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September 4, 2014
by bookseekeragency

Why Vampires? An interview with Marie Marshall, author of ‘From My Cold, Undead Hand’.

We recently had the opportunity to talk to Marie Marshall about her teen-vampire novelette From My Cold, Undead Hand. The book is scheduled for publication on 15th September, and will be available first of all as a download direct from the publisher. Shortly after that it will be available in Kindle format and print-on-demand from Amazon, and in due course there will be a bookshop launch. So fans of YA and vampire fiction can beat shopgoers to the book by buying pre-launch copies! What is more, early purchasers will be able to claim some bonus extras! This novel marks quite a departure for Marie; although she is well-known in Scotland for her macabre short stories, this is the first time she has tackled the vampire genre. We wondered why, so we asked, and her answers brought out more questions.

Why vampires? Tell us what brought this novel on.

What brought it on was an email from my trusty publisher, asking if I could write a teen-vampire novel. I took that as a request to write one on commission and just hurled myself into it.

There are many well-known writers of vampire stories, from Bram Stoker to Stephenie Meyer, so much so that it is a well-subscribed – some would say over-subscribed – niche of adult, teen, and graphic literature. What makes From My Cold, Undead Hand different?

Honestly I wouldn’t know. I have read Dracula of course, and Joanne Harris’s The Evil Seed, but very little else; oh, and watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel of course, and many of the old Hammer films. I have always avoided Twilight – you can call that prejudice if you wish. I’m very familiar with vampire images and myths, but I guess I must have absorbed this knowledge through some kind of cultural osmosis!

What I set out to do was just to write a story, most of it set in near-future with dystopic elements but with a nineteenth-century back-story I already had notes for. I cited a couple of obvious influences in the acknowledgments section of the book, but by-and-large my aim was to write a good story, almost as though the vampire theme was incidental. You could say that the true theme of the book isn’t all the vampire action, but the way that young people can get marginalised in an adult world. I think all writers of genre fiction ought to focus on writing the story first of all, and to hell with the conventions of the genre, if you see what I mean.

Tell us about Chevonne Kusnetsov your heroine. You mentioned that you like heroines to be young, strong-minded females.

Isn’t that the definition of ‘heroine’ anyway? I’ll take it that you mean ‘female protagonist’ if we’re going to generalise here. I do tend to write female protagonists that that are young and strong-minded – Eunice and Jelena in Lupa, Angela in The Everywhen Angels – I don’t know of that many major literary female characters who aren’t young and strong-minded. Well, maybe Bridget Jones, and maybe some of the women in the older Mills and Boon novels would be a bit limp, but not even they would be total dead losses. It is, of course, a literary convention to make your protagonist someone admirable, so that the reader can identify readily with that character. That’s reinforced by the first-person narrative.

Chevonne is, I suppose, a tomboy character. I wanted someone with whom young female readers could identify, but who wouldn’t alienate young male readers. I guess in many respects she is asexual. She certainly has other things on her mind than dating and what-have-you. I didn’t want her to be a Bella Swan – she’s closer to Buffy than that, but with a spiky haircut – so any hint of romance is very low key. But it does crop up, just wait and see.

I think one of the main reasons I needed her to be strong-minded was to highlight that theme of marginalisation I mentioned. Without giving too much away, I can tell you that her decisiveness doesn’t actually move the plot along, but rather she is swept along in it. Two of her most important decisions in the story actually have disastrous consequences for people close to her.

Did you know her surname is the Russian equivalent of ‘Smith’, by the way?

Tell us more about Dianne, Chevonne’s friend.

Di is easily led and, true to the theme of the book, easily marginalised, even by someone she loves. There’s a kind of gaucheness about her. There is a good reason why she sticks to Chevonne, and maybe a good reason why Chevonne sticks to her (although I deliberately don’t make that clear). She’s the character in the book whom I most want to cuddle and tell her everything is going to be all right, but of course… ooh… spoilers, spoilers!

I believe that anyone who pre-orders From My Cold, Undead Hand or is quick off the mark buying it, will learn more about Di from some extra material that I have written.

