Ice Dancing - My Scottish Village Novel

I've been working on a very slightly revamped version of Ice Dancing , my Scottish village novel, over the past week or so and now it's available on an Amazon Kindle countdown deal for the next few days, at a conveniently low price. (Here, if you're reading this in the US.) The book itself hasn't changed, but I've changed the cover, which was lovely, but not working the way I intended. I may even change it again, but for now, I wanted something that suggested 'village' and 'winter' although the novel isn't entirely set in winter.

As I've said elsewhere, this is my favourite of all my novels. I don't mean it's the 'best' thing I've written, by any means. In fact of everything I've written over the past forty years, I could probably name two of which I'm most proud: a stage play called Wormwood, about the Chernobyl disaster, that was staged at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh some twenty years ago - and my newest (historical) novel, The Physic Garden, published by Saraband. Mostly, as a writer, you never really think anything is 'finished'. You always think it could be better. But in terms of doing what I set out to do, I think I've more or less managed it with those two pieces of work. But for plain, ordinary love, Ice Dancing, a piece of contemporary fiction, is the one. How do I love this story? Let me count the ways, as a far better writer once put it!

I love the setting. After all, I live in a small Scottish conservation village not a million miles away from the one in the novel - although any resemblance to anyone living here is purely coincidental. Dear readers, I made it up.  Besides, I suspect you could find people exactly like this in any small lowland Scots village. I love the countryside. It's a landscape I see pretty much every day, the one most of the tourists tend to ignore in their mad dash for the Highlands: the hills and woods and the green, green fields of Ayrshire, Dumfries and Galloway. 

The green, green fields of lowland Scotland

I love the community. I love the domesticity of it and never understand why in some critical circles this is perceived as a vice rather than a virtue. One of my all-time favourite novelists is Barbara Pym. While there is no sense in which I would or could compare myself to her, (she's incomparable, in my opinion!) one of the things I love most about her work is that sense of what Alexander McCall Smith calls, when writing affectionately about her, the 'motley cluster of small concerns that makes up our day-to-day lives.' He does that 'motley cluster' so well himself and it was something I wanted to write about in this novel: the little things that add up to something big, as we dance precariously on ice, trying to achieve some sort of balance in our lives but not always succeeding.

I love my narrator, Helen. She isn't me. She's a lot younger for a start. And although I've lived among farming families for some years, that isn't what I do. I don't think she's much like me. But I like her a lot. I like her 'voice', I like her uncertainty and her sense of honour, even while she's behaving inadvisably, even while she knows it. I like her gradual renewal of her youthful ambitions, something I think many women who have married young come to in early middle age. And I love her 'niceness' which I think is an underrated virtue in this cynical age - and her struggle to balance that inner goodness with her need to consider herself for a change. I know quite a lot of people like her even if they seldom do what she does in the novel.

Perhaps most of all, I love my other central character, Joe, a young Canadian athlete, an ice hockey player to be precise. My hero, if you like. This is a love story and why not? But it's a grown-up love story as I think most of my love stories are, even those that err on the side of romance. It's a novel about the physical imperative of mutual attraction. The coup de foudre of love at first sight and what comes after. It's a story about the incomer, an 'interlowper' as they are sometimes called here. A disruptive incomer at that. But Joe, thoughtful, intelligent, articulate Joe, has a terrible secret which is only revealed slowly.

  

Dancing precariously on ice

Cally Phillips, reviewing Ice Dancing, says, 'Everyone, it seems, carries a skeleton in their closet, a secret which they hold from their nearest and dearest. Joe is no exception and one unforeseen consequence of his affair with Helen is that his past is revealed in all its horror. But Czerkawska doesn’t overdo this, it comes out piecemeal and then with a tsunami, and then life goes on – but changed. Just like in reality. You take the hit and you carry on. Damaged, changed but you carry on. Because that’s what people do.'

The novel is mildly subversive. After all, it concerns a heroine who is ten years older than the hero and although if it were the other way round, nobody would bat an eyelid, some people still seem to think this is a bit odd. Plus, it's a story about heading towards middle age and wondering about the decisions that brought you here and whether they were the right ones. It's set in lowland Scotland, not London. The 'secret' when it is revealed is not at all a nice one and readers have to be aware that the tsunami described above is raw and distressing. 

