Trendy But Casual

First look at UNBROKEN

If you're wondering why I haven't written a blog post in months, here's the reason: I was writing a novel instead. This is what it's going to look like.

It's a sequel to RUINED - set in New Orleans, with many of the same characters (Rebecca, Anton, Aurelia, etc), and some new ones - the living and the dead! The character depicted on the cover is a ghost named Delphine, and the house she haunts is on Rampart Street.

UNBROKEN will be published in spring 13 in the US, I think. (Certainly in time for Jazz Fest, one of the settings for the novel.)

I've been up to other things, of course, including a number of appearances at the Writers & Readers Week at the International Festival of the Arts in Wellington, and at the Writers & Readers Festival in Auckland. The German-language edition of RANGATIRA will be published in September, so I have various trips to Germany coming up - more on that in another post.

And there WILL be another post soon, I promise, before I get sucked into the vortex of another book.

 

RANGATIRA. launched

I'm in an LAX transit lounge, on my way back to the UK. There's coffee out of a machine and free wireless: what more could you want? TMiddy has emailed to tell me that DOWNTON ABBEY series 2 just ended, and He Knows Who Died. This is why internet access is so vital.

Last Monday, October 31st, the launch for RANGATIRA took place at Art + Object in Auckland. This is the contemporary art auction house run by my dear friend, Hamish Coney. (Later that week they held a record-breaking auction of rare NZ books and manuscripts). Lots of family and friends there, a big crowd from Penguin, other writers and literary people-about-town. Here are a few pictures. The first is of the podium with a blow-up of the book's beautiful cover.

 

 

Debra Miller of Penguin Books NZ welcomed everyone and said some very kind things about the novel; then Steve Braunias launched it (see a copy of his speech here); and then I stood up and burbled and cried, as I always do, while people laugh at me. (See my mother, seated, and father, standing - both brandishing walking sticks!)

 

 

I was very happy that my cousins drove down from Whangarei, and also that so many people made the long drive down from the Paratene Te Manu marae in Ngunguru, and from the Ngunguru School, which was founded by Paratene and his matua, Henare Te Moananui, in 1870. There was a mihi, a blessing, a waiata. I was very touched. Penguin were kind enough to let the marae take the cover blow-up with them back up North to Ngunguru.

 

The catering was in the capable hands of my nephew, Matthew Hill, and his gorgeous girlfriend Martha Carrillo. Martha is from Mexico and her Chilean friends, Jerson and Francisca, were also helping. (I wanted an all-Spanish-speaking team.)

 Jo from Unity Books was on hand to sell books - as she has been at all my book launches in New Zealand going back to QUEEN OF BEAUTY in 2002. Here I'm signing a copy for Jill Rawnsley, until recently the artistic director of the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival.

 This last photo I took this weekend at Unity Books in High Street in the city. They have a fantastic window display for the novel.

It was a brief visit home, congested with interviews and meetings, but I was really happy to be back for the launch of RANGATIRA. I'm proud of it. The novel is dedicated to my parents.

The Rugby World Cup: won, over.

It's Tuesday, so I must be in Auckland. I'm sitting at the desk in my niece's bedroom in Mt Albert, looking out the window at yellow flowers in a hanging basket, a blue sky, the tin roof of the house nextdoor, the top of a cabbage tree. My niece is in Germany right now. 'Don't mess up my room,' she ordered yesterday, via Skype, from her university hostel. Stuck on the wall behind her: a giant All Blacks/World Cup chart.

When the final was happening, I was on a flight over the Pacific, waiting for middle-of-the-night text updates from a member of the crew on our TV screens. My niece went to an Irish pub in Heidelberg to watch the final. After the game, she had an 'Irish breakfast' of bacon, eggs, sausages, toast and baked beans. I just tried, unsuccessfully, to go back to sleep.

Yesterday afternoon, when 100,000 crammed into Queen Street to watch the All Blacks parade by, I was asleep on my niece's bed in Mt Albert - like Goldilocks with dyed hair, jetlag, and too many SIM cards.

Apparently everything fun and festive to do with the World Cup has now closed or been trashed by drunken revellers, so I have nothing to distract me from the tasks at hand: promoting RANGATIRA. It's my fourth novel for Penguin NZ, and comes out next week. I have various interviews to do this week, and an article to write for a magazine, and arrangements for the launch to complete.

For those of you longing for dispatches from the Scudder Road Circus, TMiddy is off to St Louis while I'm away. He needs a break. The Rugby World Cup made him WAY too strung out.

He wore a different AB shirt for each game.

I'm off to my parents' place now. My father, who is about to turn 78, recently joined Facebook. This led to the following conversation between my mother and sister.

My mother: What is Facebook?

My sister: [gives long speech on how Facebook is a sort of noticeboard which allows you to post photographs, updates on your whereabouts, and information about what you're doing, all for your friends and family.]

My mother: What a good idea!

With my mother's endorsement, I believe that Facebook will now really start to take off.

