Two men, a family and an hour of Mediterranean reflection.

The cover of my self-published novel The Hidden, now to be published traditionally in all formats by Thomas & Mercer in the USA.

Yesterday evening I did something I haven't done for a very long time; I spent an hour on my own thinking. I walked to the furthest beach in my town and sat on a towel on the sand, staring at the Mediterranean. It was late, about 9.30pm. The sun was setting.

There was a family on my right and two men talking, on my left. I sat on my towel and watched the night birds fly across the sky. I watched the two men, obviously a couple, newly in love, laughing and talking. Their laughter and happiness had the sound of lustful anticipation. They were totally absorbed in each other, totally smitten.

The family on my right, consisted of a mum and a dad, two children, aged around ten and six and an older woman - a grandmother. The man had planted two fishing rods in the sand, the lines thrown out into the shallows and was doing a spot of night fishing. The children were totally absorbed in splashing about in the puddles of water, keeping a respectful distance from dad and his fishing rods. The women had set up a small bbq and were loading it with charcoal, preparing food. Each member of the family was caught up in what they were doing.

No one took any notice of me, sitting there on my towel, staring at the sea, and that was wonderful. I was the quiet, respectful observer of human interaction and it was a beautiful moment. I occasionally wondered if these two groups of people had noticed me looking at them, but I knew I was observing 'respectfully', not overtly.

Every now and again I lay down and stared at the sky, streaked with red and purple, watching the clouds. I was thinking about my next novel, about the characters growing before me in my mind. Then I got to thinking about people; people I know well; people I know through social media; people I have just met; people I have known for a long time.

The couple on my left, the two young men, were Spanish. I could hear them talking. They were good-looking, in their late 20s. The family was probably Catalan; I caught a few Catalan words on the breeze. I was wondering about their lives, their jobs, their backgrounds, what made them happy.

I starting studying the man with his fishing rods for a while. As it got darker, I noticed he had become  very still, standing there staring out at the sea. I wondered if he was doing what I was doing, meditating on a life filled with the exquisite detail of existence; the fish he would catch, the hugs he would give his wife and children, the satisfaction of eating dinner with his family on the beach at dusk.

At 10.30pm I got up and walked across the sand, barefooted, put on my sandals and found the road home. It had been a beautiful hour spent, deep inside the detail of humanity.

Life is pain!

Life is pain. I am one person split by responsibilities, desires, insecurities, feelings; who walks through the day's hours with aching hurts and frustrated plans, punctuated by bursts of happiness (every now and again). 

I go through routines, battered by duty, crippled by the pain of trying, desperately trying to find solitude in a life that has handed me a clearly-defined role to play; that of a female, in a world that is crowded and noisy and never lets up, never offers serenity, never celebrates female-ness, only seeks to define it and cage it. I live in a world that has defined the role of female as 'this' and 'that'. But I don’t want my femaleness to ‘tag’ me. I don’t want to play the role of female anymore. I want to quit.

I am chaotic but I love order and patterns; I hate violence but love writing about it; my novels are filled with male characters whose bodies I inhabit, but I am staunchly pro-women’s rights. I live in a writing world of inner debauchery but in real-life I am appalled by it. I am loving, but I loathe society’s expectations that females should be ‘nice’ and ‘kind’ and ‘submissive’. I love my female-ness and hate it too.

These schisms cause inner pain and this pain bleeds outwardly every single day.

I write to ease this pain and the novel-building/writing helps to soothe the lesions in my inner life. I am in full-on writing mode now…. in between the pain of living. I am writing about a woman whose analytical mind and utter ruthlessness makes her one of the most violent killers this country has ever seen. Her violence thrills me; the way she manipulates and metamorphoses from femme fatale to the testosterone-fuelled aggression any man is capable of, in the blink of an eye. I love her ability to feel absolutely nothing, but see everything, and to plot and scheme and her razor-sharp intelligence. 

Hezba, in The Hidden - http://tinyurl.com/pjhnuwe -  had plenty of this ruthlessness, this driven desire to break down the gender tag imposed on her. My new ‘femme’ character (as yet unnamed) is there, in my mind, smiling at me. She’s beautiful! Why? Because I love male and female beauty – the more unconventional the better - and want to live inside the mind and body of a beautiful person.  But what is making her so exciting to me, as she grows before my eyes, is the fact that she has within her a love of violence that I am trying to understand. And she will make me understand her……

A big rush of energy and ecstasy in Seattle, USA!

