Apologies for the lack of a blog last Sunday. Along with helping out a friend during some tricky times, I was also attending my monthly LGBT book club. Why’s that momentous? Well, the book in question was But By Degrees.
There’s something very surreal about sitting there while others discuss your own book. In all honesty, I was pretty nervous, especially when it got to 3:55 and no one had arrived yet! One of the members confessed that she’d been anxious about reading the book at all in case she hated it and/or it was rubbish. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. I had some constructive feedback on being a little more explicit at certain points in the novel and on grounding a little more at the beginning of the chapters. Overall, however, it was a relief to hear some positive comments face-to-face from readers.
It’s a wonderful feeling to recognise that something you’d worked hard to perfect has been successful, especially particular elements of it you spent so much time on. For instance, one of the group pointed out that the action flips halfway through – while, in the first half of the novel, the 2010 strand was the captivating one, that switched to the 2011 strand approximately halfway through. The 2010 story line became the one providing information while the 2011 action took over. Hearing that the structural intention worked was brilliant.
Two words stand out from the discussion are ‘human’ and ‘flawed’. You’ve no idea how humbled I was to hear my characters talked about in those terms. I’ve always tried to write about people who don’t make the right choices and who are stifled by their fears. None of us are perfect and, in But By Degrees, Danni and Jude are far from it. Learning that I’d portrayed them effectively was fantastic.
All in all, I’m grateful to my book club for covering But By Degrees. They seemed to get a kick out of interrogating the author and I enjoyed the slightly scary experience of having to remember everything about the book just so that I could talk about it.
