Right so this is the first day of my year long quest to make a good living as a writer. I know a year is a pretty short time to try and make it as a writer, but I've been settling for telling myself this is impossible for such a long time that I've never actually tried to take myself seriously as a writer before now. This blog it going to cover everything, from my career highs and lows (and there will be many of those) to my
geekery, feminism and general day to day life.
I'm currently
living with a friend in
Leamington Spa.
Leamington Spai s. without doubt, one of the most
pretentious and annoying places I've ever lived in my entire life. I will not be here long, but then the trick of that is to actually make it big as a writer. Trick indeed.
I'm focusing on the
commerical success, on the basis that once I am
commerically successful I can actually have some luck as a critically
acclaimed author too. I had a think about
commerically successful forms of writing.
The top ten bestselling books on amazon.co.uk today are:
1. No time for goodbye, a crime thriller thingy
2. Chinese food made easy a cook book, about
chinese food no less
3. The outcast, a historical romance set in the
forties and
fifties4. The forgotten garden (a historical novel set after WW1)
5. The
resurrectionist (a
gothic thriller set in the
victorian era)
6. The road home (a mystery set in modern day
britain)
7. The book thief (2
ww novel about a
german girl hiding a
jewish man)
8. East of the sun (about some girls moving to
india in 1928)
9. A history of modern
Britain (exactly what it says on the tin)
10. The private lives of Pippa Lee (contemporary novel concerning a 50 something
woman's private emotional life and past).
Now to break this down really really cynically all of these novels are of interest to a 50 something woman, lots of them
fietizes or
exoticse our immediate past as nation or out collective unconsciousness.
What does this mean for me; that my first project should focus on tapping into this market and write a historical romantic thriller, focusing on the private emotional life and choices of a middle aged woman, while exploring the wider
socio-economic changes taking place around her. Handily I have just the project already...
But I shouldn't just be focusing on that one novel. What about genre lit?
Apparently self help books are the fastest expanding genre of non-fiction and I'm pretty sure I have a self-help book lurking inside me, one which one in 3 women will need at some point in their lives. A rape self- help book. It's a bloody good idea, and one that only a feminist could pull off without sounding like a victim blaming
manual. So you've survived rape. The first thing to remember that you're not alone. I think I need to go away and have a serious think about this one. It'll be a tricky tricky thing to get right....
And of course there is a serious idea of selling my soul to the commercial devil and writing some kind of vampire bodice ripper. The type of novel that puts me in mind of seriously terrible
mary-sue-
esque slash
fanfic. The positives with this approach; I could actually use my dad as a kind of sounding board for ideas, he loves this kind of novel, to a slightly embarrassing degree. The negatives; well I'd have to write it under a pseudonym and it would be fairly.... cheeky!
Anyway
that's it for now, the opening post is complete, lets see how the future rolls out...