All in all, I can see how this was probably a book that was never going to find a traditional publisher. It doesn't tick half enough 'breakthrough' boxes. But I always thought it was probably a book that might sooner or later find readers. So thank heavens for eBooks and indie publishing. The people who have read it seem to like it, describing it as an 'intelligent love story'. I loved writing it. Sooner or later, I'll have to write the sequel, because now, a few people have also started to ask me 'what happens next?' and I realise that I know exactly what happens next and it isn't quite what they are expecting. It won't be this year. But maybe next ...

A Kindle Countdown Special Offer and a New eBook Release as well

I have so much going on at the moment that it's hard to find the time to blog about it! 

But if you're reading this post any time between 30th January and the 5th February, you can download my novel Ice Dancing for less than the price of a cup of coffee. It will be on a Kindle countdown deal for a week. In fact you could get the book to go with your cup of coffee and read about Scottish  village life in all its engaging reality at the same time.

I'm seriously considering rebranding the way this novel is presented. I think the cover, which is very beautiful, actually gives the wrong impression of the book. This is not the artist's fault, but entirely mine. She had much better ideas but I wanted the hockey player. I think I was wrong. I often am! We feel our way into this business and sometimes we make mistakes. So later this spring, I'm going to ask her if she can redesign it for me.

Anyway. What IS it about, if not about hockey? And why the Ice Dancing? 

 It's what I would call a very grown up love story with a lowland Scottish village setting, a novel about the lightning strike of love at first sight, a story of past suffering and the possibility of healing. I think it's quite literary, but then what does that mean? It's intelligent, I hope. But not inaccessible. And - glory be - it has a slightly older heroine. She's approaching forty. And she falls in love. With a younger man. 

Which is probably why this novel just HAD to be indie published. 

It's set somewhere a bit like this.

Helen - who narrates the novel - has almost resigned herself to the downward slide into mildly discontented middle age. She's a Scottish farmer’s wife, living in a rural backwater, with her only child about to fly the nest. But when she meets and falls in love with Joe, a Canadian ice hockey player spending a season with a local team, she realises that nothing will ever be the same for either of them again. 

Joe is nine years younger and a hero to die for, attractive, polite and articulate. But like many of my novels, which so often deal with friendship and betrayal as well as love, this is a story with a dark side. Although Joe skates like an angel, he has his own demons to cope with, a sadder, more complicated and much more shocking past than Helen could ever imagine. 

A bit like this as well!

The title is all to do with partners. Helen has been doing Line Dancing in the village hall. You don't need a partner for Line Dancing. You don't have to touch anybody. But if you're dancing on ice, and you're unsure of yourself, a partner can certainly come in handy.

Anyway, if you'd like to give it a try, and you have a Kindle or a Kindle app, you can get it cheap, here in the UK and also in the USA, (at this link) for seven whole days. You don't have to be a hockey mom or even a hockey fan to enjoy it (although it won't harm) and it might help if you're a wee bit curious about the joys and occasional sorrows of life in contemporary rural Scotland. But really, it's a story about love, about betrayal and damage, and about healing. 

I'm keen to see this novel selling well because I badly want to write the sequel. And I probably will write the sequel sooner or later. But it would be kind of nice if a few people were asking for it!

Meanwhile - but also on the subject of betrayal and friendship as well as a lot of other things besides - my new historical novel The Physic Garden is due to be published in its eBook form on ALL platforms, on 1st February. You'll find it on Amazon, but everywhere else as well. And then, ta-dah! - it will be published in paperback on 27th March with the very beautiful cover below. This one is published in the traditional way by  SARABAND, a publisher in a million and Scottish Publisher of the Year for 2013. Check out some of their other excellent titles. I'm very proud to be published by them, glad to be in such company,  and - if all goes well - I'm hoping to be able to work with them in the future. 

Cover picture, courtesy of Glasgow Museums.

