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Gill Oliver

Author

How, why, when, who… whatever’s on my mind

Paperback Launch

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Where better to launch the paperback of Amateurs than the café bar of a first-class music venue?

After all, the book’s as much about socialising as it is about singing. We wanted a party and definitely got one – I’m only sad I can’t post photos of the fun bits, all because I forgot to seek permission from attendees to share them on the internet. My error. At any rate, the sun shone on Sherborne’s Merritt Centre. A really fun event, in the company of readers, fellow-writers, musicians, fellow-singers, artists, and all those brilliant people who work to run societies, choirs and events in the town. Special thank you to Jenny Newman, who asked the questions; Emily Williamson, who sold the books; and the brilliant hospitality team at Sherborne Girls.

Author behind books for sale
Check out the choir on the sales desk!
Room full of listeners
Comfy, spacious venue and so many friends
large airy room ready for guests
Merritt Centre ready for the party...
Author and friend
Jenny Newman and Gill Oliver in conversation
Invitation to book launch 14 August 2024

Into the fold

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Here’s a new thing. I was recently contacted by Ben Fox at Shepherd.com and invited to write a set of 5 short book reviews on a theme of my choosing. In exchange, the site would feature one of my books.

I hadn’t heard of this site – it’s relatively new – but the name says it all.  The idea is to guide readers to books and authors they may well enjoy, and to do it not by star ratings and the bludgeoning numbers game you get on Goodreads, but by discursive comment.  Um, actual writing. Authors writing about authors. The plus is that the reviewer’s tastes and writing style are both on display, so as well as allowing you enthuse about books you love, and bring readers to them, it allows readers who would otherwise never have come to your work to sample the way your mind works and, maybe, look further.

Well, either you like enthusing about other people’s books, or you don’t. I relished the whole challenge: picking a theme that would complement one of my own preoccupations as a writer; whittling down that list of five – which for me meant striking a balance between different approaches; forcing myself to articulate exactly why I loved them;  then writing a personal and concise review that would bring out the star features, the particularity, of each pick.  I love a language puzzle, and that’s what it was, in a way. Writing with discipline (passion loves a corset).

So, with Joe Faber and the Optimists at the back of my mind, and drawing on the thought that the bottom has fallen out of my own world several times, I went for the five best books for when life heads downhill. You can investigate them here.

But you will find all sorts of other intriguing lists and it’s a fun site to visit. It is, as their home page proclaims, like wandering the aisles of your favourite bookstore.

First steps with audio

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It was meeting with readers of Joe Faber and the Optimists that first got me thinking seriously about producing an audio book. Many stroke survivors find physical books difficult to handle; my husband’s one of them, and only reads on a tablet now. For others, though, brain injury has affected the ability to read at all, and audio is their only option. So, alongside the new book I’ve been writing, it’s become a passion project to narrate and record Joe Faber.

There’s  a lot of noise around audiobooks. Audio is big and growing, and indie authors are curious about jumping on board, because it looks so possible.  Platforms like ACX and Findaway Voices  can help you find a narrator; AI may, in the future, offer a way to get narration done on the cheap; while digital technology means that it’s never been easier to record yourself, at home.  However, remuneration is poor and opaque, with Audiblegate rumbling in the background. The game’s probably not worth the candle unless you’re already selling big numbers, have a publisher to take the whole thing out of your hands, and have an adequate marketing strategy. 

You can do all sorts of things, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should. If something is easy to do, it’s also going to be easy to do it badly.

Alongside the altruistic motive for creating an audio version of Joe Faber and the Optimists, I  have an equally specific, but ego-driven reason for wanting to do the narration myself. Modest as I am, I can’t believe anyone else can read my work better than I can. I know where the jokes are, for heaven’s sake! I know the serious from the tongue-in-cheek; I hear where the emphasis of each sentence falls;  and if I’ve used a word, I damn well know how to pronounce it.

