Author: AJLancaster

The 2020 Sir Julius Vogel Awards – the whats, whys, and my own eligibility
This is a special year for New Zealand’s speculative fiction awards, the Sir Julius Vogel (SJV) awards.

Never heard of the SJVs or Sir Julius Vogel? Fear not, I’m here to meet all your long-winded explanation needs!

I only became aware of the SJVs when I started getting into New Zealand’s publishing / writing scene, despite being a big fantasy reader for many years before that. Judging from the number of blank looks I get when I mention the awards to other New Zealanders who are readers but not writers, I don’t think this is at all an atypical experience.

OK, so what is an SJV award?

It’s a metallic, pointy trophy that looks like this:

Sir Julius Vogel Award. Source: http://www.sffanz.org.nz/sjv/sjvAwards.shtml

The awards recognise achievements in NZ science fiction, fantasy, or horror. There are lots of categories, from short stories to best novel to services to fandom.

Why are they called Sir Julius Vogel Awards?

The awards are named after Sir Julius Vogel, an early prime minister of New Zealand. He is credited with writing New Zealand’s first speculative fiction novel Anno Domini 2000, or, Woman’s Destiny in 1889.

I haven’t read it for myself, but reviews suggest it’s unfortunately not a very good book. On the brighter side, the same reviews do think it predicted aspects of the future accurately, so that’s sort of cool?

Er…moving on.

What’s eligible for an award?

The main eligibility criteria is that the work is by a NZ citizen or resident. Oh, and that it’s published in the year before the award is given – so works published in 2019 are eligible for the 2020 awards.

(psst, THE PRINCE OF SECRETS was published in 2019).

The awards process is:
1. Anyone, anywhere in the world, can nominate works using this form.
2. The eligible works that receive the most nominations make it onto the shortlist of up to 5 finalists for each category.
3. Members of SFFANZ (Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand) and/or the national science fiction convention for that year vote to decide the winner for each category.
Now, before I get to why this year is special, I have to talk about NZ’s national science fiction conventions.

NZ’s national science fiction conventions (natcons)

So, first off, we have national science fiction conventions. Every year. This may or may not be news to you, but it was something else I learnt only a few years ago. This is probably because NZ’s national conventions are pretty small (~150 people) and fan-run (i.e. don’t have a huge advertising budget).

Once you find them they are, however, very fun. The first one I went to was in 2013, which was…seven years ago. Huh. Time flies, eh?

To make the national conventions trickier to keep track of, their name changes every year depending on which city is hosting. For example, 2019’s national convention was Geysercon, held in Rotorua, known for, you guessed it, thermal mud.

But this year, 2020, New Zealand isn’t just having a normal national convention. We’re having an international one!

The World Science Fiction Convention 2020: CoNZealand

For the very first time, New Zealand is hosting the World Science Fiction Convention. This is an international, entirely volunteer-run convention that moves countries each year, and is where the Hugos are awarded.

Worldcon is going to double as New Zealand’s national science fiction convention this year.

Which means that all the Worldcon attendees will also get to vote for the SJVs this year.

Which basically means an order of magnitude more people than usual will looking at the finalists and voting.

Which means that making the shortlist this year would be really, really awesome. And it all depends on getting enough nominations.

This is where you come in. Please consider nominating my or any other NZ SFF works. The nomination web form is HERE.

My eligible works

The awards I am eligible for this year are:

Best Novel

The Prince of Secrets by AJ Lancaster
Publisher: Camberion Press (that’s just the name for my own indie imprint)
Contact details – aj@ajlancaster.com

Best New Talent

I’m technically eligible for this, since I’m still within my first four years as a professional.

The amazingly organised Melanie Harding-Shaw has also put together an unofficial spreadsheet of eligible works, and I recommend checking it out if you’re interested in what New Zealanders speculative fiction creatives have been putting out in the last year.
January 3, 2020
One year of self-publishing: Highlights

It feels longer than a year.

Self-publishing effectively involves starting your own small business – on top of the actual writing and, in many people’s cases, including my own – on top of the full-time day job and general detritus of life administration.

Piecing together stolen moments – from lunch hours and evenings and weekends, while waiting at bus stops and seated on planes – does strange things to one’s sense of time.

But it has only been a year since I published The Lord of Stariel. Wow.

The happenings of a year are too much to fit in one blog post, so here is a random sampling of eight highlights (in no particular order).

