Peter Woolrich's Blog

HOW TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT FEELING BAD.

This is for writers who wrestle with words. Those of us for whom scribing 2000-a-day is fantasy. Who regard rising at 4am to scribble by candlelight as unnatural. And think anyone who can read a book in less than a month is an alien.

If such expectations make you feel like you belong under a real writer's shoe, pull up a pew. And rejoice in your otherness. The fact that writing a book is going to take ten years rather than one needn't get you down when you're in the company of others. Who share your sure but steady approach.

Remember the hare and the tortoise? Well, forget winning any races because you won't. But that's not to say you can't be a literary superhero like Michael Crichton (20 years to pen Sphere) or James Joyce (17 years to produce Finnegan's Wake). Even the great J.K. took 17 years to put H.P. on the shelves.

So why do some of us agonise over every word? Sweat over every comma; or is it a semi-colon. Hit 'word count' and think it's a conspiracy. Is there something wrong with us? Probably. But that's the way we roll. And we've got to live with it.

How remiss of me. I should introduce myself. I'm a former investigations journo who's had everything from a gun to a samurai sword pulled on me, which is child's play compared to being an author.

I know. I know. Given what I used to do for a living, tens of thousands of words in print, writing books should be a doddle, right? Wrong. I'm convinced it makes it even harder. If that's possible.

It took me two years to unlearn five years' worth of journalism training. Creative and factual are opposites that don't attract. Horse before cart.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, and other cliches.

I hung up my reporter's pen twelve years ago to pursue a lifelong ambition to write books. Do I regret it? Miss the expense account, company car, and not living in an ivory tower with no one to talk to? Yes. And no.

The annoying fact is that I and countless other people write because we have to. Because we've got no choice. None. Which is why we to do it even though we never leave the slow lane. Or the house.

For the likes of us, words don't fly off the keyboard onto the page. They belly crawl. There's no Stephen King rat-a-tat-tat et voila three months later another mind-bending Carrie appears. In my case, it's a rat...rat...rat. Tat. Delete. Rewrite.

I wouldn't disagree if you said I'm my own worst enemy. After all, my first book, A Corroded Soul (published by The Book Guild, April 2023, since you ask) wasn't meant to be one. A book, that is.

It began as a stream of consciousness designed to make sense of my life after my mother's death; a vent to release fifty years of frustration and, yes, anger. We weren't close. To put it mildly.

But as all writers know, books, or the creation thereof, are the Devil's work. They assume a Frankenstein-esque life of their own while subsuming ours.

Characters rise from our twisted imaginations demanding they be given dialogue, back stories, and idiosyncrasies. Baby-like, each demand to be fed until our breasts are dry. They can't even wipe their own bum, for Christ's sake.

I digress. Which is probably why I'm Mr Plod not Speedy Gonzales. Now where was I? Oh, yes. I was shamelessly promoting my book, A Corroded Soul.

BOOKS ARE BASTARDS.

My stream of consciousness decided it wanted to be a novel four years after I'd started. It said it could be more creative, and was less likely to be sued, that way. And so, without telling me, it fictionalised scenes and characters. Monsters by any other name. Make me do this. Make me do that were constant tormentors, though 3am was their favourite witching hour.

A Corroded Soul: Childhood pulled another stunt, as well. There was me thinking I was nearing the end of my endeavours; 300-plus pages of cathartic release for my now novelised protagonist Daniel Connah; fifty years of hurt expunged. Mine and Daniel's mother, Muriel, finally laid to rest physically and figuratively. The not so dearly departed done and dusted. Ashes to ashes.

Then BOOM. Turns out, or so my book decreed, that Daniel and I weren't over Muriel. In fact, unbeknown to us, we'd been grieving our mother the whole time. It was a lesson learned. There's no right or wrong way to grieve however perverse your method might seem.

Without wanting to appear self-congratulatory, smug even, it occurs to me that maybe, just maybe, there are advantages to being a leisurely scribe. Because I wasn't alongside the sprinters ahead of me in the publishing process, I had time to adjust. To improve my book by implementing unforeseen changes in direction.

While some supertankers were in port unloading their cargo, I was tapping away like Van Gogh applying final transformative brush strokes. Or at least colouring in the right numbers.