It gets worse. I also have a very specific reason for wanting to edit  the audio file myself: I don’t know anyone I’d entrust it to. (This person must exist, but we haven’t met.) I know how long I want the pauses to be. I know what needs space round it, what needs to speed up. Comic writing implies comic performance, and comic performance relies on timing. And voice. The readers who ‘get’ what I’m doing tend to say they like the way I write.  There’s a definite Alan Bennett / David Sedaris factor at play, a whimsical, performative side, and any author who writes like this will want to capitalise on whatever’s idiosyncratic about their voice in the widest sense.  Not something to be handed over to a robot.

Right. We’ve established that I’m a delusional narcissist. Read the diary below if you’re a fellow-author curious to know what happened when I tried. If you just want to cut to the chase – because seriously, some people are only reading this post to find out what happened in the end –  listen to this. And prepare to be confused. Suffice to say, I should have started where I finished up.

Diary... Five acts, but not a tragedy

Stage one Decision made:  I can’t justify the expense of  hiring a studio and sound engineer, when I don’t expect to make any money out of this.  Nor do I have the voice training to talk non-stop for that amount of time, days on end. I sign up for an ‘Audiobooks made easy for authors’ course for a modest fee, and order the recommended kit. 

Two of the recommendations on this course proved excellent for my situation.  Firstly, use a dynamic microphone, not a condenser mic. (ACX and many ‘how-to-ers’ are axiomatic about the need for condenser mic, but a condenser mic will pick up the sound of dust settling.  With a home studio, getting rid of unwanted noise is the most likely thing to defeat you come the editing / mastering stage.) Second, the free software, Audacity, is all you need. (It’s widely used by language teachers. And why pay to be confused?)

The course’s technical recommendations for editing and mastering, though, turned out to be inappropriate for narrative fiction, and for my voice. Worse, some would inevitably lead to your files being rejected (e.g. pasting in silence –  instead of room noise). Of course, you know nothing of this when you start.

Stage 2 I’m getting into it, I’ve organised my home studio adequately, but there’s one huge practical problem. The technique I’m being taught is to record a small amount, then go back and edit immediately. But my brain can’t flip-flop between performance and editing. Again, it might work if I were recording the shipping forecast, but not a story. 

Direct speech proves particularly tricky; I need a micro-pause to adjust my voice, which then needs to be edited out, if the whole thing is to flow naturally. And I start to notice mouth-clicks…  aargh. Once you hear this, you become obsessive. On the performance side, I get some useful advice and feedback from a voice-trained friend, including warm-ups. Rappers on YouTube are good on this, too.

I google everything, find good and bad on YouTube, and discover the de-clicker plug-in for Audacity. Plug-ins! Yey! I notice, on the dashboard, Audacity’s ‘ACX check’ – which checks overall sound quality for upload to Amazon – and think I might be getting somewhere. 

But every recording fails to pass.  On the technical side, I’m getting a sense of what’s wrong but don’t know how to put it right, so I talk to a friendly physicist. The method I’m using is doomed. 

Stage 3 I’ve plugged away and recorded many hours, but if editing is fraught, mastering to pass the ACX check is going to be worse… AT LAST I do what I ought to have done in the first place and go back to the Audacity manual, which, lo and behold, has a whole section on mastering for audiobook. Nothing like the course I paid for, b.t.w. 

As I edit, I’m confused as to the order in which things need to be done, so I post my query on the Audacity forum.  They have a simple mechanism for uploading a 10 second sample, which I do. At this point the tide turns… 

I get expert help from someone on the other side of the ocean who knows what he’s talking about. Koz is a legend in my life. He patiently takes me back through basics. We message to and fro on the forum over many weeks.  I glean that he’s an experienced sound engineer and full of wisdom. ( I’ve always loved working with people who have any sort of technical expertise – especially expertise I lack – so it’s a nerdy, happy place for me.) (OK, a rabbit hole – a more sensible author might have said, stuff this, it’s all taking too long.) Koz went the extra mile. His last communication was along the lines, you’ll go back to chapter one and do it all much more naturally now. 

None of this good stuff cost me a penny. Audacity epitomises the best of the digital age.

Stage 4 Big realisation. I fundamentally dislike the way I’ve dealt with my main protagonist’s direct speech. His speech is affected by the stroke – but I’d made him sound irredeemably grumpy instead of the bundle of wit he is. The answer is to hold one hand over the side of my mouth, mimicking the effect of the stroke, while allowing a smile back into the voice.  That’s going to be a lot of re-recording… I decided to park this project for a while and focus more energy on the other work-in-progress. Writing. And yes, start all over again at some future date.