#1 Seriously awesome covers

I could not be happier with the covers for my books, made by Jenny Zemanek at Seedlings Design Studio. Here are the three so far revealed (you’ll have to wait for Book 4’s cover, but it is every bit as pretty).

So pretty!

#2 Book Launch Party

I launched The Lord of Stariel in my living room last November because I wanted it to be as non-stressful and fun as possible. I made cake; my sister decorated it. I wore a T-shirt with my book cover on. I stacked a pile of books nonchalantly in the corner and signed them upon request.

Book cake!

I highly recommend this approach to book launches and am in fact planning the exact same sort of event for the launch of Book 3 (I didn’t have an official party for Book 2 because it released so soon after Book 1).

#3 Hard copies on my shelf

I think every author imagines the moment when they will hold a physical copy of their finished book in their hands. When my box of advanced copies arrived (for the book launch!), I let out a noise audible only to bats.

#4 Publishing Book 2

Writing and publishing one book could be written off as a fluke; publishing my second book The Prince of Secrets made my dreams of a writing career feel less like a dream and more like something I could build, one brick (book) at a time.

#5 Books in libraries!

Because I am self-published, I wasn’t sure whether my books would make it into libraries. But they have! Mostly to NZ libraries, but also to some in the US! I even found one on the shelf in the temporary Wellington central library (temporary due to the closure of the main library because of earthquake risk).

(Do feel free to request your library get a copy of The Lord of Stariel or The Prince of Secrets…)

#6 Meeting other local writers

Who knew there were so many fantasy writers in Wellington!

A big shout out to Melanie Harding-Shaw, who has this year been determinedly reaching out and organising Wellington speculative fiction writers into regular meet-ups, a process that bears no small resemblance to herding cats.

Earlier this year I also attended the Romance Writers of New Zealand conference in Christchurch (and wrote about it here), which exceeded expectations in terms of both fun and learning. I have yet to make it along to a Wellington chapter meeting due to scheduling conflicts, but they keep inviting me, so I hope to make it along to one in 2020!

#7 SPFBO5 (Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off 5)

This is a competition orchestrated by author Mark Lawrence. It involves 10 book bloggers working their way through 300 self-published fantasy titles to choose the winner.

The competition is still underway, and The Lord of Stariel remains in the running as of this blog post, having been picked as a semi-finalist by the blog it was assigned to. I’m thrilled about that, but that’s not actually the highlight I’m celebrating here. No, what I want to celebrate is that I fronted up to the start line and entered my book into the competition at all!

I am my own worst enemy, and tend to not even enter things because I’ve already decided I’m unworthy. You can’t fail if you don’t sign up, right? This year I’ve been making a concerted effort to stop thinking like that, and to start thinking more like, well, this:

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts”—Winston Churchill

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”—JK Rowling

“The master has failed more times than the beginner has ever tried.”—Stephen McCranie

“Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.” —C. S. Lewis

I like inspirational quotes, but they can also make it sound like a very glib process, when the reality of putting myself forward and risking failure has been extremely difficult—but also rewarding, I think. The more you shove at the edges of your comfort zone, the bigger it gets.

(As well as being a small milestone in my ongoing journey of Trying To Hide Myself Under Rocks Less, being part of SPFBO has also turned out to be quite fun. There’s a feeling of community to it and heaps of good indie fantasy books to be found by browsing the list of SPFBO books. I shall have to do another post on ones I’ve read and enjoyed so far!)

#8 Readers

Last November, the only way I could make myself press that big ‘publish’ button was to pretend that no one would actually read my book.

This, delightfully, has turned out to be not true. The first time a reader got in touch to say how much they liked my book, I had to take several hours to compose myself sufficiently to be able to respond with some degree of professionalism rather than a string of incoherent exclamation marks.

So thank you, readers, for buying my book, for leaving reviews, for sending me emails, for making and liking posts, and for tweeting tweets. You have been the most wonderful part of this indie publishing gig.

November 1, 2019
Cover Reveal: The Court of Mortals

Alritey folks – after much shilly-shallying, I can finally reveal the cover and blurb for Stariel #3 The Court of Mortals.

Once again, the fabulous Jenny Zemanek at Seedlings Design Studio has outdone herself. I love it so, so much! Tiny crowns! Tiny envelopes! Majestic palace!

Marrying your fae prince shouldn’t be this hard.

Hetta’s family now knows Wyn’s true identity, but that doesn’t mean they approve of their relationship. Princes are all very well – but Wyn’s not human, for all he’s spent ten years pretending to be.

