Tag Archives: This Is Our Undoing

FantasyCon, book tours & the Scary 2nd Book

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First up, the programme for this year’s FantasyCon has just been announced & I am delighted to be part of this event again. It’s been organised in no time at all by the amazing British Fantasy Society team after the original organisers cancelled it & I am in awe of the work that must be going on behind the scenes right now.

For anyone interested (and for me to screenshot so I don’t forget), my programme looks like this:

Saturday 17th September

  • 4pm in Atlantis2 – Climate Fiction
  • 8pm in Discovery3 – British Fantasy Awards ceremony
  • 9pm in Endeavour – Reading from The Way The Light Bends

Sunday 18th September

  • 11am in Atlantis1 – Folklore and Fairytales
  • 1pm in Atlantis2 – Writing the Difficult Emotions

If you are coming to FantasyCon, please come say hi. I promise I’m nice & I may have books. Also, I will be a quivering wreck at my reading as I’ll have just survived the excitement of my three BFA shortlistings, so I deny all responsibility for my emotional stability during that session.

Photo of the hardbacks of both my books on a scarf on the lawn, backlit by sunlight & with a wee blue ceramic hare alongside.

OKAY. Moving on … my second book was released a few weeks ago & I realised I hadn’t written anything on here about that. So … first of all, a moment to appreciate how incredibly lucky I have been with BOTH my book covers. Luna Press have produced the most perfect, beautiful covers for these books and it makes me a bit mushy to see them sitting together on my shelf!

Last year we had a book tour for This Is Our Undoing that … didn’t entirely work. A fair few of the readers on the tour were, let’s say, not the target audience for the book and just didn’t click with it. (The weird thing with booktours is that you can’t follow advice not to read reviews because you’re generally tagged in and meant to engage!) So that week was a steep, hard lesson in dealing with meh reviews, and definitely put a dent in my confidence throughout publication week.

But it served me well in some ways, in that it’s quite freeing to learn right out the gate that a) I can survive a bad review and b) the book will still find readers who love it. I mean, two BFA shortlistings isn’t too shabby, is it??  

This year, we had a tour for The Way The Light Bends with the lovely folk at Insta Book Tours, and it was a whole different experience! So many positive, beautiful reviews; so many readers’ tears; such a friendly vibe to the whole tour. There was one comment that came up a few times (about the ending) that I’m tempted to write a blog exploring because the subject of endings, resolution and folklore is one that interests me from a craft perspective. But that’s for another day. Today I just wanted to share some of the review comments and thank Victoria Hyde for organising such an uplifting tour.

Image of the cover of Light, with four quotes reading: I've never read a book where the first paragraph absolutely shattered me. The way the author writes about grief is mesmerising.' 'Cinematic and gorgeous.' 'So beautiful, draws you right in from the start & keeps you gripped.' 'A beautifully written heart-breaking tale, weaved in with folklore and mystery.' All this is against a backdrop of dark, moody water.

I was honestly quite nervous about how Light would be received. Because of Undoing’s blog tour partly, but also and contrarily, because some reviewers have been such amazing champions of Undoing and I didn’t want to ‘let them down’ with my second book! It’s a very different story to Undoing, so I was worried they would be flummoxed and disappointed, and that they’d be disappointed in me for following up with something they liked less. I know, it’s stupid, but I’m excellent at finding ways to catastrophise nothing at all, so there.

Imagine my relief then, when one of those amazing reviewer/champions of the universe had this to say about Light:

This is Wilson’s second book and I thought their earlier novel This Is Our Undoing was one of my highlights of last year. Now this one easily becomes one of this year’s best reads. Sublime character work; a wonderful sense of place and crucially displacement creates a spell-bounding tale giving us characters that we get to love and care about or even fear for. Wilson is very much an author to watch. Strongly recommended!

Runalong the Shelves

I know. I’m giddy as a kipper. Read their full review here. And now I need a cup of tea to recover.

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photo of my stripy kitty, sleeping on a stripy footstool on his back, both forelegs stretched up above his head and his fangs on display. He looks very relaxed and a little bit weird.