The problem. Was that the book was now neither one thing nor the other. Hence the rewrite. Then another. Then an edit, or ten, until 125,000 words became 70,000. Which took five years. But at least I'd got there, right? Wrong.

Two more years disappeared seeking agent representation. You know the score. Two weeks crafting the perfect synopsis - should it be plot or narrative - followed by two more honing the query letter; story or motivation?

Next. Comes. Deafening silence. A 'some nice writing but it's not for us,' if you're lucky. You re-do your synopsis
and query letter. Or, in my case, you change the opus from past to present tense to give it immediacy. Which takes 36 months. Round and round you go on a ceaseless carousel. Until you get.

THE CALL.

"This is Jeremy from The Book Guild. We'd like to publish your manuscript." Cue heart rate accelerates to 200mph.

"Sorry. Did you say you like, as in you think it's good?"

"Yes."

"Will you marry me, Jeremy?"

Okay, so the BG isn't one of BIG five traditional publishers like HarperCollins or Penguin. It's pretty much the same submission process only you don't need an agent and you don't get an advance. What you do get, depending on your book's commercial potential, is a Partnership Deal.

I agreed to a 60/40 split in my favour which means the BG pay 60% of the publishing costs, including printing, cover design, and marketing and take 60% of the profits.

This leaves me liable for 40% of the publishing costs, which amounts to about £2000, and I retain 40% of the profits. This is much higher than the typical 5% royalty paid by a traditional publisher.

A sneaky benefit for tortoises like me is that a hybrid deal allows me to steal a march on traditionally published hares - march and hares, geddit? Please yourselves. This is because trad pubs generally take two years to get a book to market while a hybrid, for example, can do it in six months.

I told you it was sneaky but, hey, slow coaches need all the help they can get. Go down the self-publishing road and you can be on the bookshelves, or at least Amazon, at the click of a button; minus cover design, marketing help, and editing assistance.

Top Tip. If you go hybrid push for as good terms as you can get. I regret, for example, not asking the BG to include a manuscript proof-read at no additional cost. I'm currently making final amendments to A Corroded Soul second pass proofs, and, so far, I'm happy with the BG. This isn't always the case by the way, when I talk to Big Five published authors.

PLOTTER OR PANTSER?

I hear a clamour from the cheap seats. Why oh why Peter, do you not plot, plot, plot instead of fly by the seat of your nylon, friction generating pants? A little less brain boiling might improve your cosmic karma ergo more words on the page, fewer pencils thrown at the wall.

It's a hard one to dispute, especially when my daily output, on a good day, totals 500 of the beasts whose name I dare not mention except it begins with 'w'. But here's my get out clause. Honest Mum, I can't help it.

I've tried. God knows, I've tried. White boards, bits of paper that stick to my fingers but nothing else, a Dictaphone, and computer software that made my ears bleed. But it's no use. Why plod, plod, plod plot goes my mind when you could be penning Pulitzer-winning paragraphs about dead people reaching out from the grave? Or car chases with multiple pile ups?

No. A marathon runner I'll be. Gasping for finishing line air when everyone's gone home. Except for Jeremy.

QUESTION.

Are you a sports car or camper van? Let me know how long it took you to get published, and who with, and I'll figure out if there are any winners.

Thank you. And remember. Words are a gift from God. When they behave themselves.

Good luck.

Peter Woolrich.

I didn’t realise at the time, but writing my book, A Corroded Soul, got me through the five stages of grief.

My mother and I weren’t close. In fact, you could say we were enemies from the day I was born. At least that’s how I saw it, sitting in my old-fashioned pram.

I’d been left, abandoned as far as I was concerned, under the back garden willow. I can see its silvery branches arching over me, hear the leaves rustle, even now.

I wasn’t entirely alone. I had Larry, a rag doll lamb, who, in order to get my mother’s attention, I hurled into the air. When my mother failed to appear, I began to blubber. Then howl. Then wail. Until I couldn’t breathe.

Still no mother though my sister returning from school, heard me. Slapping my cheeks until they changed from blue to red, she rushed me inside, shouting, “Call an ambulance. I think Peter’s dead.”