I have just got back from Seattle, in the USA’s stunning Pacific North-West, as a guest of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA) 2013. My novel The Hidden was selected as the winner in the Thriller/Suspense category of the ABNA. 

The trip was incredible; the landscape, the people, the ABNA ceremony…….it was five days of bliss. I met my fellow finalists, Rysa Walker, Ken Moraff, Evelyn Pryce and J. Lincoln Fenn, as well as the Amazon team who are such warm, down-to-earth, creative and on-the-ball people. 

We finalists were treated like royalty, showered with gifts, taken out to lunch and dinner, hosted at the event and wrapped in this gorgeous warm blanket of respect that I, as an author, have never, ever experienced before. Rysa Walker won the Grand Finalist award for her novel Timebound – congratulations Rysa! But the message from Amazon was clear; all of us five authors will be treated equally in terms of time, marketing and support by the Amazon Publishing team. This is great news for all of us.

I have always been an Amazon fan because I am an obsessive book-buyer. I adore bookshops but when I scour bookshops and they don’t have the books I am looking for I always go to Amazon and have done so since they started out. I am impatient and I want books, I have to have them. Amazon always meets this burning need.

I had no opinion at all of this massive corporation before I met the people behind it, other than it was a great service that fulfilled my obsessive book-buying needs. I wasn’t prepared for the human ‘face’ of this global company, for their obvious love of authors, for their incredible creativity in trying new things in the world of digital and mainstream publishing and selling, for their complete intuitive understanding of my novel, for their vibrancy, normalcy and their incredible positivity and upbeat energy.

My entire writing life has been a roller-coaster of ‘yes, we love you, but……’ to ‘no, your novel is not right for us…..’. I have two folders on my computer labelled ‘lovely rejections’ and ‘standard rejections’. The bottom line is my experience has shown me that publishers are cautious, inward-looking organisations who only appear to ‘risk’ investing in established names. I was blown away by Amazon’s forward-thinking philosophy when it comes to authors, based on their respect of them.

I don’t want my blog to sound like an advert for Amazon. I am just diarising my experience in Seattle, five days I will remember for the rest of my life.

But I will say I love companies like Amazon, who take risks, who are super-creative, who drill down deep into ‘what people want’ and provide them with it, and companies who dare to challenge old and tired market models and try something new. My love of this type of creativity extends to solo-operators – writers, artists, musicians, photographers, designers, illustrators – all creative people, and businesses or non-profit organisations, small or large; in fact anyone who challenges the status quo.

While I was in Seattle I went to the EMP museum http://www.empmuseum.org/ next to the Needle. I was enthralled by the story of Nirvana, the post-punk ‘punk’ band who was from the Pacific North-West region. I got totally into the story of these types of musicians who did everything themselves in the beginning; from booking their own gigs, to designing their own posters and magazines. There’s a great energy in Seattle. I adored it and hope to return one day.

On the plane back I wrote some more notes on my next thriller, writing notes in pencil in my Moleskine notebook. I’m excited now about having my feet on the ground and going back inside my head into the dark world of thriller-dom.

While I write this novel you can pre-order The Hidden which is going to be published by Thomas & Mercer in Seattle, from Amazon here…..http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hidden-Jo-Chumas/dp/1477848193/ref=sr_1_2_bnp_1_pap?ie=UTF8&qid=1371732758&sr=8-2&keywords=Jo+Chumas

It will be out on October 22 2013. When you’ve bought it and read it, write to me, talk to me. I love my readers and will listen to what you have to say, I promise. 

My letter to a loved one, written from Cairo, September 2006

Hi, I tried to call you before, but I could only hear your voice vaguely. I hope you are ok.

Our news follows: -

I have changed our flights and we are leaving tomorrow. Cairo is too much for Tali. He is not interested in the things I am interested in and to be honest is being a pain in the arse. But I can understand it.

