Blog 1 - Naoise

I’m Naoise, I’m an Irish writer, and my first novel Exciting Times came out earlier this year. It has been a strange time, as every work email autosuggest fills in for you by now. Then again, publishing a novel is inherently a bit uncanny. I finished the first draft in 2017, so there’s a dissonance in witnessing a flurry of fresh reaction to something I made so long ago.

I recently read a Martin Amis article where he describes literary fiction in the 1970s as an ‘obscure and blameless pursuit’, with none of the ‘collateral activities’ authors now undertake—no schedule of events, no press, no profiles, perhaps a few reviews.

We forget this when we discuss how the pandemic has affected book launches. The focus has been on what’s changed, on what’s gone virtual, on what’s been dropped entirely, but from Amis’s description it seems to me that the current publishing realm is far more similar to 2019’s than to the hermetic pre-dialup days. I’d begun taking my first interviews this time last year, am still being interviewed now, and will probably still be well into next year. 2020s publication still seems to me a process where you’d do well to like the sound of your own voice.

Otherwise, I’ve been trying to get on with things. Mainly, I’m working on either my second or my third novel, depending on how you see it. Before the book I’m presently writing, I wrote one that I don’t want to publish, so let’s call my current draft the second novel that anyone else will read.

Besides that, I’ve been writing short fiction and cultural commentary for various publications, and I’ll soon be interviewing photographer Tami Aftab about a personal project documenting her Irish grandmother and her family story. I’ve done various virtual author events, and I went to the Cheltenham Literature Festival in person earlier in October. There, I spoke on one panel with Camilla Pang and Abigail Bergstrom about neurodiversity, and on another with Octavia Bright about my own novel. I’d never been to Cheltenham before, but I hear the corona-adjusted setup was far less crowded than usual. What it lacked in juicy overheard conversational snippets, it made up for in elbow-room.

Personally I’ve been stretched, as has everyone. I’m worried about my family, my friends, and how the world is going. I sometimes wish I were a more visionary writer. But I write best about people and things that shouldn’t exist but do, without necessarily showing anyone a way out of it beyond laughing at the immediate absurdity. I have to trust that there’s a role for dark humour in an ecosystem where other writers are doing other things. I certainly think this attitude is preferable to talking myself up as some kind of prophet. I write novels, and I’m glad if people enjoy them.

People are often curious about my ‘work routine’. Sometimes I make one up, because the question makes me feel like I should have one. But people who can do something are often very poor at articulating how they do it, and that’s me when it comes to writing. Teaching people how to write is entirely its own skill.

I look forward to blogging more over the next few weeks. I don’t like to give away too much on works-in-progress, but I might drop the odd dark hint.