Brave New World

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Last weekend I attended FantasyCon in Birmingham (see pics), The British Fantasy Society’s annual event. It felt like a brave new world for several reasons – the first in-person event now that we are in the (hopefully) latter stages of the pandemic, my first con, my first appearance on panels, hell, my first time meeting more than three people at once in 18 months. We were all venturing out of our caves into a new world that felt both daunting and hopeful, and I personally couldn’t have asked for a better place to venture into.

Between the hotel and the organisers, and with numbers lower than normal & masks compliance higher than I’d feared, I felt far more comfortable than I might otherwise have done. So thank you, everyone, who made that happen.

I’m not going to do a report on the Con itself because others have done that already & some of the sessions are on the Youtube channel here too.  Instead I want to chat about what it feels like as a newbie author, and spoonie, doing these things.

First off, launches are great.

I am glad I did my This Is Our Undoing belated launch alongside three other authors (Allen Stroud & Cheryl Morgan, contributors to Worlds Apart, and John Dodd author of novella Just Add Water). Having all of us reading and talking made it feel like a community celebration rather than a Look At Me. There’s nothing wrong with Look At Me events, we kind of rely on them after all, but I prefer a Yay Us feel instead, personally. So anyway we all talked about and/or read from our work then signed books and ate biscuits. It was lovely, people said nice things, admired Daniele Serra’s amazing artwork, and I realised a) there is nothing I can do to make my writing look neat, and b) I often add too many ‘r’s to my name when I’m in a rush.

Second, panels are more fun than I expected.

Honestly, I had a blast on both of mine (Beginning to Write, and History of Representation in SFF). I’d never done anything like it before either as a scientist or a writer, so I was expecting nerves and overwhelming social awkwardness (especially given the emerging-from-cave situation). BUT I felt relaxed and able to contribute more or less coherently, and I wasn’t even slightly a shaky mess. I mean, I was shivering like mad in one of them as I was sitting right under the aircon vent, but Covid, etc – probably the safest place in the room to be, hypothermia notwithstanding.

Third, being with other writers is so utterly lovely, isn’t it?

I’ve missed that. I started the weekend knowing two people and ended up with a whole gaggle of new friends; interesting, enthusiastic, supportive and fun new friends. I know Zoom is useful, I find remote access invaluable, but I’d missed meeting in person. I’m so glad I went.

A photo showing four books, a necklace with clock pendant and a pair of octopus earrings. Books are The Blacktoungue Thief, Christopher Buehlman; The Academy, FD Lee; Blackbird's Song, Katy Turton, & The Flicker Against The Light, Jane Alexander.
Bookish & treasure haul (cruelly restricted by bag+train combo)

I’m so glad I went, despite the cost.

Because ooh boy, the cost. As you already know if you follow me anywhere online or have read previous blogposts, I’m a spoonie. I live with disabling illnesses that DO NOT LIKE me doing anything beyond the bare minimum. So train journeys, ‘performing’, being intensely social, late nights, changed eating routines, even carrying a bag around all day … all of these are MAHOOSIVE triggers. Which means the weekend was incredibly hard on me physically, both during and now – five days later I’m still struggling. I’m hoping to be a little more stable by next week.

Black & white photo of a 'bone harp' model, brought by Lucy Hounsom & relating to the folktale in her book 'Sistersong'.

Fortunately, I was able each day to go back to my room, dose up on a pharmacy’s worth of drugs and crash for a few hours before re-emerging frazzled but more or less human. It wasn’t perfect, and to be able to do that meant going without drugs the 10 days leading up to the event (otherwise overdose feedback bleurgh stuff), but it allowed me to carry on functioning. Even more fortunately, my publisher knew I would need to take it easy & made sure I felt able to do so.

PS: look at this ridiculously creepy/fabulous bone harp brought by Lucy Hounsom!

One of the highlights of the weekend, as I struggled with spoons, was the panel on disability representation, and the discussion around driving change in the industry. Ironically, it wasn’t one of the events streamed or recorded (no blame intended, could have been due to a number of things e.g. consent/tech issues) BUT it sounds like the British Fantasy Society have both the awareness and the will to continue to improve access for disabled writers at future events. I hope so. One of the panel members said that change depended on more disabled people writing. I pointed out that we were, we just weren’t being published, and access is a huge part of that disconnect. I would love to see fully hybrid events, subsidised tickets, comprehensive access information and provision of BSL interpreters. How about a buddy system for newbies or people who’d find a companion helpful?