Chevonne’s mother is a bit of a shadowy figure. Are you planning to develop her at some point?

I wasn’t planning to, no. One of the things I did in writing this story was to focus on essentials, via the mind of the protagonist. So much is happening in the story that her mother is hardly on her mind, so she remains shadowy. It’s a part of Chevonne’s character, which is why I guess she doesn’t see the possibly consequences of some of her actions. Add to that I didn’t want Chevonne’s mother to become a kind of Joyce Summers figure (from Buffy), so I deliberately kept her out of most of the story.

Having said that, now that I have written the extra material about Di, I can see the potential for taking figures from the novel and writing short stories about them. Maybe stories not directly connected with the novel.

Every author writes him/herself into the story at some point. Which character do you associate with most, and why?

I don’t do that. What I do is mine my own feelings and put them into characters. I’m not Chevonne, I’m not Di, I’m not Miureen, I’m not Anna Lund.

I did do a bit of kick-boxing when I was young, like Chevonne, though. I’ll say that much.

The dystopian future you describe. Is this based on political views you hold or want to present?

Not particularly. I think that trying to do that spoils a book. For me, John Wyndham’s anti-religious stance coloured his science fiction novels too much, as did C S Lewis’s Christian triumphalism. Even Tressel’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists doesn’t quite work. You have to be a Dickens or an Orwell to get away with it. What I did was simply imagine a handful of modern trends and made them a little worse, and that was mainly to create a backdrop and context against which and in which the action could take place.

Which elements of that future, do you feel, will most probably eventually happen?

Well, as they are based on what is already happening… I think the strongest element is the manipulation of government and other institutions by unaccountable forces. The only difference is that they’re not vampires doing it at present. At least I hope not!

You set the action in America. Was there any reason for this? Do you think you have successfully captured a kind of American-ness in the novel?

Well firstly to market the book! Secondly I wanted to have the gun issue as an element. It gave me such a good title, which I appropriated from an NRA slogan. Before you ask, the story is neither pro-gun nor anti-gun. Guns are simply a fact in the novel, and although there are unforeseen consequences upon gun ownership laws from one of the major elements of action, that isn’t moralised upon. I guess anyone with strong pro or anti gun opinions will assume I’m on one side or the other, and I don’t mind if they do if it helps to promote the book!

As for American-ness, well that’s secondary. As I said, I focussed on what was uppermost in the protagonist’s mind, and that wasn’t giving chapter and verse about the Statue of Liberty of the Golden Gate Bridge. To help me with aspects of day-to-day life and expression I had a couple of American ‘beta readers’. I did have a battle with my editor over one vernacular phrase which he said was only heard in the mouths of the ignorant and would pass away. I conceded, but since then I have heard Hilary Clinton use it, so I’m claiming a moral victory!

Is there a future for the storyline? We heard noises of a sequel being under construction?

Yes, a sequel is more than half-completed. Without giving too much away, I have moved it forward, so that what we are going to learn about the storyline from From My Cold, Undead Hand we’ll get in back-story. There will be one important character, however, whom we shall meet again in the sequel. There is also a ‘threequel’ planned, though I have to confess the plot is going to be a bit tricky.

Having had this success with vampire fiction, is it something you are going to stick with beyond the planned trilogy?

Heavens, no! Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound so vehement there, like I’m slamming the door shut on vampire fiction. Obviously if a good story occurs to me I’ll write it. What I really meant was that I had put aside three ideas for other novels – partly written in some cases – in order to write this teen-vampire trilogy. I would like to go back to them, and get back to writing primarily for an adult readership.

Is there an essential difference between writing for adults and writing for young adults?

Oh that actually puts me on the spot. No, there isn’t. You can’t ‘write down’ to either. If anything, though, younger readers are less tolerant of superfluity, more acutely observant of inconsistencies, sharper in their use of their critical faculties – mainly because they haven’t yet been taught how to misuse them.