With gossip spreading like wildfire, Hetta and Wyn receive a royal summons. The Queen of Prydein has heard the rumours of fae intruders, and she’s not letting Wyn go until she’s satisfied he and his people aren’t a threat. Convincing her would be a lot easier if someone wasn’t trying to blacken Wyn’s name – and if his sister wasn’t trying to kill him.

For mortal politics aren’t the only problem the pair have to face. The Court of Ten Thousand Spires is still without a ruler, and the only way out may be for Wyn to assume the throne himself – meaning he and Hetta can never be together.

Releases 18 January 2020. Pre-order your copy now!

October 13, 2019
Writing hooky beginnings: workshop notes
How do you hook a reader at the start of a book?

Slow beginnings are something I feel I’m a bit prone to if I’m not careful (true story: The Lord of Stariel first draft originally had a whole ‘nother chapter before Chapter 1 that got cut during rewrites), so I was particularly interested in Sophie Jordan’s workshop on beginnings at the recent RWNZ conference I attended.

(For the more general conference experience write-up, see previous blog post)

Sophie Jordan writes romance, but the concepts she talked about are applicable across all fiction genres.

The takeaway is that the three key components of a great opening are:
1. Character
2. Conflict
3. Voice
Ideally, you establish all three as soon as possible, in the first few lines if you can, but within the first few pages at a stretch.

(Obviously, a hooky beginning can’t make a book good in and of itself; that’s what the rest of the novel is for!)

Sophie gave lots of examples of great hooky openings (and I’ve added some from books I love into the mix), all of which you also now get to enjoy as I ruminate my way through the mechanics of why they’re hooky. (Note that I haven’t read all of the books associated with these lines, but they are definitely all hooky!).

Character

A character-driven opening should lead us to ask an interesting question, make us feel for the character, and set up something about their everyday life.

Character-driven opening examples

Scarlet O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.

—Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

I think the question here is: Who are the Tarleton twins and why is the apparently not-beautiful Scarlet charming them? (I have actually only seen the movie version of this, and my memory is pretty foggy, so this is a genuine question). Also, you have to feel for a heroine described as “not beautiful”. Pretty sure there’s a law.

Charlotte was one week short of seventeen when her life changed, falling into two halves like a shiny child’s ball: before and after.

—Potent Pleasures, Eloisa James

What changed your life, Charlotte? I must know!!!

I haven’t touched another person in three years.

—The Girl in 6e, Alessandra Torre

I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS!!!! Do you mean literally? Are you in some kind of terrible solitary confinement? Can I help you escape somehow?

Conflict

2/3 of the above examples also double as conflict-driven openings. The conflict component of a beginning instills foreboding, curiosity, or emotion, and hints at what the book’s larger conflict might be about.

Conflict-driven opening examples

“I’ll consider your debt paid in full if you get my wife with child.”

—Waking up with the Duke, Lorraine Heath

WHAAAAAAAT??? Who is he making this offer to? Why is he making this offer? Has his wife consented to this!!?? HOW IS THIS POSSIBLY GOING TO WORK OUT????

The day of the royal massacre started out like any other.

—Kill the Queen, Jennifer Estep

Well that’s incredibly ominous!

I’m pretty much fucked.

That’s my considered opinion.

Fucked.

Six days into what should be the greatest two months of my life, and it’s turned into a nightmare.

—The Martian, Andy Weir

This opening is also big on establishing character, but the main driving question is: What, exactly, has turned into a nightmare?

Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.

—Uprooted, Naomi Novik

This is from one of my favourite books, and it pulls me in every time! It evokes strong curiosity (who is this dragon, one immediately asks, and why is he taking girls?) There’s also something old-fashionedly fairytale-like even in just the first line, which very much captures the tone of the book.

Which brings us to…

Voice

This is the elusive spark of what-makes-one-author’s-style-distinct-from-every-other-author. It’s the adjective X in the sentence “Oh, this is such X writing”, where X might be clean / beautiful / funny / self-aware / intense etc.

Voice-driven opening examples

All of the above examples have strong voice, but here are even more:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

—Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

This opening has such a distinctive voice that we’ve been quoting it for over 200 years!

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

—Hogfather, Terry Pratchett

Ah, Terry Pratchett, my favourite fantasy author. Your dry, satirical voice is sorely missed.