The pandemic has demonstrated what the disabled community have been saying for yonks – that overhauling access is actually perfectly possible. Now let’s see that awakening lead to permanent changes (see these guides), and not let the comfort of the ‘old normal’ return to excluding so many.

Here’s to the crips. And the people who are listening to us.

So, with my spoons depleted and my soul revived, here endeth my blog. FantasyCon was wonderful, hopeful and welcoming … I cannot wait for next year.

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Photograph of the sea, some rocks & a distant Isle of May. The clouds are gloomy but sunlight is turning the sea silvery.
Returned home to a very Autumnal Scotland!

The Faith & The Fear

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I’m not entirely sure about this blog. I mean, basically it’s me crying ‘what if you don’t like me!’ into the void. Which is both slightly unattractive and plain daft. However, I think it’s a feeling a lot (all?) writers experience to some degree as launch day approaches (and after, but I’m living in a universe where ‘after’ isn’t allowed to exist yet). So let’s talk about it, shall we?

You see, this is all just a little bit scary. I wrote this book, you may have heard me talking about it. And I thought it was pretty good; in fact I still do. I had enough faith in it to send it to publishers, after all, which takes guts. Only … now it’s up to you guys whether you think it’s any good, and apparently I’m not allowed (by my bank manager and by privacy laws) to send you all bribes to make you say nice things?  

At present, I have had two amazing cover quotes from two wonderful authors, Yvonne Battle-Felton and Will Dean… and ARCs of the beast are out with gazillions (almost) of reviewers, including a blog tour’s worth of book bloggers. How fabulous is that? All those people willing to give up their time to read and review my own words. *melts*

ALSO, as if that wasn’t enough, my fabulous publishers have taken a huge leap of faith on the book, and produced a Limited Collector’s Edition hardback. This is truly fantastic. It moves me deeply that they see such potential in my story, and I feel deeply honoured and very, very excited to see it. Each copy is going to be unique, with an individual quote from the book, personalised messages to the buyer and my very own name (HALP – I need to decide how to sign it… Raine? Lorraine? Lorraine Wilson?). Check it out here. Isn’t that something quite special to happen to your book?

Painting of fox and forests overlaid with text saying 'Fast-paced and emotive, echoes of ghosts and promises of redemption make this a breathless read' Yvonne Battle-Felton, author of 'Remembered'
Photo of a scarce swallowtail butterfly feeding on a lavender flower stalk.
A lucky bug (Scarce swallowtail)

And honestly, I can’t wait to see what other people make of my book – how they interpret the characters and the themes, who they love, what they connected with. In the author panel I did with Yvonne Battle-Felton a while ago, Yvonne said that she loved Kai, and wanted to know more about him, and that was … wow, someone loved a person who used to exist only in my head … how fabulous is that? What a strange and magical thing to happen. I am a lucky bug.

…so anyway, that’s the FAITH. People willing to volunteer reviews of my book. A publisher gambling on special editions of my book…

And HERE’S THE FEAR:

Black and white close up & head-on photo of an Oak hawkmoth.
Oak hawkmoth looking, I think you’ll agree, fearsome

What if all those reviewers hate it? What if no-one (other than my mum) buys the special edition, or the hardback for that matter, or – hell, paperback or ebook? What if my lovely editor is in actual fact the ONLY OTHER PERSON IN THE WORLD who likes my book? It is statistically unlikely, I’ll grant you, but not impossible.

Now, in my more rational moments I know that a) these fears are understandable but equally b) shut up, you fool.

But my rational brain seems to have decided that the lead up to release is a really good time to hibernate. (It’s called aestivating in the summer, did you know? It’s a good word)

It feels weird to talk about this. I feel like I’m meant to emanate a kind of confident, enthusiastic expectation of success, or something. But isn’t it more normal to talk about being nervous before an important event? Isn’t it okay – and more honest – to say ‘hey, I’m feeling the fear, but I’m also really looking forward to hearing what other people think’ because the fear doesn’t stop that other bit being true. In fact it makes it more true. If I truly wasn’t nervous, it would be because I didn’t care what you thought of This Is Our Undoing, and I do care. Very much.

close of up a figure of eight moth on wood, looking very well camouflaged.
Me (or a Figure of eight moth) pretending I’m invisible.