August 28, 2014
by bookseekeragency

Updates on Marie Marshall’s ‘From My Cold, Undead Hand’

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The passage is from the story-within-a-story, a translation of a rediscovered, nineteenth-century manuscript said to be the writings of a female vampire-hunter. You will find it embedded in Marie Marshall’s futuristic teen-vampire novel From My Cold, Undead Hand, which now has its own feature page at P’kaboo publishers. Just click the book cover to be taken there. There are extras – text and an audio file from the diary of one of the characters – for a limited number of purchasers. For those of you who would like a paperback version in advance of any domestic print launch, you can get it at Amazon – same goes for a Kindle version.

The author, along with cover illustrator Millie Ho, are offering a couple of wallpapers using the cover artwork. They are available here.

We at the agency are getting very excited about the publication of this teen-vampire novel! As with all titles from P’kaboo Publishers in South Africa, the publisher is keen to find ‘partner’ publishing houses in the UK, the USA, and worldwide who would like to make this novel available to a wider readership. Please contact this agency for further details.

August 22, 2014
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Michael Fry & Angus Konstamm: using the past to glimpse the future

Michael Fry & Angus Konstamm: using the past to glimpse the future
Edinburgh International Book Festival
Royal Bank of Scotland Garden Theatre
20^th August 2014
Previously published at The Mumble, 21^st August 2014

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Confronting a nation’s history involves confronting its national myths. If the country is our own, that can move us right out of our comfort zone. As we in Scotland get closer to the referendum on independence, the issue of our history seems to take on more importance, and we are reminded of George Orwell’s words, from 1984, ‘He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.’ Looking at the past, for the purposes of this debate, were historian-authors Michael Fry and Angus Konstam. Their chairman Joseph Farrell described them as ‘heavyweights’, and although Angus Konstam suggested that if the conversation flagged the two of them might entertain us with a bout of sumo, the chairman was clearly referring to their intellects.

Edinburgh Michael Fry To Michael Fry, control of the past, as in the publication of books on Scottish history, has been left too long in academic hands, and has been a one-sided account of social and economic history replete with statistics. His bias was towards culture, society, and politics, in the search for what has kept Scotland Scotland; he has found that when a historian undertakes research he finds things which relate, albeit perhaps as echoes, to today, and that what we recognise are not the products of sudden upheaval but have deep roots.

In his book A New Race of Men – the title being a phrase taken from observations made in 1845 by the Rev. George Cruden, one of the few kirk ministers to have taken part in the Statistical Accounts of Scotland in both 1794 and 1845 – Fry presents a picture of a nineteenth-century largely at peace, with a conservative constitution (if I can use such a word) that supported that of England, union with the rest of the United Kingdom long since a ‘done deal’. Scottish capitalism was in the hands of men who had served their time as apprentices and shared social roots with the men who worked for them, giving rise to a sense of egalitarianism. In movements such as public health, it was recognised that contagion did not stop at the edge of working-class areas, and that therefore health belonged to all, not simply to the bourgeoisie.

Ideas like this didn’t fail to draw dissent from the floor. A questioner from North East England challenged the assumption that the nineteenth-century Scottish working class was any less exploited than the working class in his own area – and indeed the supposed difference that Michael Fry had suggested between the Scottish and English concepts of class did seem to sit rather awkwardly with a previous statement to the effect that the North East of England, for example, shared much of Scotland’s perceived remoteness from London and Westminster. Another questioner challenged the idea of the ‘done deal’ with its roots going back to the eighteenth century, citing the verse in ‘God Save the King’ about ‘rebellious Scots’; unfortunately her point merely perpetuated the canard that the verse is insulting to the Scots as a whole, when it is actually specifically directed at the Jacobites. Fry made this point in reply, however – that in the ‘age of revolution’, between 1789 and 1848, while the death toll in political causes in other countries was high, there was a total of twenty-three in Scotland. “I counted them’” he said.