I have dragged him in a lightening fast three-day tour of Cairo – a literary tour, which I based around my novel. We got this wonderful female tour guide called Seham. I told her about my novel and all the places I wanted to see – based on the areas I wrote about. She took us to all the wonderful bits – Islamic Cairo, the Khan el-Khalili bazaar, Coptic Cairo, Garden City, the Muski, Bulac, Abbassiya, Heliopolis, Zamalek, Giza. These were places were all the action took place in my book. She was very interested in my book and impressed that I knew so much about Cairo – (remember all that research I did and all the books I have on the political upheaval during the 20s and 40s!).

I totally love Cairo. It is amazing. I will write about it in more detail later. Tali got totally freaked out by the intense crowds, the noise, the pushing and shoving, Islamic Cairo and the abattoirs, markets and cafes, but I have to admit that I was freaked out too, so I can only imagine how hard it must have been for him.

OK, in summary we saw:-

• the Pyramids of Giza, Cheops, Khufu etc
• We went inside the Pyramid of Khufu
• We saw the Sphinx
• We went to the Pyramids Light and Sound show at night
• We went to the Egyptian Museum
• We went to the Muski, Khan el Khalili bazaar and the famous 200-year-old café where writer Mafouz wrote his novels while having shisha and drinking Egyptian coffee. This café – famous and even more famous for being famous is so super-brilliant, words cannot describe it. I took photos. It is called Fishwahi’s and has been in the same family for 200 years. I had henna done at Fishwahi’s, I had grape shisha (brilliant) and Egyptian coffee (brilliant), all the while talking to my new Egyptian friend Seham – the lady tour guide.
• We went to the Al Azhar mosque – went inside, took photos
• We bought a shisha pipe for you at the Khan el-Khalili bazaar – over 1000 years old bazaar.
• We went to the Northern Gates (1000 years old)
• We saw the City of the Dead (cemeteries where the tombs look like houses and people actually live in them, because they are so poor they cannot afford real houses
• We saw the Egyptian Museum – the mummies tombs
• We went to a Perfumery and smelt pure Egyptian perfumes, like the lotus flower, frankincense etc. I bought some perfumes (of course)
• We went to Coptic Cairo which is 2000 years old – brilliant
• Went to the Hanging Church, the Synagogue and saw where Mary and Joseph stayed
• We went to a papyrus shop and watched it being made (of course, we bought some prints for framing)
• At the Muski bazaar, I bought some headscarves out of necessity to wear
• We saw a 1800 year-old castle, on the Muquattam hills used to spy out invaders of the crusaders – pre-Islamic times.

 Our flight tomorrow is at 8am and so it’s a very early start. We are going straight to Mum’s. I will try and set up wireless internet straight away.

I hope you are well and that you are having some success at last in LA.

Email me soon.

Love US XXXX

 PS......I have bought lots of books, black and white prints of photos from the 1920s and 1930s of Egyptian scenes

Finally………..dreams do come true. A publishing contract with my name on it.

http://www.amazon.com/b?node=332264011

But first, some background……….

I loved writing stories when I was a little girl. I never thought too hard about the stories I wrote. I just wrote them. It was the same with my diary. I never stopped to analyse my thoughts as I wrote them down, never hesitated. I never actually thought of my writing as anything more than a way of expressing the deepest, darkest secrets in my heart.

I had few people to talk to when I was growing up. I wasn’t good at much at school, didn’t enjoy it. Languages and English saved my ennui. I was only a star pupil in one subject, writing in English. But that didn’t hold much kudos. 

Being a good writer (for a girl) wasn’t celebrated. It wasn’t congratulated. I knew deep within the fibres of my seven-year-old self, that we girls were being primed for marriage and a ‘hobbyist’ career that would support our future husbands. Secretly, without even knowing really what I was feeling I was disgusted and determined that I would suffer no such fate.

I got top marks for writing stories but serious subjects like biology and maths were beyond me. 

So I was ignored. I liked that. It gave me the space I needed to watch and wait.

I got down to my favourite pastime, observing human nature. Writing my diary and coming up with stories inside my head was my sanctuary. Writing in my notebook made me feel safe. Thinking up stories was my private territory. It was an experience no-one could take away from me. It was all mine! The world could be disintegrating around me but living within the pages of my notebook meant I was able to breathe and protect myself from the harm I saw.

I read as much as I could too, when I was little, and still do. My favourite authors were - and are - not put on pedestals, not adored, not given any more status other than that of a storyteller. 

