Mo Fanning - British writer and comic

Writing

Writing: How to decide on the story I want to tell

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In the middle of promoting my recent book – Rebuilding Alexandra Small – (99p for the month of July at most eBook sellers) I’m also writing something new. It’s the weird way of the writing world that you truly want to put all your energy into a new project, but need to set a decent chunk of time aside to sell something that’s over a year old in your head.

I’m midway through the third draft of what I hope to share either later this year or early next and the story continues to twist and turn and bend into all kinds of new shapes. I was sure I knew what I wanted to say with this next novel, but it turns out I want to say more thing. With rebuilding Alexandra Small, I wanted to address recovery and making amends – and what happens when someone you forgot about sticks their head up and says ‘what about me?’ The central storyline deals with paying the price for not saying sorry.

For my (as yet untitled) work in progress, I have three key storylines. An older couple, a younger couple. A gay couple, a straight couple. Something nefarious involving the church. And it’s all set on a Christmas cruise to the Bahamas. I started with the focus firmly on one of the key players, allowing others occasional goes at speaking to the reader. Then I switched in the second draft, dividing time equally. It’s just dawned on me in the third draft, that my previous favourite character is actually quite safe. She takes few risks. She could even be called dull (but only by a close friend). And I wanted to explore why. It’s helped me focus the theme for the new book. One of the other key characters suffers from the weight of meeting expectations and feeling inadequate. Another struggles to make good for an impulsive argument that split his family. I thought I might have many things to say with this one, but now I see I have just one: being true to yourself comes with a cost, but it’s worth paying.

Pitching your writing

As a writer, it’s vital to distil your story into one or two lines. This lets you stay focussed on the end-game and kill any non-helpful darlings in the edit – taking out each and every fabulously written chunk of prose that fails to advance the story. Having this essence bottled makes it so much easier to talk about your book when you reach the marketing or pitch stage. It’s a way to be sure of meeting the expectations of your genre, your readers and that demanding inner critic – the one who keeps bleating on about imposter syndrome. For me, everything starts with one (or more) character(s). You might work differently.

I’ll aim to share some pages with my mailing list subscribers in the coming weeks. In the meantime, enjoy the sun. If you’ve never tried placing a bottle of frozen water in front of a table fan, do it now. You’ll thank me.

And if you can spare a pound/buck/yoyo, please buy an e-book this month. It’ll help make paying my mortgage that little bit easier.

Low cost ebooks

Johnson bids for female vote with saucy, sexy romance novels

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BORIS JOHNSON

Laughable, larger-than-life populist, Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson continues to struggle with one key demographic: suburban women. This despite having extensive experience of fathering children. In a ‘magic sauce’ attempt to win them over,  Johnson is to launch a series of steamy, sexy romance novels with gold embossed covers and single word titles.

GROIN by Johnson“Time and again my ‘Tottymeter’ has gone off as a young woman delegate mounts the rostrum at conference,” Johnson told the press, “and I figured the pretty young things need something to distract them from trying to do a man’s job.”

In the first novel, GROIN, an Olympic volleyball player finds herself distracted by dashing dandy Johnson who compares her to a “glistening wet otter.”

The title will launch a series where Johnson sires children, hotfooting it before his name is committed to any birth certificate. He’ll inhabit a range of overtly masculine personas – swashbuckling pirate, cowboy, Lord of the manor and prime minister – though Johnson has specified none of the books should feature single mothers as it’s “feeble” for a man to be unable or unwilling to “take control of his woman” and that Britain needs to “restore women’s desire to be married”.

“Women are just crazy about me,” Johnson said. “All my conquests have dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital.”.

Rebuilding Alexandra Small

Difficult to put down …

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Rebuilding Alexandra Small

This is a review for Rebuilding Alexandra Small from Ceri’s Lil Blog, as part of my book launch blog tour.

I was drawn to this book as I was intrigued by the emoji style cover and the title. I wondered how each fitted into the plot, and how Alexandra Small goes about rebuilding her life as this was something I had to do, to a certain extent, a couple of years ago.

My thoughts:

I do love a revenge story, so I was taken in by the blurb. However this revenge story focuses almost solely on the experiences and difficulties faced by the victim, and this definitely helped me build a connection with the character of Alexandra, or “Allie” as she is known to her friends.

I definitely identified with Alexandra and in some ways I admired her as well. She is brave and hopeful following the upheaval in her life, and she is extremely strong when it comes to facing her demons and remaining on the right path.

However, I am aware that that description makes it sound like a far more serious book than it is. It does cover some sensitive subjects including suicide, alcoholism and infertility, but I think it is definitely accurate to describe it as laugh out loud and humorous at times too, as well as being dramatic and serious.

I really enjoyed this book and found it difficult to put down. I think Alexandra is a character that will stay with me for quite some time. I enjoyed following her journey and meeting the wonderful support network she finds around her. I would recommend this book to fans of Jessica Redland, Lucy Diamond and Milly Johnson.