Edinburgh Angus Konstam Angus Konstam, although principally a maritime historian, has been fascinated by Robert Bruce since reading a ‘Ladybird’ book about him. In his book Bannockburn, according to the event pre-publicity, Konstam ‘debunks some myths about the legend of Robert the Bruce’. He describes the modern popularity of Bruce as ‘a national talisman… wrapped up in romantic guff’. The definition of Bruce’s wars as ‘Wars of Scottish Independence’ was a later one, as are those of a nationalist or a class war, both of which would have been lost on Bruce himself. The thirteenth- and fourteenth-century conflicts were fought to ‘solve purely medieval problems’, and in them even Bruce himself changed sides more than once. Nevertheless, by the time of Bannockburn there was an unprecedented and unfamiliar wave of specifically Scottish patriotism that must have lent something to the subsequent sense of Scottish identity.

For all that, the presentation did leave me wondering what myths were going to be debunked. It is more than forty years since Nigel Tranter’s Bruce Trilogy was published, moving into popular fiction what historical study had long made known – Bruce’s career as a serial turncoat, and his murder of a rival. I listened to the account of Clifford’s unsuccessful charge against the Scottish infantry, and muttered to myself that surely the knowledge that horses will pull up before a solid mass of footsoldiers was known as far back as the Greek phalanx. However, we were brought back to popular myth when Konstam reminded us of the legend of Bruce and the spider – “It’s in the Ladybird book, so it must be true,” he said with a smile – for which there is no evidence beyond its existence in popular folklore.

Edinburgh Fry cover Of the two books foregrounded, it strikes me that Michael Fry’s is probably the more controversial. However both authors were kept busy signing copies of their books after the event. I have to say I was left wanting more time for public discussion with the two authors – to drill down into some apparent contradictions in what Michael Fry said, to challenge Angus Konstam further about whether the myths about Bruce were actually as powerful as he assumed. Joe Farrell did make the point that the pair seemed to have been drawn together simply because they were historians. This was the first time I had attended an event at the Book Festival when I wondered if either of the authors on stage was thinking to himself “If I were Germaine Greer or George R R Martin I would have this stage to myself. Obviously I’m considered second division!” I am happy to give the Edinburgh International Book festival the benefit of the doubt on this issue, because it does what it must to pack so much into its schedule, and by-and-large gets it just right.

August 21, 2014
by bookseekeragency

Publication date for ‘From My Cold, Undead Hand’ announced!

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Yes, P’kaboo Publishers have announced the date on which Marie Marshall’s long-awaited teen-vampire novel From My Cold, Undead Hand will be available from them in e-book form. Other forms will become available later, but for those readers with the facility to read the ePub format, buying direct is the way to go. You can pre-order, and as a bonus the first twenty-five purchasers will receive extras, including audio material!

The story itself is fast paced and gripping. The protagonist is Chevonne Kusnetsov, a teenager from New York City a generation or so into the future. The ecology is in crisis, electricity is scarcer and mainly generated by wind turbines mounted on top of buildings. Meanwhile, vampires stalk the dimly-lit streets after dark. But their very existence is denied by the government and the media. Expose!, a shadowy organisation formed to blow the vampires’ cover wherever it can, is routinely denounced for conspiracy-theory, anti-semitism, and downright insanity. The Resistance, a secret guerrilla army of vampire-hunters, organised in a cell-structure, is denounced as a ‘terrorist’ organisation. Chevonne has been recruited to the Resistance by her history teacher, and she’s tough – straight from the school kick-boxing club, she can use her fists and feet, but also a sword, a stake, and a laser-gun. What is the vampires’ ultimate plan? How does it involve the government? How does it affect Chevonne and her friends Di and E.J.?

The title, From My Cold, Undead Hand, is adapted from a famous slogan popularised by the National Rifle Association in the USA in defence of the right of American citizens to own and carry firearms. One of the features of the novel is that vampires, who in traditional fiction arm themselves with nothing but their teeth, exercise this constitutional right. Well, so do the vampire-hunters! By the end of the book there is a twist to this ‘right’. I asked Marie if her novel was deliberately politicised or partisan on this issue.

No, indeed not, but it did occur to me to introduce gun-carrying vampires and to have elements of the plot which developed the consequences of guns in this kind of conflict or adventure. Of course I have my own views about the issue, but there are two points I’d like to make. Firstly, I’m not American, and it’s America’s call. And secondly, no author worthy of the name lets her own views affect the way a plot is developing. The story goes how the story goes and that’s that. Anyhow it’s not ‘about’ guns. If it has a theme it’s about how young people tend to be marginalised.