So wish me luck in the weeks ahead, would you? And please, if you read This Is Our Undoing and like it, let me know?

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Photograph of a male Beautiful Demoiselle damselfly on a leaf. The sun is catching the vivid metallic blue of the wings.
Me (or a Beautiful Demoiselle) emanating confidence and success.

Real Author Stuff & Spoons

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May seems to have filled up with what my mind insists on calling Real Author Stuff. Namely, interview blogposts, a newsletter highlight, live & recorded reading events, and a book club visit. I’ll give you the details in a moment, first I’d like to squeal quietly at you, if that’s ok.

*me squealing*

I am loving it, in case you were wondering. Each one of these things is a shiny brass weight in the ‘Yes, you are an author’ half of the scales and a pigeon feather in the ‘haha, good joke, yes?’ half. Which is nice. I’ve mentioned in passing before that getting to this point involved a few set-backs. In summary, they included having and then losing an agent (book1), having two publishing offers (for book2), one of which I accepted but that then fell through, dozens and dozens of full requests (books 1-4), several phonecalls and similar near misses (books 2-4), some blatant prejudice, some amazing encouragement… and then This Is Our Undoing (book3 btw) found its true home with Luna. Add in the chronic illness palaver and it’s been an occasionally challenging process.

So being asked to take part in Real Author Stuff is … it’s magical frankly. I am stopping to smell the roses.

Photograph of wild rose bush covered in pink blossoms.

Sadly, aforementioned chronic illness doesn’t entirely agree.

This is one of the things with living with disabling illnesses – that everything, and I mean really, literally everything has a health cost. Gardening for half an hour? That’s a spoon or two please (for an explanation of the concept of spoons and being a spoonie, read this). Walking down to the chemist to get prescriptions? Worrying about a poorly cat? Cooking tea? A few spoons should cover it. Doing a live reading/author chat in the evening? SO MANY SPOONS.

black and white close-up photo of a moth with droopy antennae - it looks sad.
brindled beauty pulling a sad face

Spoonie life is a juggling act, a walking on eggshells existence.

It is a constant bartering of ‘I really want to do that on Thursday, so I can’t risk doing this today’, or ‘I’m doing this on Wednesday, so Thursday and Friday are written off.’ And that’s fine. I’m lucky that with planning and recovery time, I can generally do things. (I mean, it’s not really fine, but *shrug* that’s life, you get on with it.) However, it’s been brought into sharp relief with the advent of Real Author Stuff, because I love being asked to do things, and I love doing them, and want to do more (please) so I am … undergoing a shift, I guess. Which includes taking writerly things more seriously. It has always been effectively a ‘hobby’, so in the spoons bartering it’s been hard to justify paying too much for it, when my ‘payments’ (days of ill health while I recover) affects my family as well as me. But writing isn’t a hobby now. I’m an author, I’m allowed to give Real Author Stuff value. Which is both a very complicated equation still, and also contrarily incredibly liberating.

Statue of a woman with head bent, holding something on her shoulders with one hand. It's very soviet and very striking. There is also a pied flycatcher sitting on her head.

On the other hand, I’m still allowed to protect my health, even with Real Author Stuff. And one of the absolute greatest things about publishing with Luna Press is how unconditionally supportive Francesca has been. Honestly, I cannot put into words how bolstering it is to know that my publisher has my back and that in my health bartering, I do not have to add in the stress (goodbye spoons) of worrying about annoying my publisher if I cannot do something.

This blog has turned into … something more complicated than a ‘YAY LOOK AT ALL THESE EVENTS I’M DOING’ blog. But then, living with disability is complicated, and I don’t want to smooth over the nuances and difficulties of that. Yes, it makes for a messier ‘YAY’, but also it makes the good stuff that much more precious. I am smelling the roses, gently.

…And here are some of said roses…

Publishing Scotland’s newsletter Books From Scotland includes an extract from This Is Our Undoing … it contains bears and the very beginnings of All The Trouble. Read it here.