Years later, she told me that our mother had told her to ‘keep quiet’, irritated that her daytime television schedule had been interrupted. It isn’t overly dramatic to say my sister saved my life that day.

Relations with my mother went downhill from ‘The Willow Tree Incident’. Other sagas included ‘Not Being Fed Properly’, ‘Not Being Told I Was Loved’, and ‘Being Left to Drown in an Irish Loch’.

This last one demands an explanation.
On another disastrous family holiday, this time to County Clare, I assumed my parents and sister were accompanying me on a fishing trip. But the Cortina’s wheels spitting gravel told me I was wrong.

Aged twelve, I was left to manoeuvre a four-man rowing boat onto increasingly stormy waters until a wave capsized me. The boat keeper who rescued me two hours later was so relieved he made me a hot chocolate.

I’m not asking for sympathy. Save that for the multitude of youngsters who get hideously physically abused. What I would say is that it’s remarkable how many people say they feel damaged by emotional neglect. Do the two bear comparison? Prince Harry certainly thinks so in his book Spare.

Forgive me if I’ve digressed, but I hope I’ve painted a picture. Not that it was all bad. In fact, one of the hardest things to deal with growing up was Christmas. Not, as you might expect, because I wasn’t given any presents. On the contrary. I was given too many. Too many to understand why on the other 364 days of the year, I got little in the ‘feeling cared for’ department.

Back to my book, A Corroded Soul, available online and in all good bookshops since you asked.

It began as an attempt to make sense of my life when, as a result of a car crash, my mother died. Rather than a novel, it was intended to be a cathartic exercise until those dastardly things called words took over, creating scenes and people that didn’t exist. But, in fairness, they allowed me to write more creatively in what became a blend of fact and fiction.

Essentially, the book is about fifty-year-old Daniel Connah, a journalist with questionable character traits, trying to understand why, and who, he is after his mother’s death. Themes include nature versus nurture, morality, regret and the perverse nature of grief, which brings me on to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

The Swiss American psychiatrist and studier of dead people proposed there are five stages of grief. And it wasn’t until I’d finished my book that I realised I’d gone through them. The first is Denial.

As far as my own mother was concerned, this is both true. And false. You see, in many ways, I denied her loss because I couldn’t believe how good it felt. Let me clarify.

My mother made life hell, not only for my siblings and me but also for our father. Her moods veered from venomous sneering – ‘you’re a useless nasty piece of work’, to simmering silence lasting for days. Whilst delighted that she’d died, or thought I was, I had to suppress a sense of desertion best not faced.

Stage two is Anger. I skipped this stage because I had bucketloads of it already. Anger for the way I was raised, holding my mother responsible for my social inadequacy, low self-esteem and, yes, dubious character traits, such as petty theft.

Next is Bargaining, which relates to statements such as, “If only we could go back in time” and “What if this never happened?” It seems that remaining in the past, i.e. the time before someone died, is a coping mechanism. I buy this one least of all mainly because I didn’t feel any anguish. Relief. Yes. Agony. No.

Depression is the fourth phase. Unfortunately, I spent so much time with the Black Dog anyway that my mother being six-foot under, hardly made a dent. And whilst I don’t disagree that ‘bargaining’ focuses on the past and depression is all about the present, it didn’t happen to me. If anything, as already noted, my mum’s death cheered me up.

The final stage, Acceptance, is the one I found hardest to deal with. For better or worse, my mother had a presence. You might say so does a mosquito, and God knows my mother could leave a mark, but the sudden removal of someone who preoccupied my thoughts, came as a shock. Where had she gone and why? Was her last wound to leave me wanting more? Desperate for her resurrection, I needed her to fill the emptiness and explain the person I’d become.

Throughout the ten years it took me to write A Corroded Soul, I assumed it was about coming-to-terms with myself. And while to some extent this was achieved, writing had the additional benefit of helping me to grieve, even if it was for a mother I never had.

Was I able to forgive her? Partially. But more importantly, I realised that the person who needed to change and move on was me.
Let me know how you dealt with your parent’s death.

A Corroded Soul: Childhood: Amazon.co.uk: Peter Woolrich: 9781915352248: Books