That theme turns the dramatic crisis of the novel into a cliffhanger, leaving readers wanting more. Thankfully a sequel is half-written already, and there is even the possibility of a threequel. So who should read it?

It’s pitched at ‘young adult’ level, but it’s not ‘written down’. I think it will be snapped up not only by teenage readers but by adults who are into vampire fiction – and there are many, many of them ‘out there’. I just hope people out there will enjoy the ride as much as my ‘beta readers’ did.

From the point of view of this agency, it is encouraging that P’kaboo have shown faith in Marie once more, and are publishing her third novel on the 15th of September. Keep a watch for updates here, and by following @ColdUndeadHand on Twitter. Don’t forget that you can pre-order your copy!

August 18, 2014
by bookseekeragency

Major-Minor: Languages and Nations

Major-Minor: Languages and Nations
Edinburgh International Book Festival
Scottish Power Foundation Studio
16^th August 2014
Previously published at The Mumble 17^th August 2014

“In this age of globalisation, the English language has become increasingly dominant online and on the page. As an author writing in a different national or minority language how does this dominance affect your ability to tell your story and find an audience? Gaelic writer Martin MacIntyre and Arno Camenisch, who writes in Rhaeto-Romanic and German, join acclaimed translator Daniel Hahn to discuss.” (blurb on the Festival web site)

It’s difficult to know how to review a discussion. One angle from which to look at it might be the structure and the way it was chaired. Considering that it was to last forty-five minutes with fifteen minutes for questions and answers at the end, and to include readings by two authors, on that account it was spot on, tight, and well presented. Much credit goes to the chairman, David Codling. Of course a lot also depends on the qualities of the members of the panel, so let me introduce them.

Arno Camenisch reading from his novel ‘Alp’.
© Nick Barley

Arno Camenisch looks like a diminutive version of Simon Baker, right down to the disarming smile. He has stage presence, whether reading in his native Rhaeto-Romanic – a ‘minority language’ from southern Switzerland – or talking about his work. Despite, or maybe because of, his occasionally having to appeal to fellow panel-members for help with a word or phrase in English, he displayed a dry wit and an unconventional way of looking at things. “My choice of language depends on the weather,” he says. “If it is raining I write in Rhaeto-Romanic. If it is windy or sunny, German… I grew up in a polyphonous village. There were many languages… But television was king. We believed more in TV than god.”

To Arno ‘the sound is the soul of the text’. Martin MacIntyre agreed, speaking of ‘music’ as being the key, and praising the sound of Arno’s reading. Martin was born in Glasgow to parents originally from South Uist, and learned Gaelic from them. His spoken Gaelic is precise and clear, and when he read from a recent novel we could hear that he was not simply bilingual but effectively trilingual, and the Gaelic was interrupted by both English and Glaswegian. Frankly, that was the first time I had ever heard a passage of Gaelic with the word ‘woggle’ in the middle of it! “What excites me about Gaelic is that everyone who reads it can also read English,” he said. “There’s a tension between the two.”

Arno Camenisch and Martin MacIntyre
© Paul Thompson

Both writers translate from their ‘minority’ language into a neighbouring ‘majority’ language – from Rhaeto-Romanic to German, and from Gaelic to English. Daniel Hahn, national programme director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, said “Translation is never about the language, it is about languages. The relationship between languages… We use the big languages as a bridge for translation of minority languages. This is not an unproblematic relationship.” He highlighted this problematic characteristic by the example of a translation from Welsh to English of the words of an old man who spoke only Welsh and knew no English at all. During the question-and-answer session I had the opportunity to ask him to clarify this. I made the point that if I was reading, say, I Claudius, I suspended disbelief and simply accepted that I was reading the words of a native speaker of Latin who was writing to me in Greek; so how was a translation from Welsh to English any more problematical?

