Please welcome, friend and author...

... Stephanie Cage, who is returning to my page to talk about the serialisation of her latest story on her own blog...

AW  You say The Crash is going to be a difficult fit for a standard publisher - is that your only reason for serialising this story on your blog?

SC  It’s the reason I haven’t tried to publish The Crash sooner.  I couldn’t work out how to pitch a book which one friend describes as belonging to the category of “novels about bosses you love to hate”.  That’s a pretty narrow category!

I tend to think of The Crash as belonging to the category of ‘didactic novels’, which get a bad press nowadays, but which I’m quite fond of reading. Apart from being partly inspired by Dickens, it also came out of my experience in business. I’d helped to write some books and reports about Internal Communications, and around that time I also read Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal, which tries to teach business theory through a story, and I thought it would be fun to dramatise some of the lessons I’d learned during my research.

AW  Goldratt’s The Goal, great book and I’ve used the principles in there many times, myself.  But, I’m interrupting…

SC  I wrote the novel quite quickly as a NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) challenge, and then I put it away because I couldn’t imagine what I’d do with it.  But friends who’d read snippets kept asking me about the rest of Jason’s story, so in the end I decided I needed to put it out there, one way or another.  Blogging it seems like a good way of doing that, as it means I can keep making changes as I go, and test out readers’ reactions.  It’s all a bit of an experiment really, but at the end I do plan to turn it into a book and e-book as well – if only so I can give my Mum a copy as she’s a bit of a Jason fan!  I’ve got as far as having a cover designed now, so keep reading to get a sneak preview of what the finished book will look like.

AW  Dickens did it, Collins did it, as have many other authors, so serialising a book has a long and well established history.  Is it now a bit old hat, do you think?

SC  I have to admit that Dickens was part of the inspiration for this story, but of course the tradition of serialising stories goes back a lot further.  In particular, Scheherazade comes to mind.  She certainly grasped the power of suspense and the need to keep an audience hanging so that they’ll come back.  Writers of soap operas and other TV dramas continue to use the same techniques today and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.  As long as people value stories and want answers to the question ‘what happens next?’ then the serial will continue to thrive – what changes is not the structure but the content and the presentation of the stories.

Scheherazade, from my C19th
edition of The Arabian Nights 

For example, in the time I’ve been writing, e-books have gone from a puzzling novelty to part of the mainstream, a change which has affected readers and writers in all kinds of ways.  One effect I’ve noticed is that electronic publishing has removed the economic and practical restrictions on the sizes of books so it’s now easy to get hold of anything from short stories and novellas that can be read in a single sitting to vast tomes (often, but not always, in the sci-fi and fantasy arena) that would have been unpublishable a few years ago.  I think e-books make experimentation a lot easier, but ultimately, it’s hard to come up with anything entirely new when it comes to stories, because they’re so much a part of human nature and so ingrained in us.

AW  You introduced your central character to us here on my blog in September last year and I re-ran the post, how has he developed and/or changed since then?

SC  That’s an interesting question as character development is a major theme of the story, but actually Jason arrived in my head pretty much fully formed and has changed very little.  The changes I want to make to the story are less about him, and more about the detail of the events that occur later on in the story.  I haven’t made many changes to the chapters I’ve published so far, but as the story goes on I’m aware that there are things I want to tweak, so it’s likely that towards the end I’ll have to do some work to stay ahead of my weekly publishing schedule.  It’s a good thing I enjoy a challenge almost as much as Jason does!

AW  Can you share a little outline of the whole story with us or are you going to keep us all on tenterhooks from week to week?

SC  Well, I’ve already mentioned that the story was partly inspired by Dickens’ Christmas Carol so I don’t suppose it will surprise you to hear that some events will take place which cause Jason to rethink his attitudes.  He doesn’t get any visits from the ghosts of business past, present or future, though – Jason’s comeuppance is much more of his own making.  As far as the details go, you’ll have to wait and see.  

AW  Lastly, Stephanie, with your romances in e-form and print, I know you've dabbled with Sci Fi, you like Fantasy and you are starting to look at crime as a genre in which to write.  What would your eight-year-old self, make of you today?

SC  I guess my eight-year-old self might have been a little disappointed – I think I was about eight when I decided that my life’s ambition was to win the Booker prize, and I certainly haven’t done that!  In some ways, my aims have changed a lot, in other ways not so much.  At eight I knew I wanted to write good books, but I hadn’t yet given a lot of thought to what that might look like, so I seized on something that sounded impressive, and involved going to a televised awards dinner and wearing a pretty frock.

Although I loved studying literary fiction (I have a degree in English Literature from Trinity College, Oxford), after a few years in the working world I realised that I wanted to write books that more people would read, and that wouldn’t be too taxing to settle down with after a hard day at the office, so I switched to writing romance. 

I’ve been lucky enough to be published by two fantastic companies, The Wild Rose Press (who published Desperate Bid, The Santa Next Door and Djinn and Tonic) and Crimson Romance (who published Perfect Partners and the fairy tale anthology Modern Magic, in which my Goldilocks retelling appears).  I’ve also made some great friends through the Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA), which hosts excellent awards dinners – posh frocks and all – but I’ve always read widely and ultimately, I didn’t want to be tied to just one genre, so I’ve been experimenting with others. 

You could say that with crime I’ve come full circle, as another of my passions aged about eight was Enid Blyton’s stories, particularly the Famous Five and the Castle of Adventure series.  I’ve also always been a sucker for moral tales (What Katy Did, Little Women and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series all made strong impressions on me, and I feel that each of those is very much a story with a message) so in a sense The Crash also has its roots in my eight-year-old interests too.

And now here’s the cover I promised to show you as a reward for reading this far.  If you have a moment, I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below! 



You can catch up on The Crash on Stephanie's Blog