Stage 5  With the second draft of the new novel sent off for editorial feedback, I sign up with Findaway Voices. My aim now is to produce just one short story as a sort of experiment or ‘apprentice piece.’ I’ll go through all the stages and establish the best workflow for me. The project indulges my inner nerd.  I keep a detailed spreadsheet, with every clip, every action, and key metrics logged. I work out by trial and error what to do and what order to do it in. The uploaded file passes quality control first time, and some weeks later it’s available for distribution. It’s certainly no worse than many audiobooks (hear a sample on Spotify – here).

In hindsight, what the dodgy course did achieve was to sucker me in to trying. I needed a bit of hand-holding to get started, and some basic terms of reference. But as for the promise that, once you’ve done this course and mastered the techniques, you should only need five minutes work for each minute of recording time… Yeah, right. If that’s your aim, leave it to AI.

All I need now is a few weeks with goldilocks weather conditions (warm enough for no heating-related noises, cool enough to keep the window closed) and nothing else to be obsessing about. Big ask…

Hark at them…

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Another year, another Stroke Awareness month… I’m thrilled that Somerset libraries have  taken the opportunity to join in, with this month’s podcast. Jeremy Thompson-Smith made the whole Zoom interview so easy… Perhaps too easy. My    husband Terry, thinking we sounded so relaxed, assumed we must have finished and joined in to say hello. The best bit of this interview is his unscheduled guest appearance, and I was so chuffed it was retained in  the final edit. Unlike Joe Faber, he isn’t a model-maker – but he is a guitarist who used to play many styles, and who’s never given up on playing again. I can’t tell you how hard and painful that process is when one hand is weak and unreliable. But I can say that nine years on, he’s finding his own wacky way of playing a tune.  

I’ve had my head down, working on an audio version of Joe Faber and the Optimists. Terry has barely opened a print book since the stroke, it’s just too awkward; he reads on a tablet now.  Audio is something I’ve always wanted to do, but seemed too big a mountain to climb. However, meeting a local stroke group at Yeovil library reminded me that  so many people find books, literally, hard to handle, not just physically but because brain injury can impair one’s vision or ability to read. If it gives any of them a chuckle or a hug, the effort will be worth it. So let’s hear it for libraries and the brilliant ways they make paths cross! 

Yevtushenko on untruth… a verse translation

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Back in March, as the war in Ukraine gathered pace, I became obsessed with the memory of a poem I’d studied as a sixth-former, by the Soviet poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Ostensibly about child-rearing, the poem describes the way the communist state seeks to infantilise the masses. “You shouldn’t tell untruths to little children.”

But when I tried to track the poem down, I kept bumping up against a different, and to my mind weaker,  version. My school book, published in the west, is out of print. (And back in the Soviet era, a book might be on a university syllabus but not available to buy.)  But by searching the missing lines I came upon a Russian poetry blog which contained the text I remembered. Apparently this version, from 1952, is almost unavailable in print – and I can’t now tell you where it is, because the blog itself is no longer accessible. I did copy it, though. Phew.

Yevtushenko lived a long life – 1933-2017  – and was quite a cool dude in his day; a strong-featured man who declaimed his work on stage and achieved fame at home and abroad, as writer, performer and filmmaker. Political commentary, and criticism of Stalinism,  were a constant. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for his poem Babi Yar, about the Nazi massacre in Kiev. Another thing I read at school.

As for the poem about morality and children, which came back to haunt me… There are plenty of English translations out there, but all in the sort of free verse that might as well be prose (sorry guys).  Also they sometimes add a title  –  ”Lies”   –  when lies is a word he’s very careful not to use at all. Untruth is much more the Russian way. Poetically, Yevtushenko works in primary colours, so rhyme and rhythm, particularly in this poem, are used almost simplistically to hammer the message home. And not to observe that nail in the final line is… well… untruthful.

I spent a couple of days in a sort of linguistic trance, translating it.  Verse translation always involves compromise, but it’s the ultimate writer’s puzzle.  It’s not perfect. But, to me, this is what Yevtushenko’s poem feels like. As much to be heard as read. 

