance survey map and compass, track and find, administer first aid to and rescue unfortunates who found themselves lost. By the age of sixteen, she was carrying a pager and responded to search calls, even leaving school to do so. As parents, we were so proud. But then in the middle of each year...there was Parent Camp.

The first year, I went off on a ‘tramp’ with an older boy and another parent. We chose a short track, because I am not a fan of deeply wooded areas and as we discovered half way around, the other poor mother was three months pregnant and but for her husband being called away, shouldn’t have been crawling, knee deep in vines and bush matter anyway. We had radios and a GPS, not that we were allowed to cheat, tempting as it was and we were being monitored back at base by a group of third years which must have found our weaving coloured line absolutely hilarious.

All of the parents were loaded up with rucksacks containing emergency clothing and a small survival kit, food and water to last us should we get hideously lost and need to camp out. Good grief! Surely that should have told us what we were in for but no, off we went like innocent lambs to the slaughter.

There is a moment in my latest novel, Blaming the Child, when Callister is forced to tramp off track through deep bush. She is scratched by the hooky thorns of bush lawyer and constantly tripped up by supplejack, spending most of the time on her hands and knees. That was me! I have truly never felt so helpless. For as far as I could see in every direction, it all looked the same. I could see how easy it was to get lost. Over five awful hours, I learned to navigate using a compass and also saw how simple it could be to trust your own judgement about where you were headed and topple off a ridge or into a water course. I got to use the radio and call in our coordinates, feeling a total fool when I got the lingo wrong and had to be straightened out by a teenager. It was both humbling and humiliating.

The second year, I had the privilege to be led on a tramp by my own daughter. She had suffered a dreadful head injury at the end of the previous year, being caught in a rock fall and received a bravery award. Miles from help, her head had been kept from falling apart using a handkerchief and a bright orange Search and Rescue baseball cap for an incredible twenty four hours. Then she walked 6km carrying her own pack, to civilisation, a horrified mother and hospital. She recovered and apart from the scar on her forehead and a wariness of scree slopes, she lost none of her passion for the bush and rescuing other people from its clutches.

Unfortunately by the end of our master class, my beautiful daughter declared me to be a ‘liability.’ I have a tendency to wander off after butterflies and pretty plants and she spent half an hour searching for me and the other parent whom I had inadvertently led astray. I have no idea how we ended up on the other side of that stream as neither of us adults remembered crossing it. I also disgraced myself by eating particularly poorly. While everyone else unwrapped hearty sandwiches and sensible energy bars, I created a stir by whipping out a tin of English mushy peas which I had lumped around in my rucksack. Having produced a tin opener and a dessert spoon, I horrified my poor daughter by eating the little green darlings cold, washed out the tin in the stream and carried it back to the scout hut, clanking loudly all the way.

Needless to say in her third year, she didn’t press me to attend with quite the same degree of excitement.

My character, Callister Rhodes, is a lot like me. She is surrounded by beauty but would rather not be. The New Zealand bush is both fascinating and terrifying and she doesn’t cope well with its isolation. It makes her feel powerless and causes her to question her own significance against the benchmark of its magnificence. If it weren’t for the competence of her companion, Declan Harris, she would not have survived.

Declan is like many of the young men and women whom I encountered on those weekends. He is infinitely capable and very much at home in his surroundings. Unlike Calli, he would be perfectly happy to live indefinitely in the bush. He has been well trained by a bush loving father, who taught him everything he knew, before dying prematurely.

I have been careful not to over-egg the pudding. My characters could have hunted for their food, surviving on rabbit or eel, but I wanted it to be realistic. It wouldn’t matter how hungry I got, I would never be able to stomach a slime covered eel, no matter how well you washed it and my daughter informed me knowledgeably, that rabbits would not be found on the upper slopes of the mountain, only in the lower farmland areas. Declan provides food for Calli, made up of dehydrated mince and powdered mashed potato. I may be criticised for this but can assure you, that my daughter and her companions survived happily on such ingredients for each of her weekends and the ten day trips which they did every New Year. I should know. I was in charge of firing up the dehydrator and the smell of it running overnight was pretty disgusting. But she required enough meals to last for ten days and that was my contribution. There is almost nothing that can’t be dehydrated and some things are more successful than others. Tinned fruit mushed up and spread over the shelves of the dehydrator comes out like fruit bar - bet you didn’t know that!

Above all, I truly hope that my novel has realism. The last thing I want is someone to slam the book down and declare that the author has clearly never experienced the bush. I want you, the reader to know that I have, I did and I really don’t want to again.  

What? You actually want my opinion?