Daniel Hahn
© Paul Thompson

Daniel agreed, up to a point. “There’s a kind of sleight of hand going on when you read a translation,” he said. “We collude in that. We pretend we are reading it in the original language.” But then he made the very valid point that the relationship between Welsh and English, particularly in the context of the novel in question, is highly political, involving the identity of people where ‘to speak one is not to speak the other’. Martin MacIntyre reinforced this when he mentioned New Zealand writer Glen Colquhoun, who said that the problem was not that speakers of a majority language couldn’t ‘see’ the speakers of the minority language, but rather that they ‘couldn’t see themselves’. There is so much creativity in translation, not simply in how best to render a text literally, but how to find equivalent, analogous, or even vaguely similar concepts in two different cultures. “With modern Gaelic vocabulary, you are restricted in usage. It forces you to hone your prose in a different way,” said Martin MacIntyre. Such expressions sent us away from the event with much to think about.

August 18, 2014
by bookseekeragency

Protest! The Rhetoric of Resistance

Protest! The Rhetoric of Resistance
Edinburgh International Book Festival
Scottish Power Foundation Studio
16^th August 2014
Review first posted at The Mumble, 17^th August 2014

“Spoken Word performance can be a tool of dissent, it can give a voice to the dispossessed – and it’s not all ranting these days. Join Phill Jupitus as Porky the Poet, Elvis McGonagall, Hollie McNish and Hannah Silva as their deft rhetoric confronts, parodies and overturns issues of political, domestic and social injustice. Fun performance, clever words, serious intent.” (blurb on the Festival web site)

Sometimes it’s a pity to have to review a one-off event and to publish that review in retrospect. How better it would be to be able to tell your friends “Go and see this!” I’m in that position as I write. I wish ‘Protest!’ was mid-run and you could all queue for returned tickets at the Box Office. As it was, the theatre was full for this one-off ‘shard’ (as Master of Ceremonies Luke Wright called it) of the Festival’s ‘Babble On’ series, and you couldn’t have got a return for love nor money.

Phil Jupitus
© Luke Wright

We were launched into the stream of comic dissent by Phil Jupitus who, in the 1980s, quit a civil service job to become a poet, and who got gigs supporting bands “because I was cheaper than a support band”. Instantly there was a post-punk feel to the proceedings. To me this was a little odd, as though poetic dissent had started when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, as though John Cooper Clarke, Gil Scott-Heron, and Allen Ginsberg had been forgotten; or further back – the polemic verse of left-wing poets of the 1930s, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s political diatribes, Chaucer’s and Juvenal’s satire. Irony was never far away from Phil’s performance; praising the subversive nature of comics like The Beano and The Dandy, he led us in applause for D C Thomson, a newspaper publisher who (correct me if I am wrong) stubbornly maintained an anti-trades-union policy. Phil’s paean to The Beano had the kind of robust rhyme-and-metre scheme that lends a hobnail boot to humorous poetry. The audience couldn’t help laughing, in fact they couldn’t stop. Especially funny was his series of ten-line poems built up from the titles of Fringe shows (although I sincerely hope he decides to give ‘Sex with animals’ a miss this year!)

Phil provided what he and Luke referred to as the ‘glue’ between the other poets. Next up was Elvis McGonagall, and although this will irritate him no end, the comparison with John Cooper Clarke is inevitable. Substitute a Dundee accent for a Salford one, and you have the same facility for using rhyme, rhythm, and refrains. It’s tight, precise, and rapid-fire, with the likes of Margaret Thatcher (yes, she can provoke even from the other side of the veil) and Nigel Farage in his sights. There was a wonderful recitation of clichéd phrases in David Cameron’s voice, and, evoking Sir Harry Lauder, an address to Scottish voters who had not yet made up their mind about independence – ‘Stop your Swithering, Jock’!