 

A Not-So-Bad Author Day

It's over a month since I last posted, after a particularly bad week. This week has been better, author-biz-wise. No word of international sales, or anything like that, but the film option for RUINED was renewed, and lots of publicity requests for RANGATIRA are coming in. The novel comes out on Halloween, and I'll be home in New Zealand for the launch.

Actually, about a hundred hours of this week were dedicated to getting together a mailing list for the launch. I couldn't find anything useful - like, say, the list for my last launch. The only one I could find on the computer was the one for QUEEN OF BEAUTY, a book published in 2002, and everyone has remarried and/or moved house since then.

Much of today was spent preparing for a photo session, because it's time I had some new pictures. First up: hair cut. It looked really great until I walked home in misting rain.

I had to wait a while at the salon, so I decided to use the time wisely, exploring the great moral and philosophical questions of our time – e.g. “Is Beyoncé really pregnant?” To help me in this quest for truth, I read the captions and columns of OK magazine. This is the British version of OK (OKUK, as I think of it), and this means its pages are peopled with the ‘stars’ of BIG BROTHER and the ex-husbands of Katie Price, one of whom may be about to have a Druid wedding ceremony at Stonehenge. OKUK is highly educational, filled with celebrity insight. Kerry Katona is for the Dale Farm Travellers; Cliff Richard is for corporal punishment. My favourite column in the current issue is written by Jedward, brothers with cartoon hairstyles who are popstars of some kind. Jedward contend that the "UK is a really cool country because you've got Scotland, you've got England and Northern Ireland and Wales, and we've got the Olympics coming which will be like an upgrade for the UK." Wise words.

Later in the afternoon I paid someone to ice my face with an excess of make-up ("Is that what you're wearing?" she asked, trying to conceal her dismay). Then I met up with the photographer, Mike Brooke, in the Merchant City. We took pictures in the Trans-Europe Cafe, the Corinthian Club, and an alleyway near the music hall where Stan Laurel made his stage debut. Hopefully I'll look good in some of them. A friend, Sarah Zebaida, sent me an email this morning wishing me well for the session. You still have good skin, she pointed out, "despite your enormous chronological age."

 

 

 

Any Questions?

Often I use this blog to announce good news – a manuscript completed, a book published. The happier moments in a writing life, I guess.  Some people have remarked how easily things seem to come to me: contracts flow in, novels flow out, and there I am, disciplined and undaunted, breezily prolific. Travelling too much and spread too thin, perhaps, but getting things done. (Of course, people say, you have no children. They forget I have a circus to manage, and TMiddy.)

As public faces go, this isn’t a bad one. It’s not very accurate, but why not make a fiction of my life?  Sometimes, though, I get quite tired of being chipper, especially when I’m being asked the following questions: What’s happening with the film version of HIBISCUS COAST? What’s happening with the film version of RUINED? Why aren’t your New Zealand novels available in the US? Why aren’t your American YA novels available in the UK? Why haven’t your books been translated into 18 other languages yet? Why can’t I find a copy of TRENDY BUT CASUAL in my local book shop? Why haven’t you sold millions of copies like [All Other Authors]? Why don’t you write a book that’s a best-seller? Why don’t you write a book that wins lots of prizes?

The answer to all of these questions is: I don’t know. I don’t know why my new YA novel DARK SOULS, which is set in the English city of York, is apparently of no interest to a British publisher. I don’t know why the Bulgarian people are not rising up to demand a Bulgarian-language version of FORBIDDEN CITIES pronto. I don’t know why the film production company that optioned RUINED (just a few months ago) is not already auditioning dark-haired ingénues from the greater Los Angeles area. I just don’t know.

And if I spend too much time thinking about any of the above, I get quite depressed. So, thanks for the questions. Keep them coming!

This hasn’t been a great week, I have to say. I’ve been sitting in the British Library for most of it, willing myself to work. The sequel to RUINED is due in – oh, about five minutes. I still feel as though the story is over-sticky dough at this point, and I don’t want it to turn out half-baked. (Not sure if this metaphor works. Don’t trust anything about my writing at the moment.)

As some of you know, I’ve been writing a monthly column for NEXT magazine for the past eighteen months. The magazine has a new editor, so this week I got the ‘thanks but no more columns” email. A big UK publisher read the manuscript for RANGATIRA and seemed to love it, but it’s a challenging time, and a challenging market – and, I suppose, it’s a challenging book. It has a Maori narrator, and it’s set in the nineteenth-century. No deal.

Today is Friday, so if anyone else would like to email me with bad news, please hurry. I’d like to confine as much of it as possible to this week. Next week has to be better. Sentences will dance their way onto the page. I won’t dread opening my email. Someone will read RANGATIRA and think that other people might want to read it as well.

The only questions people will ask me will be about my books, not the selling of them.

And hopefully the university where I work will change my room allocation, so I’m not expected to change classrooms four times every Tuesday.

Back to work.

 

 

New book, new flat

This is a banner week in the M & M household. Home after a busy month of travel to London, St Louis, New Orleans, Paris and Luxembourg, we managed to stay put for an entire seven days. Our new flat in Glasgow (rented, in case any of you imagine we've come into money) is finally looking habitable - furniture delivered, stacks of paper mostly hidden, books and CDs in categories/alphabetical order and on shelves. So I haven't unpacked my suitcase completely yet, and the stacks are hidden rather than sorted: oh well. It could be worse.