Mr and Mrs Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

—Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling

I remember reading this line for the first time at the age of eleven and being simply unable to stop. I find this opening particularly interesting because Harry, our protagonist, is largely absent from the opening paragraphs, but the author’s voice is so engaging that it doesn’t matter. And the conflict of the book is hinted at in this very first line i.e. something very not normal is about to arrive on the Dursleys’ doorstep…

As part of the workshop, Sophie also got us to brainstorm openings based on various scenarios. I’m a slow thinker, so I haven’t yet managed to come up with any zingers like the ones above, but it’s filled me with determination to keep trying!
September 12, 2019
Hanging with other writers: the RWNZ 2019 Conference

Fantasy is my first and truest love, but romance is a close second (a shocker, I know, if you’ve read my books 😉). So it was with great excitement that I headed off to Christchurch last weekend for my first-ever Romance Writers of New Zealand (RWNZ) conference.

Hagley Park, Christchurch

Years ago, when I was a university student, I spent a lot of time in Christchurch Airport, waiting for connecting flights as part of my journey home. I’m not sure this really counts as having visited the city. I can’t say I’ve now remedied this, since I spent last weekend largely within the four walls of the conference hotel.

However, I can say that the few bits of Christchurch I did see were both lovely and curiously English in aesthetic (and, coming from hilly Wellington, disconcertingly flat). The hotel abutted the large and picturesque Hagley Park, where the first signs of spring were juuust beginning, cherry blossoms and daffodils and a hint of warmth.

“The trees are coming into leaf. Like something almost being said—Philip Larkin

(I thought of this quote a lot during spring when I was overseas in Oxford, and Hagley Park had that same quality to it).

On Friday morning, I turned up to the registration desk and received my name badge and conference pack. A heart sticker adorned my badge, marking me as a first-time attendee.

The name badges were an absolute godsend. Some people say they remember faces but not names; I frequently remember neither. If only name badges were fashionable in more situations!

I was quite nervous that first morning, as the only person I knew wasn’t turning up until the Saturday. However, my nerves were completely unwarranted; everyone was extremely friendly (thanks to the aforementioned heart-sticker), and luckily we all had one ginormous thing in common that made it easy to start conversations!

“So, what do you write?” was the #1 conversation opener, for the very first time in my life.

I refined my answer to this over time and eventually settled on: “Think fantasy Downton Abbey.”

(I feel I must make an admission here; I’ve never actually watched Downton Abbey, but it’s a comparison that multiple reviewers have used and it’s a more comprehensible shorthand than “Er…secondary world early twentieth centuryish inspired fantasy-of-manners with fae and romance?”. Hopefully, when I do get around to watching it, I won’t discover that I’ve been merrily giving everyone an entirely false idea of what to expect!)

Onto the workshops!

There aren’t a lot of local professional development opportunities for genre writers in New Zealand. I’d heard through the grapevine that RWNZ conferences offer fantastic craft workshops that would be of benefit to any writer, not only those writing pure romance.

Well, I’m here to tell you that the grapevine was absolutely right.

My uncharacteristically organised note-taking.

Over the three days, I made fifty pages of notes. FIFTY. Beginnings, tension, characterisation through narration, and conflict were just some of the topics covered. I think I’ll write up a few of the sessions that particularly resonated with me in separate blog posts, but needless to say that by the end of the weekend, my brain was stuffed full of information and ideas.

Let no one tell you that writing romance is easy. These guys take their craft seriously. The whole conference was infused with a determination to learn, share ideas, and ultimately bring readers joy. But more than that, everyone there practically glowed with the love of writing. The enthusiasm was infectious and left me buzzing with renewed motivation to finish my work in progress.

Plus, as it turns out, romance authors and editors have great senses of humour.

One group’s ‘guesses’ at missing titles

If every duke featured in a regency romance actually existed, they’d outnumber the sheep in New Zealand*” —May Chen, Avon editor.

*Current NZ sheep numbers = 27.3 million, which by my calculation means every New Zealander gets ~5.6 dukes of their very own!

Definitely planning to attend next year.

August 29, 2019
Fantasy Romance vs Romantic Fantasy: Is there a difference between these subgenres?
A bit of preface: I wrote most of this blog post aaaaages ago but never got around to finishing it. However, this week I discovered a new FB reader group called Romantic Fantasy Shelf, which has been set up by a bunch of indie authors and is focused on secondary-world Romantic Fantasy / Fantasy Romance / Reverse Harem fantasy and it (a) seemed right up my alley (go join if it’s up your alley too; they’re running a whole bunch of giveaways this month to celebrate the launch of the group) and (b) reminded me of this half-written blog post.