There was an instantly obvious dichotomy between the male performers’ work and the females’. The latter’s humour was gentler, the seriousness ramped up. Hannah Silva instantly grabbed our attention by speaking a series of broken semi-syllables into her microphone. Operating a recording loop by foot-switch and varying the same vocal sounds in pitch and stress, she built up multi-tracked layers in what can only be described as music, and suddenly over the top of that filled in all the missing semi-syllables to repeat and repeat Ed Milliband’s response to public sector strikes. Intricate, well thought-out, and damnably clever. I can say the same about her other pieces, one of which almost worked like a cumulative folk or children’s song where extra elements are added on at the end of each verse. Except there was nothing folksy, nothing juvenile in her gender politics, her direct expression about prostitution and the female underclass. What is difficult for me to describe is how this use of technology coupled with fragmentary speech built up atmosphere, evoked such a strong emotional response in me. Her repetition of the fact that forty percent of all soldiers fitted with a prosthesis return to war was particularly evocative in the hundredth year since the start of the Great War.

Hollie McNish got her points across by words alone. She sustained her technical power right through each long poem without flagging. Again it was sexual politics that were foregrounded. She was able to address serious issues in a vernacular setting – the facility with which she and her elderly grandmother can converse about earthy subjects which are an embarrassment to the mother/daughter generation between them. Hollie presented us with a wonderful poem about what turns her on, starting with bricks, going through a whole lot of other things including the laughter when a fart interrupts foreplay, before returning to bricks. Probably her best poem of the session was the one she wrote when breast-feeding her baby in a toilet, whilst being confronted by a poster of a young woman in a bikini tacked to the back of the door.

I spoke to Hollie after the performance, and put it to her that although it was possible to be more outspoken, more vitriolic, more insulting in an overtly comic work of art – a poem or a cartoon, say – the very fact that it is comic tends to draw its venom, to make an audience take it less seriously. By contrast, someone who enthralls an audience the way that she and Hannah Silva do and puts across a serious point, albeit with distinct threads of humour, has a greater effect and is not so easily dismissed. Hollie was happy and relieved to hear my opinion, as she had feared that the laughter her male colleagues got was a sign of greater impact. Not so, I kid you not.

July 4, 2014
by bookseekeragency

Watch out for ‘From My Cold, Undead Hand’!

Our client Marie Marshall was asked by her publisher if she could write a teen-vampire novel, and her answer was simply to write one – From My Cold, Undead Hand. She told us:

It’s both an easy and a difficult genre to write in. It’s full of ready-made tropes and pre-existing vampire ‘lore’, and of course it has a cult-genre following of highly critical fans. Basically a writer has two choices: Buffy or Twilight. By that I mean one has to chose between writing about vampire hunters, or teenage romances with vampires. Then one has either to avoid cliché… ahem… like the plague, or embrace the clichés and go nuts with them.

So, which story-line has Marie decided to go down?

Well, I chose the vampire-hunter angle, as it gave me the opportunity to create a strong, young, female protagonist.

FMCUH bookseeker image Marie is adept at those strong, female protagonists – Jelena and Eunice in Lupa, Angela in The Everywhen Angels, and now Chevonne Kusnetsov, a girl from New York a few decades in our future, in From My Cold, Undead Hand. The novels launches straight into action, with Chevonne in a darkened library, defending her dying mentor from the attack of a powerful vampire ‘sire’. Spiced here and there with hints of ITpunk and steampunk, and complete with a nineteenth-century sub-plot revealed in an old book, the pace of the novel never flags. It shuts with a bang – readers will blink and say “Huh?” – leaving a perfect springboard for the sequel, KWIREBOY vs VAMPIRE, which is already being written! Ostensibly dealing with the constitutional right of vampires to carry guns, the novel in fact foregrounds how young people are routinely marginalised. So, has she succeeded in avoiding cliché?

I hope so. I’ve tried to be innovative whilst leaving enough there that is familiar.

In fact when we read through the manuscript we noticed some cheeky inter-textual referencing. Readers will be surprised to find out who’s included in Chevonne Kusnetsov’s remote family tree, for example. Readers familiar with, say, Bram Stoker or Stephenie Meyer may spot some ‘Easter-eggs’, though Marie cites as her main influence Joe Aherne’s TV series Ultraviolet.