The book blogger Janet Emson – From First Page To Last – published a wee Q&A where I talk about why I wrote This Is Our Undoing, why I love graphs and what I owe Oscar Wilde. Read it here.

I did my first ever live reading & chat with Yvonne Battle-Felton and an eclectic, fascinating mix of other debut authors. My reading is around the 1:20 mark, watch it here, admire my fairy lights & see if you can spot the cat.

…More to come soon, thank you for reading. Wishing you all the spoons you need. This is a slightly psychedelic photo of me (not me) smelling (drinking from) the roses (geraniums).

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Photo of a hummingbird hawk moth drinking from a wild geranium flower whilst hovering.
Hummingbird hawkmoth

Cover Reveal for This Is Our Undoing

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Did you see it on the homepage? Isn’t it pretty? Just in case, and because I want to, here it is as a spread so you can see the way the curlicues in the physical book will extend over to the back – a facet I am particularly fond of!

Cover spread of This Is Our Undoing. Art by Daniele Serra

I wanted to talk a little bit about the process of developing a cover, as it was something Francesca at Luna was lovely enough to involve me in and it was a genuinely fascinating process.

The first stage for me was when Francesca told me they had approached an artist about the cover art (see Luna’s blog about it here). This happened way earlier than I expected and so I hadn’t had a chance to mention some of my thoughts on a cover, or to ask what my level of involvement would be. I was, if I’m completely honest, a little nervous at this point, worried that the artwork would really, really not be what I wanted. There was one thing in particular I was not wanting, and one thing I was…

The Not Wanting was human figures or faces. I love these on other covers, I have nothing against people’s faces in general, and I cannot even articulate why this felt so fundamental to me. I think part of it is not wanting to see how someone else visualises ‘my’ characters, and also not wanting readers to go into the book with someone else’s versions in their minds. The funny thing about publishing a book is that it ceases to be yours. But I do believe it ceases to be any one person’s, so I guess I was just leery of having one person define the characters for others. Does that make sense? Possibly not.

The Wanting on the other hand was (ironically) a different figure … a fox. I know. Isn’t that awesome? Why I wanted a fox is tricky to explain without spoilers so I’ll just say this: That to me foxes came to symbolise that dichotomy of fierceness and fragility which I think lies at the heart of a lot of my characters. They also capture a sense of the wild – the intangibility of the forest and the night. Plus they are cool. There is no carnivore more adaptable or resilient, few as floofy, and none that can pounce into snow banks with such perfection.

So, as should now be clear, when my publisher sent me through the artwork … I was stunned. Because without knowing, she had given me exactly what I had been hoping for. She said she had mentioned poetry and darkness, the fox and the forest to Daniele Serra (find him here), and I realised two things – that she saw the very same heart in the book as I did, and that seeing beautiful art that is going to be ON MY ACTUAL BOOK makes me cry.

So we have a beautiful piece of art that it would be sacrilegious to stick words all over … and then we started sticking words all over it. This was the part of the process that I was deeply involved with, and I can only be grateful that Francesca was so patient with my (many) suggested tweaks, minor worries and last-minute second-guessing. We settled on a font pretty quickly because squiggles. Then it was all about placement, and man, are there a lot of possible ways to position words on a page. A. Lot. And then, just when you think you’ve nailed it, you have to do the hardback version (I am still very excited to have a hardback version), and then an ebook version (as you can see above, the physical version has curlicues passing over the spine, which in an ebook 2D version looks a little odd. So back to the shuffling words and squiggles (and more last-minute second-guessing), until we had the version you can see on the homepage.

THEN I got a little carried away putting together pretty graphics like the one on the homepage, and the ones I’ll be sharing on Twitter and Instagram. But the story of that particular procrastination device/learning curve is for another post. Let me just finish by saying that it is an honour to have such beautiful art on my book, and seeing it makes the whole seem so much more real and precious. Yes, there may have been tears at seeing the final versions too, and also some slight dancing.

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How To Be A Debut Author – The Basics

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So I have a book deal. This is a truly wonderful thing. But now what?