Branding a New Novel and Illuminating Reviews - Ice Dancing

Every now and then, as a writer, you come across a review of one of your own pieces of work which illuminates your novel, play or story for you.  I've had reviews of my plays (in production) which seemed to indicate only that the critic had missed the point. On the other hand, I've had reviews of my plays which have taught me plenty as a playwright, the kind of helpful reviews which identified what I was trying to say and fed something back to me in the form of analysis, not precluding criticism, but doing me the courtesy of taking the work seriously, on its own terms.

It's the same with new novels. You wait with some trepidation for the early responses. And while it's nice to get good reviews and miserable to get bad reviews, the very best reviews tend to be those which in some way illuminate your own work for you (and others), with the reader doing you the courtesy of taking the work seriously and then taking the time and trouble to analyse their own response to it.

A recent review of my new novel, Ice Dancing, here , by Hilary Ely, on the excellent Vulpes Libris, was one such example. Not only is it, of course, very good to know that somebody has enjoyed the novel enough to want to write about it, but a review like this, which explains why, in some detail, is uniquely helpful to me as a writer.

As an independent 'writer as publisher' and at a time when traditional publishers also expect writers to do a great deal of their own publicity, you have to make some decisions about what kind of book you have written. And I don't just mean thinking about whether or not your novel slots neatly into any one genre. If you've embarked on eBook publishing, it probably doesn't. That may well have been part of your problem. It certainly was for me. I'm a natural mid-list writer, writing across many genres: love stories which are by no means conventional romances, historical novels with a contemporary dimension, family sagas which don't follow the usual pattern, reasonably literary novels which are nevertheless deemed to be 'too accessible to be really literary.'

And now Ice Dancing, a passionate, contemporary love story with a charismatic and handsome ice hockey hero - but mostly set in a small Scottish village. Of course it's the hockey that leaps out at you, from the rather beautiful cover, designed by a young Scottish digital artist called Claire Maclean. And when I started to think about marketing this book, I did think first and foremost of all those women, young, old and middle aged, who love hockey quite as much as I do, and go to as many games as they can. (Hockey is never just a male preserve, not in Canada and the US, certainly not here in the UK either)

But of course the novel is about so much more than that. I knew it, but it was Hilary's lovely, thoughtful and thought provoking review which clarified it for me. For this is a novel about a coup de foudre as it's known: the lightning strike of love at first sight, the irresistible thunderbolt of intense attraction which changes everything at a stroke, however inadvisable, however unlikely, however disastrous the results may be.
It's also a novel about a relationship between an older woman and a younger man - the kind of ten year age gap which, were it to be reversed, wouldn't raise so much as an eyebrow, but which still seems to be a cause for comment in these supposedly enlightened times. And which makes the thunderbolt even more difficult to deal with for all concerned.

It is, as Hilary points out, also a novel about adultery and guilt. Which may seem to be an old fashioned concept, but which can still wreck lives pretty comprehensively. And besides all that, there is a very dark back-story about the kind of damage, betrayal and maltreatment which can also wreck lives in all kinds of ways. So this is a novel about the after-effects of such things, and whether it's possible to come to terms with them and how. Besides all that, of course, it's a novel about rural life, a warm and loving account of what it's like to live in a small village: all the cosy, comfortable security of it, as well as all the stifling goldfish bowl downside when everybody knows everyone else's business and doesn't necessarily feel the need to mind their own!

I have the distinct impression that, when it comes to publicising Ice Dancing, (which my agent compared, with some justification, I think, to The Bridges of Madison County) I'm going to have to promote it to different and possibly distinct groups of people. The hockey fans will love the hockey. But even readers who don't care for sports but enjoy a good, passionate love story will find something to enjoy. The metaphor of 'dancing on ice' - precarious, slippery, needing a partner to steady you in an alien environment  - runs through the whole book, as opposed to the line dancing which is the heroine's hobby, line dancing where you don't need a partner, where you don't need to touch anybody at all. This is, I think, quite a sensuous story. And when I reread it now, I can see that it is, perhaps first and foremost, a novel about the extraordinary imperative of intense physical attraction. Which is, let's face it, endlessly fascinating for most of us, whatever our age and stage in life.