Adding to the impact of Marie’s prose will be cover art again by Millie Ho, the talented Canadian artist and writer, who provided the cover for The Everywhen Angels. This is a book to watch out for, one not to miss. As soon as there’s a launch date we’ll let you know. Follow the action on Twitter @ColdUndeadHand.

June 9, 2014
by bookseekeragency

Available for publishers: ‘Split Decision’ by Carmen Capuano

My name is Natalie and I am almost sixteen years old. I didn’t know what to do when two boys asked me out on the same day and I didn’t realise how little I knew about life at the time… but I made my decision and now I have to live with the consequences…

That, in a nutshell, is how Natalie, the protagonist of Carmen Capuano’s YA/crossover novel Split Decision, would introduce herself.

Natalie knows she has some decisions to make. Should she date the boy next door or the other one, the one who looks as if he plans to set the world on fire? What she doesn’t know is that the wrong decision will send her life spiraling into the stuff of nightmares where she might not come out alive.

Life takes a cruel twist of fate when Natalie, a completely average [almost] 16 year old is forced to make a split-second decision…a decision that will change her future and forever alter her perception of trust, love and the realities of life.

Split Decision could be thought of as ‘a modern take on Sliding Doors with a teenage edge’. It’s a novel of contrasts, of humour and dark despair, where difficult themes such as rape and drug abuse are written of in a style that is gritty but never gratuitous, coming via numerous plot twists to a surprise conclusion. It is written from the heart and tells a tale of what may be, in a world that is increasingly dangerous for all, but especially teenagers and fledgling adults.

Author Carmen Capuano is a live wire, and the agency is very pleased to be presenting Split Decision to UK publishers. Just get in touch and ask to see sample chapters, a synopsis, etc.

Heeyy! Carmen meets The Fonz! Author Carmen Capuano pictured with actor Henry Winkler.

June 8, 2014
by bookseekeragency

P’kaboo Publishers – looking for publishing ‘partners’ in the UK, the USA, and worldwide.

Part of the ‘mission’ of South African indie publishing house P’kaboo is to be a springboard from which to launch authors to bigger things, to be the first step for an author in getting himself or herself noticed by mainstream publishers in the wider world, particularly in the UK and USA. With that in mind, this agency, as the UK representative of P’kaboo, would like to bring three books to your attention.

Each one is available on request, for consideration by any commercial publisher in the UK, the USA, or worldwide. Just email this agency!

Although the three books here may all be classified generally in the ‘fantasy’ genre, this is only one of the strings to P’kaboo’s bow. Their list includes a range from children’s books to music manuals.

Solar Wind I: The Mystery of the Solar Wind
Lyz Russo
This is the first of a series – the author has completed No.IV – and the most obvious place to start. Although this novel and its sequels may fit the ‘fantasy’ genre, this one may be thought of rather as a mystery novel in a futuristic setting.

The year is 2116. Captain Radomir Lascek sails his pirate ship, the Solar Wind, around the oceans, collecting outlaws and fugitives and dodging the authorities. But then he hires three young musicians in Dublin – the Donegal Troubles. Radomir Lascek, with all his wily schemes, is about to learn the real meaning of ‘trouble’.

Here is what some readers and reviewers have had to say. Firstly in the Father’s Day issue of South Africa’s Your Family magazine:

Mystery of the Solar Wind… is a heart-warming and sometimes breath-stopping tale of murder, flight, and friendship. The Solar Wind’s crew is more than a motley one. They are a bickering, eccentric clan, full of shenanigans and loyal to the death… which might just be around the corner.

Fran Lewis, book reviewer and author of the Bertha series, says:

Secrets, mysteries, lies, deceptions, intrigue and murder are just some of what you will encounter when you board the Solar Wind for your journey into the 22nd century. This will not be just any ordinary journey, it will keep you spellbound, alert, terrified, inquisitive and more, about the new world powers of the year 2116 and just what changes are in store for you. With a cast of characters so diversified, yet so alike, you will want to not only learn the reasons why each crewmember signed on to the Solar Wind, but go along with them on their dangerous journey to find freedom and safety in a world filled with fear.