Now for the actual blog post:

Because I am me and like organising things into their Correct Places, I have spent a lot of time pondering genre nuances. And because my current project (the Stariel series) contains both fantasy and romance, this specific genre nuance (fantasy romance vs romantic fantasy) interests me particularly. Are they actually different subgenres or just different names for the same thing? Is there any real difference between the two subgenres in terms of reader expectations?

From a purely technical standpoint, fantasy romance is a subgenre of ROMANCE whereas romantic fantasy is a subgenre of FANTASY. In other words, you’d expect the dominant element to be the parent genre.

But if a book has both romance and fantasy, how do you tell which is the ‘dominant’ genre? And what if it’s an equal mixture of both?

I’ve been told that one simple way to figure out if you’re dealing with a book that has romance as its dominant genre is to ask yourself: ‘does the plot still pretty much work if I take out the romance?’ and if the answer is ‘no’, well, there you go; it’s a romance. It works for some books where the balance is clearly tipped more one way than the other.

For example, Tamora Pierce’s Alanna books still work if you take out the romance (though why would you do that!?) since the major plotline is the heroine training to be a knight.

By comparison, Robin McKinley’s Beauty doesn’t work if you take out the romance, since the main plot is about Beauty and the Beast’s relationship.

However, I have found this question of ‘does it still work if you take out the romance’ overly simplistic for a lot of books. If you take the romance out of C.L. Wilson’s Lord of the Fading Lands, you’ve still got fantasy worldbuilding and conflicts but you lose most of the character motivations.

Also, this cover is INSANE. Go, giant fire-breathing panther head, go!

Similarly with Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart. You can take out the romance and still have intricate politics, sexy courtesans, and war between nations, but, again, you lose major character motivations and some very big subplots.

For my own series, which falls into the Romantic Fantasy rather than Fantasy Romance camp, the answers to the question ‘does the plot work if you take out the romance?’ are:
- Book 1: The Lord of Stariel – Mostly yes
- Book 2: The Prince of Secrets – Mostly no
- Book 3: The Court of Mortals – Sort of?
- Book 4: The King of Faerie – Well, it would be a totally different series by now without the romance elements so hard to say
Basically, it gets silly very quickly trying to figure out whether a book still works without half its ingredients. And, really, who wants half a cake? Er, book.

I thought another way to slice this might be to look at Amazon’s categories. Fantasy has a subcategory for “Romantic” and Romance has a subcategory for “Fantasy”. So what’s filed under each one?

A lot of the same books, as it turns out.

There are slightly more sexy man-chest covers under Romance>Fantasy and slightly more women-with-glowy-magic-hands covers under Fantasy>Romantic.

I think the main difference (if any) is that Fantasy Romance series are likely to feature a different couple in each book, whereas Romantic Fantasy series focus on the same characters over multiple books.

However, my main conclusion after looking at a bunch of books that mix romance and fantasy is that this quest has not helped my To-Be-Read list get any smaller.
January 3, 2019
Typesetting Madness

This month I have been typesetting up a storm to get paperback copies of The Lord of Stariel ready for release in November.

Typesetting is the process of formatting a book, so called because back in the day it involved physically setting type. I’ve done this the old-fashioned way exactly once in my life, as part of a training course, and whilst fun it definitely isn’t something you’d want to do for an entire book (it took me about 20 minutes to set my one allocated line of type!).

Many teeny blocks of lead

Nowadays, typesetting means electronically laying out a book for print (and laying out the e-book, but that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish). I happen to really, really love print typesetting, because I am exactly the kind of person who will agonise over an extra half-millimetre of margin and spend hours weighing up the pros and cons of different fonts.

If you are not this kind of person, there are some automated solutions. I use one of these (a program called Vellum) for formatting e-books. To my mind, there’s no point agonising over e-book formatting because the appearance of an e-book changes across platforms anyway. You have to let go of the illusion of control.

You know what you can control to your heart’s content, though? Print books! For typesetting print books, I use Adobe InDesign, which is a control freak’s dream. This is both a great and terrible power. On the bright side, there will be no auto-formatting doing things you didn’t tell it to do (I’m looking at you, Microsoft Word), but on the down side, there will be no auto-formatting to save you. All faults will be entirely your own.

Truth.

You can’t truly judge your typesetting until you see a physical proof copy, but printing out pages and cutting them to the correct page size is a useful proxy. Hence my living room has been looking like a bookish murder scene recently, full of disembodied pages:

Many iterations of pages with slightly different margins, leading, or font sizes. May appear identical to the untrained or less obsessive eye.