Now I have to become an author. Not in terms of writing a series of words that someone wants to print (and other someones hopefully want to read), but in making connections both within the publishing industry and with potential readers. Half of the publishing world will tell you that having an online presence makes no difference; the other half will tell you that you will get as much out of publishing as you put in. *Shrug* Perhaps if you are publishing with one of the big five houses, and if they have chosen your book as one of the ones they exert particular marketing effort on, then you can rest easy that your tiny Twitter platform is the least effective part of that marketing process.

… But most of us are not in that fortunate situation. And frankly that is not necessarily a bad thing – there are advantages to indie publishing. Perhaps I’ll write a blog about that some day.

So what have I been doing this last month? Learned friends have shared their wisdom on what helps you reach the right readers (ooh alliteration), and although there’s a whole discussion around whether they work, I’m going to focus on the what here rather than the why. First thing to mention is that this is proving to be an ENORMOUS learning curve, and more time consuming than one might wish. But I am hopeful that this learning/establishing period will soon stabilise and require less time and less flailing around in the dark.

…tortoise interlude, because that’s about my speed…

…back to it. What have I been doing/learning/panicking about?

  • Author events. These are a thing I need to get used to. They’ll build up as I get closer to, and after, book publication. But the first one might be in the spring and I need to think about two key issues:

How personal I am willing to be in public. And,

Whether to buy a ring light so I am not plunged into gloom.

  • Early Reviews. This frankly is terrifying. Not just the prospect of people I admire (and don’t really know) reading my book, but also APPROACHING PEOPLE TO ASK A FAVOUR. Terrifying. There are two stages to this – one is asking for cover quotes, which has to happen super early, and I did last week. Aren’t I brave. The second is in the build-up to publication for which my approach so far is to draw up a list of people I at least vaguely know & who write/read in roughly overlapping genres … and that’s it. For now. There will probably be begging…

Did you know it’s really important that your first few Amazon reviews are by readers who read in your genre normally, so that the Amazon algorithm shelves you in the right place & recommends you to the right readership? I did not know this.

  • Instagram. (I’m here) I had resisted joining this, despite being a photographer, because I felt I really did not need another online procrastination tool. However, it is a great way to find book reviews and book reviewers, and perhaps more importantly, to learn what makes good visuals for a book. Which cover reveals, prettily arranged book photos, shelfie photos etc catch the eye and which ones do you skim past. I am mostly using it at the moment to share some of my gazillions of nature photographs, but I am also following and learning and (hopefully) storing away lots of information on how bookish IG works. Once I have a cover, I can really start to do more authory things on this. And that cover is coming soon…
  • Twitter. (I’m here) I have been on Twitter for a while now. Initially to stalk agents and publishers, and to follow authors I admire. At the time I had barely published a thing so my own twittering mainly involved science, folklore and sharing writerly friend’s successes. Over time I have become more engaged with another key subject that I am particularly passionate about: Diversity in publishing. As a spoonie, mixed race, ex-working class writer, this is personal; but it’s also just plain common sense. Now though, I have a book to promote too & the question of how much of that to do. A very helpful friend told me to get good at hashtags, and to find quotes, moodboards etc from your book to share. I’m working on both those things… But my feed is mainly nature, science, boosting writerly friends and boosting diversity opportunities. And actually I think that’s ok.
  • This website. I’ve been doing A LOT of work on this. Which is a stark contrast to years of sad neglect. I’ve been learning how to add social media widgets, static/feed pages, add contact forms, add links within pages (!) … and how to present myself. I am still working out that last. I see websites as only really meaningful if you have a book(s) for readers to find out about…

… AND if you have something to offer…

  • …Be that book reviews, free content or author services. As I said above, I want to do something to support diversity in publishing and am currently thinking about what I can offer to other writers from under-represented backgrounds. Keep an eye on this site and my Twitter for more of that.

There is more (isn’t there always). There are Booktubers to get to know, YouTube videos to record, book shops to write to, launches to plan, conventions to book myself into and volunteer sessions for … but for now, website, social media and reviewers are about all I can handle. And now I can tick write a new blog post off my list. Make a list of possible blog subjects is next…

… This statue eloquently expresses how I feel …

Upside down and severed statue head from greco-roman ruins in Turkey.