That’s all they were - and are - to me. But I knew - and know - that being a storyteller was - and is - an important job. Perhaps I could be a storyteller one day too.

I wrote my first full-length novel 16 years ago, having spent years writing articles for newspapers, a committed hack during the day, filling hundreds of notebooks with my thoughts at night. 

I finished my first 55,000 word novel in 1997, and sent it off to my chosen publisher. They liked it but rejected it. I wrote another, sent it off to the same publisher. They liked it and asked me to revise it. I felt this enormous sense of pride that someone had liked my story enough to ask me to revise it. I revised it and revised it again but they still rejected it, asking me to write another story.

I did as I was asked but they rejected my third novel. This time despair set in. I decided to abandon this publisher (who were very specific about the genres of stories they published) and write the story I really wanted to tell. 

I started researching my plotlines for The Hidden and gradually my novel started to take shape. I completed it – a weighty 140,000 first draft, a fully researched tale of political intrigue set in 1919 and 1940s Egypt – four months short of the 9/11 bombings. Writing The Hidden was a joyful experience of hard-core research into the political, economic and cultural trends of early 20^th century Egypt. 

I became obsessed with the era, the country, the politics, the lives of people who actually lived during that time…….I lived the story in my mind as I wrote and for the two years (with breaks) I was writing it, was living this strange double life; mother to two small children living under the Australian sun, sweltering in 40 degree heat and exhausted from the demands of young children, but simultaneously walking the streets of 1940s Cairo, living out of dusty biographies, old archived newspapers and non-fiction documentary accounts of life in the harem, soldiers out in the desert, living the life of men and women in the midst of revolutionary action.

Over the years I pitched my story to hundreds of literary agents and publishers but was rejected over and over.  And then the rejections turned into silences. Email pitch after email pitch to literary agents in the UK and the US garnered nothing but a heart-breaking silence, and silence is far, far worse than rejection. 

Many, many years passed and I wrote another novel After Rafaela, a story I love. The Hidden was resting quietly on a computer pen drive. Every year or so I would dig it out and revise bits of it, do some more research, go back to the place where I felt alive and in charge.

Then came the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award 2013 competition. I submitted my full manuscript version of The Hidden in time for their January 2013 deadline, a final version edited slightly for the Award. 

I had zero expectations. I have never won anything in my life so I didn’t hold out much hope for my novel. But I was wrong. I’m still in shock. The last four months have been amazing. I have moved through the selection process and with each announcement that I was still in the running came this relief and happiness that my story was worth reading. Strangers were acknowledging the appeal of my story. There is no greater praise than good reviews from strangers.

When I got the call from the States that I had been selected as the Finalist in my category, I was walking down a Catalonian mountain and I answered the phone with a resounding ‘Hola’. I didn’t even look at my phone to check who it was. 

It was ABNA was on the phone and it was me they wanted to speak to. They are going to publish my novel, they told me. I screamed. I was the Finalist in my category. I couldn’t believe it. 

After a long phone conversation with the lovely ABNA people I screamed some more and went to find the nearest bar where I ordered cava. All I have ever wanted to be is a storyteller and take people away with me on a magic carpet of fantasy to a place where they can forget their troubles and live out another reality for a while. I would carry on doing this with or without a publishing contract.....this is the story of my life.

The Hidden will be published in a few months. I hope you enjoy it. I am working on ideas for another thriller and I want to bring you some amazing stories for a long time to come. I want you to join me on my journey. The act of storytelling is – to me – simple, pure, blissful. It involves the process of creating a story that tantalises and excites. It involves a relationship with readers; a strong and intimate relationship. Each part of the dynamic is crucial. It’s a dance of mystery and love, whatever the content of the story - thriller, horror, murder mystery, romance....... I am a shy person who prefers to be alone, but I love people and love hearing their stories. This is the split synchronicity of my personality. Writing stories is my way of connecting with the world. It's all I can do. My readers are my partners and my lovers........I owe you everything! Please read my excerpt and vote for me. The selection of the Grand Finalist in Seattle next month is down to Amazon customer votes. Please share this page with your friends and support me. Thank you. Jo xxx

Sunshine, lemons, hope and the beauty of simplicity..........

My friend Lisa from MoreSouth - http://moresouth.com/blog/ - asked me to comment on her blog about lemons. So here goes. Thanks Lisa.