I’d love to share the original here, but don’t have permission to reproduce the text from the poet’s family. Perhaps that’s something I should get on to now!

 

On getting stuck in a shed

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Music to my ears from David Mitchell  at this year’s Sidmouth Literary Festival

Knowing neurosis from the inside ought to be really useful for a novelist, if only it didn’t make it so very hard to get yourself into the starting gate. 

If you don’t dare call yourself a writer, you can’t say you suffer from ‘writers’ block,’ can you?  I put it in inverted commas because in common usage, it’s generally a misnomer.  Most of the time, it’s a fancy way of saying you don’t know what to do; truly pathological inability to write is serious, but rare.  As a student, however, I was one of those people who needed to ‘catch the tide’ with any written task; if there was noise, or distraction, or a too-late start to the day, there would be major stress and a likelihood of procrastination. Of course, it was always somebody else’s fault.

I’m now a recovering neurotic, whose period of peak muddle collided with all the major life decisions.  Classic. School had been a place where my work had been valued and encouraged. But once I’d left, I didn’t have the guts to sustain myself as a writer, and in fact I buried myself in other business without sharing that deep-seated aspiration with anybody. Eventually a blessed conjunction of the right people and the right circumstances helped me sort my head out. When, after several false starts over the years, I completed a first, unpublished, novel, it was written largely in the middle of the night, and as a conscious act of defiance against the day job which was turning me into an insomniac.  I reasoned that if I woke at 3 am, whatever I did with that wakefulness was going to be my business and my business alone. (Interestingly, the brain is very tuned-in to fictional possibilities at that time of the night.) 

I’ve since lost count of the number of women who wrote their first book early in the morning before the kids were up; or in fifteen minutes grabbed here and there, in a parked car. If writing matters to you, you will. 

So I was very interested to hear David Mitchell, interviewed this week at the Sidmouth Literary Festival, say, in answer to a question, that he didn’t ever suffer from ‘writers’ block.’ With two teenage children, he doesn’t have set times to write; as he put it, ‘I just think, this is the hour I’ve got, I’ll use it.’ He’s no smug smarty-pants, either; what he does acknowledge is getting stuck. Hallelujah! Music to my ears. Not so much the language of the ivory tower, as the shed, or the workshop.

Like the craftsman we should all be, he has ways of dealing with getting stuck. He points out there are two main causes. The first is not knowing your character well enough. His answer? Get your character to compose a letter to you, the author, setting out how they think and feel about everything, from politics to sex.  The second reason is that the particular material you’re dealing with  – which may be very good – just doesn’t belong in the story you’re writing. He recommends putting it aside in a special file for future potential use; a welcome, positive spin on the idea that sometimes you just have to ‘kill your darlings.’ What I love about David Mitchell’s advice was its practical, down-to-earth nature. in order to get yourself un-stuck you either write, or shift segments you’ve written out of the way. You may, of course, end up with the authorial equivalent of a garage full of ill-assorted screws and bits of wood that  just might come in handy. But you haven’t wasted your time.

To hijack a phrase from Auden, about getting stuck they were never wrong, the Old Masters. There were always studies, cartoons, multiple versions before the masterpiece was finally painted. 

And yet, and yet… the problem, as you first embark on writing as a serious activity, is that it is personal, emotional, and you feel you’re putting yourself on the line, so it’s easy to be a bit jumpy and even precious about it. And how can you take material you’ve spent hours, maybe weeks, coaxing out of your head, and chuck it in the bin?

Cultivating writerly habits is important, but I’d argue that the mental habits are way more important than the circumstantial ones. Whether you sit down at the same time each day, and write in pencil or ink or on a laptop, is really a matter of personal choice and convenience. If you need your special Moleskine notebook, or insist on a turquoise pen, fine, just be honest that these have only ritual significance. (I adore buying stationery but it’s never a good sign.) What does matter is understanding that the five minutes it took to have a key realisation about your WIP equals a good day’s work; and that the material you pare away isn’t wasted, just evidence that a) you can create and b) you’re in control of your creations.

I’d much rather admit to being stuck than self-diagnose with an incurable condition…