Once you’ve typeset your book, you then know how many pages it will be – which means you can work out the spine width! And from the spine width comes the BEAUTIFUL FULL COVER SPREAD thanks to my designer:

What the paperback version of my book will look like when ironed (DO NOT IRON BOOKS!)

The last thing to decide on for a print book is the cover finish. As an indie publisher, I have two choices: matte or gloss finish (other cool combo options like metallic foiling and spot gloss etc aren’t available with the print-on-demand (POD) providers I’m using. I’ll do a separate blog about that, but basically POD means someone can order 1 copy of my book from a retailer and behind the scenes the printer will print and ship 1 copy directly to the customer.)

It’s quite hard to show the difference in a photograph, but gloss finish is, er, glossy, and makes colours seem richer. Matte is, er, not glossy, and it feels smoother in the hand but can ‘flatten’ darker colours.

Proof copies! BE STILL MY BEATING HEART. Matte finish is on the left; gloss finish on the right. (You can’t tell from this photo at all, but they actually do look extremely different in real life.)

Next step: Checking the proof copies! (It would be impossible to overstate how overwhelmingly excited I am to be able to hold ACTUAL PHYSICAL COPIES OF MY BOOK.)

October 18, 2018
Less than one month to go…

Soooo… THE LORD OF STARIEL ebook is available to pre-order on Amazon!

It will release 1 November and I am COUNTING DAYS GUYS OMG. I am both incredibly excited to show it to the world and nervous for precisely the same reason!

I think of books as a long, time-delayed conversation between authors and readers. You can keep your writing in the back of the wardrobe and never show it to another living soul. This has the advantage of keeping it safe from criticism, but it’s also a lot like talking to yourself. It also means the book is never truly finished, because there’s nothing to stop you fiddling with your wardrobe-book forever.

It’s been a long journey, getting this series ready for release, and part of me still can’t quite believe that book one is really truly actually going to be published IN LESS THAN A MONTH.

Where will the book be available to buy when it releases?

Ebook

In the long run, I plan to make my books available on all ebookseller platforms, but in the short run they will only be available on Amazon. This is due to Amazon’s exclusivity requirements for its subscription programme, Kindle Unlimited, which I plan to enrol my books in initially.

Print

You’ll be able to order books from your preferred bookseller of choice (I can recommend Book Depository for free international shipping). I’ll let you know when and where they’re available.

A sneak peek

I’ve also put the prologue and the first chapter up on the website. You can read it here. I plan to put a few more chapters up before release date, to psych myself up for it!

October 15, 2018
Writing in Cafes Review: Verve Cafe

It’s currently the heart of winter, which in Wellington means cold rain and wind. Lots of wind. The cats have become increasingly snuggly i.e. interested in sharing body warmth.

I feel the cold easily. The ambient temperature of cafes has thus become even more important to me than usual.

I do like the occasionally spectacular winter sunsets though.

For this reason, I’ve shifted my usual writing space from Mt Cook to Verve Cafe. Verve is located beneath an office/mall building in the CBD on Lambton Quay and gives the strong impression of being underground due to the complete lack of windows. I rather like the cosiness of this, but my friends have used words like “cave-like” to describe it.

Reasons to go there

Verve meets most of my key cafe criteria for writers, though the coffee quality is variable. There’s free WiFi, plenty of table space, comfy seats, many food choices. The staff seem relatively non-judgemental about my frequent presence as I desperately try to finish the last book in the Stariel Series.

Verve cafe on a quiet Sunday afternoon in July.

This is both a reason to go and not to go: The interesting playlists. I’m not sure who chooses them, but sometimes they exactly hit my preferences – one afternoon they played the entire soundtrack of Mamma Mia; another time, a list of nostalgic 90s pop hits. Other times, they choose a playlist diametrically opposed to my personal preferences, but YMMV (“I Whip My Hair Back and Forth” tests even my legendary ability to switch off my ears when I’m concentrating). Today is a good playlist day. As I write this, Tainted Love is playing in the background.

Reasons not to go there

If, you like to have some idea what the weather is doing before you go out in it, this is not the cafe for you, my friend. Sometimes I’ve been messaging people while inside Verve, suggesting we hang out, and they’re like: ARE YOU KIDDING? IT’S FREAKING BUCKETING DOWN AND GALE-FORCE WINDS OUTSIDE; I’M NOT LEAVING THE HOUSE.

July 8, 2018