A couple of times a year, Oslo’s Litteraturhuset (House of Literature) holds an open mic night for new writers of all kinds to come and share their work. Last week, I participated for the first time, reading the opening of my novel, Amaranth. I was lucky enough to have an entourage with me (fellow members of the Oslo International Writers’ Group) who not only cheered me on, but offered to take a video of my reading as well. Here is the result:
I was proud to participate in such a fun evening, and to receive such great support, not only from my friends, but from all who listened. The other participants read poetry, stories and novel fragments in both Norwegian and English, and were impressive in their range, skill and enthusiasm. Some were funny, others dramatic, but all were heartfelt and brave. I look forward to the next one in September.
At the end of 2012 I began the third book in The Eidolon Cycle, and already I know this will be the most challenging of the three. The story spans one hundred years, beginning in the late nineteenth century, and follows the origins, life and death of one of the secondary characters in Amaranth and Sweet Alyssum; Sabine. Titled Bella Donna, the story will explore how Sabine came to be the twisted creature readers will know from the first two stories or, if this is the first title read, it will introduce the saga from its earliest point.
There are always challenges when writing historical fiction, but I have not made even that part of it easy for myself; the principal location – the city of Lennox – will need to have its own believable history, even though no one really knows in which country it lies. Not only that, but the rules of the eidolon world are already set out in the first two books, even though they are set chronologically later than this story, so there are defined rules within which I need to work.
Then Sabine herself is a challenge; she is an unsympathetic character in the other books – dark, moody, callous and twisted – and to write her in the first person without alienating readers will take time and care. Knowing her as well as I do, I have that sympathy already, but can I get it across to my readers? Enough so that if they happen to read this book first, they will remain loyal to her through the other books? That is the goal I have set myself, and I accept it with relish. Why make it easy?
I am already fascinated with the research I have done so far, and it would be easy to get lost in that without writing a word. The history of our treatment of people suffering from neurological and psychological diseases is disturbing, particularly in regards to women. It is this very treatment, or mistreatment, in institutions around the world, still spoken about in whispers, that forms the backdrop for Bella Donna and Sabine.
Things became interesting this week when I received not one, but two requests from New York literary agencies who want to read more of Amaranth. It’s both exciting and terrifying to come so close: it could be the start of something huge, or it could just give me further to fall. But what I want to be able to take away from this development is the knowledge that there are at least two agents out there who think my work is worth their time. That is HUGE.
I’ve just begun work on a sequel to Amaranth, and although I won’t share too much about the actual story just yet, I can tell you how it came about. Originally, Amaranth was quite a different story; it was still based on a girl who committed suicide, but I had a completely different story planned for her than the one she ended up with. I had planned for Amaranth to have two very distinct parts, the first where Eva discovers her new existence and meets young Nicky and Elliot, the second would take place around ten years later when Nicky was eighteen and Elliot into his twenties. By the time I was halfway through the plan for what Amaranth eventually became, I realised I was never going to fit all of it into one book, especially since there are quite strict word limits for first-time authors as a rule. I’d also had real trouble with how to manage such a significant time jump without having to spend a long time describing what had happened in the interim and boring readers to sleep.
The best way I could think to tackle this problem was to further develop what I had in mind for Amaranth and split the whole idea into two books. But then the book took on a life of its own, and Timothy asserted himself into a main character in a way I hadn’t intended. He became key to the whole story and made it so that the second book could never really be about Eva.
The result is that though Book Two will essentially have the same plot I’d always intended, it won’t be a linear follow-on to Eva’s story. There will be new characters, and the ones we already met in Amaranth will have ten more years under their belts and will have changed in ways even I hadn’t anticipated.
In ancient Greece the peerless beauty, Amaranth, walks into the Alcyonian Lake and drowns, becoming the first immortal eidolon, cursed to forever wander amongst the living, unseen and unheard. Thousands of years later in the modern-day city of Lennox, nineteen-year-old Eva Hamilton throws herself off a cliff and awakens unharmed on the rocks below. With no memory of why she jumped and unaware she is bound by an ancient curse, she must find a way to either accept or escape her fate.
Back in 2009 I awoke one morning from a dream that I had started writing a novel about a girl called Eva. The name of the book in the dream is way too embarrassing to share with you, but it did plant the seed of an idea in my mind.
When I was a child, I used to write little books, complete with (terrible) illustrations, staple them together and give them away as gifts. Even back then I would brag about how I was going to be an author when I grew up.
The problem was that I never had any truly good ideas. Even when I decided to study professional writing in my 20s, I had a horrible time coming up with ideas to complete the assignments. I’m fairly sure most of what I wrote was complete rubbish. Don’t get me wrong, the writing itself was quite sound, at least if my grades were anything to go by, but it was the fact that it was based on almost nothing that brought it down.
So anyway, after I had the Eva dream I started to think about writing again for the first time in years. Walking home from work one day I looked around at the other people going about their business and thought to myself, “I really don’t pay attention to any of these people. They could be the walking dead, and I would never know.” And the idea for Amaranth was born.
Once I made a start, the ideas, for once, came thick and fast. I just sat down one evening and started to write, and the more I wrote, the more the story formed in my mind. I badgered my partner constantly about whether he thought this or that idea was good and, though he would claim otherwise, he helped me shape the idea into something I could apply a story to.
Not long afterwards, I fell pregnant with my daughter and the whole project was more or less shelved. I did write bits and pieces while I was traveling for work in Japan and the US, but there was something about the plot-line I had in mind that just didn’t sit right. I decided to leave it alone for a while and concentrate 100% on motherhood.
Throughout my daughter’s first year, Amaranth would pop up and swim about in my head now and then, the idea would morph and change, and then slink back into my subconscious. It wasn’t until she started in kindergarten and I had a few moments to myself that I felt ready to think about it seriously again. I cringed as I took out what I had written nearly two years before, ready to throw out the lot and start again.