We love our new place. The first two pictures here are our living room; the last is my study, in which many of the stacks lurk. Most of them are notes for RANGATIRA. The blind in this room is closed against the sun, if you can believe that - it's south-facing, and incredibly bright. Glasgow: endlessly surprising.

 

 

 

The other happy news is that this was the publication week for DARK SOULS, my new YA novel. It's another mystery with a supernatural twist, this time set in York, England. The action takes place over one very snowy, misty week in December. I've written some more about the book at my web site.

 

The end of Rome

Rome is eternal, but we just had a week there, crammed with too many things to see and beset by too many blisters. This was my scribbled-on, bedraggled to-do list after five days:

 

Sadly Ponte Milvio did prove a bridge too far, but we managed to get to almost everything else. And Tom took a picture that could be a cover for the Rome novel I'm writing - this is from the Protestant cemetery, where we spent a fantastic hour:

 

 

I've realized that place is the most important starting point for so much of my work. I had various plans and ideas (vague thoughts, really) before I went to Rome, but now much more is clear to me, and the story began revealing itself in the most unexpected places.

I wish I could get started on this right away, while Rome is still seething in my head, but now I must turn my attention to a sequel to RUINED. This has pushed its way to the front of the queue, in an Italian-like manner.

This last picture is me and TMiddy at the Trevi Fountain. We got up at 6:30 AM on Saturday to see it without the noise of the usual 400-strong crowd. We threw coins in, of course, as per the instructions in THREE COINS IN THE FOUNTAIN. (TM: "I think I missed.")

Auckland Writers & Readers Festival 2011

I'm back in Auckland, my hometown, for the annual Writers & Readers Festival. I always really enjoy this festival, though I spend much of it in a blind panic racing between events, figuring out where I'm supposed to be, and cramming in last-minute prep for the sessions I'm chairing.

This year is my fifth (maybe?) and I think I'm breaking my own record for over-commitment. My full schedule is posted on my web site.

I'm in Auckland for a few weeks doing various writing-related things, and I can make the following five predictions:

1. It will rain almost every day.

2. My friends will wait until the last week I'm here to sort out social events, and complain that I'm leaving too soon.

3. My brother, my niece and I will go to Luxury Karaoke on Queen Street and 'sing' things like 'In Da Club' and 'Hot N Cold' and 'Single Ladies.'

4. People in other time zones will email me and get impatient when I don't reply right away.

5. A lot of biscuits will be eaten.

As you can see, it's a cultural visit.

Signs

I've just submitted the manuscript of my novel, RANGATIRA, so I can begin to creep back into real life. There's still a lot to accomplish this year. But today all I plan to accomplish is sending out a few invoices, and tidying desktops (computer and workroom). Perhaps some daytime TV? Let's go crazy.

Actually, I just remembered about ten things I really do need to do today, including preparing for an interview/article for the Listener, and beginning work on an outline for the sequel to RUINED. I might get dressed at some point as well. Tomorrow we move house, so there's not much time for languishing.

News: I now have a web site: www.paula-morris.com. Please visit it and consider signing up for my mailing list. I have quite a few news items to post, and from now on will use the web site for all my relentless self-promotion, leaving this blog free to explore universal verities, discuss nonsense, and share pictures of TMiddy frowning at his lunch.

During my absence from this blog, I've collected a few interesting pictures. Two are actual signs, and one is a possible sign that the E.nd of Da.ys is upon us. (I have to mess up those words: don't want to attract the wrong sort of attention here.)

The first was taken a while back in Lambert Airport in St Louis. Some people see the Vir.gin Ma.ry in a pancake; some see the face of Kate Middleton in a jellybean. TM and I see a meerkat in a muffin. But what does it mean?

 

The next two are photographs of signs taken in the streets of Glasgow. We like Glasgow a lot, and now you can see why.

 

Speaking of Kate Middleton, I just reviewed a "book" about her romance with Prince William: it'll appear in next week's Listener, so please keep an eye out for it. (If you don't live in New Zealand, it'll be up on the web site at some point.) Also, I have begun my Royal Wedding tea towel collection, despite the sabotaging efforts of TM: he neglected to order the one I wanted from the British Museum, and now it's sold out. We had to make an emergency trip to John Lewis to sift through the rubble of their Royal Wedding section. Everyone's supposed to be a republican socialist in Scotland, but someone must be buying that wedding tat.

I'll be tweeting the Royal Wedding (@CamillaPOW), with insider info on the Abbey and ALL the receptions/dinners. Sometimes it's not so bad being a Duchess.

Excuse Note

Dear readers,

I'm not posting at the moment because I have a novel to finish by the end of March, and it's taking over all dimensions of my brain (and life) right now. Please bear with me.

If you could write a chapter or two for me as well, that would be very helpful.

All best,

Paula

 

 

Pictured below: the amazing self-portrait of Hongi Hika, carved by him during a visit to Australia in 1814. It's one of my absolute favourite things in the Auckland Museum.