Conville & Walsh

Josh Mowll’s THE GREAT SPACE RACE is published this year, and the book is already well underway.

Having your first book published is like releasing an animal into the wild: you’ve hand-reared it, sweated and toiled to nurture it well, but now you’re letting it go and hoping it has all it needs to survive in the big wide world.  You wait with bated breath for news of how it’s fared, and it’s scary to think of the savaging it might get along the way. 

News, then, that The Girl with Glass Feet has been longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award comes as an overwhelmingly pleasant surprise, and I hope the nomination will help the book find its way to a few more people.  I made sure to celebrate in the time-honoured fashion of the writer, by grabbing a bottle of wine immediately after hearing the news.  Upon sobering up, I treated myself to a new thesaurus, which is one of those things that makes writers giddy with excitement and non-writers roll their eyes.  In my defence, it’s a really nice thesaurus.

It’s still strange to think of the novel roaming about out there. But at this particular watering hole it’s in great company. I love the way the award gets fiction and non-fiction to rub shoulders, and I’m sure there will be some great debates among the judges and reading groups about the best methods of comparing mediums. The longlist is as eclectic as you’d expect, and I think it really shows off the diversity of the written word and the uses it can be put to.

Narrative tension and character depth – it’s a balancing act that I’m still trying to get right.

STOP ME has only been published a couple of weeks but judging by the sales on Amazon, Book Depository and at my signings the Vacation Killer and his deadly SPAM email seems to have captured the imagination of quite a few readers. This is an auspicious start but, in the meantime, I’m obviously beavering away on the second book and trying to achieve the perfect balance of character depth and action.

My instinct is to move the story along at such a pace that the reader has whiplash before chapter four. That’s the sort of book that I like to read but I have to keep my own celluloid sensibility (from my script background) in check and tick a few more boxes that make the reading experience so different from the viewing one.

STOP ME has already garnered some good reviews not least for its pace but there’s also been notes from editors about connecting more with Leo. Some thought he was ‘messed up’ but ‘endearing’ some felt they wanted to know more about his inner cogs.

I’ve finished the first draft of my new thriller and it was a relief to have it greeted by Ben (Mason) with some positive noises. Premise good, central relationship survives the critique intact. No spine to be ripped out of the story, which is always a relief. Rewriting is sometimes like being told you have to move house after you’ve only just unpacked your last crate.

There’s always work to be done on the plot but it’s the characters that I’ll be focussing on. The trick being to give the reader just enough but not so much that it slows the impetus of the story.

I’ve been catching up on some contemporary thrillers recently and some of them get straight to the meat of the plot without a pause for the reader to get to know the characters. Sometimes these books end up being the equivalent of stage directions and I find my mind wandering as the writer attempts to choreograph detailed combat scenes in my head.  There does need to be more environment and character colour but how much before your thrill ravenous reader gets restless? 

Readers are just as prone to attention deficit and when you present a book that bears the moniker ‘thriller’ there’s certainly an expectation for something that screws you to the seat of the chair until the last page is turned.  But every reader is different and demands different things from their reading experience.  I’ll never cater for all of them but I can strive to insure that there’s a mixture of story elements that don’t cancel each other out.

That’s all I need to do. Simple as that.  Take the rest of the afternoon off.

I hope my next self-contained thriller will have the right blend but I’ve a feeling it’s going to be something I’ll be perfecting for years to come. 

Sanjida O’Connell talks about the writing of her new novel, which has just been sold to John Murray: ‘THE NAKED NAME OF LOVE is set just after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. The story takes place in Outer Mongolia where the Jesuit priest Father Joseph Jacob travels in search of rare fauna and flora. He hopes to make his name in the scientific community, but instead he meets and falls in love with a beautiful tribeswoman called Namuunna, who hunts with an eagle and a wolf. I travelled to Mongolia to carry out some of the research for the book. The journey didn’t start well: my luggage ended up in Moscow. For some reason I was wearing combat trousers and walking boots on the plane so at least I didn’t have to travel across the Gobi in a Juicy Cutoure tracksuit and high-heeled boots. Being vegetarian, I didn’t actually eat any marmot or yak butter tea but had lots of tinned peas instead. We broke down in a town called Moron (actually, the pilot of the plane got very drunk and we had to wait for him to sober up). After spending two weeks on horseback and in the back of a Land Rover without much suspension, it hurt to sit down for a year afterwards. Still, Mongolia is one of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever visited even if it meant wincing slightly every time I sat in front of my computer.’