Buy my latest book here

Think of the neighbours

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Neighbours

It’s time for the Fannings to leave Brighton and float up the country. Hopefully coming to land somewhere in the middle – far, far from neighbours.

Like Alexandra Small in my upcoming book, we’re moving from the home we’ve never really loved enough to want to make it forever. While Allie’s hand is somewhat forced after losing her job and her husband all in the space of a few hours, the need for quiet guides our hunt. I’m dread invites to ‘supper’ from former public schoolboys wearing red jeans. I end up sat next to a skinny branding consultant called Justin. We’ll chat about hot yoga, Tom Hiddleston, the hazards of buy-to-let, and the novels of Elena Ferrante. There’s always some woman crying about an imaginary problem she won’t remember in the morning. We don’t fit in.

I’ve had neighbours most everywhere I lived. In Amsterdam, we were crammed in tight, under a hockey teacher who made vigorous love each Sunday afternoon at 3pm to her otherwise placid looking companion, and next door to a man who wore very little in the house, but surely should have. We overlooked one of the five most fascinating places … to pass out wasted. Smoking strong Dutch weed is perfect if you need psychological help, but have made a conscious decision not to get any.

Cigarette stealing spaniels

Years ago, in Manchester I lived next to lesbians whose King Charles Spaniels made it their mission to steal my Marlboro Lights – I was drinking a lot back then, and found it charming.

Our temporary bolthole is my late mother’s house. Or ‘the money pit’ as I like to call it, with a leaking roof, dodgy heating systems, rising, falling and ingress damp and taps that refuse to switch off. Or on again. New neighbours have made matters worse. They have five cars between the two of them and an addiction to solar lighting. I swear the lady of the house is on a mission to create the summer version of those Christmas houses that were all the rage a few years back.

Anti-vaxxer neighbours

And they’re anti-vaxxers. It’s tempting to pass comment as they stage yet another family barbecue on people who’ll eat sausage but decline a vaccine … because they don’t know what’s in it.

Mr Fanning has used the lockdown well. He’s learned how to plaster a wall, plumb in a sink, move electrical sockets and lay paving slabs. I’ve reorganised my spice collection and reupholstered a chair. Badly. And lost most of a fingernail. Something they seldom mention in those smug YouTube videos.

There’s one month to go before we put the place on the market. By a curious twist of fate, that’s when ‘Rebuilding Alexandra Small’ hits the shops for real. I’m expecting to have the audio book on sale around about the same time, so that’s three ways to show you love me more than any of those dreadful neighbours.

Rebuilding Alexandra Small by Mo Fanning

Everybody loves an unreliable narrator … don’t they?

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Rebuilding Alexandra Small

I’ve owned an unreliable washing machine, an unreliable car, and worst of all roller-coaster results from a not entirely trustworthy recipe for spaghetti carbonara. And yet I persist. It’s the same with an unreliable narrator. Make the people who live on your pages too predictably perfect, and nobody cares.

I just picked up my first advance review for ‘Rebuilding Alexandra Small‘. One thing the reader zoomed in on is the fact that Alexandra Fox is far from perfect.

“At times I felt sorry for Allie and at other times I blamed her. Allie is not perfect, hasn’t always made great decisions, and sometimes lashes out. She’s like one version of ourselves, the version we are always trying to hide. Yet even then, I envy her. Allie doesn’t suppress herself. She reacts. She says what she shouldn’t and acts on impulse… but not all the time. She is trying to pick up her pieces and move on with her life, except she’s been thrust into a state of limbo. Mo Fanning has cleverly crafted this complex environment for Allie and I was enthralled watching the ups and downs of her everyday life within this environment. I was forever guessing what she would do or say next. I couldn’t put the book down.”

Who invented the unreliable narrator?

An unreliable storyteller is a narrator whose credibility is compromised. Wayne C. Booth first coined the phrase in 1961 in The Rhetoric of Fiction. Sometimes unreliability is made immediately clear. Also, it’s better if a reader finds out about selective memory once they get to know them – just like in real life. Who hasn’t made a friend with hidden depths?

When writing Allie, I wanted to create someone readers engage with on a deeper level. First person narratives put the reader in the storyteller’s mind, and transmit their exclusive take on the world … but everyone has their less shining moments, and having Allie confront her past is my way of framing an up-down-up recovery. I didn’t want her unreliability to jump out of the first page, rather it should reveal itself in unexpected ways.

Quoting the rather lovely Rachel Barnard once more:

“Allie wasn’t always nice to others growing up, so perhaps the way people see her and treat her now might be some kind of karma, but she doesn’t deserve it.”

 

Rebuilding Alexandra Small by Mo FanningRebuilding Alexandra Small is available this month to request on NetGalley.

It’s also on sale for advance orders as both an eBook and Paperback at all good booksellers.