Lemons are very much on my mind at the moment. The lemon plays a major role in my work-in-progress novel 'Honey Lemon'. To one of the central characters - Inez - lemons are sacrosanct!  To Inez the lemon symbolizes hope, life, vitality; it symbolizes sun. Inez sees her lemon tree as her protector against all things evil. Inez feels her life in 2013 Spain is falling apart. She clings to hope for better things for the future. She is young and without qualifications. She works in a low-paid job. Her problems are those faced by so many of her friends.

Then she meets Luis. Both she and Luis are young Cubans, living in Barcelona. Both work in menial jobs with no prospects; both have lost hope that they’ll ever have a better future. They are strangers to each other and feel adrift in a modern Europe gripped by recession.

Apart from their nationality, they have one thing in common; Ines sings to her lemon tree each morning before she goes to work at the bakery deliciós close to Gracia, believing her lemon tree holds the secret to her existence. Luis, a porter at the Hotel Central close to the Ramblas, is addicted to the taste of organic honey. He worships honey and saves as much of his low pay as he can afford to buy the best he can. Both feel lost in the midst of menial work, low pay, struggle, disconnection, loneliness and fear.

One cold February morning, Ines and Luis meet. They become friends, then lovers, and over the coming weeks challenge each other to find out the reason for their love affair with the lemon tree and organic honey. What they discover surprises them. They discover not only a common heritage, a joint past, a new hope for living and the key to a life full of promise, they discover love and connection with their own history and within that the reason for their own being.

'Honey Lemon' is a simple love story about connecting with our ancestors and living true to your dreams. 

I wanted to write a novel about symbols, about simple things that inspire us, about the disconnection many of us feel with what is truly important. That's one of the reasons why I love Lisa and Haim's business MoreSouth – which is about the simple, yet powerful act, of eating beautiful food, and nothing feeds the spirit and soul more than delicious food shared with family and friends xxx.

On stage or in the shadows……

I read it everywhere…….to be successful you almost have to brain-wash people into ‘wanting’ you. You have to shout about how good you are, how talented you are, how ‘out there’ you are. You have to shout the loudest, the longest, be a bit of a diva. You have to ‘brand’ yourself (your physical self) in order to be noticed.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately. On Tuesday night I found out that I had made it to the semi-finalist section of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award for my novel The Hidden – 10,000 entries into the competition and now I am in the last five for my category ‘Thriller’.

I’d been nervous in the run-up to Tuesday, knowing that they would announce the semi-finalists on that day. I was ecstatic when I heard but I find it hard to shout about it too much.

But I am so grateful to Amazon for the chance to be read. My novel The Hidden was written after two years of research and was finished in April 2001, just two months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Because the plot involves terrorism, no publisher or agent would touch it at the time. I rewrote the novel 10 times and then it languished on a computer pen drive for many years. I dragged it out of the computer file on a whim in December 2012 and submitted my application to the ABNA competition. Now it is out of the shadows and that’s fantastic. But I still feel more comfortable in the shadows. I want my novel to be read and my words to talk, but I don’t want to say much at all.

This privacy mania comes being a person who does not like ‘diva’ behaviour at all. All I want to do is write my stories. I don’t want to sell myself but my stories. I watch favourite authors on social media and rate them according to how they present themselves. If they go over the top, I stop liking them and it turns me off reading their work. So the same must apply to over-selling yourself as a writer, digitally. 

I don’t mind if people hate me or like me (their choice) but I want them to buy and read my novels. Digitally promoting yourself and your product comes down to the promotion of self, and I don’t want to promote my ‘self’ rather my stories.

Is there a way around this? I am not sure. Because in this digital world everything comes down to ‘personality’. Personality sells. Having worked in PR for many years I know all about this.

My novels are not about me. They are fictional stories that I make up in my mind. Then comes the act of setting the stories down on ‘paper’. Once that is finished I launch them into the world and hope that people enjoy them. It seems like a simple process. Is the digital world simply a way of reminding people these stories are out there? 

On ABNA I am thrilled but I am just one person who exists in a world of talented people; so many talented writers with wonderful stories to tell. To me it’s the story that’s important not the author.

Please send me your thoughts. 

Warm wishes xxx