 

I’ve spent my whole life reading. I have memories of living in West Germany as a little girl, where my father was stationed with the Air Force and the library on the air base was better than a sweet shop for me. We had no TV and our entertainment was the British Forces Broadcasting Service radio programmes, Barbie dolls (dangerous with a little sister who had a penchant for snapping off arms, legs and occasionally heads) and books.

Books were expensive even back in the 1970’s and the likelihood of getting something written in English where the national language was German, was remote. But the library on the base had them all lined up neatly on shelves, Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, my heroes, wearing dustcovers and little plastic jackets to protect them from our tiny, eager hands. We went there on a Sunday after church but we had to be quick as the lunch would already be in the oven - my organised parents put it there before we left. There was no time to do proper choosing, it was just smash and grab, child style. It was the highlight of the week for me and sadly not always guaranteed. If Dad was on nights or working Sundays, we didn’t get to go anywhere as Mum couldn’t drive.

 

I remember once, getting home, scoffing my lunch and devouring Enid Blyton’s ‘Castle of Adventure’ for pudding. I couldn’t get enough of it. My mother refused to believe that I had actually read it all in that short space of time, coming upon me as I closed the back cover in sadness about two hours after lunch. I recounted the whole thing and she was probably sorry that she had asked, when I finally finished following her around the house four hours later.

 

But what is my point here?   
 

Well it’s basically that back then, nobody really cared if I liked the book and went back for the next one at the earliest opportunity. The publisher didn’t, the library just had it there and the author would never have known that she just make a little girl’s boring Sunday afternoon a whole lot better.

 

 

I started publishing a year ago, but only got my Kindle six months later as a gift from my mother. Up until then, I was still feeding my library habit, only I could choose six instead of one and didn’t have to pay my younger sister in household chores just to let me have her choose as well. Again, the library didn’t care if I liked my picks when I returned them, they probably measured their stats on how many times that book was issued, but they never actually asked ME personally if I had enjoyed it.

I always read the bit about the author in the back and love it when there’s a photo because I can see if they look how I imagined them. Maybe there were email addresses and website addresses but I had a book in my hands, not a computer and so I don’t recall ever looking anything up.

 

The world is different now. When I finish a book on my Kindle, a box pops up asking me if I want to give it a star rating. Amazon emails me if I ignore that and asks me what I thought of my purchase. As a reader, I’m bombarded by questions and asked for my opinion about somebody else’s work. It’s no longer that detached experience, it’s an interaction with a real person, who is going to see what I think and have an opinion on it. As a reader, I’m not sure how I feel about that. I like what I like and surely that’s nobody’s business but mine. Isn’t it?

As an author, I am ranked and rated and statistically examined a million times over, based on the reviews I get for my work. Some authors give away copies of their precious works in return for reviews which they may never get, knowing that the greasy pole which our books have to climb is aided by the solid opinion of our readers. Others cajole, encourage and resort to begging readers who perhaps agree cagily and then don’t, for a whole variety of reasons.

What seems to have happened in the last few years, is that readers who willingly and genuinely place reviews for every book they read, become hot property. Amazon and Goodreads both have lists of their ‘top 100 reviewers’. I do routinely review almost every book that I read nowadays, because I know that it’s important and even I have a rank as a reviewer - not a very good one yet, but it’s getting there. Authors used to be powerful people, able to influence the fabric of society, the perception of governments and the mood of the people. Now it’s readers.

With the click of the keyboard, a reader can place a review that either devastates or delivers hope to somebody who has put their work out there in the ether. There are no surprises (other than perhaps content) as the author will be eagerly awaiting that opinion. Some authors must check hourly for reviews. I’ve put up a review as a reader, only to get a notification from Amazon within minutes that ‘somebody’ liked my review and found it ‘helpful’. I know it’s the author, who else could it be? I’m going to time the next one and see how long it takes. I might even keep a book on it, in a light hearted, completely non-financially advantageous way, you understand.

A few reviewers really do understand the power of reviews. I have heard awful stories of reviewers deliberately trashing work which they haven’t even read, just because they can. They spend an afternoon dolling out one star reviews to random authors because it’s raining and they were bored. But I wonder if they get and keep that power, because not enough of the other readers out there, know that their opinion is wanted and valued, very much. Perhaps if the load was spread among the other millions, the corrosive influence of the few would be dispersed.

I’m not really sure what the answer is - I’m just musing as always.

I guess what I’m saying is that, if you are reading this and currently enjoying something on your iPad, Kindle or other device, just know that there is an author on the other side of that creation who is desperate to know what you thought. Yes you! They care about how your received their main character, what you liked or didn’t about the setting. Are you bothered that they killed off the lead actress at the end or did you hate her anyway? Did you want to marry the leading man or take out a hit on him and more importantly, when this author puts out their next book, will you be there? Do a 5 minute review. Let them know.